Nathan Field's new book, "The Rehearsal," looks like a malicious joke. Why make this joke? What is his purpose?
The ostensible reason is that he wants to help amateurs with "problems to solve" through this HBO reality show, so that they can better solve problems by rehearsing the difficult scenes that applicants will encounter. Cole, the first subject of rehearsal, was a New York teacher and bar quiz enthusiast. Many years ago, he lied about his education to the guessing team, and he is uneasy to this day. He hopes to reveal the truth to one of the members and apologize. The second applicant, Patrick, was embarrassed by his younger brother, the administrator of the estate, over his grandfather's inheritance. Nathan sent actors to play his younger brother, rehearsing the dialogue at the restaurant the brothers frequented. The third applicant Angela's rehearsal content is her future life. The program team prepared a dream house for her in the suburbs of Oregon, and a long list of actors ranging from babies to eighteen years old played her son Adam, so that she could fully experience the taste of ideal life in two months. 
Rehearsal poster
Nathan and HBO are powerful and able to mobilize amazing resources to keep the play + rehearsal game going on a jaw-dropping scale. In order for one person A to experience the feelings of another person B, Nathan asks A and B's actor C to rehearse. In order to make C as similar as possible to prototype B, C was assigned to observe and learn B's behavior and thinking. If it's not enough, D will appear as B and rehearse with C.
This is just an expansion of Nathan's "play + rehearsal" game. There are also several ways to make the game infinitely extend geometrically. In the fourth episode, he flew back from Oregon to Los Angeles to recruit actors. In order to verify the effect of his acting class, Nathan invited actors to play himself to reproduce the first class, and he played one of the students to attend. After the first class, Nathan sent the actors to choose the imitation objects. After finding that one of the students could not complete the task well, he arranged a suite similar to the imitation object and two roommates for the student. Push him into the life of a copycat. Nathan himself managed to get into the cadet's life, living in his apartment. In this episode, Nathan Field alone plays the three roles: director Nathan, trainee Nathan, and Nathan imitating the trainee.
After doing this, he sighed that even if he lived another life, it was still difficult to read other people's hearts. The last piece of the puzzle is always missing.
Although the above description of the rules of the game is a headache, I encourage you to spend three hours watching this so-called comedy reality show. As the story progresses, the transition between id and acting becomes more seamless, resulting in a disturbing viewing experience. You will find that there must be a real existence in the act; when it appears in the image of the id, there must be an act of acting. It turns out that there is no distinction between id and acting, only whether it is true or not to stimulate emotions. But sometimes, people can't tell the authenticity of emotional experience. 
"Rehearsal" stills
The real purpose of Rehearsal is to make you re-examine yourself.
Nathan Field's unique emptiness makes him at the heart of the mystery no matter what he shoots. In Rehearsal, he shows the evolution of an abnormal human being. In the initial stage of Cole, a teacher in New York, he took out the tree-like decision diagram he drew and rehearsed possible dialogue scenarios for Cole over and over again like a robot. When he realized that people's emotional responses play an important role in the real scene, the "emotion" element, which is more difficult than verbal decision-making, appeared in the next dress rehearsal.
In order to cultivate the "correct" emotional response, Patrick is arranged to experience a play within a play. After being infused with the emotion, Patrick and the actor who played his younger brother were at a restaurant to discuss inheritance matters. The emotional build-up of play-in-play prompts Patrick to burst into tears, breaking away from all the rehearsed scripts and succeeding.
From here, director Nathan Field strays from his stated purpose. Patrick, who succeeded in the rehearsal, left without saying goodbye, and we have no way of knowing how the actual conversation went. And Nathan realized that "for some people, the real emotion that comes out of the rehearsal may be enough." The line between false and true blurs. At this time, Angela of Oregon needs a pretend partner to raise Adam with her. Nathan, 38, who was divorced and childless, decided to take on the role himself and called off other rehearsals to fully experience what it was like to be a father.
It ended with the original intention of helping others solve problems, and turned to three directions: Nathan understood others by "wearing other people's shoes"; Nathan gained the experience of being a father himself; Nathan thought about the meaning of this large-scale social experiment.
It's more of a devil's game. Nathan Field, a very boring and powerful devil, sets up scenes within scenes, sets within scenes and acts in person. Whether in Christianity or Judaism, the devils are tempted to take the bait with beautiful promises, and then manipulate people's hearts, causing people to fall for a living. From all indications, Nathan Field is playing the role of the devil. This is a devil who made his debut as a director and doesn't yet understand human nature. He needs to probe people's hearts by constantly creating rehearsal scenes. Due to a natural defect of the devil - no feeling (Angela's biggest criticism of Nathan), no amount of observation and acting can only allow Nathan to gain knowledge, and it is difficult to empathize with him. We'll see that Nathan's cries are bizarre when his 15-year-old character, Adam, passes out from a drug overdose, like an attempt to imitate sadness to call out real sadness.
Of course, the devil is arrogant. The New Yorker commented that Nathan was arrogant, condescending, manipulative, and focused only on his behavior, ignoring his inner workings. Can't say it's entirely true. 
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There must be arrogance. When Angela, a devout Christian, showed the attitude of "everyone is drunk and I'm awake" to the devil, thinking that Google and Halloween are the devil's tricks, Nathan couldn't help but "envy" this kind of stubborn living in his own world simple stubbornness.
