The Rehearsal, Tiffany Haddish, Aries Spears and the Complicated Ethics of Child Acting

I just finished The Rehearsal but I am identifying with it on a powerful level for reasons that go beyond also being a neurotic Jew named Nathan who does not understand himself or the world around him.

I’m also fascinated by it because it’s a marvelously meta exploration of the surreal, mind-melting process of mounting a Nathan Fielder television show. It’s a television show about doing a unique television show. As someone writing a book about movies about movies, that’s subject matter I find innately fascinating.

But I’m also obsessed with The Rehearsal because it’s, on some level, about the inhuman crucible of being a child actor regardless of the circumstances. It goes deeper than that. On some level, The Rehearsal is also about the pain of being a child, and the agony and confusion of being human. When Fielder, speaking of himself in third person, says his character is “just figuring things out and messing up along the way” he could be speaking for the sum of humanity. I know that I will forever remain someone just figuring things out and messing up along the way.

I wept like a baby at the end of The Rehearsal because it is an intense and powerful emotional experience, not just a television show, but also because my mother abandoned me when I was a baby so I could relate to the desperate yearning of a fatherless child actor who wants Nathan Fielder, his TV pretend daddy, to be his daddy in real life as well, and cannot understand why that’s impossible.

When your mother abandons you when you’re two years old, as mind did, you never stop looking for mother figures to fill that vast hole in your heart, soul and life. The pain recedes sometimes but then it comes back with a vengeance when you don’t expect it and you have to add, “never getting over childhood abandonment” to your lengthy list of insurmountable problems.

The Rehearsal is a real work of art that forthrightly addresses the ethics of thrusting child actors into the adult world of entertainment without adequate preparation or warning, and expecting them not to be confused and/or traumatized by the messy, complicated blurring of real life and reel life, reality and reality television.

Fielder’s justly revered, much talked about, zeitgeist-capturing show should win Peabodys and Emmys and pretty much every award that it’s eligible for.

But there’s something deeply, purposefully wrong with The Rehearsal as well. That’s more or less the theme of The Rehearsal: that you cannot mess with a child’s sense of self and sense of reality without doing damage to their developing minds.

I thought a lot about the final episodes of The Rehearsal when I found out about Through the Eyes of a Pedophile, a sketch Tiffany Haddish and Aries Spears created in 2013 featuring a seven year old child actor as the target of a pedophile’s lust.

For reasons I cannot begin to understand, Spears played the titular pedophile opposite a seven year old boy who was apparently traumatized by the experience.

You’d never imagine it from this thumbnail, but that “sketch” is creepy as fuck.

The “joke” of the sketch is that child molesters love molesting children. The sketch is unconscionable and bewildering because if there’s a single subject that incites the rage of the American people it’s child molestation. Even in prison, child molesters are derided as the worst of the worst.

According to the child’s mother, he was traumatized and reduced to tears but when she complained to Haddish, she reportedly coldly informed the horrified mother, “I don’t think acting is for him.”

For a seven year old with no experience in show-business, it must be difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference between weird adults you don’t trust pretending to be sexual predators and the real thing.

I’ve watched parts of Through the Eyes of a Pedophile and it feels more like child pornography than adult comedy. My heart goes out to that poor child, who had to endure things no one should for the sake of a sketch that isn’t just a crime against comedy; it’s a legit crime that should land people in jail as well.

I’m a 46 year old father of two who has been writing professionally about pop culture and the world for a quarter century and I fundamentally do no understand an impossibly complicated and dark universe. How can we expect otherwise of a seven year old entering a weird and uncomfortable entertainment realm for the first and last time?

It feels like we are having a long-overdue reckoning when it comes to child actors and the morality of exploiting children for adult gain. Former Nickelodeon big shot Dan Schneider’s creepy behavior towards the children and teen actors on his many shows was, for a long time, one of the worst kept secrets in entertainment.

Now all of that ugliness is spilling out, thanks to a much-read Business Insider expose on Schneider’s misdeeds and former child actress Jennette Mccurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.

The Haddish/Spears video made me think of the chimpanzee massacre scene in Nope because it prominently involves child actors who are murdered or horrifically disfigured on the job and a murderous chimpanzee thespian who understands the difference between real life and entertainment even less than his human child actor compatriots.

We’re hopefully getting to the point where animal actors are no longer necessary, since we can get the same performances from CGI or motion capture creations, like the various beasties played by Andy Serkis.

I’m not sure we have to go that far with human child actors. But we’re hopefully seeing a paradigm shift. We need to stop assuming that child actors will be okay after being thrown into the adult world of acting and entertainment and assume that unless we collectively do everything in power to protect children nightmares like the Through the Eyes of a Pedophile will continue to happen.

Young, inexperienced children cannot be expected to understand the nuances and emotional complications of acting so let’s stop pretending otherwise.

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