Acting is Reenacting: Nathan Fielder’s Herzogian Pursuit of Truth

Werner Herzog famously differentiates factual reality, which he calls “the accountant’s reality” from his widely imitated style of near-documentarial filmmaking called the ecstatic truth, a term that was also coined by the German eccentric. This idea, which has been interlinked into much of his entire filmography and writing, finds a fitting successor in Nathan Fielder. In Fielder’s HBO show, The Rehearsal, which now faces its second season among multiple inquiries about how he could’ve even financed the first, began with a simple premise. Elaborate reconstructions of real life situations are built with one goal: Rehearse.

Cemented as one of the more mythical characters in all of cinema, Herzog has built his life around a reputation of the extreme—visiting a volcano on the brink of an explosion, or juggling death threats with his equally eccentric cast members in the jungle. It is an intrinsically brutalist version of a character. Herzog creates without ornamentation. Though many serious incidents have happened across his film sets, Herzog remains a figure deeply idolized in contemporary cinematic culture. His life-stories read like a fable, much of which was finally written down in the 2022 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God against All. His journeys to filmic excellence at the start of his career were those of grandeur and megalomania. Bringing a German amateur crew into the wilderness to find El Dorado, or dragging an immense ship across a hill—these stories found fascination in the public, much of them functioning as a real version of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Like the documentary of the same name about Francis Ford Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now, the stories of Herzog and his crew filming his complicated movies, which was similarly depicted in documentaries like Burden of Dreams, often gathered more interest than the actual end product. 

When Herzog stood on stage in 1999 at the Walker Art Center and presented his manifesto with the title Lessons of Darkness, in which he coined the term Ecstatic Truth, he described a truth that transcends factual accuracy. In contrast to the mere truth, which he satirically names “the accountant’s reality”—a sterile collection of objective facts—the ecstatic truth searches for insight into emotions and core questions of life. He argues that cinema, which in its nature reveals itself to us through the light of a projector screen, was always there to illuminate rather than present. So for film, it should be the goal to reach an ecstatic truth, through fabrication, imagination and stylization. Herzog uses Michelangelo’s sculpture Madonna della Pietà as an example of creative illumination, where Jesus Christ appears older than his own mother, Mary, ultimately giving the artwork a profound meaning.  

For Herzog, the ability to have an ecstatic experience elevates us from nature, wherein he quotes the philosopher Kant:

nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature)

The notion of ecstasy originated in the old-greek ekstasis, which translates as “stepping out of yourself.” The ecstatic condition is an out-of-body state, intoxicated with overwhelment. It is an unveiling of a feeling one cannot fully comprehend. Herzog argues that the ekstase is a sublime revelation, and how he compares this ecstasy to film, however, makes it interesting. Herzog likens that this revelation of truth revolves in a practical process in the world of filmmaking. The pictures are first invisible, burnt into celluloid, which then has to be developed and finally revealed through light. This is a process dissimilar to nature. Film is not a mirror—it is a painted, projected picture. 

Fielder is no stranger to creating a modern mythos within filmed reality. He is a character where we can often be only deeply unsure of his intentions and sayings. The most commonly googled thing among Nathan Fielder’s works very well may be “Did this really happen?” It’s all as speculative as irrelevant. His stunts and punks in older shows like Nathan For You became the subject of wide publicity, at times even confused with the work of contemporary figures like Banksy, who was suspected to be the brain behind his “art installation” recreation of a normal Starbucks, called Dumb Starbucks.

The Rehearsal’s first episode revolved around a man named Kor Skeete who struggled with confessing a lie to his friend. To rehearse Kor’s revelation, the trivia-bar in which he planned to confess was rebuilt in a warehouse and filled with actors, one of which closely imitated his friend so as they could rehearse all the possible emotional responses in an almost identical environment. Throughout the remaining episodes, these rehearsals escalated into a swarm of psychological labyrinths.

In its second coming, the show starts with the basis of Fielder stating he’s studied commercial aviation disasters and found a common denominator in the topic of social anxiety and human communication. Like in Herzog’s work, the line between fiction and reality becomes deliberately blurred and results in a depiction of emotion that, though it may not be real, feels true. Through the use of comedic and dramatic elements, as well as meticulous staging and spontaneity, we get an image that cuts deeper than any other portrayal of emotional truth—an ecstatic truth.

For Werner Herzog, facts remain unimportant in the art form and further nebulize real intention. The presence of a camera alters emotions, even in real scenarios, so even neutral documentation, where for example the camera is hidden, can be shaped by editing and narrative choices. This is done by virtually all nature documentaries, often narratively showing different animals as the same character. This happens in The Rehearsal in an expository manner. Sometimes, the show cuts between rehearsals and actual scenarios in a seamless manner and sometimes even real people get played by actors, as Fielder rehearses his own scenario of being a director. 

Film and art are forms of fiction, however much they are tried to be made real, and Herzog, rather than denying it, uses it as an outlet. Some of his early works, like Fitzcarraldo, place inexperienced actors into extreme, real-life environments like the Peruvian jungle, making the performances reactions to actual scenarios. In the actual documentaries Herzog has made, like Grizzly Man or Into the Inferno, the distinction between objective facts and hallucinated truths remains blissfully uncertain. The result, however, feels as real as anything else.

