By Haoran Xia
Published on: ToroScope
July 18, 2025
“What if we start over again?”
— Ho Po-wing (played by Leslie Cheung), Happy Together
At the beginning of Happy Together, Lai Yiu-fai, played by Tony Leung, quietly says: “What if we start over?” Every time Lai tries to break up with Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung), Ho throws out this impossible question: what if we start over? “Starting over” sounds like an extraordinarily simple idea—we stop clinging to the present, return to the past, return to the very moment we first fell in love, reboot time itself—but it is precisely this simplicity that makes it impossible.
Whether between lovers, friends, or any two people, the desire to return to the past always grows out of dissatisfaction with the present. We lose our meaning in this moment, in this place, and so we long for an impossible chance to return to a past that has not yet been destroyed by our own hands. It sounds romantic, and perhaps romance itself always carries within it something that cannot be realized in the present. To restart everything—or rather, the very idea of “restarting”—is a false proposition when applied to life. Its impossibility exists in every second, every place, and every word we speak.
The traces of life are everywhere. The “beginning” implied in “starting over” vanishes the moment something begins, and so what we truly wish to reboot is not the entire event, but that decisive first instant that determines everything.
But if we cannot start over, can we predict the future instead? Can we prepare ourselves in the present, no longer entangled with past, present, and future? The television series The Rehearsal proposes precisely this vast hypothesis.
The Rehearsal may be the most absurd television series ever made.
Developed by HBO, its first season premiered in 2022, with the second returning this April and concluding at the end of May. The premise is deceptively simple: creator Nathan Fielder recruits real people to participate in the show, takes problems from their real lives as narrative foundations, and then reconstructs the places they frequent—bars, apartments, schools—inside meticulously built soundstages. Why expend such immense effort and resources for strangers? Because Nathan wants to help them rehearse their life.
Nathan believes in method acting: if you want to portray something or someone, you must first become it. Experience outweighs emotion. This emphasis on experience lies at the core of The Rehearsal. In order to help participants succeed in real life, to allow them to foresee everything that might happen, Nathan constructs a virtual world based on reality. In this world, systems are written in advance, possibilities multiply endlessly, language becomes data, emotion becomes variables, and life itself becomes something that can be rehearsed.
You might not find this immediately compelling; you might even wonder what distinguishes it from the many script-driven reality shows that already exist. Indeed, much of what happens in the studio is pre-written, and the presence of scripting is undeniable. But this scripting and world-building constitute only part of the project. The more crucial question is whether—and how—what happens in this virtual world affects reality.
At its core, The Rehearsal resembles a mathematical proposition: if everything in real life can be quantified, does the future become controllable? This is no longer merely a story about scripts, but a debate about virtuality and reality, simulation and fact.
Whose World Is It?
In the first season, Nathan helps Kor and Angela rehearse their lives. Kor regularly attends trivia nights at a bar but has lied to his friends about holding a master’s degree. Nathan reconstructs the bar, hires actors to play the staff and friends, and prepares Kor for every conceivable outcome. After days of rehearsal, Kor confesses in real life, and everything goes smoothly. The rehearsal appears to work—but this is only one case.
From the second episode onward, Nathan works with Angela, who wants to become a mother. He builds a house and casts actors to play her husband and children. As the rehearsal unfolds, complications arise: the actor playing the husband quits for religious reasons; Angela herself repeatedly hesitates, wavering between stopping and continuing. Eventually, as actors withdraw, Nathan steps into the rehearsal himself and plays the husband.
As he inhabits the role of husband and father, he gradually loses control over the boundary between the virtual and the real. He begins to feel genuine sympathy for the role, investing increasing emotional energy into the “child.” When the child accuses the father of absence and emotional neglect, Nathan replaces the teenage actor with a six-year-old, allowing himself to experience something neither he nor the role had ever known: a missing father–son relationship. But what Nathan is attempting to repair is no longer clear—whether it is the character’s loss, or his own unfulfilled desire.
In the final moments of the fourth episode, Nathan returns to the park in search of his “son.” He secretly switches actors: a fifteen-year-old enters the slide, but a child emerges. Nathan takes the child’s hand and slowly walks away. In that moment, the father is given a second chance to become a father; the real Nathan grants the virtual Nathan a chance to “start over.” At the same time, the boundary between reality and simulation collapses. As suggested earlier, The Rehearsal is ultimately concerned with a mathematical proposition—one that may succeed in Kor’s case, but cannot be universally applied. This is why everything becomes unstable once Nathan enters the simulation himself. The real disrupts the virtual; emotional awareness jumps between frameworks. Nathan simultaneously creates the father and becomes the father.
