In the first scenes that we spend with Whitney Siegel, Emma Stone’s character in The Curse, she is trying to convince everyone around her that she is a caring and responsible person. She informs us about bringing work to a distressed community, assisting her neighbors with rising rents, and supporting local artists, all in an effort to promote her “holistic home philosophy” embodied by her self-designed and self-developed carbon neutral homes. This firm commitment is both unsettling and forebodingly familiar. A common criticism of environmentalists such as herself is that they are out of touch and expect too much from others. They are often seen as idealists overly focused on the abstract and distant concerns like the environment, while also being preoccupied with seemingly trivial things such as LED lightbulbs, recycling, and low-flow toilets.
This description might make you, especially if you are an environmentalist, anxious and uneasy. It casts an unflattering light on individuals who strive to embody environmental consciousness. This discomfort is the central theme of The Curse, a new Showtime series directed by Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder. The plot revolves around Whitney and her husband Asher Siegel (played to horrifying effect by Fielder) as they attempt to turn their Doug Aitken-inspired passive house properties into a reality show starring themselves for HGTV. Despite quickly gaining a cult following, The Curse has been described using phrases such as “the hardest to watch thing I’ve ever seen,” “physically curled in pain,” and “a weekly anxiety nightmare.”
While energy-efficient insulation and circular plumbing may not seem like harbingers of terror, the show is distinctively unsettling because it reveals its characters at their worst. The series exposes Whitney, a dedicated advocate for carbon-neutral living, as a morally corrupt, self-serving, and malicious character. It raises the question: how can someone who has committed their career and public image to promoting climate-friendly homes turn out to be such a convincing antagonist?
I spoke with Jennifer Bernstein, editor-in-chief of Case Studies in the Environment, who watched the show to try and understand what makes Whitney’s environmentalist character so disturbing. She observed that it is due to “this lack of self-awareness paired with this idea that her idea of the good life has some moral high ground and should be everyone’s idea of the good life.”