Handling is also sure. His control over the details is outrageous. He has set up scenes for the rehearsal 1:1 for many times, unfolding the illusion layer by layer, so that human emotions can be polished over and over again in the rehearsal, leading to the ideal direction.
But it would be wrong to say that he was indifferent to inner activity. Nathan Field, played by Nathan Field, is a new devil, or a human with emotional difficulties. Although it is extremely difficult to understand the emotions of others and himself, he has been trying.
In the fifth episode, Nathan has a conflict with Angela because of Adam's religious beliefs. He decided to change the habit of obeying others every time he had a conflict, and insisted that Adam also learn the teachings and rituals of Judaism. In defending Nathan's own lazy Jewish beliefs, his childhood memories are awakened and projected onto little Adam. It was an amazing experience as a parent, and he was starting to appreciate it.
As the devil, Nathan isn't perfect. He often reveals flaws in lack of mana. In terms of manipulating the time, all Nathan can do is let the staff artificially snow fall around the house to simulate the coming of winter. In order to speed up the flow of time to match Adam's rapid growth (three years old every week), the staff buried the melons and fruits purchased from the supermarket in the vegetable garden outside the house. The fruit was carefully "harvested" into the kitchen by Angela, and a green pepper showed a price tag. Nathan reached out and turned the green pepper, hiding the label.
In the countless stories of the devil circulating among the Jews, all the devil's methods are much better than this. The carefully crafted traps by the devils will not be exposed for at least a period of time, so that the prey can be convinced and immersed in it. Angela and Nathan's experience of raising Adam together isn't realistic. It is like a doll that resembles a person but not a person, causing people to fall into a different dimension of time disorder and generate resistance.
Angela finally left. She realizes that this "rehearsal" is no longer her parenting rehearsal, and the protagonist is Nathan. Before that, she had gradually withdrawn from the role she should play, and as Angela herself, she had a conversation with the actors who played Adam, and wasted time in the mansion. This is Angela's instinctive resistance, she wants to grasp the real in the virtual.
The devil's tricks have a time limit. Even the devil loses a trick without a time limit. Just think, a rehearsal that can start from scratch infinitely is like a country's central bank printing money without restraint. A sports game that never ends will only consume the emotions of the participants (including the manipulators) and smooth out the ups and downs of hormones. Curve, in the end nothing happens. 
Screenshot of "Rehearsal"
What Nathan did to the house in "The Dress Rehearsal" was ostensibly to set the clock fast and make the time fly by. The essence is that he is borrowing time and using the borrowed time to make things evolve to the best "best" results. This daring social experiment, like Thanos' attempt to wipe out half of the planet's population, lacks common sense of time, human nature, and natural evolution. Once freed from the constraints of time, an event can be rehearsed countless times without any consequences, and people change their attitude toward it, and their attitude toward life changes forever.
People always say there is not enough time. Paradoxically, if the devil promises you unlimited time, he will only get you nowhere. The emotional energy and hormonal levels required to make decisions have a premise: time does not cycle, but only linearly. The new interpretation of time by modern physics has not affected people's ancient cognition of time at all. Only the time-limited setting can make people enter the state of fighting for the future, release all emotions and hormones, and strive for the best result.
Animals live in the present, and only humans prepare for the future. Once time can be reversed, efforts will be meaningless, and everyone will become Angela who has nothing to do and spend time in the mansion.
So Nathan Field's social experiment was doomed. Failure is common sense. Those who try to go back in time and change the past in a time loop are never successful. 
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"The Dress Rehearsal" is more of a drama than a reality show. The difference between the two is whether the actor is acting according to the script (allowing some improvisation), or whether the actor/amateur with the belief of "going to HBO" voluntarily participates in the experiment. Another difference is, did Nathan write the script, or guessed it, or had limited control over it?
As far as Rehearsal is concerned, none of these factors that differentiate the genre matters. Nathan's cryptic and reluctant secrets don't stop us from appreciating it.
This show has been highly praised (9 points on Douban) because its multi-layered nested structure is difficult to distinguish between true and false, breaking the barriers between reality shows and virtual works, and providing audiences with the ability to be manipulated on the timeline and move forward. The depths are like an endless experience like a Russian nesting doll.
This kind of experience is not uncommon in film and television works, and in recent years, "Russian Dolls" (Russian Dolls", "Undone" and other series provide similar experiences. The biggest difference between "Dress Rehearsal" and them is that , Others have become more and more courageous in the time cycle, and enrich their life experience with the accumulation of emotions. Although it is impossible to change the past, the characters' hearts have undergone tremendous changes. Their vision of the past, future and self has changed. The characters in Rehearsal are the opposite. The more they rehearse, the less interested they become, and eventually they lose interest because they perceive the limit of time.
It was not until the last episode that Nathan and the child who played six-year-old Adam formed an off-screen friendship, reconciled with Angela, and began to reflect on what it was all about. What did Nathan gain and what did he lose? Why is Nathan, as a director and actor, so sad when he sees the tears of a six-year-old child? In the end, he muttered to himself that it turned out that the important thing was not to change the course of things, but to look at the past and the future with new eyes.
If the sad devil Nathan wants to send us a message through this film, it is: don't try to live forever. You can feel alive by living as if you were going to die immediately, by mobilizing all your emotional power. Otherwise, one more rehearsal will weaken the strong feeling of being alive.