The world of The Rehearsal is a world within a world—a reconstruction of what is already known. Repeated endlessly, simulation ceases to mirror reality and begins to generate another form of the known: a hyperreality, detached from the real world yet existing as fact within the participant’s consciousness. This hyperreality no longer adheres to the structure of past, present, and future. Instead, it is governed by variables—every word spoken, every action taken, every meal eaten, every song heard. In Kor’s repeated rehearsals at the bar, and in Nathan’s decision to replace actors to reconstruct a child’s past, the participants cease to be merely the subjects of simulation. Once reset, arranged, and calculated, they become the roles themselves.
Yet within this complex network of transformations, Nathan discovers another problem. No matter how carefully he rehearses, people inevitably say and do things he cannot predict. A gap emerges between the character as imagined and the character as enacted—a gap that can never be fully bridged. He believes that through observation, calculation, and rehearsal he has foreseen everything, that within his constructed world he possesses absolute authority, yet there is always something that escapes him, something that can never be rehearsed.
This leads to a fundamental question: can we ever truly know another person?
Who Relationship Is It?
If the debate between virtual and real constitutes one core of The Rehearsal, then its other core is relationship.
In the second season, Nathan turns his attention to commercial aviation. Fascinated by flight since childhood, he researches plane crashes and concludes that their primary cause is failed communication between captains and first officers. Captains and first officers are assigned randomly and are often strangers before each flight. In emergencies, captains hold absolute authority, while first officers’ input is frequently ignored. In black box recordings, crucial seconds of miscommunication lead to plane crashes. Nathan reconstructs an airport and invites pilots to rehearse pre-flight interactions, but the results remain ineffective. Communication stays awkward, constrained by hierarchy.
He interviews a reserved first officer and stages rehearsals for everyday conversations—dialogue, communication, even how to speak to someone he has a crunsh on. Still unsatisfied, Nathan decides that involving others is not enough. He chooses to experience the life of a captain himself. He transforms into Captain Sully, shaving his body, reenacting infancy, childhood, adulthood, and living out every stage described in Sully’s biography.
As in the first season, he no longer merely designs the role; he becomes it. When this already feels sufficiently absurd, the second season finale reveals that Nathan has, in fact, become a licensed pilot. During the hiatus between seasons, he trained at flight school, earned certification, and successfully flew a Boeing passenger plane with actors onboard.
In the second season, Nathan elevates rehearsal to a far more expansive scale. On the surface, the show examines the causes of plane crashes, but beneath this lies a universal human problem: communication and relationship.
Communication forms the foundation of relationship—without it, there can be no recognition or understanding of the other. Yet the seductive aspect of communication is that it appears simple, while effective communication is extraordinarily rare. Communication requires sacrifice. Every word spoken is a partial surrender of the self in the hope of being understood, respected, and heard. As Derrida suggests, this sacrifice also reveals the impossibility of communication. Casual talk—gossip, weather—fails to produce understanding. It is social lubrication rather than emotional exchange, incapable of constructing a shared world.
And constructing such a world through sacrifice is precisely the essence of relationship. The illusion of relationship lies in the belief that entering a new relationship allows us to discover a new self, to be reborn. What we often forget is that relationships also bring endless pain and suffering. Before entering any new relationship, we are forced to ask ourselves: are we seeking companionship and self-discovery, or are we fleeing from past relationships, falling from one abyss into another?
Father and son, husband and wife, one friend and another, captain and first officer—relationships always entail gain and loss, intimacy and distance, closeness and boundaries, recognition and compromise. This unavoidable duality means that relationships are not about constructing a free world of perfect communication, but about writing new rules that confine parts of both “you” and “me.”
Returning to the earlier question—can we ever truly know another person? The answer is no. Through endless rehearsals, Nathan tests the possibilities of relationships by quantifying them, turning them into formulas that hover between virtual and real. In attempting to eliminate uncertainty, he exposes the most painful truth of all relationships: other people are eternal variables.
For this reason, The Rehearsal is both comedy and tragedy.
Its comedy does not arise from political satire or overt jokes, but from the way it lays bare tragedy itself. Tragedy is the highest form of comedy. The difference between high and low comedy lies in discomfort: high comedy produces an awkwardness born from the gap between script and reality, pulling the viewer out of fiction and back into the real, forcing reflection on that gap.
This reflection is painful. It reveals the underlying logic that fleeting joy is always built upon enduring sorrow.
In Nathan’s tragicomic world, virtual and real intertwine, communication fails, relationships generate pain, and others remain forever unknowable.