In some ways, The Rehearsal interpolates Herzog’s method—instead of placing actors in a real environment, he throws real people, or what we think of real people, into simulated experiences. In the first episodes of Season 2, Fielder builds a stage of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport to train social interactions of real participating pilots, before and during the flight. Most of the people they meet during these stagings are actors. If not, they are fellow pilots. While it is the goal of an actor to show rehearsed emotions, in the show it is the goal for presumed real people to rehearse emotional outcomes. The simulations are rehearsals for performances, much like a screen test, for when they finally give the act. Throughout the episodes, ideas get spun into bigger webs, and the original premise develops into multiple ethical dilemmas and emotional insecurities. While the goal at the start of the series was more simple, like confessing a lie in a planned scenario, the ideas in Season 2 grow much more sophisticated. Changing the way of reacting to an extreme situation, such as standing up to a superior in an unpredictable emergency situation. What prompts us to perform, for it may not be a camera, but the idea of being burned into someone’s memory? The Rehearsal uses planned scenarios to interrogate reality.

As in his earlier series Nathan For You, Fielder’s impact in the show consists mainly of a highly controlled form of reaction. He often speaks only a few words and lets the people unravel themselves. His minimal input, which is often deliberately awkward, unfolds a randomness in the outputs of his subjects and often prompts them to project their insecurities onto him. Within a conversation, he is quasi-directing the outcome of the exchange through spontaneity. The viewer may feel like they had conversations just as awkward and deep, however what separates Fielder is that he fully controls the conversational outcome. Over the course of the show, Fielder begins to inject his own insecurities, or the insecurities of the Nathan Fielder persona, into the veins of the narrative and therefore is much more ambiguous and exaggerated than the poetic seriousness Herzog often radiates.

In this season’s second episode, Fielder reflects on his own past morals when he was a talent-scout. Reenacting denying people their hopes in performing for a talent show. Through this experiment, different reactions of disappointments are shown, depending on the different way the news gets conveyed. It is a showcase of direct reactions to reactions. Fielder is consciously strange and we can never really be sure where the persona ends and the real person (which very well may never be on screen at all) begins. This is a contrast to Herzog. We may not know if Herzog’s image is also hugely fabricated, but his insertions into his documentations feel more real and less constrained. When Herzog narrates, his old German dialect, though it may come across as funny, gives us the impression of a real, stoic person behind the microphone. Fielder’s persona seems more of an act. 

Whereas the show makes it seem like the hyperreal reconstructions of buildings, places and situations are only for the participants, they also deeply disorient the viewer. Through the lens of a camera, the precision of these replicas makes them merge within the perception of the real locations. Through this method, the viewer loses control over what’s “real” much more. Sometimes short cuts differentiate between rehearsals and the real situations, which functions as a punch for the viewer, in which they notice the loss of perception. While Herzog’s material is much less stylized and narratively dense, both works function as a critique of constructed sincerity as they evoke emotional resonance in the captured events, real or not. Fielder takes the idea further by blurring, dismantling and reassembling boundaries so as to blur the layers of reality within the show. The only thing the viewer is left with is their very own emotional reaction. 

The Rehearsal pushes the narrative into unsettling ethical dilemmas. At the end of Season 1, a child actor called Remy, who was participating in a simulated family for multiple days, begins to call Fielder his “dad.” As Fielder acted as his dad in these situations, the child began to form a real connection, thus bringing the experiment to a complicated halt. In Season 2, the first episode questions if a comedic show should even try to engage with serious topics, asking if real-world traumas can even be addressed in a productive manner in the presence of a camera crew. The show keeps its momentum in self-exposure and further pursues it as a central theme. Where the viewer is left to sit back and question the morals, Fielder plays with them. Entertainment is made out of anxiety and issues of people that reflect common vulnerabilities.

Even if the morals of the camera are less a topic in Herzog’s work, it is not entirely missing them. In Grizzly Man, Herzog gets ahold of a voice document of the death of Timothy Treadwell. Herzog withholds the viewer the recording and even his direct reaction. In the scene where he listens to it, we only see the reaction of Timothy Treadwell’s long lasting friend, Jewel Palovak, and her emotional response to Werner’s face. Fielder often shows us his reactions and actions and doesn’t hide from them. We often see the camera pointed to both himself and his counterpart. Giving full view into both reactions, the viewer can study each depicted emotion. 

We can find many echoes of Werner Herzog’s Ecstatic Truth within the realms of the rehearsal, whether Fielder consciously draws from them or not. In the context of a hyper-anxious and hyper-connected generation, a world where performance is the key of many screen-bound social interactions, Fielder manufactures a place where emotional truths show themselves, through the viewer or whatever may happen on screen. As many of the comedic elements fade behind the curtains, we are left to ask: Is this real? Is it worth watching? What connects Herzog and Fielder is that they are not insisting on being a document of life. Their art exists in its awkward, unsettling nature, that may be fictional or not. Through the lights on screen we love to be deceived and at the heart only find realism to be secondary to our entertainment.