Who is Nathan Fielder, really?

Nathan Fielder has been quietly building his cultish brand of meta-comedy since 2013 and has now exploded into mega-stardom thanks to “You Can See Everything,” the three-hour documentary about now-imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. For those unfamiliar with Fielder’s career or filmmaking approach, his assent to award season hopeful — even frontrunner — has felt like welcoming a strange alien to a planet inhabited by the slick Hollywood establishment.

If you’re new to Fielder, the film might leave you wondering who is this odd man that Holmes, a convicted fraudster, invited to live in her seaside bungalow with her partner and children in the days before she reported to prison? Is he a serious documentarian? A funny trickster? Both?

Fielder’s work, both predating his buzzy feature-length project and the film itself, defies simple description. At its core, his work looks to address a central question: Can you ever really know another person? In his shows and his movies, he combines deep inquiry with awkward comedy, often with himself as a main character. This is his magic trick: Using artifice and absurd scenarios to capture uncanny glimpses of truth, with himself as a prop.

Originally from Toronto, Fielder developed his first inklings of niche fame as the host of Comedy Central’s “Nathan For You,” a docu-reality series that parodied business consultants and their tactics. The show, which launched in 2013 and ran for four seasons, stars Fielder, using his (real) business degree to help (also real) struggling small businesses. Fielder played up a version of himself on the show, acting as a dumbly ambitious business school graduate, socially inept and desperately seeking connection. His schemes were not so helpful. In one episode , he suggested a frozen yogurt shop debut a “poo” flavor, saying the notoriety would draw customers. In another , he placed an ad for a pet store at a pet cemetery.

Comedy Central/Courtesy Everett Collection

The show was critically acclaimed, with the New York Times calling it “the television series with the most incisive take on the 21st-century economy.” Documentary master Errol Morris called the season finale, which veered from the business scam format, his “new favorite love story,” an exploration of our collective “unfettered capacity for credulity—not just the suspension of disbelief but the acceptance of the preposterous.”

Fielder followed up “Nathan For You” with “The Rehearsal,” an HBO show that premiered in 2022 and leveraged his obsessive anxious mind and penchant for ultra-realistic simulations. Like “Nathan For You,” “The Rehearsal” used real people — but instead of small business owners, they were people with a problem to solve and, for different reasons, issues communicating.

Fielder constructed elaborate scenarios to allow them to “rehearse” for real-life events, practicing each possible outcome so they could be prepared. When one man wanted to prep for an awkward conversation with a friend, Fielder constructed an exact replica of the bar where the feared conversation would take place. Fielder, still dry but less overtly comic than in “Nathan For You,” played a laptop-toting social architect, a Machiavellian evil genius whose social anxiety became the engine for esoteric social experiments.

Both shows are at once very silly and surprisingly serious. Saying “Nathan For You” is about a business scam or “The Rehearsal” is about problem-solving is like saying “The Titanic” is about a boat. Both shows veer into surprisingly philosophical and meta explorations of love, memory, perception , and performance. Most broadly, Fielder’s exploits depict the near-universal struggle for people to understand each other.

His persona’s failure to understand social norms shows how arbitrary they are. Fielder often plays the loner, the outsider; his struggle to find romantic love is a common theme in his early work. “You remind me of the wizard of loneliness,” one subject tells him on “Nathan For You” in a surprisingly pointed riposte.

Fielder insists his comedic style developed just from being himself. “I noticed that people would laugh at things when the camera was on me that I didn’t intend to be a joke,” he once told British documentarian Louis Theroux.

“At first, it’s humiliating to have people laugh at you when you’re not trying to be funny, but then you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, I guess these aspects of me are funny,’” he said. “Obviously, I can write jokes, but the moments I was always trying to chase were those that were inexplicably funny because they were human.”

In his previous work, Fielder honed the surreal approaches he deploys in “You Can See Everything,” which he co-directed with Lance Oppenheim.

In the new film, as in his previous work, Fielder uses actors to play out real scenarios, and leans on his own dry, bluntly awkward persona to bring out his subjects’ quirks and oddities.

But there are differences, too. In his shows, Fielder tends to let things unfold as they may — he’s not looking to fact check or mock his subjects. “I don’t want anyone to look bad,” he told Theroux. “I want to be the fool.”

