“It’s like dying but you’re still alive. Like trying to breathe underwater. Like being cursed.”— María Fernanda Ampuero, Human Sacrifices
Our car smelled of the sulfurous hot springs. We spent the night on the side of a cliff, woke before sunrise and hiked six miles, soaked for an hour in water the color of a neon-blue milkshake, and then drove south to the Timpanogos Caves. Our tour guide was a white man from Boston who spoke with a thick accent: Every time he said “cave bottom,” we heard “cave bottle,” and imagined our headlamps tipping sideways in the vertiginous darkness. The cave bottle was shaken; only the nominal difference between stalagmite and stalactite gave us any sense of direction. The guide’s voice told the story of a curse that beset those caves: the legend of an Indigenous woman who fell in love with a settler. The star-crossed romance was opposed by the two lovers’ communities; the settler was killed by the woman’s tribe, and, heartbroken, she took her own life in the depths of the Timpanogos Caves. But first, she sang a curse into the caverns, warning visitors not to disturb the natural formations lest tragedy befall them just as it did her.
We managed to avert tragedy, doggedly navigating our way through the gallery of speleothems. However, we witnessed a middle-aged dad in our group break off the tip of a helictite, thereby damning himself to a lifetime of misery.
In the traces of Indigenous land stolen and culture erased, a sense of dark magic lingers. Legends about the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony were fabricated by settlers as a way to grapple with the memory of genocide and their own sense of guilt. Burial grounds, sacred sites and former settlements are said to be haunted by ghosts and supernatural monsters like the wendigo. Horror provides an imaginary realm where we can play out the drama and danger of colonization without facing its reality and the need for restitution. As history fades out, colonization has fused with its domesticated successor, gentrification. But gentrification is a more banal form of violence, so it’s not so much explored in terms of horror as it is by ridicule.
The Curse, an indie TV show from 2023, written by Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems) and Nathan Fielder (Nathan for You, The Rehearsal), is one of the most cutting examples of media on the topic of gentrification. The Curse follows a white Jewish couple — Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Fielder) — as they attempt to launch their own HGTV show, Fliplanthropy, which follows them in their ambitious attempt to clean up and remake the largely working-class, Indigenous and immigrant population of Española, New Mexico. The Siegels, with their bleeding hearts on their sleeves, go around town ostentatiously performing acts of kindness and service — employing the formerly incarcerated, advocating for the rights of the native Picuris Pueblos, even housing an immigrant family rent-free.
The Curse warps the notion of a “good deed” by satirizing the intention behind it and taking philanthropic benevolence to its most absurd extremes: A hygge-style coffee shop stationed in a strip mall is guarded by an armed ex-con all hours of the day and night; Whitney’s denim store becomes a hit for local looters because she decides to put all stolen items on credit — accruing upwards of $3,000 — instead of calling the cops. Whether their goodness is entirely fake and they know it, or whether we are simply primed to view it as such, their work in Española is also the perfect marketing scheme for their ecohome business — “invisible passive homes,” decorated entirely in symbolic reflective glass, built on cheap properties and then flipped for major profit. The word play in Fliplanthrophy is one of many naming games that Fielder and Safdie employ in The Curse.
Gentrification dates back at least to the third century in ancient Rome, when the large villas of a more affluent population displaced farmers and their small shops. The word gentrification reflects the class conflict inherent in development: Its etymology comes from gentry, meaning a high social class of “gentle” and “well-bred” people. The -ification means that any space that is gentrified is in the process of becoming part of the higher social class. In gentrification, antagonistic classes are not merely brackets on a socioeconomic hierarchy. They become a kind of crooked mirror in which the failures and fears of one class are reflected and amplified in the other.
In gentrification, antagonistic classes are not merely brackets on a socioeconomic hierarchy. They become a kind of crooked mirror in which the failures and fears of one class are reflected and amplified in the other.
Colonizing and gentrifying a community under the guise of bettering it is the terribly sinister endeavor at the heart of the White Savior Complex. The director of Fliplanthopy, Asher’s childhood bully Dougie Schecter (Safdie), manipulates the premise of the HGTV show to place the couple’s marital problems at its center. Highlighting their intimacy instead of the ideal façade of whiteness the couple attempts to maintain, Dougie shows the cracks in the complex. In an act of selfless giving, Asher tries to prove that he will be a good father by gifting Whitney what he thinks she wants: He’s swallowing thousands of dollars to give an immigrant family one of the couple’s rental properties for free. Whitney’s subsequent distress and disappointment ripple beneath Stone’s tight lips and big-doll eyes. … If only Asher could have booked them a trip to Cabo.
