The Curse

 Asher (Bennie Safdie) and Whitney (Emma Stone) are two self-absorbed yuppies working on a pilot for a HGTV reality show in the Showtime limited series The Curse.   The couple are frustrated with one another, neurotic, and (increasingly) unhappily married.  The situation is complicated by the director of their TV series, Dougy (Nathan Fieldler), a character who is both deeply sinister and ingratiating and, also, perhaps, a bit mad.  Whitney is self-confident and completely incapable of imagining how others perceive her -- she thinks she's a gracious, idealistic activist when, in fact, she's completely spoiled and self-aggrandizing.  By contrast, Asher is a tangle of masochistic impulses:  he perceives that Ashley is too good for him, obsesses about his small penis, and imagines degrading scenarios in which his wife sleeps with other men.  In one riveting, if horrifying scene, Asher is shown Whitney's disdain for him, pictured in sequences in which his wife mocks him shot for the TV show.  The material is profoundly humiliating and Asher storms out of the screening, only to return a minute later to tearfully plead for his wife's attention.  The show is unflinching in its portrayal of an intrinsically asymmetrical relationship -- Asher can't imagine life without Whitney and clings to her with a combination of ridiculously aggressive and, even, possessive gestures that oscillate between wild declarations of passion and humiliating supplication.  Whitney cares a little bit for Asher, but doesn't share his melodramatic jealousy and commitment.  The whole situation is configured to make the audience feel uncertain about the show's premise, episodes frequently revolving around cringe-inducing encounters between the couple and their orbit of friends.  (I use the word "friends" advisedly; Asher and Whitney are too selfish and narcissistic to really have any real friends, a point that the show makes repeatedly in a series of lacerating vignettes.)

It's hard to identify the exact tone of The Curse -- it seems to be a comedy, albeit one that involves characters so perilously close to clinical mental illness that it feels a little shameful to laugh at them.  The show is intensely observed and never less than gripping, but it's also very unsettling:  most of the episodes are shot like scenes from a horror movie. You're on edge expecting something terrible to occur -- and, when this happens in the last show, it occurs in spades.

Asher and Whitney are pitching a show to the home improvement network.  The show is initially called Flipanthropy based on the notion that the couple's houses are Green ecosystems, so-called "passive houses" that are carbon neutral.  The pair purport to community activism; they want to build a community of like-minded ecologically conscious people in the town where the show is set, improbably enough Espanola, New Mexico.  (Anyone who has driven through the grim, wasteland of Espanola understands what I mean; the place is an inescapable crossroads that you have to traverse when driving north of Santa Fe -- you end up there if you are going to see Georgia O'Keefe's Abiqui, Los Alamos, or Taos.  But the town seems impoverished, full of drunks and junkies, with sinister side-streets leading nowhere, a kind of open-air desert ghetto.)  The show, ostensibly about the couple's quixotic ambitions, really features the increasing dysfunction in Ashley and Whitney's marriage, a theme that Dougie exploits since he understands that network executives like reality shows with teeth in them -- in fact, Dougie delights in stirring up trouble for Asher with regard to Whitney and suggests that the real title of the program should be Green Queen since "every queen needs her jester" (in this case, the hapless Asher).  Of course, no one really wants to live in the bizarre mirror-walled houses that Ashley and Whitney are building -- the structures are impractical, hard to heat and keep cool, and very, very expensive.  Ultimately, no one bids on the second of the two houses built in Espanola and so Ashley has to recruit local people to act as if they are interested in the project.  (The guy living in the first house built discards the "induction" oven and puts in a gas-fired range in defiance of Whitney's ecological;y correct demands.)  Whitney's relationship with the local pueblos is problematic.  She dutifully recites a land declaration with the Tiwa (or Tewa -- the confusion is never really solved) governor acknowledging that the houses occupy property misappropriated by colonialist oppression from the local Native Americans.  But in the same breath she is quick to proclaim that the tribe has no legal rights to anything that she is building, expressly stating that tribal concerns about the land don't apply to her title and her easements.  Whitney has an acquaintance who is a Native American artist -- but her protestations that she is "friends" with the woman are, more or less, rebuffed by the artist.  (Whitney has to pay for her friendship -- she engages the artist to work for her as a consultant on the basis of a $20,000 contract, the funds paid in cash borrowed from Whitney's parents who are, in effect, slumlords who own apartments in the vicinity.)  Whitney's community-spirited ventures all fail.  She starts a coffee shop but it tanks. She runs an emporium that sells expensive jeans.  But when local people start to shoplift from her she simply tells the counter-girl and clerk to put the stolen items on her own (Whitney's) credit card.  Of course, this isn't sustainable.  She and Asher hire a local thug to provide security -- he was supposed to work as a barista in their failed coffee shop and they have promised him a job.  The man brings a long-gun to work and has a pistol tucked in his pocket, weapons that horrify the liberal-progressive Whitney.  This fellow thinks that Whitney's policy of looking the other way when locals steal from her is "a cancer" eating away at the community -- in other words, he opposes Whitney's refusal to call the cops on shoplifters.  

