A Dystopia for Our Time
Nathan Fielder’s The Curse

3,539 words

Nathan Fielder is a Jewish comedian and actor born in Vancouver in 1983. After a false start in the business world, he got his big break in 2007 on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, as a socially awkward consumer affairs correspondent hosting a recurring segment called “Nathan on Your Side.” Fielder later developed this premise into his Comedy Central “reality” series Nathan for You, which premiered in 2013 and ran for four seasons.

I’ve heard him described as a blend of Woody Allen and Larry David, and indeed, he is ultra-Jewy. Fielder is a real Jewy Jewstein, as Howard Stern would say. In truth, however, his persona actually surpasses Allen and David in its cringey Semitic awkwardness. Without question, Fielder — or, at least, the character he plays — hangs his hat somewhere on the autism spectrum. And it is uncomfortably close to the end of the spectrum that usually involves muteness and excrement-flinging. Fielder makes Woody and Larry seem, respectively, like Cary Grant and Fred Astaire. We should be cautious, however, in assuming that this is merely Fielder’s onscreen persona — given that he has never dropped this “persona” and appeared “as himself” in any interview. This may, in short, be the real Nathan Fielder. If so, we should pity the man.

Each half-hour episode of Nathan for You features Fielder trying to help a struggling small business to become more profitable. All of the businesses featured in the series were real, and though the owners and employees consented to being filmed, they were not told that the series was a comedy. This is a vital part of the humor. The “real people” featured usually have no idea what to make of Fielder. They do not perceive him as projecting a comic persona (if, indeed, that is what he is doing) and instead respond as you or I would to an astonishingly awkward person we might meet in real life.

In other words, they are made visibly uncomfortable and struggle to relate to this improbable sperg. This results in moments that are so painfully cringey I literally wanted, on several occasions, to burrow under the couch. Typical is one scene in which an interlocutor tells Fielder that he has to cut their conversation short as he is taking his girlfriend on a date — whereupon Fielder asks if he can tag along. Cue very long, very awkward pause. “No,” the man says flatly.

Fielder’s claim to be able to help these people is that he majored in business at the University of Victoria, where he got, in his words, “really good grades” (though a screenshot of his transcript shows him finishing one semester with a B, A-, B, C+, and B+). In fact, he winds up almost ruining some of the businesses he tries to “help.”

For example, he persuades a frozen yogurt shop to introduce a new flavor that looks and tastes like shit (because it’ll create “buzz”). Visitors to a “new and improved” Halloween haunted house experience the ultimate in terror when they are whisked away in an ambulance by men in hazmat suits, who tell them they have been exposed to a dangerous disease. Fielder persuades an auto repair shop to allow customers to ask for estimates while the mechanic is hooked up to a polygraph machine. And he uses “Holocaust awareness” to promote his own clothing line, Summit Ice Apparel (but not before receiving the official imprimatur of a rabbi, by the way).

And yet, just when you think that you’ve figured out the series’ “formula,” Fielder throws you a curve. The finale, which spans an hour and a half, dispenses with the usual format and features Nathan trying to help a Bill Gates impersonator (a man who looks nothing like Bill Gates) locate and reconnect with the great love of his life. It is here that the series actually manages to be poignant — and also just plain weird.

There was weirdness all the while, simmering beneath the surface. Fielder’s awkwardness seems to progressively get worse as the series goes on. Unlike the odious Sacha Baron Cohen, Fielder does not humiliate the ordinary folks he encounters (not usually, at least); instead, he is the one who is invariably humiliated. It is like watching a man immolate himself in slow motion, across 32 episodes. The effect is deeply unsettling.

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Fielder followed Nathan for You with The Rehearsal, which premiered on HBO in July 2022. Described as a “docu-comedy,” the series again involves Fielder “helping” real people, and is (for the most part) unscripted. While Nathan for You had been cringey and weird, The Rehearsal veers off into straight-up surrealism. The premise is that Nathan helps people to “rehearse” for important moments in their lives.

In the first episode, a middle-aged black New Yorker who participates in a local barroom trivia team wants to prepare for the moment when he finally confesses to his friends that he lied when he told them he had a Master’s degree (perhaps Fielder should come to the aid of Claudine Gay). To prepare for this momentous event, Fielder has an exact replica of the bar in question (the Alligator Lounge in Brooklyn) built on a soundstage, correct down to the smallest detail. Then professional actors are hired to play the man’s friends, with whom he can “rehearse” his big confession.