In order to be a White Savior, you must first find someone in need of being saved. The Curse provides an easily trackable one-to-one ratio of savior to saved. Asher’s double is Abshir (Somali actor Barkhad Abdi), the father of the family to whom Asher has gifted the home. The name “Abshir” derives from a miscommunication during his introduction to Asher. Apparently, Abshir repeats Asher’s name to confirm that he got it right, but Asher thinks that his accented pronunciation means that the man himself is named Abshir. He projects himself so thoroughly onto Abshir’s identity that we never even learn Abshir’s real name, the kind of mistake that lies at the core of the caring and concerned surface of neo-gentrification.
Similarly, Whitney’s double is Indigenous artist Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Austin). Cool and unimpressed by Whitney’s pandering, obsequious attempts to gain her approval, Cara is Whitney’s resistant foil. Whitney participates in Cara’s performance piece, during which she is given a slice of ham that she subsequently eats. Cara screams at the top of her lungs as Whitney’s perfect teeth chomp down on the meat, which we learn later represents Cara’s body. Whitney is overcome with guilt and can’t shake the feeling that she did something wrong in the performance. She subsequently tries to exert herself for Cara, genuinely hoping to reconcile her “white woman tears,” even as she also tries to gain the rights to display Cara’s artworks in Fliplanthropy. She bribes Cara with $20,000, fibbing that HGTV wants to hire her as a Indigenous consultant on the show, when, in reality, Whitney had her parents write the check. As the working-class, brown-bodied double, Cara is a victim of her identity and must accept Whitney’s offer — doing so with resentment and disgust, but also a feeling of smug satisfaction at her newly loaded bank account.
The Curse is about those most blessed — the white financial elite — becoming cursed, and vice versa. The characters and their doubles evoke a classic form of irony called peripeteia, the original change-of-fate narrative. This is where the sharpest satire emanates. Aristotle defines peripeteia in Poetics as “a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.” From Kurtz in Heart of Darkness to Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre, characters of the colonial narrative can be ruined by their internalized guilt and fear of the Other. Through either probability or necessity, Asher also internalizes this warping darkness. But Safdie and Fielder make light of this historical trope; instead of glorying in the chaos and potency of a colonial victor, Asher is portrayed as a castrated clown.
The show’s titular curse occurs when Asher sees a young girl selling Sprite cans in a parking lot. Aware that he is being filmed for his show, Asher gives the girl, Nala — Abshir’s daughter — a $100 bill. Once the camera is off him — or so he thinks — Asher snatches the money back from Nala, and she curses him. Because of his perception of Nala as the Other, Asher believes her small act of retribution is indeed a horrific Indigenous curse with a chthonic capacity to destroy his life. The horror of colonialism frightens Asher and looms over him, transforming him into an increasingly anxious, angry and enfeebled co-host and spouse. Later, it’s disclosed that Nala’s curse is a part of a TikTok trend called “tiny curses,” which subject their victims to small inconveniences; it is not some ancient practice inherited from her ancestors. Haunted by his own guilty imagination, Asher attempts to reconcile his fate by giving Nala and her family a place to live, not because it is a good thing to do, but because he hopes it will end the curse. Asher’s fears become incarnate as strange occurrences continue to happen, culminating in a supernatural event that flings Asher out of the stratosphere, literally.
The Curse shows how the overwhelming residual colonial fear of and guilt towards the Other can override our contemporary logic and bring the blessed/cursed duality to life.
These days, people in the West rarely think about their life’s trajectory as either “blessed” or “cursed.” We generally take moralizing biblical narratives and horrific lore as stories that could guide our actions one way or another — we can defile sacred caves without having to worry about the consequences. If anything, being #blessed is a simple trend on social media that helps us recognize how good our lives are and to be grateful for it. The Curse shows how the overwhelming residual colonial fear of and guilt towards the Other can override our contemporary logic and bring the blessed/cursed duality to life. Asher identifies Nala as a victim, but instead of treating her with genuine sympathy, he treats her as a victor. Asher fabricates and performs the duality of both gentrifier and cursed one — victor and victim — as soon as Nala shows any discomfort with his actions. In the end, the stories we tell ourselves in the face of the Unknown are what will most likely lead to our own demise.