The show's title The Curse refers to a little girl of Somali ethnicity who puts a "tiny curse" (as she calls it) on Asher when he stiffs her with respect to some cans of pop that she is selling to support her impoverished family.  The "tiny curse" is that Whitney and Asher's Pad Thai take-out will not have chicken among the noodles -- "I take away your chicken," she says.  (Before Asher discovers the nature of the curse, he is angry that the Pad Thai that he has ordered has been delivered without chicken; later, someone sticks chicken in a toilet that he is using at a fire station where part of the show is being filmed -- Dougie has encouraged the firemen to flirt with Whitney about their big hoses.  Dougie buys a whole chicken at a Mexican restaurant and, then, goes to the Somali girl's house to see if she will curse him -- she refuses.  But Dougie and Asher get into a terrible fight, involving in part the director's wife who was apparently killed in a drunk driving incident in which Dougie was involved.  So Dougie, then, curses Asher.)  There's a great scene in which Asher is told to not talk about curses by the Somali girl's father -- "they get in your head," the man says.  Asher asks if this is part of his culture.  The man nods.  "Well, where are your from?" Asher asks.  "Minnesota," the man replies.    

The appearance of The Curse is really extraordinary and the peculiar manner in which the show is staged and shot embodies an important theme.  Conventional film grammar is mostly repudiated for nine-tenths of the show:  images appear on grainy, distressed film-stock, impressionistically blurred and bleached-out as if shot on a poorly functioning cell-phone.  Framing is unconventional and, whenever possible, the characters are shot through a palimpsest of foreground figures, bars and blurred obstructions.  Generally, camera angles suggest that the cameraman is spying on the characters, taking pictures of them covertly.  Figures are often too far away f rom the camera to register their features clearly.  Everyone is framed between walls or trapped in niches and alcoves; the sense of claustrophobia induced by this staging is palpable -- the characters are confined by the interiors in which they exist, perversely shot through tiny apertures in walls, slot windows, or only partially opened doors.  Mirrors are everywhere so that the viewer is never certain whether he or she is seeing a reflection or an actual image; in some scenes, entire landscapes full of cars and pedestrians are visible as reflections on glass surfaces through which we glimpse the characters.  This distancing technique, obstructing the viewers understanding of the images, is carried to perverse extremes; some dialogue scenes are filmed from interior rooms in which we see people in the foreground watching TV or a secretary typing on her computer -- the part of the image to which we are supposed to be attending is only partially visible through a slit of window in a corner of the frame.  Eye-lines don't match -- in one early scene, Dougie flirts aggressively with Whitney but the two of them remain in separate small enclosures that don't intersect in any way and they seem to be looking away from each other.  There are many so-called "empty frames" -- that is, shots of random exteriors that seem accidental:  these images don't have the classical composure of Ozu's "empty shots"; they aren't carefully composed and appear arbitrary with no real thematic connection to the plot or adjacent dialogue.  The "passive houses" that Asher and Whitney are promoting are entirely glass , made from mirrors and so they simply vanish into the dusty shrubbery in which the buildings are set -- you literally can't see them.  It's only in the 9th episode when a pilot of the HGTV show is screened that we can actually see the mirror-houses and understand their layout.  The alienating manner in which the great bulk of The Curse is shot is intended to contrast in the strongest possible way with conventional TV photography, shown to be lucid, bright, schematic, and, even, in some cases, equipped with helpful arrows and other diagram signs. (We are shown this type of footage in the pilot of the HGTV show.)  The entire strategy of the show's mise-en-scene is to repudiate the typical techniques used to produce Home Improvement shows or, in the last (10th) episode, TV cooking programs.  

