‘The Curse’: An Unsettling Tale of Art and Luxury

‘My homes are art,’ Whitney Siegel insists of the mirror-clad passive houses she builds in the Santa Fe suburb of Española. Each is hermetically sealed to maintain a carefully calibrated climate. Air conditioning is forbidden; appliances must abide by strict energy codes to maintain their eco-friendly German certification. The structures blend so seamlessly into the high-desert vista that birds regularly crash into their facades. Whitney’s mission? To rejuvenate the impoverished community with these intentional, artful homes – a process she plans to document for HGTV’s latest house-flipping series titled, tongue-twistingly, ‘Fliplanthropy’.

This is the premise of The Curse (2023–24), a brilliantly sinister series co-written by comedian Nathan Fielder and filmmaker Benny Safdie, who both star alongside Emma Stone as Whitney. The series is the latest entry, and among the smartest, in a recent succession of satires about the worlds of art and luxury. As the wealth gap widens, the custodians of high culture – often humbly paid functionaries compensated with prestige – are engulfed by a burgeoning culture war, their fates depicted as comedy in high-camp horror flicks like Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) and The Menu (2022), or as tragedy in Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017) and Triangle of Sadness (2022), along with Safdie’s own Uncut Gems (2019).

The Siegels justify their outré upscale houses through their proximity to art and their association with authenticity, which they locate in Indigenous culture. Whitney borrows her design from artist Doug Aitken’s Mirage (2017), a reflective ranch-house in the Coachella Valley, as well as traditional southwest adobe architecture. Wary of the established tropes of reality television and its spectacle of middlebrow domesticity, the couple is careful about who they welcome into the community, weighing each prospective buyer’s politics and aesthetic sensibility, and they promise jobs to every family they displace. Homeowners (mostly white) are gifted Native pottery in a welcoming ceremony and asked to sign a statement of solidarity with the Puebloan Land Back movement. Each construction site begins with a land acknowledgment.

The daughter of local slumlords who have ceded her Española for redevelopment, Whitney fashions herself as a Gaia figure, full of abundance and magnanimity. She gives away money, clothing (which she allows to be shoplifted) and even a house – albeit one they planned to tear down. Whitney harbours altruistic intentions but also an unsettling sense of entitlement toward Pueblo culture and a strange fascination with dispossession, illustrated via subtle nods toward her conversion to Asher’s Judaism. Her attempts to artwash the more obviously exploitative aspects of the family business – even her name is a riff on the quid pro quo of biennials – is consistently foiled. Her sleazy producer Dougie Schecter (Safdie) meddles alongside her dopey, penny-pinching husband, Asher (Fielder), a former casino marketing manager and beta cuck whose micropenis is one of the show’s recurring gags. After receiving tepid feedback from a focus group – why is she married to this bland, pathetic man? – Dougie recuts the pilot to dramatize Whitney’s marriage through a plot emasculating Asher and rebrands the show ‘Green Queen’.

For the Siegels, gentrification is a communal project, a profitable form of participatory art. One of the most compelling scenes comes when they attend an exhibition opening for the Picuris Pueblo artist Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Austin, a Diné/Tlingit actor and painter), who reclaims problematic depictions of Indigenous figures, such as local baseball teams’ caricature mascots, in a way that recalls aspects of Nicholas Galanin’s re-appropriative practice. Proximity to artists of colour – or, more accurately, their heavily mythologized proxies – serves as professional currency for Whitney. ‘Cara’s work is about her struggles as a Native artist,’ she tells James Toledo (Gary Farmer), the governor of San Pedro Pueblo, hoping to demonstrate her political sympathies. In the process, she conflates Cara’s affiliation with the Tiwa and James’s with the Tewa.

At the exhibition, Cara invites viewers into a tipi, where she hands them a plate of sliced deli meat and then wails. Whitney is obsessed; James is unimpressed. One of Cara’s friends mocks Whitney’s fixation with Indigenous culture by affecting an American Indian Pidgin English accent and offering a prayer for his burrito: ‘May your spirit be free as I eat your delicious body,’ he mournfully intones. ‘Rest now and join your brothers and sisters in the next life. Aho.’ Leaning forward intently, her green eyes wide, Whitney responds: ‘That’s so beautiful.’ Later, at a collector’s party, Whitney corners Cara and demands an explanation of the tipi. ‘As a Native person, that’s basically what you’re doing every day – just fucking slicing off pieces of yourself,’ Cara replies – a line the actor ad-libbed during her audition. Whitney again replies, her voice quivering: ‘That’s so beautiful.’

In the end, the Siegels buy out Cara, hiring her as the show’s credited creative consultant: Whitney purchases validation from the artist she views as social capital. Cara gets US$20,000. In the series finale, perhaps the single most surreal episode of television since Twin Peaks (1990–2017), a now-pregnant Whitney appears at her lowest. HGTV moved ‘Green Queen’ to its streaming service while the Siegels deliver an awkward morning-show interview to a totally apathetic Rachael Rae. Meanwhile, Cara has quit the art world to work as a masseuse, leading to a reverent profile in The New York Times. As the couple sits for Shabbat, Whitney admits that she ‘doesn’t share the experience or the struggles of your history’. Asher replies, ‘If you think for a second that just because you converted, you’re any less Jewish than I am, you’re dead wrong.’ Then he adds, ‘There’s almost the same amount of Indigenous people in the US as there are Jews.’ It’s a riveting scene. Feeling defeated, Whitney seems on the verge of questioning her unearned sense of affinity with the oppressed. Asher gives her new hope, but she still has the ick.

The next morning, Asher awakes stuck to the ceiling and can’t get down. Whitney’s water breaks and she’s rushed off to the hospital by her doula. Asher escapes from the house and flies into a tree before being expelled from the Earth, literally ejected by some inexplicable reversal of gravity. The Curse ends with Asher orbiting in space, frozen solid in the foetal position. As Whitney gives birth, she transcends her earthly ambitions and achieves a bleak sort of supremacy. Shed of her deadweight husband and her artistic rival, at last she appears poised to get what she wants – but at what cost? The Green Queen’s reign brings its own mantis-like sense of justice, ultimately indifferent to human ambitions.

'The Curse' is available on Prime Video

^{Main image: Emma Stone as Whitney in The Curse (detail), Season 1, 2023–24, film still. Courtesy: John Paul Lopez/A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME.}