In the fall of 2023 my first television show—a loose adaptation of my first novel, itself already a loose adaptation of a period of my life marked by familial strife, internet addiction, exploitative jobs, deep love of a violent animal and intellectual torpor—entered that bone-chilling process known as development. For years I’d felt a numb non-control over my life story; now, I was its executive producer (or one of them, at least): I had a contract that said so.

I soon found myself talking for many hours each week with several other people who’d been involved in the making of television shows far longer than I; it turned out that making and writing television was mostly about talking about making and writing television. In the middle of one of these long talks one of these other people eventually—inevitably—very casually mentioned something about having met Nathan Fielder a bunch of times at various parties she’d attended over the years: parties hosted by and for makers of television.

With speed and ease I envisioned an industry party in full detail; I pictured Fielder there, eating a passed hors d’oeuvre. “What is he like,” I asked, suddenly rabid, needing to know.

“Oh, he’s not into girls like us,” she replied.

I blinked. That wasn’t the right answer. I wanted to ask again. I was sweating. I could not ask again. I could not find words that might clarify my meaning. I could no longer picture the cool, peopled industry party. I felt doomed by the fear I would never attend one like it. I could see only my own face, on Zoom, mortifyingly red. “Oh,” I said, “okay,” falling back on a Fielderism.

For many days and nights I puzzled over this devastating exchange. I hadn’t been trying to ask this person whether she thought Nathan Fielder would be “into” me, yet I worried that that was what she thought I’d been asking, yet I’d shirked the opportunity to laugh her answer off and seek another one. How could she have misread my meaning so? Maybe I’d asked What is he like so emphatically, so insanely, that something in my tone had led her to interpret my question as “What does he like,” and the category of “what” that came to mind for her was not Activities or Entertainment Properties or Vacation Destinations or Genres of Cuisine but Women, and the category of woman Fielder liked seemed to this person to be Not Alex, and to soften the blow of delivering this news this person had chosen quickly to fall on her own sword, to implicate herself alongside me, even though we weren’t really the same type of girl; maybe there’d been a glitch in the Zoom connection, or a lag, and she’d only heard a part of what I was asking, and she hadn’t quite known what to say, and she had grown flustered and decided to answer me with some random fact; or maybe (and this possibility struck me as the worst of them all) she’d heard my question correctly, found it stupid and striving, and had simply chosen to respond in a way that would put me off while telling me all I needed to know: that whatever else Nathan Fielder might be like, the thing he’s like the most is a guy who wouldn’t be into me.

I’d had one chance to ask someone acquainted with Fielder what he was like in person and receive an answer or something like it, and now, whether owing to a mondegreen or a bump against some social code or the rails of reality, I would have to keep guessing. I felt full of profound shame. I didn’t—don’t—don’t generally?—consider myself someone susceptible to the sinister phenomenon known, in the excruciating parlance of our washed times, as “the parasocial relationship”; I wanted to know something about Fielder so badly, I told myself, because he’d made a game—publicly, and for years—of playing a kind of keep-away with himself. Fielder gives relatively few interviews, never makes a public appearance out of character; the game feels like the point of the work. I like feeling smarter than games. It is, in the yada yada of our yada yada, my “toxic trait.”

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I didn’t start watching Fielder’s first major reality-comedy television program, Nathan for You, until it had already ended. I tuned in the day after its series finale aired; I’d read about how part of the episode revolved around Fielder, or a version of him, falling in love with an escort named Maci, or a version of her; I had to see if it was real.

I quickly found that the question of the real—whether an emotion or an experience is real, or feels real, and whether performance, repetition or forced logistical investment can make it become real—is at the center of the show. Fielder, who worked as a segment producer on Canadian Idol early in his career, ostensibly used the lessons he ostensibly learned working on a major reality program to create, with Nathan for You, a reality program about the opacity and predation of reality programs; about how certain people will suffer nearly anything to get on television, and certain creators will do nearly anything to stay there.

