TV Review – The Curse

The Curse (Showtime)
Written by Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Carrie Kemper
Directed by Nathan Fielder, Nathan Zellner, and David Zellner

I will not sit here and pretend to tell you I know exactly what The Curse was about. Having watched the series only once, that would be an absurd claim to make. Not since Twin Peaks: The Return have I felt I was in the presence of a piece of art that seemed like an impossible thing made reality. The fact that Showtime greenlit this is a monumental achievement. Nathan Fielder enters a new era, taking the themes and threads of his pseudo-documentary programs like Nathan For You and The Rehearsal and developing a narrative experience that is so incredibly rich & dense. He’s also a damn good actor, which reminds us that the Nathan we think we know has always been a performance and not the actual person.

On the surface, The Curse is the story of Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone), an ambitious young woman who wants to become famous by developing passive homes in the New Mexico city of Espanola. She can parlay these houses/art pieces into an HGTV series via her husband, Asher (Fielder). Asher’s childhood friend Dougie (Benny Safdie) is a reality television director hired to help develop a pilot. 

Things take a strange turn when one afternoon, after shooting, Dougie encourages Asher to approach a little girl selling cans of soda in a parking lot. The director thinks it will be good footage to help show how philanthropic the Siegels are. Asher only has a $100 bill and hands it to the girl, and when Dougie tells him to “cut,” he takes the money back from her. Asher promises to return with a twenty and genuinely wants to do this. The little girl says she curses him before Asher unsuccessfully runs off to find an ATM. Later, the couple’s meal kits arrive, and one dish is missing all the chicken. It seems small, but Asher can’t get that curse out of his head.

You are not likely to see anything like The Curse again anytime soon. It was a story that I genuinely could not predict where it would go, yet I found every twist in the narrative to feel like a completely natural avenue to go down. Even the final episode, which throws us the biggest “what the fuck” moment of the entire ten-episode affair, feels earned. Why something so ludicrous worked was the commitment to the concept & style that everyone involved held. For people trying to decipher what The Curse “is about,” I think they need to realize it’s not just about a single thing; in the same way, Twin Peaks: The Return is about a myriad of things. Sometimes, it’s the people making the show finding ways to make each other laugh; others, it’s an attempt to evoke a very particular mood; and in even more scenes, it’s about communicating something about the human experience in a profound, honest, painful way.

There’s so much talk around Fielder that we forget that his co-writer was part of a film duo responsible for some of the most tension-riddled American cinema to have come in a long time. Most people who know the Safdie Brothers know pictures like Good Time or Uncut Gems. I highly recommend watching slightly older films like Heaven Knows What and Daddy Longlegs for even more of that horrific anxiety. I could feel that aspect of Benny’s contribution in the overwhelming sense of dread that pervaded each episode, alongside Fielder’s pointed critique of the nature of media, fame, and public personas.

When you look at a piece of art like The Curse, there are essential questions to ask that help you understand it more. They might seem like basic questions, but they have value in being asked. For example, why New Mexico? None of the three key actors/creators are from there, so it’s a question worth raising. By setting the show in this place, a theme arises: Europeans’ colonization of the Americas. This wasn’t a single instance but an ongoing cyclical colonization. Gentrification is a modern process of colonizing what has already been taken. The native people have found a way to live in two worlds: within their indigenous culture and as part of the white superstructure. Yet, the colonists are void of culture, so they dress up in the trappings of the colonized, never really understanding what they are looking at.

This theme is played out in the relationship between Whitney and Cara (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin), a Native artist whose work Whitney is desperate to feature in the show. But Whitney is also desperate for Cara’s approval, not just as an artist but as a Native person. Early on, we learn that Whitney’s parents (Constance Shulman and Corbin Bernsen) are notorious slumlords in the region, buying up rental properties and failing to maintain them for the tenants. Whitney embraced the chance to change her last name when she married Asher because it allowed her to disassociate from her parents publicly. However, she frequently borrows money from them to finance her projects. Whitney benefits directly from her parents’ exploitation of the poor and marginalized communities while fiercely pursuing the approval of people who are in the demographics of those being harmed. 

Cara tries to be polite but eventually has to rebuff Whitney. This is a breaking point for the privileged party, but she doesn’t turn on Cara. She attempts to manipulate situations, Whitney distances herself from Asher, whom she has now labeled as someone pulling her down, and she colludes with Dougie to make the show about her passionate desire to be “independent.” Yet, how independent is Whitney? She defines herself by and in opposition to others; she clamors for affirmation from communities she doesn’t and will never belong to. She is so miserable. What does Whitney actually want? She wants to be perceived as a happy & morally good person. The emphasis is on “perceived as” because there isn’t any truth behind this. With the final shot of her in the series, the first time we see the hint of an authentic smile, not a fake one for the cameras, we realize one way Whitney might find true joy in her life. It’s still enigmatic and asks us to sit with that smile and what it means.

This is one of many ways the show satirizes the contemporary white American liberal. Asher is a given (Ash), and Whitney means “white island.” There’s a good intent…or at least a partial one, but it’s ultimately couched in self-serving actions taken by the Siegels. They want to buy homes and make them environmentally passive. It all sounds good on paper, but the closer we look, the greater the flaws become. There’s a moment where the details surrounding the passive homes come into question, and we see Whitney bristle. She re-explains with an increasingly annoyed demeanor why these things are “good, actually.” She talks about how one tenant “doesn’t deserve” to live in a passive home after he throws out her specialty stove. 

Asher is just as complicated but in different ways. He’s clearly a cuckold and experiencing dissonance as he comes to terms with this concept. The curse of the title worms its way into his mind and comes to dominate all his thoughts. He’s shaky at the start, but by the end, he’s so distracted that he suffers a complete breakdown. That incredible scene of pathos delivered in episode nine had my jaw on the floor. I don’t want to get all parasocial, but I wondered how much of Fielder’s actual divorce found its way into his work. Both this series and The Rehearsal focus on domesticity and marital relations. Fielder isn’t playing himself but exploring the fragile nature of relationships in the modern era, especially when under public scrutiny.

There’s the aesthetic appeal of The Curse that makes it so engrossing. Every episode is filled with long, eerie takes, accompanied by music from John Medeski, an avant-garde jazz composer. Nothing really happens in these scenes that we might classify as overt horror, but it establishes a palpable mood of unease. I liken it to that feeling you might have when you contemplate the many cruel truths about being alive as a human. Your stomach sinks, and you feel chills. For much of the series, it refuses to make clear what these moments mean. That ambiguity adds to the horror. What does it mean when you feel a sinking sense of dread but can’t pinpoint why. As one person tells Asher, specific ideas burrow into our psyche and fester within.

The Curse is about many things, and unpacking those things will take time. I appreciate it when a filmmaker presents us with something so layered that I can’t fully digest it in one viewing. I’ve watched the original run of Twin Peaks about a dozen times and found new things with every watch. I suspect the same will be said about The Curse. If you felt something visceral when you saw this excellent show, follow that emotion, figure out what evoked that in you, and then focus on that aspect of the show. What are Fielder & Safdie trying to say through that element? Don’t try to uncover the big MESSAGE; just let yourself get lost in the work.