Ramblings/A Review of The Rehearsal Episode 4

child abuse and drug addiction......

“Our screams heal the torn silence. We are the scars.”

-C.K. Williams, Dimensions

A small urn rests above the fireplace in a home in Middle America. This is a home filled with a good, honest, hard-working family. This is a home where nothing bad has ever happened. Inside that urn is the face of a friend I knew in Kindergarten, a girl in my biology class, my best-friend, my worst enemy. Inside that urn is the face of thousands of children blended together and made featureless through the leveling out of a kiln’s furnace. 

The fourth episode of the Rehearsal begins with a thought-provoking investigation into the lived-body, the way that the inescapability of subjectivity means that one can never truly be known or know another. This on its own would make for a great piece of television. But it is the last half of the episode which elevates it to a groundbreaking piece of art: one the most honest portrayals of drug addiction ever seen on film or TV. 

I have always been of the opinion that drug-addiction is not meant for on-screen portrayals. Not out of a sense of moral pearl-clutching, but because I feel that visual media is incapable of getting it right. That ineffable it that gets to the heart of what it means to be addicted to drugs. A prime example of this is Trainspotting. The novel is filled with heart wrenching accounts of alienation, poverty, grief, and rage. It encompasses the joy of using, the moral degradation that comes from the singular goal of getting high. It delves into the heart of its character, Mark Renton, to find a scared little boy, reeling from the childhood abuse of his older brother, the guilt and grief that the loss of his mentally handicapped younger brother inspired in him, the resentment he feels towards his parents and his friends, the disgust he has towards a society that mocks and abuses those they feel are inferior. Trainspotting, the novel, understands it. Understands that drug addiction is at its core the patching of a long bleeding wound. 

The film adaptation cuts all of that. It does not include Mark’s brothers. Or his parents. The issues of ableism, racism, and childhood abuse are ignored, despite them being some of the most prevalent driving forces of the novel. Instead flashy visuals are deployed, the euphoria of being high blasted across the screen as if one were floating. Floating. It’s always floating. Breaking Bad, Jesse rises above the mattress with his first hit. They don’t get it. Euphoria, Zendaya, rolling around a moving corridor, glitter on her face, neon lights behind her. They don’t understand. In the spectacle what is real is lost. Drugs are never about the addition of experience, they are about subtraction. You subtract what kills the child inside of you in order to survive. You subtract yourself. Your whole world. You subtract and subtract until you are left with nothing but a pinprick of being. And at the end, as Osamu Dazai once stated, the addict “can't even guess… what it must be to live the life of a human being.”

Nathan, I think, is able to hit upon this truth of the wounded child, precisely because he is not trying to. He is manipulating the narrative, that is for certain. But the metaphysical darkness of drug addiction is sort of through a veil for him. He is too close to the trees to see the forest of his creation. In trying to recreate what it means to be a parent, he unintentionally stumbles into the reality that every parent must face: failure. The fallibility of human nature determines the fallibility of the parent. There are a million ways to hurt a child, each more heartrending than the last. Nathan acts without comprehension for what his actions might bring to his family, stumbling through parenthood, eyes closed, feet tripping, just like everybody else. It is the mundanity of his sins that makes the outcome of the episode so chilling. Nathan leaves for a week, and he comes home to a child nine years older than when he left. The jig is up. A child, once unable to speak for himself, enters adolescence and gains a voice. In the case of the wounded child, that voice is very often one that cries out for nothingness. And Nathan has wounded this child. He asks his false son, Adam, Joshua, Adam, to compound it, ever more in each sequence. You can almost hear the production notes. Dress him in dirtier clothes, put a beanie on his head. Tell him in the next scene to start using drugs. Tell him in the next scene to withdraw completely. Nathan’s actions walk a line between willful ignorance and calculated manipulation. What as written from the very beginning, and hat as decided on as the narrative itself unfolded before Fielder, is unclear. He will do anything to bring the point across, though what that point is Nathan himself sometimes forgets. Nathan’s attempts to mend the bridge between him and his false son Adam only compound the problem. A gift of a guitar pedal, a lecture about using cocaine. Nathan understands that Adam’s acted pain stems from his false father’s refusal to apologize. He acts it out, wandering through the rooms of an old farmhouse, at a loss. What does a parent do, when they have hurt their child so deeply, so drastically, that it seems it can never be repaired? Nathan answers honestly, the way most parents do. I don’t know. 

The final ten minutes are the most heartbreaking of all. Nathan asks his co-parent if she could be willing to restart the project, to go back to when Adam was six. Nathan is abandoning his son again, because he feels he has failed. Adam is a thing to be discarded, like a toy that has become too difficult. This is the suburban family on drugs. If it can’t be fixed, don’t apologize. Instead agonize. If it gets too hard, cut ties and restart. There are fifteen year olds wandering Hollywood Blvd right now, their eyes glazed over, because they are too difficult. Nathan, fake tears in his eyes, or are they real, or are they fake, over his dying stupid fake actor son, overdosing on heroin, screaming I don’t know what to do. And Adam, Joshua, Adam, running into the woods, Nathan chasing after. The final scene is one of utter devastation. The drug addicted Adam shares a mournful look with his false father, sitting on a playground, drinking 40’s. Nathan has scoured the city for him. For a moment you think that when Adam goes down the slide he will emerge into his father’s arms, and they will embrace, and maybe cry, and something beautiful will be born from the echoing of shared emotion. Back and forth, actors that have their strings cut, coming to terms with what cannot be said out loud. Instead… Out of the slide instead is the new toy fit for consumption. Six year old Adam. Real name unknown. There is no embrace. Cowardice reigns.

People don’t like to lay blame. People like to claim that a drug addict makes a choice, each time they use. And that is true. No one forces a needle into your arm. No one shoves your face into a line of coke. But there is blame to be had for the original wound, the blood soaked betrayal which demands the price of a young child’s life in search of a numbing of pain. There is a whole nation of children suffering. They are being beaten and degraded and raped. They are starving, They are shaking. They are afraid. This country is not in the midst of a drug epidemic, it is in the midst of a child abuse epidemic. At the heart of drug addiction, the thing at the very beginning, is the truth that no one but Nathan Fielder is willing to acknowledge: drug addicts are not born, they are made.