This post contains spoilers for the first episode of The Curse, which is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.
Perhaps the only way to begin discussing Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie‘s deliberately weird and even more deliberately uncomfortable new miniseries is to paraphrase Reservoir Dogs. So let me tell you what The Curse is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a small dick. The whole show is a metaphor for small dicks.
Well, maybe not the whole show. But a lot of it.
When we meet Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Seigel (Emma Stone), they seem to have an admirable marriage, and an admirable business model to go with it. They sell climate-neutral passive homes. In the series’ opening scene, they are helping an unemployed man named Fernando get a job at a chain coffee shop in a strip mall they own, which is presented as one example among many of how they are giving back to their community in Española, New Mexico.
But that opening scene is part of the pilot episode for their would-be HGTV show Fliplanthropy, and it’s as scripted and artificial as a lot of reality TV. Dougie, an old summer camp bunkmate of Asher’s who’s now producing the pilot, feels the Fernando scene isn’t quite emotional enough, and insists on putting some water in the eyes of Fernando’s mother to make it look like she’s crying with joy over this news.
Over the course of the hour, we discover this is just one piece of artifice among many in the company, and in the Seigel marriage. Whitney is the daughter of a pair of local slumlords (played by Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman). The primary purpose of Fliplanthropy isn’t to preach the gospel of passive houses, but to increase the value of all the properties Asher and Whitney have purchased around town — which would only accelerate the gentrification they claim to be fighting. And the couple’s sex life revolves around cuckolding fantasies, where Whitney masturbates to the idea of being with another man, while Asher watches.
And, of course, there are the tiny dicks.
At a dinner with Whitney’s parents, we see Asher go to the bathroom, to reveal an extremely modest endowment between his legs. Nathan Fielder — pulling triple duty on the episode as director, actor, and, with Benny Safdie, co-writer — films the urination scene in a fluid take that features both his crotch and his face. Whether this is a special effect or Fielder being candid with the world about his package, we are meant to view this as yet another example of Asher punching above his weight in marrying someone like Whitney. But a few minutes later, we get a different perspective on things. Whitney’s father Paul shows Asher his indoor tomato garden. As he feeds the plants by urinating on them, he gives his mortified son-in-law a lecture with a barely-veiled metaphor about how size doesn’t matter, and concludes it by proudly showing off his own micropenis. Earlier in the same sequence, it’s made clear that Whitney has told her parents this fact about Asher, and it’s at least implied that she knows the deal with her dad. So while she presents herself to the world as an enlightened, progressive woman who’s rebelling against everything her parents stand for, she is also running her own real estate hustle, and has chosen to marry a man whose anatomy has one small but crucial thing in common with her father’s.
A psychologist would have a field day with this whole dynamic, and with the way the balance of power in the Seigel marriage is tipped almost entirely in Whitney’s favor. She has converted to Judaism for Asher, but otherwise they do what she wants, the way she wants. Even when he is lying to her — as he does in the premiere’s final moments — he does it because he’s completely intimidated by her.
But there is no mental health professional on hand. All the Seigels have is the extremely sketchy Dougie (Safdie). Asher treats him as an old friend, even as Dougie seems mostly dismissive of him. And Dougie makes no effort to hide his attraction to a rightfully uncomfortable Whitney. But he is also a means to an end for them, and he in turn is convinced that Whitney will single-handedly make the show a hit, even with the socially awkward Asher as dead weight.
Most of “Land of Enchantment” is focused on introducing the players and the stakes of our story, as well as establishing the unsettling tone Fielder and Safdie have chosen. The music feels better suited to a traditional horror story than to this small drama, and the characters are frequently viewed through grimy windows, peepholes, and other transparent pieces of glass that both put them at a distance from us and frame them as much dirtier than the Seigels want the world to see them as.
Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone, and Tessa Mentus in ‘The Curse’ Episode One.
There are, however, two key plot points introduced here. The first is that a local TV reporter refuses to act as a glorified publicist for Fliplanthropy. Her interest in the connection between Whitney and her parents is trouble enough, and then Asher makes it worse by losing his temper on camera, without Dougie in charge of the environment. So now the Seigels need to massage the situation, by giving the reporter a juicier story than their own.
The other story is the one that gives the show its title. Dougie suggests Asher give money to Nala, a little girl selling sodas in a parking lot, likely as a bit of B-roll footage to reinforce the idea of the Seigels as generous, pure of heart people. But all Asher has in his wallet is a $100 bill. He gives it to Nala for the sake of the show, then takes it away from her, promising to return with something smaller. Nala is, unsurprisingly, furious at Asher for violating the No Takebacks rule, and says she’s putting a curse on him. This unnerves everyone, especially after Nala vanishes before Asher can give her another denomination. Eventually, Whitney insists he track her down and give her some cash. But she, her father, and her sister aren’t at the local shelter for the unhoused(*).
(*) Asher, a caricature of wokeness as cosplay, is extremely reluctant to say out loud that Nala and her family are Black when he’s trying to describe them to others. And when the man at the shelter tells him that they no longer have the budget to operate every day of the week, all but begging this clearly affluent guy into donating money, Asher ignores the request and leaves. He does, however, feel guilted enough by the sound of a crying child in a tent outside that he hands the kid’s mother the money he intended for Nala. He’s not as interested in systemic fixes as he and Whitney claim, but he can be moved by the plight of someone directly in front of him.
So Asher goes home, and invents a whole story for Whitney in hopes she’ll let the matter drop. His lies do not sound convincing — or perhaps I’m just conditioned to be suspicious of everything a Nathan Fielder character, by any name, does in one of his shows — but a relieved Whitney buys in completely, then rushes off to finish recording voiceover for the pilot with Dougie. It is, we’ve already seen, a marriage and a life built on half-truths and hypocrisy — in an episode bookended by fakery — so wanting to believe whatever her husband says is probably Whitney’s default mode.
All in all, an intriguing start to this collaboration between Fielder, Safdie, and Stone.
