In the first scenes we spend with Whitney Siegel, Emma Stone’s character is in The curse, she assures everyone around her that she is a good person. She tells us that she brings jobs to a struggling community, personally subsidizes her neighbors’ rising rents, maintains the work of local artists—all in service of a “holistic home philosophy” that surrounds her self-designed and developed carbon-neutral homes. .
The insistence is both ominous and disturbingly familiar. A common criticism of the environmentalist is that she is out of touch; she demands too much; she doesn’t understand the everyday life and demands of everyday people. She is an idealist, too concerned with abstract and/or distant concerns — the atmosphere! the deep sea! in the future! – and at the same time overly preoccupied with unimportant and less than exciting things: LED light bulbs, proper separation of recyclables, low-flow toilets.
Perhaps this description makes you, if you are an environmentalist, uneasy. It’s an unflattering reflection, to be sure—but that discomfort is the currency of The curse, a new Showtime series from directors Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder. The plot revolves around Whitney and her husband Asher Siegel (the latter played, to horrifying effect, by Fielder), who are trying to save their Doug Aitken ripoff passive house properties in an HGTV reality show starring themselves.
Although the show quickly gained a cult following, it was also described by phrases such as: “the hardest thing I’ve ever seen to watch,” “physically writhing in pain,” and “weekly anxiety nightmare.”
Energy-efficient insulation and circular plumbing might not seem like the stuff of nightmares, but the show is so clearly disturbing because it exposes its characters as their absolute worst selves. And it’s Whitney, a dedicated ambassador of the carbon-neutral lifestyle, who gradually reveals herself to be the most ethically warped, self-serving, malevolent character on a competitive roster.
Why make someone who spends their career — their entire public image, no less — building climate-friendly homes such a believable monster?
I spoke to Jennifer Bernstein, editor-in-chief of the journal Case Studies in the Environment, who watched the show, to try to analyze what exactly what makes Whitney’s environmentalist protagonist such a disturbing character. She noted that it is “this lack of self-awareness coupled 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.”
Indeed, those who oppose environmentalism and its purported ideals tend to point to a desire for control: they want to take you away. gas stoves, your hamburgers, your trucks. Some of Whitney’s scariest moments, exposing a self equal parts desperate and domineering, occur when she tries to explain the gospel of her eco-living mission. When the buyer of one of her passive houses unplugs the expensive induction stove and replaces it with a gas stove, breaking the home’s self-contained “passive” ecosystem, Whitney urges Asher to be “more choosy” about who they hire. sell their homes; that some people “don’t deserve to be part of what we build.” She tells a couple making an offer on another home, when they plan to put in an air conditioning unit that also destroys the home’s passive certification, that they are throwing away an opportunity to “members of a very exclusive club”. part of history.”
It’s impossible to argue that an $800,000 eco-home isn’t a marker of some elitism. Not all accoutrements of a green lifestyle are expensive, but those of a type of green lifestyle is decided. Whitney and Asher repeatedly try to assure residents of the working-class New Mexico community where they build their homes that their developments are not a force for gentrification—a claim so patently false that it is unclear whether they lie to themselves or their neighbors.
Passive houses are kind of the archetypal example of a climate solution that makes a lot of sense, but one that also costs a lot of money. The reduction in energy consumption that a passive house can provide, compared to the average mobile home, is as high as 90 percent. Residential energy is responsible for approx 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, so this is not an insignificant offer. But like Project Drawdown in his analysis of insulation as a climate solutionThe embodied emissions in the actual construction of passive houses that can withstand hot climates (like the Southwest, for example) make the potential energy savings less attractive.
Des Fitzgerald, an authority on green urbanization at the University of Cork’s Radical Humanities Lab, says that a significant contingent of the environmental movement has a blind spot around the status and costs associated with eco-living. Green development in a community will more often than not inflate property values and drive out lower-income residents. But Fitzgerald also explains how a kind of supposed supremacy of an environmentally conscious way of life can also drive people away.
“So much of the public discourse around the use of environmentally friendly materials in housing, and planning more generally, really grounds itself in being empirically rigorous and well grounded in research,” Fitzgerald said. “The reality is that many attachments that people have to this as a form of life are not really scientific or rigorous or empirical. It has this symbolic, quasi-religious quality to it – and I think it has to do with those deeper associations we have with green things and status.”
In other words, a green lifestyle is defined as much by actions proven to reduce emissions as it is by talismans and touchstones of sustainability—and as often as not, those talismans become status symbols more than legitimate climate solutions. Claire McNear for The Ringer brilliant clocksfor example, the eco-accessories of Whitney and Asher’s “certain breed of moneyed-class angst”: the Tesla, the New York Times-featured Birkenstocks.
Richard Foreman Jr. / A24 / Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
Is there anything uglier than an aspiring cult leader with no charisma? About halfway through the series, Whitney retitles their show “Green Queen,” which happily sidesteps Asher and makes herself the star. But any passion for “green” values seems to be limited to her aspirations for fame and recognition. For example, Bernstein notes that Whitney never once talks about climate change, or nature, or anything remotely related to the environment away from the cameras.
The 10th and final episode features an attempt to introduce the couple’s show to a mainstream audience, where they make a bizarre appearance on the Rachael Ray Show. Asher and Whitney loom on a big screen behind a host who casually, bored and half-engaged, quizzes them about the many ways a passive house is unattractive to the average American: You can’t have air conditioning, or a basement for your husband’s TV, or yes, gas stoves.
Whitney’s smile became more and more strained. Does she struggle not to offend Ray and her middle-American audience for prioritizing their shallow preferences over saving civilization from devastating climate change—a fate from which she, the Green Queen, offers salvation? Or is she mourning another failed opportunity to get viewers for the show?
Whitney’s own personal curse is that she simultaneously embodies two miserable archetypes of green lifestyle advocates. The first is that of the green influencerwho preaches about climate change while making money to convince you to buy stuff – the right things, however – and take advantage of the consumer culture that is the mortal enemy of environmental progress. The second is the above eco-tyrant, who wants to ration your water and electricity and beef. We are repulsed by the first because she is a hypocrite, and by the second because she is a bossy control freak.
There is no doubt that Whitney is unacceptable, but it is not only because of her personal characteristics. There is a part of us that want environmentalists must be frauds and fascists because we want them to be wrong. We want their claims about the climate-saving value of low-impact homes and plant-based diets and the electrification of everything to be ridiculous. Because if they’re right, then we need to transform so many things about our homes and diets and economies and overall ways of life to prevent apocalyptic ecological collapse.
But what if the fraud and fascists are at a certain level, operate on a belief system that is fundamentally right? It more or less defines the morality that weaves through The curse‘s most surreal moments: that people can really mean well and want to do good in the world, and still be horrible and self-serving; that ego and desire for power and status can still drive the most seemingly ethical mission. And when something righteous is driven by something rotten, it can ever truly do well? Or is it just cursed?
