The Curse: Hex-citing Satire's A Must-Watch

The Curse: A Hex-citing Subversion Of White Saviour Narrative

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s satirical cringe-fest about appearances vs reality is a must-watch, writes Prahlad Srihari.

EMMA STONE wears a smile as a multi-purpose mask in The Curse. The smile emerges where the words end. As currency, it only gains in value with each episode of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s satirical cringefest about appearances vs reality. Playing a white liberal keener on appearing than being good, Stone gets more out of a smile than most performers, calibrating the geometry of her face to express/counterfeit emotions. Sometimes those jade green eyes bulge a degree more to signal disapproval; sometimes the glance turns inward in embarrassment. Barely noticeable tremors in the lips register the pressure of disguising selfishness as selflessness. The longer Stone holds her smile, pearly whites and all, the uncannier it feels. The eyes stay frozen, almost unseeing, exposing a visible mismatch.

Smiles are infectious. We unconsciously mimic an on-screen smile even if it isn’t directed at us. There are no winks to the camera in The Curse. Yet, as viewers, mimicking Stone’s bare-toothed, dead-gazed expression, we recognise its insincerity at once. The mismatch betrays the gap between intentions and actions of Stone’s Whitney Siegel. Social media and reality TV have reshaped our world into one where those who know how to weaponise superficiality are rewarded. What Whitney seeks is the reward of being considered a good person. If she professes solidarity with marginalised groups, it is to gain social capital. If she lets people shoplift on her dime, it is to absolve her guilt. If she hires a Native American artist as a consultant, it is to immunise her from deeper scrutiny. Her idea of allyship is not to understand and put in the work to end structural injustices, but to pay her way through and skip to the end. (Can’t spell Whitney without white, can you?) Where allyship is insincere and sincerity flails out of reach, false smiles tell the true story.

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By Prahlad Srihari

Sure enough, Stone is phenomenal, so much so that she should have been given a co-creator credit. But The Curse is a lot more than just an acting showcase. Stone is the anchor; Fielder and Safdie are the architects. The squirm-inducing discomfort of Fielder’s work is reinforced by the pulsating anxiety that drives Safdie’s work, and vice-versa. With both joining forces behind and in front of the camera, viewers are wound so tight all they can do is smile or cringe through the discomfort. Momentum here comes not from endless gags, but from an atmosphere of escalating unease. At the end of 10 episodes, as liberal subterfuge is unmasked, the hypocrite living inside even the well-intentioned emerges in unguarded moments.

Whitney and Asher Siegel (Fielder) are a newlywed couple looking to “ethically gentrify” the small town of Española, New Mexico for a reality show, tentatively called “Flipanthropy”. How does one ethically gentrify, you ask? According to the Siegels, by selling eco-friendly “passive homes” while helping the displaced locals with jobs, affordable housing and second chances. Each episode sees these supposed do-gooders slip up again and again. At times, they say the wrong thing. Other times, they do the wrong thing. In the very first episode, a performance of generosity ends with Asher getting cursed by a young Somali girl (Hikmah Warsame). Ready to film all of the couple’s awkward efforts with a conflicting vision of his own is smarmy producer Dougie (Safdie).

For a reality show to get picked up, it can’t just be about do-gooders doing good. Bearing audience interest in mind, Dougie zooms in on the tension in the Siegels’ marriage, going so far as to pick at the scabs until they bleed. The Siegels, however, are eager to sweep all the unfavourable aspects of their marriage and their mission under the carpet. Interviews are buried, facts distorted, reality staged, to keep the couple’s image squeaky clean. Whitney, as it turns out, is the daughter of slumlord millionaires, “borrowing” her parents’ property and wealth to distance herself from them. If she converted to Judaism, it was neither due to some crisis of faith nor out of blind loyalty to Asher, but simply for optics. Theirs is not a healthy relationship of equals. While Asher worships the ground Whitney walks on, she belittles him again and again. Only he accepts every criticism, taunt and mockery as if it were a test of loyalty. Fielder cuts the pathetic figure of an impotent man who readily absorbs indignities like a human sponge.