In “You Can See Everything,” however, Fielder steps into the role of quasi-journalist, pushing back on Holmes’ relentless insistence of her innocence and naivete. He still makes jokes, but he mostly lurks in the background of Holmes and Evans’ already surreal post-Theranos-implosion life.

Oppenheim says Fielder-opposite-Holmes is the comedian at his most authentic. “I feel like this is the closest we’ve ever come to actually seeing Nathan not being a character onscreen or doing a bit,” he told New York Magazine .

Which doesn’t mean you should take him entirely at face value. “As soon as there’s a camera, it is a performance,” said Sophy Romvari, a filmmaker whose debut feature, “Blue Heron ”, blends elements of fiction and nonfiction. “It’s a performance, maybe more of self.”

That’s true of Holmes, Romvari said, and also of Fielder.

“It’s probably a version of himself, but there’s no such thing as, like, capturing the authenticity of a person without some element of performance,” she said. “Because you’re aware that you’re being captured, you’re aware that cameras are there, and you’re aware that there’s something to be either gained or lost in doing that.”

Which might explain why some have scoffed the film’s designation as a documentary. When a film is presented as a documentary, there’s an expectation “that you’re just watching a real person and that this is their true self,” said Romvari. But, she said, “A documentary is just a form of filmmaking like any other.”

The question, Romvari says, isn’t what’s real, for Fielder or Holmes. The project of filmmaking instead – whether it’s fiction or documentary – is to try to capture what’s true: emotionally true for the people we watch.

“I don’t really care so much about, ‘is it real?’” said Romvari.

“It’s not real. But it’s still coming from a place of truth. It’s that person’s truth in that moment.”

内森·菲尔德自2013年以来一直在默默打造他独树一帜的元喜剧风格，如今凭借纪录片《一切尽收眼底》（You Can See Everything）一举成名。这部长达三小时的纪录片讲述了如今身陷囹圄的Theranos创始人伊丽莎白·霍姆斯的故事。对于那些不熟悉菲尔德的职业生涯或电影制作方式的人来说，他这部影片成为颁奖季的热门之选——甚至是领跑者——就像是在好莱坞这个由老练的权贵阶层占据的星球上，迎来了一个陌生的外星人。

如果你是第一次接触菲尔德的作品，这部电影可能会让你好奇：霍姆斯——一个被判诈骗罪的人——在入狱前几天，邀请这个古怪的男人和她的伴侣、孩子一起住在她位于海边的平房里，他究竟是谁？他是一位严肃的纪录片导演？一个滑稽的骗子？还是两者兼具？

菲尔德的作品，无论是早于他那部备受瞩目的长篇电影项目，还是电影本身，都难以用简单的语言来概括。他的作品核心在于探讨一个核心问题：你真的能了解另一个人吗？在他的剧集和电影中，他将深刻的探究与略显尴尬的喜剧元素融合在一起，而且常常以自己为主角。这就是他的魔术：运用人为的技巧和荒诞的场景，捕捉到令人意想不到的真相瞬间，而他自己则成为了一个道具。

菲尔德出生于多伦多，他主持喜剧中心频道（Comedy Central）的真人秀节目《内森为你效劳》（Nathan For You）是他初尝走红滋味的契机。这档节目以讽刺商业顾问及其惯用伎俩为主题，于2013年开播，共播出四季。菲尔德本人在节目中扮演着一个略显愚蠢却野心勃勃的商学院毕业生，他社交能力欠佳，渴望建立人脉。然而，他的种种妙招却往往收效甚微。在其中一集中，他建议一家酸奶冰淇淋店推出“便便”口味，声称这种恶名能吸引顾客。另一集中，他甚至在宠物墓地为一家宠物店投放广告。

喜剧中心/埃弗雷特收藏公司供图

该剧广受好评，《纽约时报》称其为“对21世纪经济最具洞察力的电视剧”。纪录片大师埃罗尔·莫里斯称，偏离商业骗局模式的季终集是他“最喜欢的新爱情故事”，探讨了我们集体“不受约束的轻信能力——不仅仅是暂停怀疑，而是接受荒谬之事”。

菲尔德在《内森为你效劳》之后，又推出了HBO剧集《排练》，该剧于2022年首播，充分展现了他焦虑不安的性格以及对超逼真模拟场景的偏爱。与《内森为你效劳》一样，《排练》也使用了真实人物——但与小企业主不同的是，这些人物都是需要解决问题、并且由于各种原因存在沟通障碍的人。

