Review: ‘The Curse’ Episode 5
In It’s a Good Day, the fifth episode of The Curse, Whitney seems to be teetering on the edge of a full-blown breakdown. As her and Asher are looking for a couple to film segments of their documentary series with them as they explore one of the eco-friendly homes, they have to confront several setbacks and last-minute changes.
In TV shows like Euphoria or The Idol, breakdown scenes are common, where you can feel the tension the character’s experiencing, and then moment to moment, day to day, that feeling amplifies until it reaches boiling point. In both of those series, these scenes are entertaining, but by being so emotionally and visually charged, they don’t convey what it’s like to experience stress. There’s less tension in these moments because the outcome seems inevitable.
In It’s a Good Day, the feeling oozes out of every moment of its 54 minute runtime, yet at the start of the episode it’s unclear whether it’s Dougie, Asher or Whitney who will be the one left feeling adrift amongst other people and themselves by the episode’s climax.
This time around, it’s Whitney’s time to shine, as the couple stress themselves over a contract they’re looking for their potential buyers to sign, which offers vague language that could suggest that the land the property is on could be considered Native land.
Even outside of this conflict, there are minor tensions abound, like when Whitney realises the husband wants to install an air conditioner in the home. If he does, it will lose its eco-friendly seal of approval. The home comes with an in-built temperature regulator, but opening a door or window will mean the regulator takes five to seven hours to adjust again.
Essentially, it’s an unliveable home, completely useless in such a hot climate. It’s similar to what makes Whitney such an easily dislikeable character, since she never lets up on her self-righteousness even when it’s clear she must understand, at least on some level, how duplicitous and exploitative she is.
Her parents and Dougie admonish her beliefs, but it’s hard to ally with them when they’re only saying that because they act so heartlessly towards the suffering of others. Whitney’s beliefs are rigid because she needs to see herself a being that creates order. That’s why she has to have the perfect homes with the perfect occupants, so she can keep up this illusion, even if she’s the only one who believes it.
When they can’t find anyone to buy the property, out of desperation they invite prospective buyer Mark to view the property again, who Whitney initially vetoed because she noticed a Blue Lives Matter sticker on his car.
After spending an incredibly stressful day looking for the right buyer (and trying to film the best possible reaction from would-be buyers for their series) it’s a fitting ending to this waking nightmare to have Mark, completely unprompted, mention all of the aspects of the home’s eco-friendliness to Whitney and Asher.
As he enthusiastically lists every detail, the writing is already on the wall: in all of the ways that matter, he’s the ideal candidate. When asked about the flag on his car, he says that he supports local police and firefighters, and lists off some of the charities he denotes to, all innocuous, all benevolent. All ‘safe’ for someone with Whitney’s political leanings.
The problem with Whitney’s hard-line way of thinking is that it has no appreciation of life’s complexity. Life isn’t social media, or a checklist where you make sure you put a tick beside every progressive measure on the page.
You can believe that there’s widespread bigotry, and that one extension of this is in present throughout a national police force, without thinking that it’s a conservative or far-right position to generally support your local police force. These aren’t mutually exclusive ideas.
But what’s so frustrating about Whitney is that I don’t even get the sense that she disagrees with the merits of these ideas. Instead, it seems to be the mere notion of political differences that causes her to reject him outright. For Whitney, it doesn’t matter that Mark is personable, environmentally conscious, or quite progressive. She can’t stop herself from fixating on the one area where she thinks he comes up short.
It’s an interesting parallel to how much she fawns over Native artist Cara, whose art Whitney doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate. As a non-white, indigenous woman, Whitney looks at her as almost a saviour figure. Yet Cara is an incredibly unlikable person, talking down to Whitney like she’s playing the bitchy, popular girl and Whitney is the unlovable freak. She’s also just as callous towards the documentary’s subjects as Dougie, as she smiles thinking about his trick to blow menthol into subjects’ eyes to make them cry for the betterment of the show.
Whitney, like all The Curse’s characters, has a unique and limited version of empathy, but her real failing is her stunning lack of introspection. Instead of experiencing a cathartic breakdown, she bottles up her emotions, while still wearing them so plainly that even Asher is able to see them.
In The Curse, there is no catharsis of an emotional breakdown. Instead, the horror keeps progressing, and if this is only the first day of the resumed film shoot for Fliplanthropy, I look forward to and dread what will come next.
