[COLUMN] The Curse is a House of Mirrors | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Curse.

It can be hard to describe what exactly The Curse is, beyond being a Showtime series created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. Even early publicity material was somewhat vague, describing it as “a genre-bending series that explores how an alleged curse disturbs the relationship of a newly married couple as they try to conceive a child while co-starring in their new home-improvement show.” That’s not a bad summary, as it gets to the heart of The Curse: this is a story about the home.

Thematically, The Curse is about the dysfunctional relationship between married couple Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Fielder). Whitney is a self-involved narcissist trying to distance herself from a wealthy family, while Asher is a spineless wimp insecure in his own skin. The pair are trying to conceive a child together, but their marriage doesn’t seem healthy. It often feels like Whitney can barely stand her husband while Asher doesn’t entirely share his wife’s convictions.

In a more literal sense, the show is about the “passive homes” that they have built and are trying to sell in Española, New Mexico. The pair are working with sleazy producer Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie) on a reality series for HGTV, initially titled Fliplanthropy and later rebranded Green Queen to focus on Whitney, exploring the couple’s efforts to revitalize the local community by building and selling these homes while also encouraging business investment in the locality.

As Whitney explains, these specially designed houses are “net-zero structures, meaning the amount of energy used by the home is equal to the amount of energy created on site.” As Asher describes it, these units “eliminate thermal bridging, which are areas where heat escapes from the house. Those are your windows, your basements, your attic. What you end up with is a home that's kind of like a Thermos that maintains a consistent and comfortable temperature inside.”

Essentially, these homes are entirely self-contained. It might be more accurate to suggest that they are disconnected from the environment around them. They are “from the ground up using a foam foundation instead of a basement,” meaning they don’t even really touch the soil of Española. They lack any windows that might connect inside and outside. From the outside, in one of the show’s most striking visuals, they are reflective. They are funhouse mirrors, distorting the world back at itself.

These passive homes are one of the show’s central metaphors. The distinctive exterior design captures the sense of reality television as a warped reflection of its subjects. Reality television has long been a subject of fascination for Fielder, whose first job on television was working as an interviewer on Canadian Idol and who broke out through deconstructions of the genre in Nathan For You and The Rehearsal. The Curse explores the cruelty and unreality of that mode of television.

In The Curse, characters are often seen through reflective surfaces: the sneeze-guard at a buffet, the windshield of a car, the lid on a tray of pastries at a coffee shop. Characters are repeatedly positioned with their back to the camera, their face visible only in a mirror. The audience is rarely allowed to see the characters clearly, instead glimpsing them refracted through screens and viewfinders. Who are these people, really? Are these people real at all?

The design of the passive homes says so much about both Whitney and Asher, particularly Whitney’s cynical brand of well-rehearsed progressivism. The houses are ostensibly forward-thinking. They are environmentally conscious, provided the occupiers don’t make any changes. They make a big deal out of not taking anything from their surroundings. However, they also don’t give anything back. There is a recurring sense in The Curse that these homes look pretty, but do little of actual value.

Whitney works hard to prove that she is “an ally.” She supports indigenous artists. When Asher uses the word “homeless”, she interjects with the term “unhoused.” However, Whitney is more concerned about how she is perceived than the good she is actually doing. She stages “spontaneous” videos for social media. She is constantly googling herself to ensure that she hasn’t been publicly connected with her parents, predatory local landlords Elizabeth (Constance Shulman) and Paul (Corbin Bernsen).

Whitney is constructing a warped image of herself. Ironically, she resents Asher for loving that version of her. “Here is this man who is so genuinely interested in me,” she confesses, prompted by Dougie. “My ideas, who I am. It's like he worships me. I mean, who wouldn't want that?” In his own way, Asher is just as much a mirror as the passive homes. “When a person is this infatuated with you, do they really see you?” Whitney wonders. “Or is it just an idea of you?” The Curse is another of the recent studies of the unknowability of marriage.

The Curse is a house of mirrors. Just as the show’s concept plays on Fielder’s established television persona, Stone's performance demonstrates considerable self-awareness.  Jackson McHenry has described it as “self-immolating”, arguing that it exists in conversation with her “white savior” role in The Help and her casting as an Asian-American in Aloha. Stone seems aware of that baggage, yelling “I’m sorry” when called out by Sandra Oh at the Golden Globes four years after Aloha. There’s a lot at play in The Curse.

Although it is built around reality television, The Curse borrows from the tropes of classic horror. Indeed, one of the show’s most interesting stylistic touches is the overlap between the cinematic language of horror and the televisual language of faux-documentary cringe comedy: voyeuristic camera angles, slow zooms, awkward silences, stilted dialogue. Composers Daniel Lopatin and John Medeski score what could be scenes from The Office like moments from The Exorcist, to great effect.

