The Rising Tide Of Color Against Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie: "The Curse"

"Man, we *just* got here"

A high school English teacher who was overly ambitious to the point of pretension once had his class do an essay on “what is the point of tragedy”. Expecting a class of strivers, mercilessly selected for guessing the teacher’s password, to seriously address this question, was a bridge too far. No one ever even told us of the existence of Nietzsche, and it’s not like we were going to reverse engineer it from first principles on the spot, let alone our own “take” on it - or worse, the guy who had done some extra reading would pretend that he had, indeed, just thought at it really hard that moment, and whaddaya know, it all adds up.

The empirical answer was “because tragedy is going to be on the test, thus, Stanford (or at least Duke).” This answer generalizes. “You tell me, dude”, is the natural counterpoint - knowing the limits of one’s own wisdom is at least honest. Being forbidden from such a response, a word salad of “uhhh the human condition, cautionary tale, hope in a dark place, and stuff” sufficed to demonstrate the core bullshitting ability we were actually being trained on.

In retrospect this experience was rather cringe, which provides a neat little recursive element to the whole situation. Cringe is just a specialized form of tragedy - shame as the outcome, rather than the traditional pile o’ corpses, and with stakes so low as to intentionally avoid catharsis. The aesthetic experience of cringe specifically, at least for me, boils down to an attempt to reverse engineer “why does this suck”, on an intellectual level. Yes, you are embarrassed on someone else’s behalf - but what brought them to this point? Does this… say a lot about society? Can you perceive the struggle of man versus whatever force brought him to this point? Why does he believe it is appropriate to behave in such a way?

I don’t necessarily blame someone for stopping at the starting line, saying “I don’t care, this does not elevate the soul, one could simply not behave in such a way”, and turning the Streaming Service off. But if you are going to indulge, you should do it correctly, not just sitting in a pile of your own discomfort, enjoying the ramp up and down like the literary equivalent of a One Chip Challenge.

“The Curse” derives most of its cringe from the collision of haute bourgeois progressive mores with a passive underclass that refuses to validate them, and a materialist class that winks at them while trying to figure out what the angle is. A huge part of this memeplex is the pretense of egalitarianism, both in material and value terms - we’re all just friends here, ha ha, who might happen to have more or less money than each other, but we’re all human, you know? We all just want, the environment, and especially how the environment with the native Oglabago people, because that connection is just so important. I just think it’s so important, that we communicate, and really try to grow. As a community.

The response from the various mystery browns is either a blank stare or outright hostility. “So watchu want?” In “The Curse”, the answer is to flip eco-friendly “passive homes” as part of a show-within-a-show HGTV series, while also purporting to promote a nebulous sense of “community” with Española, a (perfectly named) downscale exurb of Santa Fe.

Emma Stone is fantastic as the ur-prog wife, Whitney, (who happens to have oblivious boomer parents who themselves fell into a fortune in real estate) trying to impose her view of herself as an ally and an advocate for the vulnerable upon a world that ultimately just doesn’t care. HGTV wants a hit TV show, her artist friends want to sell their pieces while maintaining their pretenses, the locals want to listlessly vibe. And her husband…

There’s not really a way around it, Nathan Fielder’s character Asher is “the curse” referred to. He is a literal and metaphorical cuckold, a cringing caricature of the liberal man who absolutely must put everyone in front of himself, the worse they are the better, and be seen doing so. His enablement of his wife makes everyone’s lives, including his own, ultimately much worse.

It is interesting that he and his co-writer, Benny Safdie, chose to make Asher explicitly Jewish, and his wife a convert - not as one-off background, but with regular seders featured as part of the plot. At one point, after a mildly inappropriate Holocaust joke, Fielder tells his WASP wife - “hey, don’t ever think you’re less of a Jew just because you converted”. This raises an intriguing thematic possibility.

Asher quite literally worships his wife, facially because she is such a Good Person - but of course she converted to his particular set of moral beliefs in the first place, telling her parents in essence “it’s easy to decide to convert when you were raised with nothing to believe in”. It’s impossible not to read this as a mirror of the century long societal conversation between progressivism and Judaism. In the context of the show, and society, this culminates in the idea of a kind of self-serving service to the Other - personified most clearly by Barkhad Abdi’s character. You may know him as the “I am the captain, now” guy - on the show he is a dead-eyed squatter on one of the couple’s properties who is gradually indulged to a greater and greater extent, under more and more fraught circumstances, despite not displaying any real gratitude or even cognizance of what precisely is going on, beyond that he might be entitled to something so he might as well ask. The final irony is that having acquired everything he could want - the shiksa goddess wife, a television credit, and a real estate portfolio - the Last Prog gives it away to an undeserving and never ending sea of color, because it’s the Right Thing To Do.

Because of the way the show rubs your face in these themes through the lens of the worst people in the world, and the sheer grostesqueness of Stone and Fielder’s performances, this show is not for everyone - you’ll figure that out in about half an episode. Nevertheless, if it is your sort of thing, it’s a complex treatment that will leave you contemplating the intricacies of lib neuroses for weeks.