Meet Joe Black, Finding Frances, and the Concept of Letting Go to Move On

There are two things I’ve watched in the past couple of days that haven’t left my thoughts. One is Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal on HBO, and the other is the 1998 movie Meet Joe Black.

As mentioned before in this very newsletter, I am a big fan of Nathan Fielder and can relate to all of his awkwardness and dry humor. Side note, I was watching a video of his, and my mom told me that she didn’t like him because he was too weird. Ouch.

While the Rehearsal is only five episodes in, Fielder clearly takes its cue and premise from the series finale from his previous show, Nathan for You, on Comedy Central which ran from 2013-2017. That it ran during my college years and that I hadn’t seen it should tell you just how dedicated to my academics I was during that stretch (hahaha).

In the trailer for the Rehearsal, Fielder mentions all of these conversations that people have in real life and wonders if people can rehearse these so that there is no regret. Nathan takes the concept from Finding Frances, his series finale. In it, Fielder accompanies a person he knew on a quest to find a person he regretted not choosing over his career. It’s important to note that this person, Bill Heath, is an actor who moved to LA from Arkansas after college. The other important thing to know is that Bill is now in his 70s and lives alone in a studio apartment in LA. Fielder first met Heath when Fielder hired him to be a Bill Gates impersonator in season two of Nathan for You. Heath realizing that Fielder has a production budget via Comedy Central, asks Nathan for help finding the love of his life, Frances. He needs help “Finding Frances.” What ensues is a haunting and compelling two hours unlike anything I’ve ever seen in tv or film. If you came in contact with me within the past couple of years, you’ve most likely gotten my spiel about it and my offer to buy the episode (2 or 3 dollars on YouTube) for you to watch just so we can talk about what transpired next.

Before I talk about why that’s important, I want to share another movie (I know, I have no social life) I watched yesterday. Meet Joe Black was a 1998 film starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. The premise is a funny one. Death inhabits a body to spend a holiday on earth and holds hostage his next victim as a guide so he can experience what being a human is really like. Oh and Death falls in love with said victim’s daughter. It’s sweet, poignant, and funny. Death, played by Pitt made me laugh when he told Hopkins character “Easy Bill, you’ll give yourself a heart attack. That’ll ruin my vacation.” It was emotional but you don’t experience just sad emotions. You laugh, cry, and wish you could look like Brad Pitt. Like one YouTube comment said under the trailer, it was a three hour movie that felt like it only lasted thirty minutes. There are so many good moments but I want you to watch it for yourself.

Like previously mentioned, Death falls madly in love with Bill’s daughter who ironically plays an ER doctor who tries to save people’s lives from dying. In the end, Death realizes that he’s only on earth for a limited time and knows that because he loves this girl, he needs to let her go.

In a similar way, over two hours, In “Finding Frances,” Bill Heath learns the same thing. While very different characters in very different genres, I was struck by the similarities between Death and Heath. Fielder, playing the straight man, serves as the narrator that helps guide the viewer as he and Heath go back to Little Rock, Arkansas to find this Frances who told him that she would always love him. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that life moved on for her, but Heath is just a sad enough but likable character that the viewer roots for him up until the very end despite some very creepy behavior by Heath. Unlike Death in Meet Joe Black, Heath has also lived life not as a stranger on holiday but rather as a person who chose one thing but had regrets for not choosing the other fork in the road fifty years earlier. Again, Heath had grown up wanting to be an actor and chose that career and LA over the love of his life. That he was unsuccessful in his career (again, he was hired as a Bill Gates impersonator for a short segment on a Comedy Central show) only further caused that sense of regret. I won’t ruin the ending if you want to watch it on HBO Max or other platforms but Heath realized what has happened over a short ten minute period. He learned of what happened to Frances and learned that she was thriving and had been for a long time without him. He knew that if he truly loved her, he needed to let her go.

At the end of Meet Joe Black, Death and Hopkins’ Bill are watching fireworks right before Death’s holiday ends and Bill’s afterlife begins.

Bill tells Death:

“It’s hard to let go isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, Bill” Death replied.

“Well, that’s life.”