作者：夏浩然
发表于：陀螺电影
二零二五 七月十八日
要不我们从头来过。——何宝荣（张国荣饰演），《春光乍泄》
《春光乍泄》开头，梁朝伟饰演的黎耀辉默默说到：“要不我们从头来过”。每当黎耀辉想与何宝荣（张国荣饰演）分手时，何宝荣便会抛出这个不可能的问题：要不，我们从头来过。“从头来过”听起来是一个十分简单的概念——我们不再念想当下，回到过去，回到我们彼此爱上对方的那一瞬间，重启时间——但却是一个不可能的概念。
无论情侣，朋友或是任何人想回到过去，是因为我们对当下不满，“我们”在当下这个时刻，这个地点失去了意义，所以我们渴求一次不可能的机会，回到那个还没有被我们亲手毁灭掉的过去。这听起来很浪漫，也或许，浪漫的事往往带有在当下无法被实现的不可能性。重启一切，或者说，“重启”这个概念本身对于生活而言是一个伪命题，它的不可能性存在于生活中的每一秒，每一个地点，以及被我们说出口的每一个字。
生活的印记四处可寻，“从头来过”的“头”在事情开始的那一瞬间便彻底消失了，所以，我们期望重启的并不是整个事件，而是事件开始的，那决定一切的第一瞬间。
但如果，我们无法从头来过，我们是否可以预判未来，在当下做好准备，不再考虑过去，当下和未来？剧集《彩排》便提出了这个庞大的假设。
《彩排》或许是最荒诞的电视作品。
由HBO开发，《彩排》第一季开播于2022年，第二季于今年四月回归，五月底完结。《彩排》的核心/故事十分简单：主创内森·菲尔德召集现实生活中一部分人作为参与者参与这部剧。内森将参与者现实生活中的一些问题作为剧本基础，在这基础之上，内森根据参与者在现实生活中常去的地点，比如酒吧，居住的公寓，学校等等搭建影棚模型。那么问题浮现：为什么内森要耗费这么多精力和资金为陌生人搭建模型？因为内森要帮助他们彩排人生。
内森相信方法式演戏技巧（method acting），即如果你想表演某件事或某个人，那么你首先得成为那件事或那个人，一种体验大于感受的方式。这种强调体验的方式便是内森创作《彩排》的核心：为了让参与者在现实生活中成功，为了让他们能够预知未来或许发生的一切，他选择在影棚里根据现实世界打造一个虚拟世界，而在这个虚拟世界里，事物运作的规律被提前写好，每个人所经历的一切有千万种可能，话语变为数据，感情变为变量，人生得到彩排。
或许读到这里，你并没有被我所写的内容所打动，甚至会思考，推荐这部剧的意义何在 - 这听起来和国内大部分根据剧本进行的综艺或真人秀毫无差别。
诚然，在影棚里发生的一切由内森提前撰写好，在这一程度上，我们可以看到剧本创作的部分。但在另一程度上，这样的剧本撰写以及场景搭建只是《彩排》项目的一部分，它的另一部分——也是更重要的一部分——在于，在虚拟世界里发生的一切是否，以及，如何影响现实世界？
换而言之，《彩排》的核心问题或许成为一个数学推论：当我们量化现实生活中的一切，我们的未来是否变得可控？这不再仅仅是一个围绕“剧本”开展的故事，而是一场关于虚拟与现实，仿真与事实的辩论。
谁的世界？
在第一季中，内森帮助Kor和Angela分别进行彩排。
Kor每周会在酒吧和朋友聚会参加问答游戏。但他向朋友谎称他有硕士学历，内森则为Kor还原了酒吧的模样，在影棚里搭建了酒吧，并召集演员扮演酒吧工作人员和Kor的好友。在几天的彩排下，内森为Kor准备现实生活可能会发生的任何情境，为Kor准备各种问题，帮助他应对所有可能发生的情况。最终，彩排结束，Kor与朋友见面，他向朋友坦白，一切安好，彩排的效果仿佛得到实现。但这仅仅是Kor的例子罢了。
从第一季第二集开始，内森便开始帮助Angela。Angela想成为一位母亲，内森便为她搭建房子，召集成年和孩童演员扮演她的老公和小孩。随着Angela彩排逐渐展开，问题不断出现：扮演老公的演员因为宗教原因临时决定退出；Angela前前后后对这次彩排抱迟疑状态，不断纠结于中断还是继续。因为多方演员决定退出，最终内森亲自参与彩排，扮演Angela老公。
