Behind these performances, The Curse has a big thing to say about the easy collapsibility of progressive values, the fragility of good intentions, the limits of capitalism as a mechanism for undoing the many crimes of capital. Its most trenchant insight is that the reason those values fail, the reason that people—white people in particular—with good intentions so often overpromise and under-deliver on their ideals is that, at the end of the day, it’s hard to talk to people. This is, in some ways, the grand conceit of Fielder’s The Rehearsal: The fundamental problem of society is that every second of interaction with another human being brings with it the possibility of humiliation and embarrassment.
Over and again, the characters on The Curse do wrong because doing right is more awkward. When Asher is trying to find someone to break the $100 bill, he bursts into a juice bar. The cashier won’t accept hundreds, but he points to an ATM in the corner. Asher can’t get it to work, and an older man in the store offers to help. Turns out, there’s a trick to pressing the buttons on the dilapidated machine. The man asks Asher for his PIN so he can help him enter the numbers. Fielder lets us watch the entirety of Asher’s anxiety about sharing his PIN; he also lets us see the full, banal sadness of the man fully understanding why Asher won’t share the numbers. By the time he gets over the awkwardness of the moment, Nala is gone; his chance to undo the damage has passed. Opening oneself to humanity is awkward; connecting with another person is awkward; progress is awkward. The Curse gives us a show that understands the “cringe” as a debilitating social, even cultural, problem.
In order to make that point, The Curse has to be a lot more awkward than we are used to on TV. In some ways, in fact, it plays off of its audience’s relative desensitization to cringe. Larry David is a lovable meme; The Office came to America and somehow paved the way for a new televisual sentimentalism; the mockumentary look to the camera transformed from a desperate appeal for escape to the cuddliest, most intimate gesture on television. In The Curse, cringe is what it feels like for the world to end. When Whitney gets her head stuck in a sweater and Asher struggles to pull her out, the two stumble into a small, intimate moment of reconnection. It feels, briefly, good. When Whitney insists they restage the moment as a viral video to share on socials, and Asher keeps his merciless phone camera going for take after miserable take, we feel a weight greater than vanity or shallowness. These long sequences are a key to Fielder’s directorial style. The setup happens, the cringe occurs, and then we have to sit in it until our souls are sick. Whatever object or action is being satirized is, at best, a secondary target. What we’re left with is emptiness. The cringe is the soul leaving the body.