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Things I have been Watching: (spoilers for The Curse and Poor Things)

The Curse:

I watched The Curse partly with my darling GF (we stopped watching pretty much exactly at the micropenis sex in the first episode). Since then, I have sort of half watched it by myself while doing other things, finding it too often too painful to watch with any care. Last night I binged the 5.5 episodes I haven’t seen (uncaringly, my attention distracted elsewhere). With just the Finale to go this could be your time to jump on to watch this horrible tale of destruction. 

I love Nathan Fielder, who in his work seems to dig for and poke out fundamental unspoken bits of our shared reality. With Nathan for You, poking fun at the absurdity of “business advice” entertainment TV. The Rehearsal, poking fun at human interaction and our desire for control in a world we cannot possibly hope to control. Or How to with John Wilson’s documentarian approach to the tiny crazinesses that surround us, that we as humans create for ourselves and the people around us (often the people we love, or profess to love). 

The Curse is like a Bible for understanding the dynamics at play in the bourgeois ascendent educated white upper middle to upper class western world of high-income households that shape NYT Magazine coverage, of generational passings-on, of the curses real and imaginary haunting in the closets of “the largest generational wealth transfer in history” (that the Twitter bot ads tell me I should cash in on). The main characters' stories revolve around the fragility and insecurity of white wealth and the limits of white experience and capability. Nathan Fielder’s Asher and Emma Stone’s Whitney Siegel are as desperate to absolve themselves of their guilt and shame and childishness as they are incapable of ever freeing themselves from it. 

The show is set in Espanola, NM, providing a background of centuries of colonization, centuries of unfamiliar undesired rules and systems being forced upon the local population by the Spanish, the railroads, and Uncle Sam’s little atom project in the desert, setting the stage for Whitney and Asher’s bid to remake the run-down, poor town in their sparkling carbon neutral image. Not! in a colonizer way though - the Siegels have a perfectly memorized land acknowledgment speech to give on demand in perfect sync like horror movie twins. 

Not to mention Whitney’s one sided best-friendship with Cara, a Native artist. A “friendship” bankrolled by money from her parents. Whitney’s access to white money, power, and status is gatekept to her by her parents, and she in turn gatekeeps her own access from Cara. In kind, Cara herself holds a power over Whitney: she is her connection to the Real World and Real People, to Native Culture. Even when Cara let’s slip while with Whitney and another artist that being inauthentic and sucking up to white people seems to be the only way to move towards success in art. Or as Cara wrestles with signing a release for her art to appear in Whitney and Asher’s show, flexing the power of the artist over the patron. 

This culminates in a truly face crunching scene when Whitney, staying in a fancy resort with her landlord parents, books a massage only to arrive, robed with hair down, to find Cara, uniformed and masked, is her masseuse, having gone back to work at the resort for money - Whitney leaves, paying the cancellation fee and tipping $350 (what a great friend!)

Fielder’s Asher, meanwhile, deals with his own cross-class relationship dilemma when he is cursed by Nala, a Somali girl who along with her sister Hani and father Abshir, go from homeless to squatting in a home owned by Asher and Whitney (slated for later redevelopment), to awkwardly accepting bags of groceries along with mold tests (a liability concern, Asher explains) and after hours smoke alarm battery replacements. Asher is cursed after he exploits Nala and Hani, offering them $100 to garner a reaction for the show, then taking the money back. Asher is cajoled into this by the as of yet unmentioned Dougie, played by Benny Safdie, who is consistently creepy - he is Asher’s old summer camp bully turned reality TV director, and the psycho bully rage very much comes across as Dougie picks at Asher in mean ways (and Whitney in increasingly creepy ways), mocking their relationship, and the boundaries they have set for the show they are making. 

Again, this conflict between Dougie the artist and the Siegels his patrons serves to illustrate the lack of agency in Whitney and Asher’s characters. They cannot make this show, or do anything solely with their own effort (save design ugly houses no-one wants, and throw money at problems), so they are left negotiating with their own patrons to fund a team of artists and workmen.

Their plan for class and status ascendancy is based around Whitney’s inheriting of a stock of distressed properties from her slumlord parents along with their continued cash payment style support (funded by their network of last-resort apartments in decaying Espanola) for the ventures necessary to secure a life interesting enough for HGTV. Rather than follow the formula of colonial landlord class exploitation as exemplified by her parents, Whitney is desperate to use her power for good. Only not at her expense, but as an investment. The HGTV world, rife with pitfalls of cancellation and public scrutiny, also promises a way to transform the narrative of your life, to curate it to be seen by everyone else, and to monetize and capitalize on Your Life. Your life just needs to check certain boxes. You must be “with it” culturally on a visual level, real feelings or actions not required. You must be palatable and marketable: married, happily (or single, happily), pursuing your pure and honest Dreams. You must be Target. So you probably shouldn’t have a micropenis, or have weird sex, or have evil landlord parents, but these can all safely be kept in private in service of the Dreams.

We all have dreams. The Curse prods at the brutal truth: who gets to follow their dreams, and how they get to follow them, is as unequally distributed as wealth in America. Whitney’s parents aren’t truly “wealthy”. They do not hob nob, they live in one of their slummy apartments for six days a month on the advice of their lawyer. They are by no means cultural elites. They do not have to be Succession-level wealthy for their wealth to “matter” in the context of Espanola, they are already so far above the line of single-home ownership, of stability in basic needs, relative to their surroundings. The Curse focuses on this dynamic, present everywhere you go in America, between the people who have crossed the line and increasingly run beyond it, and everybody else. 