菲尔德精心设计了一系列场景，让他们能够“预演”现实生活中的事件，练习每一种可能的结果，以便做好准备。当一位男士想要为与朋友的尴尬对话做准备时，菲尔德甚至搭建了一个与可能发生这场对话的酒吧一模一样的场景。菲尔德的表演依旧冷幽默，但相比《内森为你效劳》中少了些许夸张的喜剧元素，他扮演了一位手持笔记本电脑的社会架构师，一个阴险狡诈的邪恶天才，他的社交焦虑成为了他进行一系列深奥社会实验的动力。

这两部剧都既荒诞又出人意料地严肃。说《内森为你效劳》讲的是商业骗局，或者说《排练》讲的是解决问题，就好比说《泰坦尼克号》讲的是一艘船。这两部剧都出人意料地转向了对爱、记忆、感知和表演等主题的哲学和元叙事探讨。更广义地说，菲尔德的经历描绘了人们彼此理解的近乎普遍的困境。

他塑造的角色无法理解社会规范，这恰恰暴露了这些规范的随意性。菲尔德经常扮演孤独者、局外人；他早期作品中一个常见的主题是苦苦寻觅爱情。“你让我想起了孤独的巫师，”在《为你而来》（Nathan For You）这首歌中，一位受访者出人意料地尖锐地反驳道。

菲尔德坚称他的喜剧风格完全源于做自己。“我注意到，当镜头对着我时，人们会因为我一些并非有意为之的举动而发笑，”他曾对英国纪录片导演路易斯·塞鲁说道。

“一开始，当你并没有刻意搞笑的时候，却被人嘲笑，这确实很尴尬。但后来你就会想，‘哦，看来我身上的这些特质确实挺搞笑的，’”他说道。“当然，我会写笑话，但我一直追求的是那些莫名其妙却又充满人性光辉的时刻。”

在之前的作品中，菲尔德磨练了他在《你可以看到一切》中采用的超现实主义手法，该片是他与兰斯·奥本海姆共同执导的。

在新电影中，菲尔德像他之前的作品一样，利用演员来演绎真实场景，并依靠自己冷幽默、直率笨拙的个性来展现人物的怪癖和奇特之处。

但两者之间也存在差异。在菲尔德的节目中，他倾向于顺其自然——他并不刻意去核实事实或嘲讽他的拍摄对象。“我不想让任何人难堪，”他告诉特鲁，“我想当个傻瓜。”

然而，在《你什么都看得见》这一集中，菲尔德扮演起了准记者的角色，反驳了霍姆斯一再坚持的她天真无邪的说法。他仍然会开玩笑，但更多的是在霍姆斯和埃文斯在Theranos公司倒闭后本已超现实的生活中，隐身于背景之中。

奥本海姆说，菲尔德与霍姆斯搭档时，展现了他最真实的一面。“我觉得这是我们迄今为止最接近看到内森在银幕上不扮演任何角色或表演小品的一次，”他告诉《纽约杂志》。

但这并不意味着你应该完全相信他的话。“只要有摄像机在，一切就都变成了表演，”索菲·罗姆瓦里说道，她是一位电影制作人，她的处女作《蓝鹭》融合了虚构和非虚构的元素。“这是一种表演，或许更多的是一种自我表演。”

罗姆瓦里说，霍姆斯的情况确实如此，菲尔德的情况也是如此。

“这或许是他自己的一种表现形式，但要完全不带任何表演成分地捕捉一个人的真实面貌，是不可能的，”她说。“因为你知道自己正在被拍摄，你知道摄像机就在那里，你也知道这样做可能会有所收获，也可能会有所损失。”

这或许可以解释为什么有些人对这部电影被贴上“纪录片”的标签嗤之以鼻。罗姆瓦里说，当一部电影被冠以“纪录片”之名时，人们会期望“你看到的只是一个真实的人，这就是他/她最真实的一面”。但她也表示，“纪录片和其他电影形式一样，只是一种电影制作方式而已。”

罗姆瓦里说，问题不在于菲尔德或霍姆斯眼中的“真实”是什么。电影制作的意义——无论是虚构的还是纪录片——在于努力捕捉真实：捕捉我们所观看的人物情感上的真实。

罗姆瓦里说：“我不太在意‘这是不是真的？’”

“这不是真的。但它仍然源于真实。这是那个人在那一刻的真实感受。”