Throughout all of this, the black man, whose name is Kor Skeete, evinces not the slightest bit of surprise or puzzlement over Fielder’s absurdly elaborate preparations. There is no moment of self-realization in which Kor seems to see that his trivial personal difficulty cannot possibly warrant this complicated and extremely expensive charade. He seems to find it all completely natural, seldom sees any humor in the situation, and behaves as if he thinks he has it all coming to him.

It is here that we realize there is something genuinely “postmodern” about The Rehearsal. It is reality TV for the end of history. With all war, famine, and disease expunged from the world — all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused — our most trivial personal problems will take on cosmic significance. No expense will be spared in sparing our feelings and putting right the slightest wrong. With no need any longer to deploy vast armies or armadas, the same money and effort will be put to use teaching Gen-Zers how to order food in a restaurant, or helping grandpa remember where he left his keys.

However, almost as soon as Fielder has established the series’ format, he largely abandons it. The catalyst for this is his encounter with Angela, a woman who is considering marriage and children, and wants to rehearse the experience of actually raising a child. Initially, things proceed much as they did with Kor Skeete. Fielder sets Angela up in a rented farmhouse somewhere in Oregon, and hires infant actors to play her child. In order to comply with Oregonian laws governing child labor, each of these “actors” must be relieved every four hours by a different child. At night, Angela’s child is played by a robotic baby — whose incessant crying drives away one of her suitors.

Angela appears to be around 35 years old and is white, though she looks Jewish. She is a born-again Christian and seems to be a QAnon enthusiast. Further, she possesses one of those indescribably grating voices that so many American women have today (and which, when I hear them from tourists abroad, cause me to tell others that I am Canadian). Everything that emerges from Angela sounds glib and superficial, even when she is expressing what she claims are her deepest convictions — such as her belief that Halloween is “satanic.” We see her on dating sites, flipping rapidly past images of eligible bachelors because, though she has little going for her in looks and even less in personality, Angela has predictably set her standards very high.

And, to remind you, this is a real person and not an actor. There is nothing fake about her: She is a genuine idiot. In short, Angela is comic gold. This fact is not lost on Fielder, who decides she is far too good to feature merely in a single episode. The result is that much of the rest of the series focusses on Angela’s situation. Fielder decides to move in with her and play her pretend husband. Angela gets to see what it would be like to have a husband, and husbands watching the program get to see that their own marriages could have been much, much worse.

To give Angela the experience of raising “Adam,” their pretend child, at different ages, Fielder begins replacing the children with older and older actors. This process reaches a climax when 15-year-old Adam develops a drug problem and suffers an overdose (complete with the arrival of actors playing Emergency Medical Technicians). After this drama, Fielder decides that Adam will revert to being six years old, rather than explore the rest of what can only be some very bleak teenage years.

A conflict develops, however, over Adam’s religious education. Angela, needless to say, wants him raised as a Christian. In secret, therefore, Fielder begins taking little Adam to a Jewish tutor, an old lady who makes no attempt to disguise her total contempt for all Christians. That it is a child actor who is involved, and not Fielder’s own child, makes this situation utterly absurd.

The series’ denouement, however, is not the least bit funny. By the end, The Rehearsal, like Nathan for You, manages to be poignant. Remy, one of the child actors playing six-year-old Adam, develops a strong attachment to Fielder, calling him “daddy” off camera and crying when he leaves. This is a development that no one expected, least of all Fielder. In hindsight, however, it was predictable: We find out that Remy is being raised by his mom, with no dad or father figure in the picture. The situation is inexpressibly sad, and Fielder clearly realizes he is morally culpable for what has transpired. I won’t ruin the rest for you. You’ll just have to see it.

HBO has announced that there will be a second season of The Rehearsal — but Fielder put production on hold to film a limited series for Showtime, titled The Curse. This series, which premiered in November 2023, is unique in Fielder’s oeuvre. Co-created with standup comic Benny Safdie, it is Fielder’s first scripted series and has been described as a “drama.” This is inaccurate. In fact, The Curse is a dark comedy — though that is putting it mildly. The humor in The Curse is, without question, the most black-as-pitch humor I have ever seen on television. It is blacker than black. So black that it shades off into horror. The Curse makes Chris Morris’ Jam seem like H .R. Pufnstuf.