In Espanola, one venture of the Siegel’s is a strip mall, filled with business designed and curated for the up-start, do-good vibe they want to generate (a coffee shop, a jean store). The businesses themselves are inspirational fronts, show pieces for the community they want to build, untethered from the reality of basic money-in money-out finance. When Whitney objects to the very visible arrest of a shoplifter, and instead asks her employee to charge any shoplifted items to her credit card, word spreads and the theft becomes so rampant it enrages another employee at the strip mall to the point of arming up as a vigilante and demanding action from the Siegels. 

The disparate divide in wealth between the Siegels and their employees taints the structure of the community, as the couple sets about on their mission of destroying what was there before to make it their version of better. This gentrification of Espanola is their generations’ version of the snowballed wealth accumulation, colonization and exploitation that created this society, whereby new technology and ways of living are enforced to supersede the old, and so those with the resources to bring and build technology and ways of life set the rules for the rest. The only chance the rest have is to either create art or technology (no different), take wealth back by force, or be content to pull the levers of the world’s machines to continue their function, and in doing so continue to feed the beasts who built and own them. 

The Siegels dream: a thriving community built around carbon neutral homes aspiring for a green future where wealth is not only preserved, but grows for all, is as noble as anyone else’s dream. In fact, it’s basically United Nations COP28 boilerplate climate change language, the kind huddled over and shaken on by oil tycoons at conferences they flew to on jets to tell us after, “we’ve done what is needed, it’s all fixed, stop asking.” Who gets to solve the world’s problems, who is consulted about how they should be solved? The Curse pokes out: the people with the money have all the power, the people with the money are not asking you how you need to be helped, and they aren’t doing anything without taking their cut first (who cares what’s left for you). In a world where tech scions are proposing IQ test checkpoints at the gates of the ends-of-the-earth palaces they are building for when our feeble little societies collapse, The Curse pokes out: this is what has always been happening, with urban renewal, suburbanization, gated communities and school district tax dollar boundaries. 

And how do we navigate this deeply cruel and unfair world? For many of us on the winning side living in comfort, I think we choose to disassociate (I am shaped in my thinking on this by P.E. Moskowitz), and The Curse explores this as well. Asher and Whitney’s relationship itself is mutually a dissociation from their actual conditions. Whitney is Asher’s gatekeeper to status, money, love, a life beyond himself. But his self image in the relationship is disconnected from his micro peen reality, and the show explores how far he is willing to go to bridge the gap between who he really is (fragile, broken, clinging) and who he needs to be for TV (normal).

Reality TV is not real, it’s acting. The show forces Whitney and Asher to confront the acting they have already been doing for each other in their relationship. The performances they have been putting on of happiness, satisfaction, optimism to hide from their real feelings. The performative sex they have been having, together and alone. The show puts to tape the performances they have been giving to the Espanola community, their friends slash employees, and parents. They must confront for themselves: have I been honest, or have I been pretending to sound like how I think an honest person might. Am I happy, or am I performing happiness to distract myself from deeper disturbances? And if we are acting happy, is it to hide ourselves from the crushing weight of the debt of the haves to the have nots in this world (multiplied by how short our life spans are, by how powerless we feel we are to change things for others by acting alone, and by our primal brains dragging us towards sex and hugs and our own safety before that of others)? Do we convince ourselves to be happy in spite of the suffering of others? Or is our happiness the result of their suffering?

None of which is to say we can’t alleviate suffering or build a better cleaner world for everyone. We can and all should play our own part in the work of making the world around us a better place, and in supporting those who do really important work with our true honest community. The story told in The Curse is about how laziness, insecurity, and greed poison human connection, and how often in our shallow world even good deeds are done for selfish reasons. Maybe in the finale we will see the masks the characters wear for eachother and the world come off, but I think it is even more likely we see the masks be put right back on and the denial continue.

I don’t know how this show ends, but I am excited to find out! 

Poor Things: 

On this same note, Emma Stone as Bella Baxter goes to Alexandria, witnesses the suffering of the masses, throws someone-else’s money at the problem (to no effect), and returns to continue her trauma cycle unbroken in London, a monster created by monsters. Pretty much the same deal, but with way better sex scenes! (No micropeen stuff)

Things I have been Reading:

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe

    • https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinsey-comes-to-town-by-walt-bogdanich-and-michael-forsythe/
    • Rich people, not great! A story of enshittification of business society - why businesses and government agents are worse today than they were before. Particularly brutal are the injuries of the steelworkers in Gary after McKinsey came in to update US Steels safety and maintenance programs to cut costs. I am just starting this one
    • Walt Bogdanich has won 3 pulitzer prizes. Michael Forsythe was part of a team that won the George Polk Award, these are good prizes!

One a similar note I picked up The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington

The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy

Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein 

Things I have been Hearing:

Nymphowars Podcast by Macy Rodman and Theda Hammel

Too Far Pod with Rachel Kaly and Robby Hoffman

    • https://www.patreon.com/toofarpod
    • This is a rare good pod I simply must listen to because the conflict is off the charts hilarious and the guests are great and it seems more fun for me the listener than for them making it often, like they really fight and get at it on here. 

Joy Tactics with Eric Rahill, Jack Bensinger, and Nate Varrone

    • https://www.patreon.com/joytactics
    • These guys get goofy with it. I don’t always listen really close to this one. Their Patreon has a Google Doc anyone can add to and it’s crazy in there.

Horn Dawgs with Steve Hernandez and Jonathan Cerda Rowell

Ok love you bye!!!!! Thanks for reading. I hope there’s something in here you liked!!!!!!

kevo's blog episode one

The Curse, Poor Things, When McKinsey Comes to Town, The Big Con, The World for Sale, Secrecy World, Nymphowars, Too Far, Joy Tactics, Horn Dawgs