I suppose a "spoiler" alert is here mandatory although I doubt the application of that term to the jaw-dropping finale to The Curse.  A "spoiler" is the description of a plot development that the viewer could reasonably anticipate from clues and foreshadowing in the show leading up to its last episode.  But in The Curse, the show's ending is so surreal and, seemingly, arbitrary that telling you what happened isn't going to spoil anything in the rest of the show for you.  There's no careful groundwork laid for the last episode which strikes like a bolt out of blue.  But you have been forewarned.

In the 10th and last show, a year has passed.  Asher and Whitney appear on a screen projected on a wall on the set of the live-shot Rachel Ray cooking show.  (Rachel is making meatballs with a mobster who has published an Italian cookbook.)  Asher and Whitney are on-camera to promote the second season of their TV show called Green Queen.  Whitney is clearly pregnant; Asher grins like a jack-o-lantern.  Rachel Ray pays no attention to them and scarcely allows Whitney to promote her show; Asher's efforts to talk about their baby -- who will be featured in the second series that the network has picked-up -- don't seem to interest Rachel and she reverts to flirting with mob boss in an embarrassing way.  Asher and Whitney are shown in Espanola where their appearance has been filmed.  They are doting over their unborn baby. (It turns out that the passive house, always described as a thermos bottle, is not good for the baby and, so, Whitney has hired a contractor to subvert the home's design to provide more consistent air conditioning in the child's room.) As a gift to her, Asher decides to deed the house in which the Somali father and his daughters are squatting to the immigrants.  Together, they go to the house where they are met by the father who is clearly distrustful and seems completely unimpressed by their benevolent generosity.  (The little girls are not home and we see a figure traipsing around the background in the house who seems sinister and whose identity is never established.)  The Somali father's lack of gratitude is disconcerting.  In the next scene, a cell-phone alarm sounds.  Whitney wakes up to find Asher inexplicably plastered on the ceiling of the "passive" mirror home.  Gravity has been reversed for Asher and, for some reason, he is falling upwards, that is, being pulled away from the surface of the earth into the air.  Asher's dilemma, involving creeping around on the ceiling like a spider, is compounded by the fact that Whitney has gone into labor  After desperate machinations to get her cell-phone (Asher thinks the house is causing the gravitational inversion), Whitney is taken to the hospital with her burly male Doula, Moses.  Moses isn't too helpful because the child's presentation is breech requiring a C-section.  Meanwhile, Asher ends up outside, clinging to a branch on a nearby tree resisting the violent pull upward by the reversal in his gravitational field.  Dougie is called and taunts Asher for climbing a tree to escape the obligations of paternity and the rescue crews also misconstrue Asher's posture high above the ground -- they mistakenly believe that he is about to jump to his death.  Ever the opportunist, Dougie calls for a drone and launches a camera to better photograph Asher's plight.  As the infant is cut out of Whitney's womb, Asher is "freed" from the tree with a chainsaw that drops the branch to which he is clinging while freeing him to blast straight up into the sky.  Asher ends up in outer space, presumably dead or dying.  Some neighbors speculate that the whole thing was a stunt to gin up interest in the HGTV show.  The camera prowls around the mean streets of Espanola and the show ends.

The sequences involving Asher's fight to stay earthbound in the face of a gravitational pull upward are staged with great and fearsome authority.  Although the condition is bizarre, the show imagines Asher's plight effectively and presents his upside-down exploits with impressive aplomb.  The effect of the show's last forty minutes is Kafkaesque in the sense that the imagery resists symbolic or allegorical interpretation -- like Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect, Asher's desperate situation must be accepted as simply an inexplicable vagary in the laws of nature; it's not clear that his tendency to fall upward into outer space means anything at all.  There is some sense that Whitney's childbirth may ground her and hold her down -- this what having children means.  By contrast, poor Asher ends up doomed, drifting in outer space.  In a way, the show is about establishing "roots" in a place and community; Asher and Whitney are privileged, selfish, and, I suppose, "rootless" -- this is exemplified by Asher's fatal difficulties in the last episode.  But this interpretation is too glib, too facile, I think, and the utterly confounding climax to The Curse has to be accepted on its own terms -- it is an instance of the inexplicable that can't really be decoded.