Fielder’s post-Nathan projects together betray what seems to be a growing concern about what’s to be done with that knowledge: what can be done; what should be; what must not be, and what’s done anyway. 2023’s The Curse, a fictional narrative series starring Fielder and Emma Stone as aspiring reality stars Asher and Whitney Siegel, and Benny Safdie as their producer, Dougie Schecter, neatly lays out the status quo in the first episode: “Is it okay if I put some water in her eyes?” asks Dougie when a cancer-riddled interview subject—an elderly Latina woman living in poverty with her unemployed son—doesn’t react to good news with enough emotion. “She’s dying,” says Asher. “I know,” says Dougie, “sad.” Then he dribbles water on her face and blows menthol in her eyes. This marks the end of the cold open.

Meanwhile, The Rehearsal, which premiered in 2022, offers regular people the chance to rehearse, through elaborately crafted sets and uncannily cast doubles, events that commonly inspire both yearning and apprehension: the confessions, to intimates, of unhappy truths; the strictures and joys of parenthood, and of country life. All at once a cringe comedy, a docuseries, an improvisational exercise, a piece of gonzo journalism, a well-funded lab study, a surrealist ballet, a prestige drama, and a piece of theater of cruelty, The Rehearsal is serious and silly, ridiculous and self-ridiculing, frequently unearthing and then just as quickly burying the real—burying it, and then just as quickly unearthing it—over and over again, sometimes within the span of seconds. As the Fielder-character wanders repeatedly into the emotional and intellectual traps his subjects have asked him to lay for them, his capacity for self-denial deepens: he’s shown a truth about himself, and he turns from it, shrugging off the genius of his own increasingly elaborate mechanisms of apocalyptic revelation. At least that’s what might be happening.

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“I hope you’re hungry,” Fielder says in a now much-memed moment from the second season of Nathan for You; having promised a “lobster lunch for one at sea” to a man named Jonathan, an eager-for-screentime participant in a needless scheme to bring more business to Pink’s Hot Dogs (a “Hollywood landmark” operational since the 1940s that regularly turns out 1400 meals a day) who was caught abusing Nathan’s “line cutting allowed if you’re in a hurry” policy. Fielder sets before Jonathan an ornate silver-domed serving tray, then yanks the lid triumphantly into the air—briefly inducing Jonathan to flinch—and intones plainly: “for nothing.” To choose a moment from Fielder’s fast-expanding body of work that exemplifies it in toto would be a difficult and fairly pointless exercise, but one can get some mileage out of this one. Fielder has made us hungry for what he must not give us. Though he frequently films himself naked (shaved and dressed in a diaper to play a baby version of hero pilot Sully Sullenberger), and in compromising situations (escaping “The Claw of Shame,” flying a hundred-foot plane despite admitting to being “the least experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America”), and sometimes both naked and in compromising situations (bald-capped and stuffed in a life-sized hot-dog bun), he has been able to maintain, through the cultivation of a mostly inscrutable persona, things quite unheard of in the world of television: dignity and privacy. And yet via this particular posture Fielder has wrought, over and over again, a kind of epistemological violence on his viewership: knowledge of the real is not possible, denied continually in ever-more-inventive jerk-aways of the football. I hope you’re hungry for nothing.

Against this backdrop, last month’s Season Two finale of The Rehearsal, “My Controls,” felt in many ways like the closest the viewing public has come to seeing some stripe of truth—however veiled, however meta—about who Nathan Fielder really is, or might be, or fears he is not. Throughout the episode’s first act, in which it is revealed (to everyone who isn’t a real head) that over the past two years, Fielder has quietly earned not only his pilot’s license but also a series of certifications and type ratings—including a 737 type rating—we see footage of him in cockpits, in classrooms, in his office, in his yard; squinting, struggling, shrinking away from his controls in a montage of early aviation mistakes. In these sequences Fielder is unshaven, uncertain; seemingly uninterested, for very brief spectacular moments, in the cameras eyeing him through all of it. Then, at the midpoint of the episode, Fielder complicates what has begun to feel like an almost illegal sense of closeness by revealing—or by ostensibly revealing—he’s learned how to exist in the world only by “copying” what he refers to as “regular people.” Here he admits—seems to admit—that he, too, is a victim of the void; of a painful not-knowing about himself. He has assembled himself painstakingly for and through others, conscious always of something within him that’s innately not-right. We can’t know him, this episode posits, not just because of all the other reasons we can’t know him, but also because he doesn’t know himself.