在内森扮演老公/父亲这个角色的过程中，深入彩排的他逐渐失去了对虚拟与现实的掌控：他逐渐对老公/父亲角色产生同情，他对自己的“小孩”投入越来越多的感情。在彩排途中，小孩责怪内森扮演的父亲从小不在他身旁，导致父子关系薄弱，在这一刻，内森则决定将责怪他的青少年演员换为6岁演员，以此来体验自己/角色从未体验的那一部分——缺失的父子关系。不过内森想要弥补/再体验的，究竟是角色所需求的体验，还是他自己内心渴求的欲望？
在第一季第四集结尾，内森回到公园，寻找他的“儿子”，在这一刻他已经私自决定调换演员：15岁的青少年演员进入滑梯，而当他从滑梯滑出的那一瞬间，转变为了孩童。内森牵着孩童的手，逐步慢慢离开公园。在这一瞬间，作为父亲的内森重新获得了构筑父亲角色的机会；在这一瞬间，现实世界的内森为活在虚拟世界的内森提供了“从头来过”机会；同样，也是在这一瞬间，《彩排》中的虚拟世界模糊了现实的边界。
如前文所提到的，《彩排》在乎的实则是一个数学推论，一个将现实量化为单位来实现虚拟的数学问题。或许在Kor的例子里，这个数学推论得到实现，但这并不代表这个数学推论会在所有例子中实现。
这也是为什么，当内森亲自上阵扮演角色的时候，虚拟的效果变得十分模糊：存在于现实中的他扰乱了存在于虚拟中的他，他的情感认识从虚拟框架中跳跃至现实框架，以至于扮演父亲的内森真正开始期待父子关系的修复/父爱的弥补——他既创作了这个父亲角色，同时他也成为了这个父亲。
毕竟，《彩排》里的世界是”世界中的世界”，它是一个对于已知世界的重筑，重筑的结果则是已知现实成为一场被数学填满的模拟演示，而当模拟演示无数次地被排练，被重演，被产出时，模拟这个行为已经再创造出另一种已知——它成为一种超现实，即一种超出且脱离于现实世界范围的主观现实，它仅仅作为一种客观事实，存在于参与模拟主体的意识里。
这样的超现实不再关注”过去-当下-未来”这个结构，它关注的是发生在每一瞬间的变量以及这些变量如何构造成一种质变。这些变量存在于我们说的每一句话，做的每一件事，吃的每一口饭，听的每一首歌，也就是生活中的一切。好比Kor在酒吧里的无数次排练，也好比内森替换演员重新为小孩构造童年，当他们在自己的模拟中被重置、被安排、并计算所有变量时，他们不再是那个参与模拟的、被创造的角色，他们已经成为了这个角色。
不过在这样复杂的转换网络里，在这样虚拟（超现实）与现实相互交替的世界里，内森通过角色扮演发现了另一个问题：无论他如何努力地帮助角色进行彩排，这些角色总会做出或说出他所预想不到的内容，而这样的沟壑便存在于他脑海中设置的角色和角色的所作所为之间——他以为通过观察、计算、安排、彩排，他做到了预判的一切，他也以为在他构造的世界里，他有统领所有角色绝对权力，但总有那么一部分，是他永远无法预知，也永远无法彩排的。
那么，我们是否真的能够彻底地了解任何一个人？
谁和谁的关系？
如果虚拟与现实的二元辩论，以及前文提到的关于虚拟与现实的量化关系是《彩排》的核心议题之一，那么它的另一核心则是关系。
在第二季里，内森将实验问题指向了客机。在剧集里提到，他从小对航空感兴趣，而更感兴趣的是造成飞机事故的原因。他针对飞机事故做了大量研究，而他认为，造成该类事故频繁发生的首要原因是机长与副机长之间的沟通。
剧情发展，他采访了众多机长与副机长，也在机场候机厅仔细观察机长与副机长之间的互动。他发现，在每次航班起飞之前，机长与副机长是陌生关系，每一次分配都是随机。而当航班遇到危险事故，需要机长与副机长做出快速判决时，机长往往拥有绝对话语权，地位较弱的副机长则坐在一旁，毫无分享权——在多项黑匣录音中内森发现，即便副机长向机长分享他的建议，机长通常选择无视，固执做出他自己认为最好的决策，而正是在机长与副机相互无效沟通的那10秒，决策失误，飞机坠毁，人员伤亡。
这一现象成为了第二季讨论的核心，内森再一次在影棚里搭建世界——这一次他搭建了一座机场。剧集过程中，他邀请了几位机长与副机来到机场对飞行前的互动进行彩排。而彩排效果当然是无效的——无论内森如何设计他们之间的独白，机长与副机之间的沟通仍以尴尬为主。
