Ben Watches Television : The Curse
2023 was somewhat of an Emma Stone renaissance. She was never NOT cool, but the girl next door thing had kind of run its course. What we didn’t know about Stone is that she’s a freak who loves the weirdo stuff. I’m talking experimental theater and whatnot. Her performance in Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things is her main project that caught people’s attention, but it’s by far not the best. Emma Stone was absurdly great as Whitney Siegel in Nathan Fielder’s latest demented project The Curse.
I don’t review television anymore, but I really want to talk about this.
The Curse tells the story of Asher and Whitney Siegel (Fielder and Stone), a privileged couple with a reality show project of revitalizing a distressed community in New Mexico through eco-friendly housing. It’s more of Whitney’s idea than Asher’s, so he’s quite uncomfortable with it and when he’s asked to buy soda from a little girl in a grocery store parking lot for B roll, Asher does with a hundred dollar bill and immediately takes it back. The girl curses him and things go downhill from Asher and Whitney.
A Brutal Self-Examination of Wokeness
Although it is highly conceptual and weird, The Curse is a courageous undertaking. It explores the idea of performative progressivism and whether or not throwing money at problems actually solves them. It might sound self-explanatory, but it’s a deeply rooted idea in North American culture that you can give yourself a good conscience by pouring money into something or even worse, that a situation needs more of you in order to improve.
Asher and Whitney’s plan of building eco-friendly homes is not suitable for the economy of the community of Española they’re trying to help out. All they’re going is enriching themselves and gentrifying the community by building homes none of them can afford. Whitney’s environmental concerns are in direct conflict with her social concerns, but she wants to make it work anyway. Are all the struggles compatible? When you try to improve something, aren’t you making something worse? On top of Whitney being a spoiled brat and a performative leftist, The Curse asks real questions and challenges ideas a lot of people are comfortable with.
One of my favorite examples of Whitney’s incompatibility with the people she’s trying to help out is her relationship to Native artist Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin), a talented creator and performer who has a come to Jesus moment when she realizes that the art she creates in order to express the oppression of her community is going to end up as a commodity for white people to fawn over in Whitney’s silly reality show. It’s funny because Whitney is so desperate to bond with her in order to convince herself she’s not just a self-loathing rich white girl.
If you’re a left leaning person (and I am), The Curse is going to ask you tough questions.
But the Nathan Fielder of it?
Nathan Fielder is renowned to be a genius of uncomfortable art and The Curse might be his most disturbing creation yet. MAN this is weird. The Curse is weird on a micro level and a macro level. For example, it is luridly established in the first episode that Asher has a micropenis and it doesn’t serve any purpose outside of giving you insight on why Asher is the way he is (he’s a difficult dude). It makes such a powerful statement only to be abandoned like three episodes in. I love stuff like this. It’s cosmetic, but it makes a narrative more vibrant and memorable.
But what is the titular curse huh? I’m not going to spoil it because The Curse’s finale is the most memorable hour of television I’ve seen since the first season of True Detective in 2014, but it’s both extremely clear and still quite mysterious what the curse placed on Asher actually was. Although the events seem final, it was abstract enough to make another season work. It is weird and symbolic and uncomfortable. I loved every second out of it. If you guys wanna reach out, I’d be glad to tell you my hypothesis on what it meant.
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The Curse is the best television show I’ve watched in many, many years. It’s deep and uneasy, but also extremely funny and provocative. It’s life-affirming stuff for pop culture nerds like me who are constantly on the lookout for something different and challenging. It's some real subversive stuff that will make you question your values and change your outlook on things your care about.