“When you practice being other people for long enough,” Fielder says in a sad voice-over, “you can forget to learn about yourself;” in his delivery he emphasizes the word can, transfiguring a melancholy admission into a kind of flex, or a kind of punchline: like he’s saying Duh; Haha; No wonder; Oh shit; How do I land this thing? You can reach the middle of your life and realize that you don’t know yourself; that there might be no self to know. There’s no self, and this is tragedy; there’s no self, and this is comedy.

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In act three of Hamlet—a work that has the luxury of confidently naming itself a tragedy—the prince entreats the group of players he’s hired to perform a shoddy version of a play called The Murder of Gonzago to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” He’s hoping to “catch the conscience” of Claudius: his uncle, his father’s murderer, his king. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out in his lecture “Against Self-Criticism” that definitions of “conscience” accurate to the period in which Hamlet was written differ, a little, from our contemporary ones; conscience was not just “internal moral regulation” but “inmost thought, mind, heart.” Inmost—and for that reason likely obscure even to its bearer, who has a cacophony of selves and voices (most of them quite nasty) stacked up inside. Any conscience that can be caught out, then, in Phillips’s estimation, “might be part of that fragmentary repository of alternative selves that is like a troupe of actors.” To catch another’s conscience, to force it into view, to make another “seen to be like a character”—this is a wish Phillips regards as “radical,” and perhaps, in its ambition, worthy. At the same time, does that ambition make it, in a certain light, unfulfillable? Our selves shimmer within us like schools of fish; do these many selves comprise a conscience, or obscure it? Can they be caught at all; is there anything to catch?

I thought of this Phillipsian conception of our private consciences—our fragmented, alternative selves, ready and waiting to play for any audience—upon watching Fielder, in a recent rehearsal, unleash something he calls “the pack” upon a trepidatious cargo airline pilot named Colin. Colin’s pack, a motley group of fifteen actors of varying genders, ages and races, arrange themselves around him as he rehearses a coffee date in the spotlit middle of a dark soundstage; they move shimmeringly and near-synchronously just behind him, like the prenominate school-of-fish form our inmost selves might be said to take, as they work to keep up with his movements—to become mirrors up to his nature—with the ostensible aim of making him feel surrounded, ergo fortified, ergo confident within a vulnerable moment.

The pack doesn’t really work for Colin, and Fielder instead recruits one of its members, a young bottle blonde named Emma (a double, in a sense, of the young bottle blonde named Emma opposite whom Fielder acted/for whom he struggled to imagine “feeling real love” in The Curse) to endeavor to build Colin up in a different way: by macking on him. All this attention and hopefulness is beamed heartily at sweet Colin, who has no clue what to do with any of it. In the end, all Colin can muster in the way of the sexual confidence Fielder so badly wants for him to realize—that is, both understand and make real—is a peck on the cheek for Emma.

Even after watching five groups of horny young actors rehearse rounding the bases in five abutting replicas of his apartment, Colin cannot follow suit. The pack holds a mirror up to him; who knows what he sees?

Rather than picking apart a person’s mannerisms or sartorial choices (as we often do ourselves, and as we might frequently imagine a group of faceless others doing too) the pack embodies them, underscoring the elements of choice—conscious or not—and performance—ibid—within even the most mundane interactions. In this way, the pack functions in spiritual opposition to another of Fielder’s favorite vehicles for self-criticism: the focus group. Early in The Curse’s third episode, Dougie shows Whitney and Asher some footage from a focus group HGTV has assembled in order to gauge early response to their reality pilot, Fliplanthropy, which documents their mission to bring expensive, eco-friendly “passive homes”—temperature-controlled, warpily reflective Doug Aitken knockoffs—to the economically depressed city of Española, New Mexico. The focus group unilaterally hates Asher, who scoffs off their criticisms of his woodenness and lack of gravitas. In a Season Two episode of Nathan for You, Nathan lets an ethnically diverse focus group “watch [his] every move” and give him “real-time feedback on the fly.” They encourage him, via a hidden earpiece, to smile, express himself with gestures, look into the camera; Fielder puts his new personality to the test by visiting his nemesis, private investigator/former Playgirl model/future star of the reality program Cry Wolfe, Brian Wolfe—the man who first dubbed Fielder “The Wizard of Loneliness.”

