In a series full of painful-to-watch interactions, this week’s episode might be the most excruciating yet.
Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Down and Dirty’
This week’s episode of “The Curse” is about friendship. Or maybe, more accurately, it’s about the concept of friendship and the trouble our protagonists seem to have with grasping it. Asher and Whitney call people “friends,” but that’s just empty language to them. They have no true sense of what it means to be a friend to someone else.
The backbone of the hour consists of one night in which Whitney and Asher have divergent outings. Whitney goes to a party that Cara is attending in a beautiful home hosted by an art collector, who also happens to be a military contractor. Naturally, there’s an ulterior motive to Whitney’s excursion: She has a camera trailing her to capture footage for the show of what her life is like away from Asher. At the same time, Asher and Dougie have dinner — a sort of apology meal on Asher’s part for having neglected their friendship.
The episode brings into focus just how transactional Asher’s and Whitney’s relationships are. Even their marriage is one of convenience. And we’re confronted once again with just how poisonous Asher and Whitney are to the people in their presence.
Dougie, who is so mired in loneliness and self-hatred that he craves whatever companionship he can find, has clearly come to despise Asher for what he sees as a dismissal of his feelings. So he has taken to torturing him with the barely concealed glee of a schoolyard menace. Cara, meanwhile, is starting to realize just how soul sucking it is to be beholden to Whitney at any price; indeed, taking Whitney’s money in last week’s episode has only tightened her bind, forcing her to pantomime her way through her revulsion. In a series full of painful-to-watch interactions, this week’s episode might be the most excruciating yet.
In some ways, Whitney should be at ease at the art collector’s gathering. These are her people: rich capitalists who use their interest in art to help mask their exploitation. But she doesn’t want to recognize herself in them. She needs to believe she is like Cara — an artist. So she tells her camera guy not to film the host, and she balks when she introduces herself to a group and a man tells her he works in private security.
Whitney parades around the room with a drink in hand, posing as she examines the art in the room, making sure the camera captures all of her angles. She approaches other guests hoping for interactions that will make her look good. Some play her game. Cara’s friend Brett (Brett Mooswa), having clearly heard about Whitney from Cara, decides to play the role of the wise and mystical Native American, and she eats it up. “That was so beautiful,” she says after his speech. “Can I give you a hug?” She’s unaware that when he turns away from her he is giggling to himself.
But Cara doesn’t find Whitney’s cluelessness as funny as Brett does, especially when Whitney tries to goad her into performing for the camera. Cara seems to know that she has put herself in an impossible position: Whitney’s money has obligated Cara to be cordial, but at a price that seems to exceed the $20,000 she received. Pretending to be Whitney’s friend helps Whitney believe they are artistically on the same level, which Cara and we as viewers know is not true. And while Cara’s good word, even if it’s fake, lends value to Whitney’s work, the association risks having a negative impact on Cara’s own standing in the art world and in her community.
Whitney feeds Cara lines she wants her to say about how she’s proud to have her work displayed inside Whitney’s homes, and Cara dutifully repeats them. Finally, however, she gets the opportunity to tell Whitney a little bit about how she really feels when Whitney asks her to explain her performance piece in the tepee way back in Episode 2. Whitney still wants to know if she was supposed to eat the turkey Cara sliced.
“The slicing of the meat is me giving pieces of myself to people, whether I want to or not, and as a Native person that’s basically what you are doing every day,” Cara says. She adds: “Whether people choose to eat it is totally up to them. And you ate it.” As Whitney, Emma Stone’s face changes from an understanding smile into a grimace. Someone finally called her out to her face. Maybe that’s just what friends do.
While Whitney is learning some hard truths about herself, Asher and Dougie are engaged in an emotional battle of performative friendship. In a way, their date starts with Dougie’s interview with Asher, where he is quite evidently trying both to unnerve him and to catch him in linguistic traps that will make him look terrible in the edit. Dougie brings up details we have never heard about Asher before, among them that he came to New Mexico for another relationship, which ended before he got together with Whitney.
Although Asher is uncomfortable during the interview, he leans into congeniality at dinner with awkward attempts at niceties, saying things like “I’m happy you’ve been such a good friend to me” as Dougie throws back beers. And Dougie is hardly a victim. He is also a bully. During the interview, he brings up Asher’s embarrassing sexual proclivities; during their meal, he secretly orders chicken to the table, just to freak Asher out.
When Asher has to go to Abshir’s to change the battery in a smoke detector, Dougie comes up with a plan. He wants to see if Nala will curse him with the same chicken-related fate as Asher. If the chicken they have taken home from the restaurant — Dougie’s joke — disappears, then it worked. Asher is resistant, but Dougie forges ahead, essentially barging his way into Nala’s room under the ruse of needing to do housework. As he asks Nala to curse him, he grows desperate, crying. She screams for her father, terrified by this strange man weeping beside her bed.
It’s a sequence that’s almost hard to parse. Is Dougie genuinely sobbing? Is he doing this for Asher? Maybe he needs to believe in curses so he can have something to blame his awful life on? Regardless of his motives, Nala doesn’t fulfill his request.
When Asher and Dougie get back into the car, they start to fight. It leads to perhaps the most brutal exchange of the series so far. “Does this get exhausting,” Dougie asks, “cosplaying as a good man?” Asher replies, “Like you’re one to talk.” Dougie wants to know what that’s supposed to mean. Asher then coup de grâce: “I don’t know, ask your wife.” He quickly apologizes, realizing the cruelty of his blow. But something has shifted. Even the score sounds different. It is harsher and less eerie, like something out of a sci-fi movie.
As Asher moves to exit the car, he tries again to make amends. Dougie coldly agrees, saying, “We need more friends than enemies in this world, right?” His cute little axiom sounds like a threat, and at this moment Asher really doesn’t have any friends. Neither does Whitney.
And now Asher has two curses on his back: One from Nala and one from Dougie, who curses him as soon as he gets out of the car. While Nala’s might have been mostly child’s play, there’s deeper malice behind Dougie’s hex.
Notes from Española
It’s always a jolt when an episode begins with entirely new faces. This one started with some local kids who have learned that they can steal jeans with no repercussions. There might, however, be some repercussions for Asher and Whitney in the form of Fernando, who sees them as enabling crime.
Whitney has spent about $14,000 on the stolen jeans. Jeez.
Whitney’s baby voice as she whines to Asher after Fernando leaves is one of the most haunting, grotesque things I have ever heard. Props to Emma Stone for that.
Once again, Whitney has an interaction with the Española Sikh community, this time in the form of a man at the party who flirts with her. I’m starting to wonder if this is all going to end with her joining.
“Exhausting” is a term that keeps coming up. The experience of being Native in this country is “exhausting” to Cara; Dougie asks Asher if cosplaying as a good person gets “exhausting.” The performance of life is tiring, and “The Curse” is digging into that.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
