‘The Curse’ Recap: Emma Stone’s Whitney Shows Her True Colors
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This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Curse, which is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.
“It’s a Good Day” opens with two potential buyers prepping for an on-camera tour of one of Whitney’s passive homes. As is standard for The Curse, things are getting uncomfortable immediately, on both an emotional level and a physical one. The Seigels have decided — well, Whitney has decided, and Asher has gone along, because that is their power dynamic — that all buyers have to sign a letter in support of the Pueblo nation. Asher is able to mostly allay the couple’s concerns on this front, but there’s a bigger issue that won’t go away: The husband, Dennis, will not swap sweating. Whitney brags that the house is like a thermos, but in this case it’s a thermos that keeps your lemonade unusually warm, and Dennis can’t handle a constant temperature of 78 degrees in the summer.
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Talk of the couple installing an air conditioner — and thus, like the guy who threw out the induction oven last week, invalidating the carbon-neutral nature of the house — scotches the deal. Dennis and his wife move on to potentially cooler options, leaving Whitney to be the one who spends the hour sweating.
Because Whitney is played by Emma Stone, because Asher is played by Nathan Fielder, and because both of them give off the energy we’ve come to expect from those performers, both the audience watching The Curse and the people watching the making of Flip-lanthropy are inclined to look at her as the smooth, charming, completely together partner, and at him as the clumsy buffoon. Instead … well, no, that’s pretty much who Asher is, in almost every setting. But “It’s a Good Day” wants to make sure we understand that these two did not get together by happenstance, and that Whitney’s adorable facade just barely conceals how she can be just as desperate and clumsy as her husband.
Last week’s episode concluded with Asher failing to make his corporate comedy classmates laugh. This one, meanwhile, has an early moment where Whitney’s playful banter with a member of the HGTV crew abruptly turns sour, as she warns him not to call her a spoiled TV host in front other people, and says she wants the respect she deserves. A beat later, she reveals that she’s just messing with him, but things remain deeply uncomfortable between them. It’s not just that she has a huge power advantage over him. It’s that she could so easily be the privileged, horrible person in this situation that it barely seems like a joke at all, as misguided in its own way as the creepy face Asher made in the class.
From there, it’s an hour of Whitney flailing more and more to keep the show on message, gradually moving this piece of reality TV further and further from reality itself, and gradually moving away from many of the things she professes to believe in. With genuine home buyers out of the picture, Whitney takes Dougie’s suggestion to build the season around a fake buyer. First she tries Cara, once again failing to recognize that Cara does not consider Whitney to be a friend, and in fact seems to strongly dislike her. After Cara trolls the show and its hosts by acting like a gentrifier who wants no part of the local community, Whitney next switches to recruiting people off the street. First she tries combining one half of a young couple with a mom, then tries mixing and matching the adults and the baby before finally settling on the actual couple. (Who, in at least one take, act as if they are about to be expecting a baby of their own.) The whole thing’s a mess even before the guy randomly, painfully (and/or amusingly, depending on your tolerance for mortifying humor) starts singing “Stand By Me” while touring the house.
In the midst of this, Whitney finds herself fighting with her parents, who show up to set uninvited, once again making it difficult for Whitney to keep the saintly image she wants to maintain separate from the slumlords who not only gave birth to her, but who are bankrolling her allegedly more progressive business. She’s arguing with Fernando, who won’t stop bringing his gun to the strip mall, and won’t stop detaining shoplifters until Whitney finally gives the jeans store her credit card number to pay for any losses from theft. (Surely, nothing bad can come of this plan, can it?)
And she gets into it with Asher, who is so desperate to find a real buyer for the house that he insists they meet again with Mark Rose(*), whose Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker has her convinced he’ll be another terrible addition to the neighborhood. Whitney assumes this guy is full MAGA and, like some of their other buyers and potential buyers, has no interest in the actual function of the passive home. But it turns out the design is appealing to libertarians, too, since Mark likes the idea of being somewhat off the grid even as he’s living in a nice house in a real town, rather than a shack in the middle of nowhere.
(*) Mark is played by Dean Cain, one of the more outspoken conservative actors in Hollywood. Sometimes, art imitating life works.
By the end of the meeting — where Mark also enthusiastically supports the Pueblo cause (he’s part-Apache) — Whitney is so exhausted by her terrible, no-good, very bad day that she gives into Asher’s desire to sell to the guy, just to unload the property. (“He seemed polite,” she admits.) At bedtime, Asher tries to be flirty, and mindful of her fertility cycle, but Whitney’s not having it. Over and over, she has found herself inadvertently insulting people, being insulted, feeling betrayed, and making one bad decision after another. She returns her husband’s “I love you,” but in the robotic tone of a woman who has put her life on autopilot, because the more she tries to think about situations, the worse she seems to make it. The focus group complained that Asher seemed to have no personality, but at least for a moment, those roles are reversed.
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