“You’re still a goober,” Wolfe barks upon encountering the new Nathan, who’s dressed in a deep V-neck and smiling wide. “But that’s just you.”

Fielder looks hurt. “What are you talking about—‘goober’? What’s that mean?”

Wolfe hits back. “Goober just means like a dork, a nerd. You know you’re a nerd. You’ve been a nerd your entire life. There’s nothing wrong with being a fucking nerd.”

“I’m not a nerd,” Fielder says, looking—or play-looking—or looking—even hurter, and doomed.

There might not be a self, and yet we can be nothing but it. If only the circumstances were perfect, we think wishfully—if only we had access to certain resources—we could become anyone; when Fielder dispatches those resources in service of others’ becomings (to say nothing of his own), this wish reveals its childishness. We are assemblages of traits and tics that we did not choose for ourselves; we are, nonetheless, responsible for all of it. “Self-criticism,” writes Phillips, “can be our most unpleasant—our most sadomasochistic—way of loving ourselves.”

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As Fielder’s work has evolved away from the business-school logic that defined early-days eps of NFY, it’s become more vexed about these mysteries of unintentional becoming: what we cannot help being, and how we deal with being it, no matter how unfair or impossible the dealing-with might be.

One way to reckon with all of these ontological impossibilities is to assume the Method-esque position that doing is tantamount to being; that certain under-gardened parts of the self can be made real through repetitious pantomime, while certain others—all the ugly bits we love and hate and love to hate and hate to love—can be jettisoned if we simply cease our performances of them.

This idea is played for laughs in the Season Four Nathan for You episode “The Anecdote,” in which the Fielder-character painstakingly constructs, ahead of a high-stakes talk-show appearance, “the ultimate talk show anecdote”—a story that involves an out-of-town wedding, a suitcase switcheroo that leaves Nathan with nought but a comically oversized suit (in whose breast pocket sits a baggie of suspicious-looking powder) to wear to said wedding, a stopped-by-a-cop-en-route-to-the-wedding scenario, a cop-asking-What’s-in-the-bag scenario, an It’s-not-mine-officer scenario, and an incredible reveal: the baggie contains the suit owner’s dead mother’s ashes. The scenario, while perfect, is not real. This—hilariously, given its meta-commentary on the content of the show—activates Fielder’s fear of being caught lying on television (“Brian Williams once did it,” he says, “and it destroyed his career”).

To make sure he isn’t caught in a lie, Fielder finds a way of recreating each element of his zany story: he secures, through subterfuge, an invite to a wedding, an oversized suit and a baggie’s worth of human ashes; he orchestrates a suitcase mix-up; he scripts a traffic stop, and his way out of it. Performing these events makes them real; there’s cover. Through doing the perfect talk-show anecdote, it becomes real; by becoming the person the anecdote happens to, Fielder becomes the kind of person who can deliver something of himself to an audience. It’s real because he’s made it so.

Conversely, the final (and most-discussed) moment of “My Controls,” which shows Fielder, again, becoming through doing—not-becoming by not-doing—is played frighteningly straight. As part of the medical clearance questionnaire pilots must complete each year, Fielder is asked to check “yes” or “no” as to whether he has “mental disorders of any sort: depression, anxiety, etc.” Much of the second season, up to this point, has toyed with how Fielder’s rehearsals resonate with autistic people, and even mimic certain therapies that allow autistic people to practice “socially difficult” situations. Now, we watch that “etc.” trip Fielder up—just as it might an autistic person.

He goes for an fMRI scan that promises to reveal whether he might have a mental disorder—what he seems specifically curious about, and specifically afraid of, is an autism diagnosis. The scan results aren’t ready in time for Fielder’s big moment—his “Miracle Over the Mojave”—and when they are, he declines to learn what they might reveal. Instead Fielder continues to fly planes around the world in his downtime, taking comfort in what his new role as a pilot means about who he is, and who he is not.