他甚至邀请其中一位副机长，对他进行深度采访，了解到这位副机在生活中也是一位害羞、内向的人，他便邀请十几位演员陪他一起练习：练习对话，练习沟通，以及练习如何和心爱的女生聊天。
但内森认为，让机长与副机参与实验仍是不够的——他决定自行体验机长的一生。这是《彩排》第二季的高光之一。内森化妆成为美国航空史上最伟大的机长之一：萨利机长。他剃掉身体上所有毛发，如婴儿一般体验被喂奶的感受；他让自己经历小学，中学，大学以及成年生活，一步步体验萨利机长传记里描述的一切——与第一季构成回响，他不再是自己设计的角色，他在超现实里成为了这个角色。
而当你认为这一切足够荒诞，在第二季季终集（第二季另一高光）里，内森向大家展示：他成为了一名飞行员。在《彩排》第一季与第二季的制作空窗里，内森在航空学校学习并成为了一名有资格证，能驾驶波音客运机的专业飞行员。在剧集结尾，他召集演员作为乘客，与另外一名副机成功驾驶了波音客机。
在第二季里，内森将“彩排”的实验性提到一个更宏观的层面。表面上看，内森想探讨的是飞机事故的首要原因，但通过一次次彩排，飞机事故背后所体现的是人类共通的基本问题：沟通与关系。
沟通是构筑关系的核心——毫无沟通，何来对彼此的认识与认同。不过沟通的诱惑性在于，它看是一种很简单的行为方式，但真正做到有效沟通，却少之又少（好比第一季的父子，也好比第二季里的机长与副机）。
沟通代表着一种身份交互，一种政治式聆听，一种构造世界的方式。每一次沟通里，沟通双方所说的每一个字、每一句话代表了他们各自的一部分，这一部分传输、被吸取、消化、认识，当然也被牺牲——所以，在语义领域的沟通上，“我”说出口的每字每句，都是“我”为了让“你”理解、尊重、聆听所做出的牺牲——这正是德里达关于沟通（communication）的核心论点，这也代表了沟通的不可能性。无效沟通——聊聊八卦、说说天气——不足以让彼此理解彼此，这样的沟通只是一种社交方式，而非情感交换，不足以构造一个新的属于沟通对象之间的小型世界。
而做出牺牲，构筑小型世界也正是关系的核心。关系的迷思在于，我们总以为进入一段新的关系会让我们认识一个全新的自己——如获新生，但我们也总是忘了新的关系会给我们带来无尽的痛苦与折磨。
所以，在进入每一段新的关系前，我们不得不问自己：我们是否想在这段新的关系里获得陪伴，认识一个全新的自己？还是，我们在逃避过往关系，随同地心引力，由一个深渊陷入另一个深渊？
父与子，夫与妻，朋友与朋友，机长与副机，关系的构造代表着获得与失去，亲密与疏远，临近与边界，认同与妥协。这是关系无法避免的二元论，这也意味着，关系的核心不是构造一个自由的世界，一个实现绝对沟通的世界，而是书写新的规则，禁锢一部分的“我”与“你”。
回到前文提问：我们是否真的能够彻底地了解任何一个人？答案是不。内森一次次彩排，一次次在虚拟中测试现实世界中各种关系的可能性，他将关系量化，转变为一个存在于虚拟与现实的数学公式；他试图预排生活中所有的不确定性，反而暴露了关系中最痛苦的核心：他人是永恒的变量。
所以，《彩排》既是喜剧，也是悲剧。
它营造的喜剧氛围不来源于讽刺政治或现实生活的笑料，也不来源于一种隐藏在文本之间的中性幽默。
它的喜剧来源于它刻画的悲剧性，这样的悲剧性则来源于内森对于关系不可能性的深刻剖析。而悲剧则是喜剧的最高境界。高级喜剧与低级喜剧的核心差别则在于：高级喜剧营造的喜剧感会让人陷入一种尴尬，一种诞生于现实与剧本之间的落差的尴尬感，这样的尴尬感将你脱离出剧本，拉回至现实，思考剧本与现实之间的沟壑，而在认知这种沟壑之后产生一种深远的自省意识。
这样的自省意识是疼痛的，它让你意识到喜剧背后所隐藏的核心逻辑，即短暂的喜永远搭建在永恒的悲上——所谓乐极生悲。
在内森营造悲喜剧世界里，虚拟与现实交叉，沟通无法实现，关系生产痛苦，他人永远无法被理解。