User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/The Gag of Realism
- Read on 2024-01-25, 2024-03-23
- Read it here
An essay on Nathan for You S3E5 Smokers Allowed, written by Nathan Fielder's The Curse co-writer Benny Safdie, that I encountered when watching a Thomas Flight video.
Nathan for You is a show for which the driving force is the continuous ambiguity of what is real and what is fake. Media with this ambiguity seems to fascinate me (see also my notes on this episode of 60 Songs that Explain the 90s). This element of intrigue is even more present in Fielder's The Rehearsal, where it is even explicitly acknowledged and used as a narrative device.
In Smokers Allowed, Nathan helps a bar that is supposedly struggling to get customers due to anti-smoking laws. It turns out you can smoke inside such a venue in California if and only if it is part of a theatrical production. So Nathan arranges for two big chairs and gives two tickets away to a play 'Smokers Allowed'. The visitors, unaware that what they're seeing is scripted nor acted, turn out to love the 'show' for its sense of realism and avant-garde nature. Nathan then tries, mistakingly attributing the play's success not to its concept but to its content, to recreate the performance to the T. The scenario is then shown to another audience, yet this time it is completely scripted. Meanwhile, we are meta-observers through the show's airing lens, seeing both plays as results of production, and seeing both audiences with a sense of wider-scoped understanding.
I recall watching this episode, and The Rehearsal alike, thinking: I know this is, to an extent, the magic of production. I know there is design and intent and, ultimately, fakery. But I don't really care, I am willing to commit and to believe. Willing, because even in it's potential 'fakeness', it's telling something that is 'true', that holds meaning.
Of an earlier Nathan for You project, Dumb Starbucks, Safdie notes:
[...] Fielder is not playing it for parody. He even says, “This is no bit or joke, this is a real business I plan to get rich from.” By playing it for realism and not flinching, it’s so much funnier. He created something genuinely fake.
Maybe it is not a question of real versus fake, but rather one of genuinity.