“No one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them,” he narrates. “So if you’re here, you must be fine.” We make our selves: through love and hatred, through criticism, through mimicry, through doing; through denial, and the opinions of others, and too through those truths we refuse to incorporate.

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In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace writes:

To the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending putdowns of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté.

Naïveté—the human condition, kind of—had by the early Nineties already been made criminal by the specter of ridicule comedy; if you somehow acted like a sucker in the real world despite the advantage of being able to see suckers getting suckered on television for six hours a day—well, you deserved it. This logic, or a piece of it, defined Fielder’s early period. Midway through “My Controls,” though, something fundamental to the Fielderian project seems to shift. An old man—the proprietor of “an aviation boneyard” somewhere in rural America—tries to sell Fielder an ancient 737, all exposed wires and broken controls and sticky windows. Over and over, for many minutes, Fielder picks apart the aircraft’s very clear defects, trying to get the old man to admit the plane might not be ready to fly; over and over, the ancient salesman insists he’d “fly in it in a heartbeat;” if he had a family, he says, he’d even let them fly in it. “Okay,” says Fielder, then points out a nest, built by birds, just above the old guy’s head.

“When you’re an HBO show with money to spend, the challenge of deciphering the truth can be difficult. You sort of have to just look at someone and decide whether to take them at their word or not,” Fielder deadpans via VO. After years of spiraling down into Hamletian, conscience-catching pranks—pranks designed to exploit normal people’s desires to appear on television for minutes, or seconds—Fielder is now the one being toyed with by someone who couldn’t care less whether he lives or gets blown to pieces in a 737 crash. At last, Fielder-as-we-see-him has become as needful as his prankees, as needful as us. Fielder doesn’t really have to decide whether to believe this particular man’s particular lies about this plane in particular; but here something essential about the real Fielder seems to break through. When you are in TV, and especially when you’re on it—when you have something people want—who can you trust to tell you the truth? Whose motives can you afford to read as pure? If Fielder, exposer of humanity’s crimes of naïveté, is himself vulnerable to them, then—who’s flying this plane?

The transference Fielder’s work occasions is complicated, throughout The Rehearsal’s second season, by sidelong glances at the countertransference that attends it. “This wasn’t a performance for you, the viewer,” he says, midway through a standout rehearsal of the season—a puppet-filled, fluid-drenched vision of Sully Sullenberger’s life story—“it was an experience for me.” For the sake of comedic effect, Fielder frames the categories of “you, the viewer” and “me” as distinct, unequal—but that framing begs the question: Between viewer and performer, who needs what from whom? Isn’t there, in certain of the Fielder-character’s more vulnerable moments, a sense of mutual need? Or do I just want for there to be?

In a Season Three episode of the Showtime docuseries Couples Therapy, Orna Guralnik, who is Israeli, speaks of her longing for a queer Palestinian-Lebanese couple to reconcile their differences “because of this kind of tortured part of the earth” from which all three of them hail. “I have this fantasy in my mind,” she chirps. “Break up for a few years, and then come back.” A fantasy in my mind, an experience for me. I find these twinned moments not just profound but titillating. The television performer’s obscure or unspeakable wishes made sheer: brief passing surrenders to the crime of naïveté of which we at home are again and again made guilty through our supplication to our screens. Something of the performer’s self, however uncertainly or badly made, is given here—given in exchange for our hours. Television makes the same animal of all of us.

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“The television screen affords access only one way,” Wallace writes from a time quite unlike our malignant present; the TV set of the 2020s listens to us when we speak to it, and sometimes speaks back; it pays attention to our habits; it knows us.

