Why was satire made during the Trump administration so bad? It’s a question I’ve found myself asking as we move further and further away from the late 2010s and the historiography of the era begins to take shape. My early theory is simply that the attempts to send up Trump by comedians like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and comedy shows like Saturday Night Live grew so stale because they were too focused on the man himself. As someone who writes about politics in addition to pop culture, I’ve always felt that stories about elections and their aftermath should really be about the people who elected the leaders in question, not the leaders themselves. If the president is ridiculous and worth mocking, then shouldn’t the culture that allowed him to become president be worthy of the same scrutiny? 

That kind of cultural satire – the idea that the most ridiculous things in this world happen not in the halls of power but in the house next door – is what makes The Curse, the recently concluded Showtime miniseries from cringe comedian extraordinaire Nathan Fielder and blue chip filmmaker/actor Benny Safdie, such a perfect parody of our current moment. Of course, it’d be reductive to simply call The Curse a social satire – it’s also an incisive look at male/female relationships, the anxiety of impending parenthood, and, especially in its finale, a pure surrealist freakout – but it’s at its sharpest and most vital when, like most of Nathan Fielder’s work, it holds a magnifying glass over the ways in which we seek attention and acceptance in the modern world. The end result is something that’s equal parts hilarious and disquieting, and that disquiet is a product of how raw and honest it truly is.

Like Nathan for You, The Curse is, on its surface, a send up of reality TV. Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) are a millennial couple shooting a pilot for HGTV called Flipthranpothy, which will chronicle their attempt to transform the economically depressed community of Españiola, New Mexico via Whitney’s “passive homes,” giant reflective houses that are supposedly eco-friendly. Here to help document this journey is Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie), a veteran reality director and childhood/friend bully of Asher’s. In addition to building their literal glass houses, the Siegels entice trendy businesses, like a boutique coffee shop and a designer jeans outlet, to Españaiola as a means of both attracting new residents to the town and providing employment for the people who already live there. One day, during down time on set, Dougie tells Asher to buy bottled water from Nala (Hikmah Warsame), a girl selling it in a parking lot, so he can film it as B-roll that demonstrates the Siegels are good, generous people. Asher only has a $100 bill on him, and tries to get it back from her in exchange for exact change after the scene is shot. After an argument, Nala “curses” him, leaving Asher paranoid that the series of bizarre personal and professional setbacks the Siegels begin to experience is a result of the titular hex. 

The first layer of The Curse’s satire is obvious – the Siegels’ plan to make Españiola both a hot real estate market while not displacing or negatively affecting any of its current residents is clearly untenable. Like any well-educated millennial couple, they’re acutely aware of this fact, and perform a number of futile and self-flagellating gestures to signal their virtue. They give Fernando (Christopher Calderon), an unemployed Españiola resident, a security job at a strip mall, but won’t allow him to carry a gun or apprehend shoplifters, choosing instead to offset the cost of theft by paying for the stolen merchandise themselves. They shoot a land acknowledgement as part of their pilot, but also go to great lengths to explain how the properties they own are not covered by a dispute between a local Native American tribe and the state over usage rights (even though Whitney’s homes are built on stolen land anyway). In other words, they’re trying to both maintain their privilege and act as vanguards of egalitarianism, a sweaty balancing act that anyone not involved in their show is able to see through.

But Asher and Whitney aren’t just engaged in all of this posturing as a way to assuage their white guilt (Whitney’s parents are slumlords who made a fortune taking advantage of the local Latino and Native American community) and build a “progressive” brand for their TV show. They’re also in search of a source of fame that feels unique to the 2020s, a kind of quasi-influencer status where people praise you for not just being good at what you do, but for being a good person as well. Whitney doesn’t just want to be an HGTV star, she also wants to be considered an artist, an ally, an activist. She wants to be thought of as being something without actually being that something, and the end result is a mindset that makes her just as patronizing and discriminatory as the nefarious forces she ostensibly opposes. While social media doesn’t play a large role in the show’s plot, you can recognize Instagram and Pinterest’s promise of infinite curation in Whitney’s approach to other people. Her reluctance to sell one of her passive homes to someone with a Blue Lives Matter flag on his truck (even though, it’s implied, he has very progressive attitudes on Native American rights) reflects her desire to maintain a certain aesthetic and ideological purity to her neighborhood – a kind of woke form of housing discrimination. She also displays a shallow understanding of the people she actually wants to be around, especially Picuris Pueblo artist Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin), whose work Whitney wants displayed in her homes partly as a testament to her supposed appreciation of Native American culture, but mostly because it makes her look more artistic than she actually is. 

