The TV show that blew Christopher Nolan’s mind: “Unlike anything I’ve ever seen”
Nathan Fielder is perhaps one of the greatest minds of this century, with a level of genius that exceeds the comprehension of most people. From the poo flavoured frozen yoghurt episode of Nathan For You to the death of Adam in The Rehearsal, Fielder has created television shows that nobody else could, creating a meta commentary about our dependency on performing in everyday life and the blending of our public and private selves.
Nobody quite knows if Fielder is playing a caricature of himself or being genuine, something that adds to the mystery of his stories and the idea that now more than ever, people are struggling to be authentic and let life unfold in a natural way, obsessed by appearance and maintaining an illusion of self rather than actually being ourselves. This is also reiterated through Fielder’s very rare public appearances and interviews, with few opportunities for people to discern who he actually is and get a sense of his thoughts on the scenarios he creates.
This only adds to his genius, with an air of mystery to each of his creations that expands the discourse around the subject matter of his shows. This is something that Christopher Nolan was hyper-aware of, discussing the one television show from Fielder’s belt that completely blew him away.
Not many people expected Fielder to expand his work into the world of dramatic acting and fictional storytelling, with the filmmaker previously making documentary-esque productions in which he participated as ‘himself’, with allegedly no acting required. But when it was announced that Fielder would star alongside Emma Stone and Ben Safdie in a fiction limited series called The Curse, it was perhaps the only iteration of this announcement that made sense, with Stone proving her love for weird cinema and stories through repeated collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos.
The show follows a husband and wife who are in the midst of creating their own TV show while struggling to conceive a child, with life taking a turn for the worse after one of them is cursed by a small child. It’s a strange and abstract story, turning our attention to the absurdities of online performance and people who are completely disingenuous in every aspect of their identity, with this couple pretending to be motivated by kindness while contradicting this with their true selves.
It’s one of the strangest and most indicting shows about social media and people who completely lose themselves to an illusion of who they are, becoming so empty and lacking in integrity that they fade away entirely.
Nolan can only dream of making something with this much depth, with the filmmaker praising the show by saying, “It’s an incredible show, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen on television before. There are so few shows that come along that have genuinely no precedence. You’re going back to things like Twin Peaks, or The Prisoner, or Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective and things like that, so you’re in an amazing space, and I can’t wait to catch up with the climax.”