The one-way television of the 1990s is not our television; the “ironic self-reference” that defined the era in which Wallace’s observations about “the metastasis of watching” were formed has been replaced by the all-consuming demand for vulnerability; truth; what we aren’t supposed to see: reality TV programs. That the first big one was called The Real World now feels unbearable, and in some lights unbearably beautiful. Early on in the story of reality television the camera held the promise of revelation. To enjoy reality TV, a viewer must sign the devil’s book: that is, one must agree to a contract that only goes one way; a contract that cannot even be read. Suspend disbelief; accept as real the palpably not-real. Plug in somewhere and live there; forget the fact of your elsewhereness; forget, even, the forgetting of it. It’s kind of like buying hamburger meat. I don’t know how else to explain it.

Into this market of cultural reaction to cultural reaction to cultural reaction came Nathan for You’s conscience-catching self-weaponization; the auto-performance. Not Lucy Ricardo, not Tracy Jordan—not even, quite, Hannah Horvath—not a caricature slipped into and out of, but a kind of shade; gossamer and just-real-enough to sustain 1) the illusion that the performer is depositing a meaningful piece of themselves on screen and 2) the knowledge that some other, more meaningful piece of them remains withheld. The continual testing of the viewer’s powers of discernment becomes the entertainment itself; consumption of the auto-performance, we think, will insulate us against the crime of naïveté.

As below, so above; common, now, to the realms of the televisual and the literary is a demand for sheerness between creator and consumer. The market is seeping with the response to this demand—what I’ll term here “upmarket autofiction,” a kind of literary crime of which I myself could, in a certain light, be said to be a perpetrator. “Wan little husks,” prolific writer and shitposter Joyce Carol Oates once dubbed these novels, which employ certain autofictive preoccupations: the auto-portraitist’s self-making, the gap between the artist’s true self and their pageworthiest performances of self. But as in the successful auto-performance (Larry David’s Larry David, Jerrod Carmichael’s Jerrod Carmichael, Nathan Fielder’s Nathan Fielder), the writer of a successful autofiction must in some way be inserted, and indicted. Instead, so often a muted hovering betrays the author’s fear of any indicting eye, in spite of the legacy in which they’ve chosen to work. These novels are passive, slippery. Too often, the struggle to locate a sufficiently presentable self doesn’t play as comedy or as tragedy; neither is there a metafictional vacillation between these two modes that might reflect the pain, or the hilarity, of finding out that there’s no self to grab hold of. Instead there is only a tiresome emptiness.

Katie Kitamura’s recent smash Audition is, at first glance, not necessarily autofictive, though it is a novel about the above-mentioned gap: the inscrutability of the artist’s self, or selves. The text itself is guarded and abstract; the experience of reading it is much like looking in a clouded mirror. Reviewing the novel in Harper’s, Lidija Haas compares Kitamura’s elusive style to

an ascendant strain in American movie acting: a resolutely contained, withholding style for an anxious dissociated, hypermediated age of forever wars, prolonged socioeconomic crises, and numbing, relentless exploitation. A retreat from the more maximalist, keening-and-weeping approach that had been dominant in film for so long, this style (employed by the likes of Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence, and Oscar Isaac) resonates with audiences as a kind of antiperformance, signaling a new pessimism about the value of expression—and signaling, too, a form of stealth resistance, a refusal to yield up any remaining scraps of self to the meat grinder of ubiquitous surveillance and enforced display.

Out with the auto-performance; in with the anti-performance. The passive style of on-screen emoting is cast here as a kind of courageous refusal of the demand for sheerness. So too, then, must we read the passive style that now marks much of the current literary landscape—a style which seems to have reached its zenith (nadir?) in Audition—as the author nobly holding something of themselves back from a readership of wolves. Haas dubs Kitamura “The Passive Trickster”—doesn’t that sobriquet just sing? Doesn’t it sound just like “The Wizard of Loneliness?” Of course, I had to read this book.

Audition unfolds in two parts and is cleaved in half by a weirdly timed pause—as bad plays are wont to do—and, by design, there is not much concrete information about any of the characters that readers can grab on to. In the novel’s first part, a middle-aged actress fields a bleating request for connection from a young man who claims to be her son. She is rehearsing a new piece from a young playwright—it’s called The Opposite Shore, and we are given little sense of what it’s about. At one point, the playwright, delivering a note to her star, says: “This is the moment when your character achieves a kind of breakthrough, and reaches the opposite shore.” To her credit, the actress seems to fight the urge to lol. As the playwright continues talking at the actress about the meaning of the play, the actress’s “sensation of dread” grows. She narrates:

When I stared back [at the director] her face closed down a little, as if she had been confronted, and I knew then that she had no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play, how it would bridge the two versions of the character, the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder. She had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing, I realized, and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether.