The elaborate pretence of the Siegels’ happy marriage, as sold to the public, is best illustrated in a scene of engineered intimacy. Whitney is struggling to take off her sweater with a broken zipper; Asher lends a hand, pulling carefully, then firmly, before wrestling the sweater off his wife’s head, the force of which causes both to lose their footing, fall belly up and burst out laughing. Whitney then suggests they recreate this uncontrived private moment for the public on Instagram so the couple seem more endearing, more relatable. Their bid to recapture the same intimacy organically instead culminates in a heated argument.

Inside their passive home, the Siegels try to have a baby — via cuckold roleplay — to keep their marriage from falling apart. Outside, the couple strives to manage their perception, but end up pulling themselves into a vortex of ethical quandaries. Both suffer from a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease. The intention-action gap is made clear right from the get-go. While filming the pilot for their show, Dougie places drops of water on the face of a cancer-stricken mother so she appears more moved by the Siegels’ gesture to get her son a job. Whitney and Asher don’t launch an open protest against the manipulation. Instead, they flag their displeasure only to each other, as if doing so after the fact somehow disowns their complicity. Each time the locals shoplift from a jeans store, Whitney urges the cashier to charge her credit card for the stolen items. She insists they are stealing out of necessity. If she continues to let them, it is because she gets to be the hero without treating the root of the issue.

Awareness indeed is not action. Whitney, in particular, is a moral grandstander who knows all the buzzwords. For clout, she curries favour with Cara (Nizhonniya Austin), a Native American artist, and James Toledo (Gary Farmer), the governor of the San Pedro Pueblo, hoping she will look good by association. Whitney maintains she and Cara are friends. If it is a friendship, it is asymmetrical. Cara knows Whitney is using her for validation. Displaying her work in the Siegels’ home for the show may get her exposure as an artist. But she is conflicted about her art being diluted to mere aesthetic in the home of cultural appropriators. If almost all the characters Whitney, Asher and Dougie know or encounter feel like ciphers, it speaks to how the three see everyone else as stepping stones to their own success.

As far as the Siegels are concerned, an outward show of doing good matters more than actually doing good. The disingenuous performance that is their kindness is emphasised in the scene where Asher meets the young Somali girl Nala selling cans of Sprite in a parking lot. At Dougie’s encouragement, he gives her money on camera. But all he has in his wallet is a $100 bill. Once Dougie gets the shot, Asher snatches back the bill, assuring the girl he will go to the ATM to get smaller change. Nala gives him a firm stare and utters, “I curse you.” As chicken goes missing in his penne and chinks open up in the ethical gentrification plan, Asher grows more and more paranoid. To make amends, he lets Nala and her family (Dahabo Ahmed as older sister Hani and Barkhad Abdi as dad Abshir) live on one of their properties rent-free. Nala later owns up that the curse was nothing but a TikTok trend. Yet, if Asher remains convinced he could be cursed, it has more to do with white anxieties and stereotypes about people of African descent.

There have been many stories, like The Shining and Pet Sematary, centred on curses haunting those who disturb indigenous burial grounds. The Curse distorts this storied tradition to show white interlopers doing the disturbing and the haunting. For 10 episodes, it is Asher and Whitney plaguing a small town with their white guilt, their empty gestures and their performative altruism. Cringe comedy and desperate drama here stem from the same source: the desire to be seen as good as opposed to being good. The mirrored exteriors of the passive home warp faces beyond recognition, reflecting the moral disfigurement of the Siegels and the dubious illusion of their ethical mission.

The camera often frames the Siegels from a distance, peering from behind objects, slowly zooming in through windows, positioning the viewers as voyeurs. Jazz keyboardist John Medeski and frequent Safdie collaborator Daniel Lopatin set loose some ominously buzzing drones to keep the proceedings on edge. The electronic score nudges us to look under the surface and not fall for the Siegels’ charades. Alice Coltrane chanting “Jai Ramachandra” lends a sense of the cosmic, heightened by the slapstick nightmare of the show’s out-of-this-world finale. Throughout the show, Asher’s inability to determine if the curse is real or not puts him in the same position as the naive participants of Nathan for You and The Rehearsal. Casting himself out of his own conceptual house of mirrors allows Fielder to reconsider his own past work, while reaffirming he has always been the butt of his own jokes.

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