“Green Queen” gets an awkward early screening as Whitney tries to broach her feelings with Asher.
Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Young Hearts’
It’s amazing what a reality television edit can do. Throughout “The Curse,” we’ve been exposed to what Asher and Whitney look like acting for the cameras, but we have rarely seen what they are like when they are actually on camera, once they’ve gotten the glossy treatment that the Property Brothers and other hosts have before them.
The truth is: Whitney might seem painfully fake in her daily interactions, but she performs very well. She’s a natural, and watching a cut of the newly retitled “Green Queen,” it’s easy to understand why the network is so high on her. All of that falsity fades away under the bright lights, which crave that sort of manicured behavior. She fits into her role perfectly.
This week’s episode, is revelatory with regards to Whitney on multiple levels, and it’s also a tour de force for Emma Stone, an actress whose natural understanding of the camera and what it can do allows her to play all the facets of this complicated, troubled character. The episode leaves no doubt about just how wrong she and Asher are for each other. But before then, a series of smaller Whitney-related events peel back layers of her carefully constructed persona.
Why did Whitney marry Asher? The question has plagued this series. Their relationship is so lacking in any affection that doesn’t feel forced, you have to rack your brain to imagine a time when they were truly in love. Here, we get clarity on some of her potential reasoning. Asher’s infatuation with Whitney provided her with an escape hatch. She could take his name to get away from her old life as a lackey for her parents. After learning that a relative of one of the show’s drivers was evicted from a building run by her parents, she Googles herself under her old name, “Whitney Rhodes.” There’s a photo of her smiling at the opening of the complex, complicit in all of their misdeeds.
Asher was a way to disassociate from her parents on paper — even if she’s still using their money to fund her ventures. She’s no longer “Whitney Rhodes”; She’s “Whitney Siegel,” who wears a Star of David around her neck to further distance herself from her past — no matter how merely symbolic that piece of jewelry is.
Maybe at one point the intensity of Asher’s affection was appealing to Whitney, who saw something almost exotic in his Judaism. Now, however, she can’t stand him. And what’s worse: Now they have to perform for a representative from HGTV, Martha, stopped by to check up on the show’s progress. When Dougie, parroting what he has heard from the network, explains that the story line about the dissolution of their marriage isn’t going to work, Whitney starts to cozy up to Asher again. And she yet can’t help but feel enraged by his little touches. Asher challenges her to say that she loves him. She refuses, though she will go bowling, clearly a favorite pastime of his, to make amends.
During their outing, there is a moment of what appears to be genuine joy between the two of them, but the spell is quickly broken when Asher’s friend Bill from the casino approaches. Bill wants to apologize. He thought that Asher was the leaker, but says he was mistaken. Asher, thinking he is impressing Whitney, confesses to being the “whistle-blower.” Later that night, she hears him quietly speaking to himself, perhaps masturbating, proudly bragging about this achievement. But then the fantasy morphs into imagining himself watching Bill having sex with Whitney. You can see the disgust grow on her face.
He approaches her while she’s furiously rowing on an erg machine about new language in the contract that suggests he might be “exposed to ridicule, humiliation or condemnation.” Then an idea seems to dawn on her: She’ll show him everything, including the confessional where she spills her feelings about their relationship. Maybe if he sees it, he’ll listen to her and understand. So she and Asher and join Dougie in his hotel room, sitting awkwardly in the bed, to view an early cut of “Green Queen.”
A strange thing is that after everything we’ve been privy to, “Green Queen” is still pretty compelling television. Dougie knows what he’s doing, and you can see why HGTV would be interested in the material. Here’s a very pretty person — Whitney — vowing to do good, and, as filmed by Dougie, she seems smart and capable. Asher, meanwhile, just seems at first like a goofy nuisance, making nonsensical jokes about Arnold Palmers. It’s bizarrely charming.
Dougie is willing to skip over the material that really goes for Asher’s jugular — the network doesn’t want to use it anyway — but Whitney wants Asher to see just what she has done to him. Stone’s face is solemn. All of Whitney’s eager-to-please brattiness has been sapped from it as she watches with grim anticipation. It’s brutal to behold. Onscreen, Whitney appears earnest as her minor complaints about Asher morph into genuine concerns about her relationship. The problem is his worship of her.
She wonders: “Can someone love you so much that the real version of you completely ceases to exist?” It’s a funny question coming from Whitney, who doesn’t really seem to have a great sense of self to begin with.
And yet it’s possible, thanks to the manufactured quality of reality TV, to empathize with Whitney, maybe for the very first time. On one level we know what we’re seeing is at times fake — for instance, the shots of her laughing at the art collector’s party, where we know she had an uncomfortable time. Still, Stone sells the oppressiveness of Asher’s love for her and how stifling that can be. So it’s almost a relief when Asher storms out of the room. He got it, you think.
But then he returns, his fervor renewed. He has manic energy as he closes in on her face, telling her she was right. “I’m a terrible person,” he spits. “There’s not some curse. I’m the problem.”
Whitney is shocked. Instead of repelling him, she has succeeded in making him cling to her even tighter. “I’m all in on Whitney,” he says.
It sounds like a threat. She starts to cry, tears he reads as an emotional outpouring. But there is terror in her eyes.
Notes From Española
The episode begins with an eerie sequence from the point of view of an unknown driver who waits for Whitney to leave her home and then drives all the way to the shopping plaza. Who is that?
I had to put on closed captioning during the scene where Asher is talking to himself to understand what he was saying, so if you didn’t catch that at first, that’s not on you.
Whitney’s discovery that Cara is her masseuse is exquisitely awkward, but does the fact that she eventually decides to walk away from the appointment show some growth? Or does her overtipping as a way of assuaging her guilt undo all that?
The way in which Stone flinches just a little bit every time Fielder touches her is brilliant.
Fielder’s enthusiastic bowling is almost as unnerving as his enthusiastic rapping last week. Almost.
I can’t get over the ick factor of the shot of Whitney’s father trapping a roach in the apartment where he apparently is now forced to live. Her folks might be the scummiest people on this show.
We’re in the homestretch, and I truly have no idea how any of this is going to resolve. That’s a good thing, but also I’m so scared.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
