Season 1, Episode 1: ‘Land of Enchantment’
Nathan Fielder’s career to this point has been defined by an obsession with the way people act when they are being filmed. In his Comedy Central series, “Nathan for You,” he came up with outlandish ideas to promote small businesses, often capturing the surreality of human behavior as he instituted his plans. He followed that up with “The Rehearsal,” an HBO show in which he tested the idea that one could “rehearse” for real life scenarios — confrontations with friends or even parenthood — and filmed the results.
In his latest series, Showtime’s “The Curse,” created with the “Uncut Gems” filmmaker Benny Safdie, Fielder has stopped playing himself but has kept the same fascination. At the center of the first episode are two incidents that involve his character, Asher Siegel, caught in unflattering and uncomfortable situations on camera.
Asher and his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), are the self-appointed stars of “Fliplanthropy,” a home renovation pilot they hope to sell to HGTV in which they tout their “Invisible Homes,” mirrored structures that are supposedly eco-friendly. They know they are supposed to be the perfect couple — smiling, in love, generous — and while Whitney plays the part well, Asher can’t help but let his mask slip. He’s desperate to be seen as a good guy but that desperation only exposes his pettiness.
Television’s tendency to create its own reality is a core theme of “The Curse,” announced by the opening scene in which the couple’s producer, Dougie (Safdie), pours bottled water on the face of a cancer patient to make it look like she’s crying over the news that the couple has found her son a job. Whitney is outraged — even if that outrage is performative, she has a reputation to maintain — but Asher is more comfortable with Dougie’s machinations. He wants to trust his childhood friend, even though from early on it seems clear that Dougie deserves no one’s trust.
And maybe Asher also innately understands how useful it can be to edit reality. At the grand opening of Barrier Coffee, the sleek, impersonal cafe the couple is touting as a local job creator, Whitney and Asher are interviewed for a local news station. They think they are doing a puff piece on their TV show and local businesses, with Whitney babbling buzzwords about their development philosophy.
But the reporter (played by the actual New Mexico newscaster Tessa Mentus) has tougher questions, asking Whitney about her parents, who have been called “slumlords” by a newspaper in Santa Fe. You can see the panic in Stone’s eyes as Whitney tries to smile through her evasive answer, but Asher decides to jump in and defend his wife.
Instead of salvaging the situation, he makes it worse, berating the interviewer. He snaps his fingers at her: “Look at me when I’m talking to you. Don’t look at her. I’m the one talking so you should look at me.” He tries to bring the topic back to the good they are doing for the community, but he’s clearly lost the plot, and Fielder licks and purses his lips with anxiety. The camera focuses on his mouth — the fury and the regret.
Faced with this damaging bit of footage, Asher and Whitney come up with a plan to get the station to not air the interview by offering them a better story about lax gambling regulation, based on Asher’s time working at a Native American casino.
Their quest leads them to a strip mall, where Asher is going to make his plea. Dougie, sporting an array of bracelets and wannabe rocker hair, is annoyed by this detour, and even more peeved that Asher and Whitney won’t let him film the interaction. While they are all killing time, Dougie outfits Asher with a microphone and tells him to give money to a little girl selling soda in the parking lot so he can capture it.
Asher abides by Dougie’s request, but yet again the camera is his enemy. He only has $100 in his wallet, which he hands to the girl (Hikmah Warsame), thanking her for “being you.” She’s ecstatic. But then when Asher thinks Dougie has finished filming, he asks for the bill back and promises to return with a $20. She’s furious, and he snatches the money out of her hand. “I curse you,” she says with a concentrated intensity. Even then he won’t give the $100 back.
Whitney has no idea about this incident until they are in Dougie’s hotel room looking at playback, and she notices the footage from the parking lot. After she demands to see it all, her face twists into a mix of horror and embarrassment. She’s especially unnerved by the “curse,” but Asher chides her for thinking it might have any real impact. “C’mon, you’re not a moron,” he says.
Whitney wants to make things right, though it is unclear whether this is because she is genuinely appalled by Asher’s behavior, concerned about the potential blowback, or driven by a racist fear that this Black girl might actually be capable of inflicting curses. It is probably some combination of all of the above along with a more generalized sense of self-preservation, but Stone’s shifty performance signals that Whitney’s true motives are likely a mystery even to herself. All she seems to know is that she wants to look good on camera, whenever that may be.
At any rate, Asher dutifully drives around looking for the girl, but all he finds is a depressed shelter that doesn’t have enough funding to stay open. It is the side of Española the Siegels have no interest in exploring in “Fliplanthropy,” but here it is, dreary. Asher continues to make poor choices, returning from his fruitless mission to tell Whitney that everything went as planned, he found the girl and the curse is gone.
We see part of this conversation through a peephole, but it’s not clear who, besides us, is doing the watching. It echoes that theme that keeps popping up in Fielder projects: There’s always the possibility that cameras could be rolling. Asher may damn himself when he’s being recorded, but it’s even worse when he thinks he’s in the clear.
Notes from Española
Asher and Whitney’s Shabbat dinner with Whitney’s parents is hilarious and horrifying. Everything is wild, from Whitney’s father calling yarmulkes “little fabric hats” to Stone trying to emphatically sing the prayers to the shot of Asher’s tiny penis.
I’ll be curious to see if the conversation between Whitney’s father (a nearly unrecognizable Corbin Bernsen) and Asher about their respective small genitals has any later impact on the plot, beyond Asher’s general insecurity. Regardless, the phrase “cherry tomato boys” will live in my head.
Another unhinged interlude: The trailer for Dougie’s never aired dating show, “Love to the Third Degree,” in which a group of women vie for the affections of a masked man until they learn he is a burn victim.
Asher’s outrage that the meal delivery company forgot the chicken in his prepackaged chicken penne just further demonstrates his general feelings of being cheated.
Stone is an absolute master at barely masking discomfort.
Perhaps my favorite shot in the episode is when the woman walks into the fancy jeans store Asher and Whitney have established, takes one look and leaves. Is this really supposed to appeal to the community? Some of the best filmmaking involves the people of Española milling around the action surrounding Asher and Whitney. They are in frame, but our protagonists could not care less.