Though this is a scripted series, the plot involves a reality TV show. The two central characters are a young married couple, Asher and Whitney Siegel, played by Fielder and Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone, who are launching their own HGTV show called Fliplanthropy. As the title implies, they are “flippers”: people who buy foreclosed properties, fix them up, and then “flip” them (i.e., resell them at a substantial profit). But in this case, so they claim, the Siegels are doing it all for a “good cause”; they are philanthropic.

Asher and Whitney

If you guessed that these people are affluent, phony, virtue-signaling, narcissistic, clueless, soy-eating libtards, then you win the prize. That is exactly what they are. This fact has been lost on liberal critics in the mainstream media, however. They have given The Curse rave reviews (on Rotten Tomatoes it enjoys a 94% positive rating among professional critics). Yet many of them are convinced that, in the words of one, the series is “a hilariously incisive interrogation of white privilege” (whenever someone uses “interrogation” to mean anything other than what goes on at Guantanamo, you can be sure you are dealing with a liberal arts major).

In fact, The Curse is a systematic parody of virtually everything objectionable about liberals. You can practically go down a list and check off every box. The Siegels are advocates of “passive living,” which means sustainable, renewable, eco-friendly, yada yada. They build “Passive Houses,” ultra-low-energy homes that are supposed to leave little “ecological footprint.” Because these houses are mirrored on the outside, the result is some extremely interesting images (among other things, The Curse is visually arresting) and some revealing moments.

These characters are constantly being confronted with themselves, in literal and figurative mirrors, yet never seem to attain any self-knowledge — just as the series itself holds up a mirror to liberals, who consistently fail to see themselves in it. Birds keep flying into the mirrored surface of the Siegels’ “environmentally friendly” house, dying upon impact. This produces only annoyance from Whitney. Fielder, who directed most of the episodes, doesn’t belabor the point: so far as I can recall, a bird flying into the house is only shown once (though Whitney states that it is a recurring problem). But once is enough. It is an obvious but brilliant piece of symbolism. (And, by the way, the “Passive House” is a real thing!).

Asher and Whitney at the Passive House.

Asher and Whitney have built their Passive House in Española, New Mexico, an impoverished city that is 84% Latino, with a fairly substantial Native American population. The Siegels’ actual objective is gentrification, yet they delude themselves that they are “helping” the local population. They open — surprise! — a trendy, Starbucks-like coffee bar, which provides some employment for locals, until it’s revealed that the store only operates while the reality show is in production.

In the same mall they open a trendy boutique, “Española Passive Living,” which sells various objets that no one in Española wants and could not afford to buy anyway. Also unaffordable are the designer jeans sold at the boutique Whitney opens. When her store clerk informs her that some people have been coming in and stealing the jeans, Whitney insists that the police not be involved. Instead, she gives her credit card to the clerk and tells her to charge her for any merchandise that is shoplifted.

The result is highly predictable. Word gets out and shoplifters descend on the store, leaving with armfuls of jeans, not even bothering to conceal the theft. The strip mall housing the store begins to attract a bad crowd, and soon an angry mob of straight-arrow Hispanic locals shows up at the Siegels’ Passive House toting guns. “You said you were here to help!” one of them cries, indignantly. It is all too depressingly familiar. Liberal good intentions gone awry — in ways even a child could have predicted.

Emma Stone as Whitney

As Whitney, Emma Stone is nothing short of brilliant. An actor’s task is to make a fake (i.e., made-up) character seem real. In this case, Stone’s task is to make a fake person seem fake and yet seem like a real-life fake person. Everything Whitney says is false and insincere. It is all signaling, all the time. Every facial expression is false, every cock of the head, every laugh, every tear. She is an unforgettable portrait in narcissism. One could define narcissism ostensively, just by pointing to the character: “See her? That’s it.”

Eventually the bill for the shoplifted jeans surpasses $20 thousand — roughly the same amount as the latest in a series of “loans” given Whitney and Asher by her parents. They are slumlords, and while Whitney is only too happy to take their money, predictably she feels superior to them. In exchange for financial support, she lectures them on “compassion.” One actually has to sympathize with the parents, slumlords though they may be. And their outlook on life is quite a lot more realistic than that of Asher and Whitney.

