Fact-Checking Nathan Fielder’s Wild Claim About Captain Sully and Evanescence
This week’s installment of The Rehearsal boldly answers the question “What if the movie Sully starred Nathan Fielder instead of Tom Hanks and took place inside a 19th century carnival performer’s feverish nightmare?”
The episode opens with a stunt involving Fielder’s attempt to revive the personality of a dead dog via its clone. Then, in a left turn so wide that it mounted the curb and hit several pedestrians, Fielder endeavors to try out this “personality transfer” approach on himself. And because this season is all about aviation safety, the personality he tries to hack into is that of Captain Sully Sullenberger.
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Using Sully’s 2009 memoir Highest Duty as his road map, Fielder restages key moments in the pilot’s life, experiencing them firsthand. It all begins in infancy, a feat that’s accomplished with gigantic sets and towering puppets. Of course, Baby Nathan doesn’t actually try to breastfeed from the pupp— no wait, he definitely does. Lazy old Tom Hanks probably never even considered trying this.
If all of that wasn’t ridiculous enough, a close reading of Sully’s book leads Fielder to conclude that music played a huge role in his life following the release of the iPod. “With unlimited access to music, it felt to me that, for the first time, he had a way to understand his feelings through lyrics,” Fielder says during his narration.
The show notes that Sully specifically loved the band Evanescence. Fielder theorizes that the gothy rockers may have been partly responsible for the “Miracle on the Hudson,” when Sullenberger safely landed U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River after it was struck by a flock of geese. That’s because Sully doesn’t speak for 23 seconds, which just so happens to be the same length as the chorus of Evanescence's hit song “Bring Me to Life.”
Is it possible that Sully used that time to pop in his earbuds and allow his favorite track to help him guide that plane to safety? It’s an intriguing theory to be sure, and one that Evanescence’s Amy Lee called “really beautiful.”
It’s also why people have been hounding Sully on social media, posting Evanescence GIFs and demanding that he share his playlists in response to unrelated posts.
Unfortunately, there’s basically a zero percent chance that any of this happened. And not just because Sully’s lack of chit-chat can easily be explained away by the fact that he was focusing on landing a plane in a river, which happened literally less than a minute after the 23-second silence began.
The show also misrepresented one very important detail. While poring over Highest Duty, Fiedler claims that “the one band (Sully) mentions more than any other is Evanescence.” But if you look at the actual book, Sully only ever mentions Evanescence once, as part of a long list of musicians he likes, which also includes Natalie Merchant, The Killers and Green Day. It would appear that Fielder selected Evanescence for this bit because, not because Sully was necessarily a huge fan but because, with apologies to the band, they were the hands-down funniest choice.
Even more damning evidence can be found at the end of the book. While Fielder would like us to believe that Sully kept his beloved iPod on him at all times, in reality, Sully’s device was packed away in his case during the flight. Four months after the crash, the airline sent him the contents from his roll-aboard bag, which included his laptop, alarm clock and iPod, all of which had been destroyed.
Fielder’s hypothesis was still better than anything in the Hanks movie, though.