Stone’s natural charisma let’s you believe Whitney isn’t a total phony – she’s genuinely charming while dealing with local residents and members of the HGTV crew – but whenever one of her assumptions is challenged, you can see her slowly begin to crack as she realizes she may have to choose between her stated values and her quest for fame. It’s a potent mix of defensiveness, rage, spite, and manufactured optimism that few actors are able to convey, and it makes for one of the best TV or film performances of the decade so far. 

If Whitney is captive to the public’s perception, then Asher is a slave to his wife’s perception of him. The kind of self-sacrificial posturing Whitney goes through when it comes to racial politics Asher lives out in full when it comes to his marriage. He’s hopelessly devoted to Whitney, enduring all manner of humiliation to further her career and, by extension, keep their marriage intact. Alongside the passive homes and artist “friends,” he’s the last bit of curation in Whitney’s life, but his complete lack of on camera charisma and graceless business manner makes him defective in her eyes, something he tries to remedy by taking increasingly painful corporate comedy classes and engaging in a convoluted media campaign to distract from Whitney’s parents’ business dealings. Fielder’s trademark stiff, deadpan demeanor makes him perfect for this role, especially when contrasted with Stone’s natural magnetism and Safdie’s smarm. The true pain in his performance comes from the idea that, out of all of these characters, he might actually be the most authentic. He just can’t properly express this, which leads him to being taken advantage of by both Whitney and Dougie and, in a twisted domino effect, causes him to take out his paranoia and resentment on unworthy targets like Nala’s family, who he finds squatting in a house he and Whitney buy with the intention of flipping. 

If all of this makes The Curse sound like a deeply uncomfortable watch, that’s because it is. While the series may lack the frenetic pacing of Safdie Brothers films like Good Time or Uncut Gems, it features the same raw but clear digital cinematography which, when when paired with a queasy electronic score and the uncanny performances of many of the non-actors in the cast (another Safdie trademark), creates a truly surreal atmosphere. A good chunk of the dialogue scenes are shot through a window or a doorway, making the viewer feel like an unwilling voyeur forced to watch something they shouldn’t be. It’s a cinematic representation of the Siegels being sorry for what they wished for – they’ve finally got our full attention, just not at the particular time or place that they want it. This same anxiety was exploited by Fielder in The Rehearsal, his buzzy HBO miniseries in which he gave real people the opportunity to practice for uncomfortable life moments in excruciating detail and repetition. In The Curse, that excruciation comes instead from how poorly prepared Asher and Whitney are for people to not like them, and how little control they actually have over their own image.

This is a uniquely modern dilemma, one shared by anyone who engages in any form of online life. Even those of us who merely want to use the Internet as a tool to find work have to be conscious of what kind of “brand” they’re building for themselves. Every bit of public-facing information we put out about ourselves is loaded with meaning, geared towards generating a preferred outcome. How can we advertise our virtues while still being authentically good? And does any authentically good thing that we do immediately become compromised when we use it as a means to advance our own interests as well? 

The Curse doesn’t offer very clear cut answers to these questions, but I don’t think it’s designed to, either. The series is full of loose ends that never really get resolved, like Dougie’s guilt over his wife’s death and some open questions about Asher’s sexual peccadilloes. Even the finale feels less interested in wrapping up the story than it does in providing viewers with one memorable, surrealist set piece that leaves them questioning the very reality that Asher and Whitney inhabit. Maybe this is, as some reviewers implied, the sign of messy and uneven storytelling. But I prefer to think of it as Fielder’s final joke – a mockery of the very notion of meaning itself. Just as the Siegels do with their show, modern viewers insert an oversized amount of importance on pop culture, assuming it can cure social evils or even breed new evils. What the ending of The Curse seems to suggest is that this meaning is malleable – these fictional worlds exist at the whim of their creators, and characters and situations can be plucked out and altered even when it doesn’t make sense. They don’t have a say in how they behave or what happens to them. The viewer, on the other hand, has choices to make – and The Curse suggests it’s time we start being as honest as possible about them.