In a TV year dominated by crime shows, zombie apocalypse and, bafflingly, still the Marvel Extended Universe, The Curse (Paramount +) could be overlooked for the apparent blandness of its premise: “A newlywed couple struggle to make their vision for eco-living a reality in a small New Mexico town.”
But the clue to what this show is about is in the list of people involved in its creation: Oscar-winner Emma Stone, now in an experimental phase of her career, Benny Safdie, the actor and director behind the anxiety-bait indie hits Uncut Gems and Good Time, his co-director brother, Josh, and Nathan Fielder, creator of singularly strange cult shows. . These people could never make something normal. The Curse is an extraordinarily painful comedy, a masterwork of cringe, and a horror story all rolled into one. It is also, to this viewer, an indictment of an era, and the generation that defined it.
When The Curse began to air in mid-November I laughed out loud at every episode, but on second viewing the show is quieter, darkerand possessed of a creeping flatness that renders it eerily anthropological. The plot isn’t far from that of a Stephen King novel; a young white couple, Whitney and Asher Siegel, arrive in a small town built on land belonging to Native Americans, Española. Dressed in Birkenstocks and organic cotton, they are followed by a reality TV crew as they plan to fill the town with eco-friendly ”passive houses”. But their invasively chipper approach tests the patience of locals, one of whom pronounces a curse on them. For the rest of the show, as their marriage is strained, and their elaborate plans go awry, we’re left asking whether this is the work of an actual curse, or whether they were blinkered, misguided and utterly doomed from the outset.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Fielder has invented his own form of entertainment over the last decade, making parody reality TV which exposes the genre as exploitative, absurd and tragically sincere. The Curse revisits these themes with a new intimacy; shots are slow and meditative, zooming steadily into characters’ faces, eavesdropping through keyholes or, in one especially jarring scene, hovering in front of a window inside a stranger’s living room, capturing a conversation outside while inside, a woman is slumped, staring directly into the camera.
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For their odious TV show-within-a-show, ”Flipanthropy”, the Siegels place the people of Española in front of the lens again and again, asking them to perform gratitude, or hope, or a sense of community spirit that they themselves cannot access. The first episode even opens with Safdie’s sleazy producer, Dougie, sprinkling water in the eyes of an elderly woman to make it look like she’s crying. Whitney and Asher, meanwhile, welcome the cameras into their lives, because they want to be TV stars. Surveillance mediates their relationships with locals, with each other, perhaps even with themselves. Whitney oscillates between wide-eyed charm and bitterness, depending on whether or not the camera is rolling, while Asher enrolls in a comedy class, in the hopes of becoming funnier, more loveable, something other than the dead-eyed corporate shark that he is.
How ill at ease they are, how desperate to belong in a world which their very existence opposes. The Siegels have conflated virtue with vanity. They are not alone in this, but typical of a generation, my own, the millennials, who ushered social media into the mainstream, bringing with it technological surveillance and a kind of convoluted performance of humanity. We turned activism into t-shirts and tote bags, we tweeted as an extension of our being. Now we see our influence falling away, what remains of it warped, or meaningless, or co-opted by Musk and his army of edgelords.
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This show expertly captures the thwarted lot of the late-youth millennials, who cannot afford homes, or who, if they can, like Whitney and Asher, are funded by their parents. That veneer of happiness and security in life – the glaring white smiles, the job, the electric car – is not earned, it’s the product of generational wealth, and a readiness to exploit others under the guise of camera-ready ‘values’. The Siegels’ efforts at community-building are all the more doomed, and insincere, because Whitney’s ‘slumlord’ parents have loaned them over $1 million dollars. Their future depends on them perpetuating a cycle the previous generation started.
There is something fabulously dismal about this show, its refraction of an era and its politics through the queasy prism of reality TV. I am writing about it here because I love it, but also because, on some level, every episode feels like a personal attack. The Curse has left me questioning my responses to the world, the face I prepare to meet other faces, the sight of my own smile on Zoom calls. This show has sent me into a spiral of self-interrogation, and I don’t even own property, am not married and I am not telling anyone how to live their life in a small California town. Perhaps, reader, it will do the same for you.
What will become of these rough millennial beasts? Nothing good, it appears, by the time the show airs its final episode in mid-January. Perhaps Whitney and Asher will succeed at gentrifying a town. Perhaps they will realise how unhappy they are, and dismantle the panopticon they’ve built around themselves. Even if this happens, perhaps it will already be too late.
There’s a sadness that creeps into The Curse, in moments when characters see beyond their situation, staring off-screen, into the emptiness they’re engulfed by on all sides. This is when their fears, their torments, become universal. “We’re doing good here,” Asher insists. “We are good people. We’re really good.” Then they smile for the camera and return to the only damnation they have ever known.