The Curse
SHOWTIME
In his essay titled “Laughing with Kafka”, David Foster Wallace talks about the difficulties in explaining to Americans how tragically funny the Czech writer’s works are. In particular, when talking about teaching his students, he says: “We've taught them to see humor as something you get – the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”
The Curse, the new television show created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, is Kafka for the modern age: fashion and culture may have changed in the past century, but humanity sure has not. Starting with his work as a CBC correspondent for This Hour Has 22 Minutes and then directing his documentary shows Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, Fielder has explored what it means to live in a world increasingly obsessed with putting masks to conceal the true self. The sad reality is that, not unlike the thesis of many works by Luigi Pirandello (primarily One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand), the self has been lost behind the masks.
It only makes sense that someone like Fielder, who revels in the awkwardness of daily social interactions, would find a kindred spirit in filmmaker Benny Safdie, whose career with his brother Josh started with independent projects that starred regular people instead of professionally trained performers. The Curse, with its deeply voyeuristic use of long lenses – some shots were achieved with a 2000mm lens! – crafts a deeply unsettling atmosphere, as if what is being shot should not be watched. Viewers are made privy to the crumbling relationship between Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone), newlyweds who star in an HGTV show called Fliplanthropy. Right from the first episode, it is clear that these two are liars: they lie to each other about their feelings, they lie to their audience by manipulating the truth of a supposed reality show, and they lie to themselves about their happiness.
The discomfort caused by witnessing Asher’s constant emasculation, starting from the reveal of his micro-penis and continuing with his wife constantly comparing him to a baby, only gets worse as more characters and scenarios are introduced. The loose structure, which lacks the conventional cliffhangers and twists of television programming, gives freedom to the creators of The Curse to follow the characters’s lives however and whenever they want. There are many laughs to be had here, courtesy also of Benny Safdie himself who plays Dougie, the manipulative producer of Fliplanthropy, but the laughs are always off-set with the dark reality of life. Moments that would be played straight or in a quirky way in a straightforward comedy end up feeling completely disturbing here.
The protagonists of The Curse are not good people. Whitney’s state-of-the-art passive homes, these dystopic self-sufficient buildings, are covered with reflective surfaces, which work as fun-house mirrors that distort every image. The forced smiles and positive attitudes of the Siegels are a warped version of who they truly are: highly performative, insecure people. It is existential horror at its finest, a Kafka-esque exploration of the human soul that ends with a deeply upsetting climax that has a terrifying reminder: we are all alone. We build barriers, find excuses, and role-play as adults to cope with living with ourselves, but in an actual time of need (just like “the boy who cried wolf”), no one will help. People do not change or grow, only their image does, while their soul, their Dorian Gray painting, is cursed to rot in a place no one will ever find. Their cosplays of goodness, made just to feel good about themselves rather than doing genuine good, ultimately bite them back. The Curse is outstanding, with career-best work by everyone involved in front and behind the camera, and it will likely become one of the most analyzed and obsessively discussed television shows since 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return.