Four pages later this exact phenomenon occurs in the text: after a one-page intermission we’re in a different world, and we’re following a new version of the narrator through a new reality. Now her stalker is her adult son, and he wants to move back home, and he wants to bring “a friend”—his lover. The reason her son gives for his paramour’s need for a place to crash strikes our narrator as “at once wholly plausible and completely vague.” Upon reading this line—which, to me, rang out as a tongue-in-cheek self-criticism—I went apeshit. Audition is not exactly autofiction, and yet it does precisely that which the new autofictive mode, and what anti-performance, does badly; it plays keep-away with itself to uncertain ends; it employs esotericism in place of vulnerability; it claims trickery, but catches nothing out.

“We don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage,” thinks Kitamura’s narrator; “we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. … Performance allows [a] dangerous proximity.” Wholly plausible, completely vague. In the late 1960s, while directing a production of The Bacchae, André Gregory wanted to get a real human head from the local morgue and have it passed around the audience “so that somehow people [would realize] that this stuff was real.” (The actress who would’ve been responsible for starting off the passing around of the head “absolutely refused to do it.”) It seems to me that we are starving for the real; that we have been for the last half century. We are so very hungry and so often served nothing. In our fiction, in much of our television, there is no sense that even from behind the veil of an avatar, or from within the void where the self was never assembled—where the call to assemblage was forgotten, or ignored—the creator is there; active, not passive; playing tricks or laying traps that hold within them deep wishes about what of the self they might catch out. For a trick to really land it must first create an asshole-shivering sense of lift.

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“It’s consolidated its six-hour hold on my generation’s cajones,” Wallace remarked of TV all the way back in 1993; six hours a day spent watching television now seems quaint in the extreme. Last weekend I watched nine hours of artily filmed sessions of Couples Therapy in a single evening; then I put on Grand Theft Hamlet; then I put on a speculative cli-fi anime about the sinking of Japan; then I fell asleep to a documentary about black holes. It’s 2025 and actors are on strike against emoting. Passivity is an artistic virtue. Everything is AI, or seems like it could be; everyone is a bot, or perhaps just a plant. We sign Satan’s book four times a night. We do this because we want to watch good television. We want to see something real, and yet “real” is not precisely what our own lives seem to be. We long for what must not be revealed. We observe other’s observations to catch out who they are and of what they might be guilty: the crime of naïveté? We want to learn how to be. We want to see Kristen Stewart cry. We want People-circa-’03-style coverage of Nathan Fielder’s love life; WHAT DOES HE LIKE? When I say we, I mean me, of course, whoever she is; like any auto-portraitist, all I can say for certain about myself is that I’m driving myself insane trying to find out about her. This isn’t an essay for you, the reader; it’s an experience for me.

All my life my deep unspeakable wish has been to make a living working in television. Now I do, kind of; for the moment, at least. It doesn’t feel real, and I keep treating it like it isn’t, and then feeling a wash of shame. I thought when my unspeakable wish was made real I would at least be able to feel it. Instead I feel only a great ambivalence about the real. Last year I published my own wan little husk and struggled so mightily to answer questions from strangers about which parts of it were real that I lost which parts of myself were. All of them. None of them. I couldn’t discern between truth and intimacy. I couldn’t decide how much of myself to give. I still can’t. What kind of television show will I have, when I have one—if I have one? What of myself will I put on the line? Nathan Fielder flew a plane on his reality program. Even up in the air, away from it all, TV’s puppet strings tugged tight on Fielder’s trick: experience or performance; which, and for whom? The lift was real, and so was the landing. But for a little while there, I couldn’t believe it.

Photo credit: HBO, The Rehearsal, “My Controls,” Season 2, Episode 6.