Why The Curse is the Best Writing on Any Platform

I spend most of my time now in cautiously optimistic mode about the offerings on screen or on streaming. I have felt for a while now that storytelling has been lost in America for whatever reason. Maybe it’s hard to tell stories now because we’re so polarized. But at least, prior to 2020, there was an effort to tell good stories somewhere in Hollywood. After 2020, it vanished completely. In its place, dogmatic content that mirrors the social justice hierarchy the internet invented around 2013. We are separated into categories that define who we are: white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, Black or Brown or “of color.”

When you watch any movie or read any book (and I read a lot of them), most of the time, if they have been written in America or the UK, they will be “woke.” How I define that is this: they must adhere to the rules of the hierarchy. Women must only rescue themselves. Heterosexual men are usually bad people, predators, unless they’re not white. People of color are always the good guys — always. Usually in a pivotal role that elevates them in the story.

Everyone must be represented at all times to prevent a social media shitstorm by rigid, strident, entitled activists. If you want to see how this manifests in more serious ways, watch the opening scene of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. The Chinese Cultural Revolution is not all that different from what we’re living through now – except without live murders like that, obviously.

Hollywood is filled with cowards up one side and down the other. Even if good stories were being told on the millions of screenplays floating around, the people who greenlight them are too afraid to break from the new fundamentalism that protects them from the shrieking mobs online. But this madness has flattened storytelling and made most things a complete waste of time to watch.

There are ways to pretend it’s not that bad. I do it all the time. I just ignore what I know are obvious genuflects to the activists and find some good in the story I’m watching. But every so often, someone miraculously produces a brilliant piece of work like The Curse.

How this series got made remains a mystery to me. Sure, at the end of the day, white people are the butt of the joke, as usual.  But it’s far more complex than, say, Triangle of Sadness. That is to say the characters, even those who are not white, are funny and complicated and flawed. I watched The Curse with my mouth hanging open thinking, how can anything be this good in this environment? Yet, somehow it is.

What makes The Curse so utterly watchable, at least to a sick mind like mine, is the collaboration between the awkward, hilarious Nathan Fielder and the dark weirdness of Benny Safdie. Somehow these two people came together to write The Curse. Then they got the brilliant Emma Stone to star in it. What shocked me about it is that it reminded me of what storytelling used to be like when the story mattered more than anything else. If you don’t remember those days, I can assure you, they did exist.

What made me curious about The Curse, because trust me, no one was really praising this series in the mainstream, was Thomas Flight’s analysis:

He’s one of the best “critics” online because he takes you deeper than your average review can. He doesn’t really talk much about how The Curse lampoons what has happened to the Left of late, but he doesn’t have to. All he has to do is make you interested enough to watch it.

Here is an example of one of the best and weirdest moments in the show, taking us all the way back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf:

I loved The Curse so much as a brilliant work of art I don’t even want to know what Nathan Fielder or Benny Safdie think about it. I don’t want to hear them explain it. I just want to allow my brain the luxury of complex storytelling because it is almost non-existent now. We get weird, plenty of weird, like Caligula weird, but we don’t get smart, we don’t get complex. And yet, here it is. On Showtime and Paramount Plus somehow.

They even made a funny trailer for their show within a show:

The best thing about this is the first comment:

Watching The Curse took me back to being a very young person and discovering art for the first time. This happened while listening to a Bob Dylan song. It happened when someone showed me a Woody Allen movie for the first time. It happened when I walked into the Museum of Modern Art. We need art to be ruthless in its expression of the truth. It isn’t exactly the truth because it’s art, and thus, it is a commentary on the truth, but buried somewhere in there has to be an authentic truth about the human experience.

In case you didn’t know, The Curse is about a well-meaning “woke” couple filming a reality-TV show about house flipping. But they’re not just flipping houses – they are re-creating a utopian version of house flipping. They are trying to build “passive houses” that first do no harm. But of course, all they do is harm. They are built with reflective glass so birds are always crashing into them. They’re too expensive for anyone in the town to afford and the only people who can afford them are politically inconvenient (a white right-wing prepper) so they have to hire locals to pretend to be buying the houses.

The houses themselves look great but are essentially useless as practical homes because they are designed only to make Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder seem like good people. They have to show their goodness to the world via their reality show. But the series shows us the other side of it, the reality of who they actually are.

Every character in The Curse is funny somehow. It’s never a case of a nice, noble person of color showing up and being symbols of virtue. They’re just as flawed, in their own ways, as the stars. That is what makes The Curse so timely – we’re all just people in the end trying to make it through our complicated lives.

Artifice is the central theme that runs throughout The Curse. Everything is “fake-pretend” for the cameras. Cell phone cameras, security cameras, and reality TV cameras all capture things that are true that people want to hide. And isn’t that just like today, when we live our real lives and present our virtual lives? It isn’t just reality TV; it’s also social media. We’ve all become accustomed to being reality TV stars in our own tiny little worlds.

The Curse isn’t out to educate you or lecture you or make you a better person. It is just there as a brilliant work of art and the best writing of the year on film or television. And yes, that makes it a tough sell for 2024. Most people I talk to have never even heard of it. I have to try to explain it, and I always say, “If you can make it through the first episode, you can watch the whole thing.” It isn’t an easy sit. Both Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder are experts at making you uncomfortable. But if you have a hungry brain that is so bored lately with the flat storytelling on offer, this is for you.