Last week, Nathan Fielder came for Paramount+. On Sunday night, he came for Clint Eastwood.
If Season 1 of Fielder’s genre-defying series The Rehearsal was centered mostly on staging elaborate simulations to help people rehearse potentially anxiety-inducing moments of their lives, Season 2 has seen him transfer his comedic prowess to the area of aviation safety. Namely, how his signature Fielder Method could be employed to reduce the number of flight-related accidents. Given the subject, it may come as no surprise that 10 minutes into the third episode, “Pilot’s Code,” he sets his crooked sights on Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, famed aviation hero and the subject of Clint Eastwood’s 2016 film, Sully.
For the uninitiated, Sully was the airline captain who, on January 15, 2009, landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River after it was hit by bird strike, saving the lives of all 155 people onboard. Eastwood dramatized this “forced water landing” in the aforementioned film, casting Tom Hanks as Sully in a piece of competency porn that also ranks as one of the guiltiest pleasures in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Yet for all of Sully’s delights, it somehow pales in comparison with Fielder’s latest episode, which simultaneously serves as a deconstruction of the type of movie Eastwood made and a superior biopic about Sullenberger.
Fielder finds his way to Sully through his first officer Jeff Skiles (played by Aaron Eckhart in the Eastwood film). During the last two episodes, Fielder’s main hypothesis regarding aviation safety has been that a copilot’s discomfort with their superior can lead to a lack of assertiveness in the event of any incompetency on the part of the captain. Fielder argues that the lack of such discomfort on Flight 1549—underscored by cockpit audio of Sully asking Skiles whether he had any ideas—contributed to an environment where the pilots were better suited to competently handling a catastrophe. Sure enough, even without Sully’s express permission, Skiles felt justified in putting out the flaps during the plane’s fateful descent, creating drag to slow it down for a smoother and safer landing.
This gets Fielder thinking: “If other captains could have the instincts of Sully, his personality,” he muses, “it’s possible the entire aviation issue I’ve been obsessed with would vanish overnight.”
Cut to Fielder shaving his head and body and strapping on a diaper in an attempt to transform himself into Baby Sully. The goal is simple: live as Sully from cradle to grave to understand how, as his subject puts it in his memoir, his “entire life led [him] safely to that river.”
“If even just the tiniest bit of Sully could become a part of me,” Fielder deadpans, “it would all be worth it.”
What follows is a typically deranged series of tableaux as far as Fielder is concerned. A giant Bread and Puppet Theater–esque replica of Sully’s mother wanders into a re-creation of a baby’s bedroom, tending to Baby-Sully-slash-Fielder, who’s nestled snugly in an oversized crib. She changes his diapers, reads him Charlotte’s Web, and, in a particularly haunting moment, breastfeeds him with a geyser of milk that nearly asphyxiates him. (“Fuck,” Fielder utters after the deluge ends.)
This is all par for the course in terms of the comedy we expect from Fielder. But in his typical hall-of-mirrors way, he’s lacing the laughs with a fascinating interrogation of our desire to reduce entire lives down to a series of defining experiences and traumas. This is, after all, the core stated aim of not only Sully’s memoir, but also every biopic ever made. Fielder has his fun with these types of biopic tropes, dramatizing Sully’s father giving him his first toy plane and, later, showing Sully respond to his wife’s insistence that life is not a checklist by stating, “I’m just trying to be efficient.” And the scene in which a bewigged Fielder plays a teenage Sully courting his high school crush Carol calls to mind the sun-drenched “cornpone” early sequences of a movie like Hacksaw Ridge, where Andrew Garfield put on a cloying “aw-shucks” accent while lit with golden sunlight and accompanied by a sweeping score.
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To Eastwood’s credit, this is the type of bullshit he left out of his film. Barring a few flashbacks to formative flights, he never really engages with Sully’s past. In Clint’s telling, Sully is a man made by a moment rather than a man whose life has led to this moment. But while that separates the movie from the rote formulas of conventional biopics, it also leaves the film without any perspective on the interiority of its subject. In contrast, Fielder isn’t just dramatizing Sully’s life but “living it.” While exploring a flight young Sully took with Carol, Fielder attempts to understand how he compartmentalized his sexual desires and the safety of the flight by “basically masturbating” in the plane while trying to fly it.
Again, that’s preposterous, but the genuine investigation Fielder is teasing belies a curiosity about what made Sully the right man for the job, while Eastwood seemed interested only in reminding everyone that he was. His film is essentially a re-creation of the “Miracle on the Hudson” with a tacked-on third act entirely devoted to underlining just how competent Sully was on that fateful day.
“He’s like Gary Cooper,” Clint said in a press junket interview at the time of the movie’s release. And that’s all well and good when you’ve got Tom Hanks in full-on America’s Dad mode. But it doesn’t change the fact that Eastwood views Sully mostly as an uncomplicated piece of iconography. Yes, this lends the film an aura of camp—namely, in the repeated monotone utterance of the word “birds.” And yes, the moment when Hanks states plainly, with dawning realization, “We’re gonna end up in the Hudson” has an unmistakable charge.
But in his own strange way, Fielder’s time with Sully yields a far more interesting character study than Eastwood’s: less a celebration of the strong, silent type than an investigation of how “someone who was careful to stop short of implying his emotions ever got the best of him” was able to ask for help from his copilot in his greatest moment of need. His conclusion, imaginary as it may be, is that Sully was able to get in touch with his feelings through music after the death of his father and the purchase of an iPod. This leads to the climax of the episode, in which Fielder imagines a scenario where Sully zens out during the crash landing and plugs into Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” the chorus of which is coincidentally just as long as the period of silence from Sully in the cockpit audio before he spoke up to his first officer.
Fielder’s hypothesis that Sully was able to get in touch with his feelings and have the bravery to ask for help because “WAKE ME UP INSIDE” was blasting in his eardrums is, of course, ridiculous, even if Sully’s iPod was found submerged in the flooded cockpit after that fateful day. But it speaks to how his jagged way of looking at things can yield a more nuanced portrait of a man who has mostly been portrayed as an uncomplicated hero. “I’ve been really trying to take the human mind seriously,” he says at the top of the episode. And despite his dementedly Synecdoche, New York–esque approach, the result this week was a greater understanding of his subject than the actual movie about him managed to convey.
Maybe the Fielder Method should be employed for every biopic. Maybe Bob Dylan wouldn’t have been such a “complete unknown” had Timothée Chalamet masturbated while trying to compose “Like a Rolling Stone.” Maybe Austin Butler should’ve had his Baby Elvis diapers changed by a giant puppet to really convey what makes a mind so suspicious. Maybe all we need to understand the Miracle on the Hudson is 23 seconds of Evanescence.