The Curse is named for one of the plot’s inciting incidents. Dougie asks Asher to shoot some B-roll, buying a soda from a child named Nala (Hikmah Warsame). Asher only has a hundred-dollar note, and so takes it back after filming the footage. Nala responds by cursing him. Asher spends the rest of the show convinced that he has been the victim of some ancient magic. In reality, Nala is just emulating the “tiny curse” trend that she saw on TikTok.

Throughout The Curse, both Whitney and Asher are taken in by faux mysticism. Whitney is drawn to the indigenous artwork of Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin), an artist who is also working as a masseuse at a local hotel to make ends meet. When the pair meet at a fast food restaurant, Cara’s friend Brett (Brett Mooswa) enchants Whitney with pseudo-spiritual nonsense like “hate is a passion that often resembles love” in the hopes that “she'll want to pay [him], too, for some of [his] wisdom.”

The Curse suggests that Asher and Whitney are drawn to these supernatural explanations because they allow the couple to avoid any introspection. When Asher confesses that he feels cursed to Dougie, Dougie empathizes. He argues that the car crash that killed his wife was the result of a supernatural hex. “I was cursed,” he admits. “There’s nobody in particular that I can point to, but… there’s no other way I can explain what happened… with Melanie.”

“I thought it was an accident,” Asher replies. “It was,” Dougie confesses. “It was, but… I happened to be drunk that night. Nothing… nothing makes sense. And then… I’m not… I don’t wanna talk about this anymore, all right?” Despite the fact that Dougie now has to use a breathalyzer every time he drives, it is easier to believe that his wife died as a result of a curse rather than because of decisions that he made. The supernatural explanation preserves Dougie’s belief in his own innocence.

This is a recurring motif in The Curse. Much like the passive homes are self-contained systems, Whitney cannot conceive of her actions as tied to larger systems. She doesn’t see that the residents priced out of the neighborhood by her passive homes will end up renting accommodation owned by her parents. When she agrees to cover any losses to shoplifting to avoid being seen to criminalize members of the community, it attracts opportunistic criminals from outside the locality.

The supernatural explanation is an evasion, a way to ignore more complicated real-life forces. This is a classic horror trope. To pick an example relevant to the displacement of indigenous populations in The Curse, the ghosts haunting the hotel in The Shining can be seen as a metaphor for the genocide of the Native American population. Hereditary, another project blending horror and comedy to great effect, grapples with similar themes of generational tension through demonic possession.

This gets at the ending of The Curse, in which the show leans completely into surrealism. Green Queens has become a massive success. Whitney is pregnant. The couple seems happy. They are living in one of their passive homes. However, as Whitney goes into labor, Asher becomes completely divorced from gravity. He wakes up on the ceiling of the house. Then, as if falling upwards, he clings to the top of a tree. Finally, he ends up spiraling into the heavens, just as Whitney gives birth.

It's an abstract image, and it’s possible to read it any number of ways. It’s possible that Asher has become just as self-contained and disconnected at the houses that he built, so passive that he is not even affected by the Earth’s gravitational pull. However, it also feels notable that Asher’s disappearance is so overtly tied to the birth, to the point that the sequence of firefighters taking a chainsaw to the branch holding Asher in place is cut against Whitney receiving a Caesarean section.

This reading isn’t as wild as it might seem. The Curse constantly replays footage of Asher pretending to welcome actors Janice (Aliyah Lee) and Pascal (Alexander Gibson) to their passive home by presenting them with a necklace from a local artist. “The snake signifies rebirth, because of the shedding of the skin,” Asher explains of the design, suggesting an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail - a perfect metaphor for the close system of the house. Before he flies away, Asher even tells Whitney, “There's a little me inside you.”

Asher and Whitney have built a closed loop in which they are never forced to confront reality, so there is no chance for growth or development. Can Whitney ever truly address systemic problems if she won’t acknowledge that her privilege derives from her parents’ exploitation of these people? If Whitney can’t do that, her insistent use of progressive language and talking points is as meaningless as any random supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It’s a charged topic in modern America.

Asher might have been lifted out of his child’s life in the same way that Whitney has sought to erase any connection to her own parents, but nothing has really changed. The cycle is doomed to repeat itself. Asher’s son won’t grow any further than Asher has. The child might even be Asher himself. As long as they’re unable to look at their own reflections clearly, these characters are cursed to eternal recurrence. This is perhaps the real curse in The Curse.