I guess I forgot to mention that Asher and Whitney are Jewish. But I took it for granted that you would assume this: Fielder is constitutionally incapable of playing anything other than Jewish. I’d like to nominate this show for Greg Johnson’s “Goebbels Award,” bestowed on any film or TV show that Dr. Goebbels could have used as anti-Semitic propaganda, without changing a thing (previous recipients have included Curb Your Enthusiasm and Quiz Show).

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Fielder is also excellent as Asher. In many ways, his performance in The Curse is a continuation of the Nathan persona we have already seen in his two previous series: terminally spergie, awkward, and Jewy. Yet here there is genuine darkness. Asher is thoroughly amoral. He is petty-minded and seldom seems to think about anything other than money. His attempts at virtue are invariably shams, and most of them are designed to impress Whitney, with whom he is inexplicably, pathetically obsessed.

In the first episode we are unwillingly treated to a glimpse of Asher’s penis as he urinates. It is very, very small (presumably, a tiny prosthetic penis dangling out of Fielder’s pants — or so one hopes). We discover that Whitney has discussed his small penis with her parents. And we are treated to what is without question the most painfully awkward sex scene in film history. Because he cannot make her climax, Asher has to stimulate Whitney to orgasm using a vibrating black dildo they refer to as “Steven.” The actual stimulation takes place off camera, but that is small comfort.

Actors sometimes refuse a role if it requires them to do something they regard as undignified or humiliating. Laurence Olivier refused to appear in Being There because of a scene involving masturbation. George Harrison wanted to play the role of the thief in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, but withdrew because of a scene in which he would have had to have displayed his anus. By contrast, Nathan Fielder seems compelled to place himself in the most humiliating situations possible. I doubt there has ever been a TV character more painfully pathetic than Asher Siegel.

The Curse derives its title from a scene in the first episode. When Asher and his director, Dougie (played by Benny Safdie), notice a little Somali girl selling bottled water in an Española parking lot, they decide on an impromptu scene. Asher will approach the girl and, while Dougie films, signal his virtue by buying a bottle. When Asher takes out his wallet, he discovers, however, that all he has is a $100 bill. He hands it to the little girl — who is suitably wide-eyed — and receives in return one of those tiny water bottles that shouldn’t even cost a dollar.

As soon as the camera is off, however, this parsimonious little Hebrew demands that she return the $100 bill! Asher promises he will go and get change and then give her $20. It’s a raw deal, of course, and the girl rightly refuses. When Asher simply snatches the bill from her, she raises her arm, pointing at him, and says very deliberately “I curse you!” There follows a series of events that may or may not be the result of this curse. In a moment worthy of David Lynch (there are many such in The Curse), the chicken in one of Asher’s ready-made meals disappears and then apparently reappears on a restroom sink. And the Somali girl and her family keep showing up in Asher’s life.

We don’t know exactly what the curse consists in, or even if we are supposed to think it is real, but it is clearly established in later episodes that the girl does indeed have some kind of supernatural power. Of course, it hardly seems to matter whether or not Asher actually has been cursed by this little black goblin, since it seems as if he got cursed a long time before: cursed with zero personality, no character, no conscience, no sense of humor, no guts, and a micropenis. The gods were not smiling on this one.

I have revealed a lot, but concealed much else. And I wouldn’t think of telling you how it all turns out. You will just have to watch The Curse and see for yourself. As I mentioned before, critics love the show — although in some cases for the wrong reasons. But this is yet another major disconnect between critics and audiences. While The Curse has overwhelming critic approval on Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score is a mere 39%. This sort of disparity usually occurs when liberal critics are pushing something lame and gay, and audiences rebel. But not always.

I’ve looked at the audience reviews. The dumbest one says “It’s no The King of Queens.” Most of the negative reviews, however, are from people who confess they just “don’t get it.” This is unsurprising, given how dark and downright weird this show is. A lot of people don’t know why it’s funny — also unsurprising. Some can’t figure out how we are supposed to “take” Asher and Whitney, and others seem to see nothing particularly unusual about them. They seem kinda like “regular folks” to some viewers.

This is almost as disturbing as the show. The Curse brilliantly displays just how twisted and morally imbecilic a significant percentage of our population is — and they are the people with money, education, and a huge and baleful influence on the culture. If the Siegels are now “regular folks,” then we are officially cursed.