Hyper-reality and self-surveillance in ‘Nathan For You’

Posted On February 4, 2025February 4, 2025

For Nathan Fielder, there is nothing more terrifying than the unknown, with the filmmaker creating shows like The Rehearsal and The Curse in which he carefully engineers social situations that allow him to experience key human moments without the looming threat of social anxiety. While they are rightfully marketed as comedies, there’s a social commentary beneath the ridiculous goofs and gags that highlight a deeply humanitarian and existentialist undercurrent.

Nathan For You shows the early beginnings of a much wider conversation about how social media and self-surveillance have corrupted our ability to live authentically and form genuine connections. Through his hilarious and painfully awkward comedic timing, the actor uses the tactic of improving local businesses to help him make friends. He often ends his encounters with each entrepreneur by asking if they’re “interested in seeing him socially,” highlighting the true intention beneath his façade of professionalism. In one episode, he tries to help a struggling frozen yoghurt shop boost sales by creating a poo-flavoured yoghurt. In another episode, he proposes that a real estate agent diversify her client pool by appealing to people who believe in ghosts, employing a priest to perform an exorcism on a property to market it as ‘a ghost-free property’.  

Each episode creates surrealism from the awkwardness of everyday life, with Fielder leaning into the social friction and disconnect prevalent in a modern world by heightening his social anxiety and desire to be accepted for comedic effect. Fielder remains impressively committed to the bit, with the audience being unable to tell between reality and the simulation of reality as he embraces hyper-realism.

Much like our lives on the internet, Fielder comments on the lack of separation between our identities in public and private spaces. Our authentic and constructed selves merge so closely together that we cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. By performing a heightened caricature of himself that exaggerates his flaws, we become lost in who he truly is, with Fielder appearing to be more involved with his hyper-real world instead of his distinctly lonely reality.

The hyper-reality of Nathan For You exposes how we have become consumed by presenting a specific image of ourselves that attempts to cancel out our flaws and insecurities, performing an ideal of ourselves that works to negate our most authentic selves. This creates a disturbing tension between reality and our illusion of reality, with Fielder also commenting on the impact of reality television and the carefully constructed spaces that are designed to mimic real life. 

Through this, Fielder explores whether reality itself has become obsolete, with our public-facing selves becoming palatable copies of our true selves. Most people are now unable to distinguish between the imitation of authenticity and genuine authenticity on the internet, something that Fielder exaggerates through his presentation of himself on the show as we struggle to tell the difference between his true self and the character. 

In his later show, The Rehearsal, Fielder expands on the concept of hyper-realism to a new level. The series follows Fielder as he helps people prepare for real-life situations that they are anxious about by creating a simulated version of the scenario for them to practice, allowing them to ‘perfect’ the interaction and prepare for every possible outcome. However, this eventually leads to Fielder himself becoming involved in one of these simulated scenarios, with the actor confronting his fears over not being able to start a family by creating a fake one, allowing him to experience this and practice for when the real thing comes along. 

What initially starts out as a tool to help people fulfil their goals and overcome their fears ends up being about how to perfect the presentation of someone who has reached these goals, with Fielder carrying out a performance of himself and the life he hopes to lead, despite the fact that the audience is painfully aware that it isn’t real. Fielder performs the various milestones that we have been told will lead to a fulfilling and accomplished life, going to bizarre lengths to perfectly replicate how this stage of life might look for him.

He creates an entirely fake house with a new child actor being employed each day to represent a different stage of his fake child’s life, with Fielder being presented with new scenarios that allow him to practice the different challenges of being a parent. These scenarios become increasingly outlandish and dark, with one scenario towards the end of the show as his now-teenage son overdoses, with Fielder practising the best response in the unlikely case that this happens.  

In a modern world, we’ve created a society of watchers who closely surveil and self-regulate each other, with many people preferring to display a heightened version of themselves that has mastered something they feel most insecure about. We’ve watched people falling in love on television and now know how to mimic the appearance of someone in love, with celebrity couples and TikTokers making gratuitous videos that work to convince audiences of the validity of their relationship, despite the fact that they actually can’t stand each other. We know how to imitate displays of character traits that work to cover up our flaws, much like Fielder and his presentation of being socially competent despite being desperately afraid of human interaction.

While it seems absurd, there is a dark under-layer to Fielder’s hyper-reality that critiques our subconscious surveillance and meticulously controlled presentations of reality, with people finding new ways to perform authenticity and success through a hyper-real version of ourselves. Many of us are living out a rehearsal of situations in our own lives, with a general level of anxiety becoming increasingly prevalent as we reckon with global uncertainty about our future, leading us to try and control things outside of our control.  

The realist escapism in The Rehearsal and Nathan For You is both a response to the expectations of perfection and a coping mechanism, touching on a deeply human fear that now plagues most of us. People are obsessed with obtaining perfection in order to be worthy of the lives we want for ourselves, leading us to perform perfection in the hopes it will grant us all our hopes and dreams.  

Everyone is doing the best they can to cope with the absurd business of being alive, and for Nathan Fielder, his way of doing so is by leaving no stone unturned – performing a version of himself that will allow him to feel accepted and live out an imitation of life that matches his deepest desires, afraid that if he exists as who he truly is, this life won’t be possible.

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