— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सत्तर-सात —
There was this show on Showtime, called
The Curse. It originally aired weekly, between November 10 and January 12—so, really not long ago. It was co-created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, both of whom star in it, and costars Fielder and an incredible (as always) Emma Stone, as a rich White liberal married couple overtaking a small town in New Mexico with a large Indiginous population, building their supposedly green, "Passive Homes," convincing themselves they are creating a "sustainable community" while blinding themselves to the ways they are destroying the community that was already there.
Laney was the one who told me about it, and recommended it. I only finally was able to watch it because she shares her Huly login, and she switched from using Amazon Prime for using her Paramount+ / Showtime add-on to using Hulu, which granted me access. When she first told me about the show, knowing that it was on Showtime, I really doubted I would ever watch it, because I don't subscribe to Showtime or Paramount+. And so, I already knew the truly wild turn the show takes in its finale, as she told me all about it in great detail.
But then, when she made the switch between Amazon and Hulu for accessing Showtime, I decided to watch it—even though I knew it would be painfully cringey to sit through. And I wasn't even prepared, still, for the amount of cringe in this show. It's like nothing else, making it the kind of show that's impossible to enjoy watching most of the time, but you find yourself glad you did.
That alone might have made me ambivalent about recommending it to others, just because it's clearly a hard sell. The finale, however, takes that notion and catapults it into the stratosphere—quite literally, actually. Even after having listened to Laney tell me all about it, I was not prepared for what transpires. The entire series is fully grounded in reality up to this point, and then, out of nowhere, there are
laws of physics reversed—for just one character.
I went looking for online articles offering explanations, but it seems that, really, no one else can make much more sense of it than I can. I truly have never experienced anything like it in a lifetime of watching television. Multiple sources compared it to
Twin Peaks: The Return, but I never watched that, and also you would go into any David Lynch project expecting wild turns into surrealism.
The Curse gives not even the slightest hint of such a thing until the finale.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सत्तर-सात —
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सत्तर-सात —
I'll give the
The Curse credit for this much, at least: that finale in particular was riveting television, and I will be thinking about it for a very long time. The flip side (ha ha) is that, I'm not sure I will ever understand what the point of it was. As in, the point of episodes 1 through 9 were quite clear. The point of the wild turn in episode 10, however? Not so clear.
I already noted that last night was the fourth night in a row that Shobhit worked until 9:00. I walked home, and I had four episodes left of
The Curse. I no longer wanted to stretch out the experience of discomfort that most of that show is, so I made the conscious decision that I would binge through all four episodes, and finally get to the wild finale I thought I knew was coming.
I also needed to make dinner, but I wasted no time. As soon as I got into the condo, I started playing episode 7 on my laptop, so I could carry that into the kitchen and watch while I prepared a pizza for dinner. Eventually I took my prepared dinner into the bedroom so I could eat while watching with my laptop on the desk. I took the laptop back to the kitchen a couple of times: to fetch the last of the leftover cake from Dad and Sherri's 40th Anniversary Dinner on Saturday; then, to wash my dishes.
After that, basically between epsiodes 8 and 9, and finally switched to watching Hulu on my desktop computer, so I could use the larger screen. (Ideally I would have watched on the huge TV in the living room, but here's one of the cons to using Laney's Hulu account: it seems to have some setting where, even though I
can access regular Hulu content on the TV's Hulu app, the Showtime content won't appear there—only when logging in to stream on my computers.)
My timing worked out perfectly in the end. The finale had
just ended when Shobhit got home from work, around 9:30. I quickly gave him a brief rundown of what happened in the finale, which I think slightly piqued his interest in the show overall. I don't think he'll make time to watch it all in the end, as he's trying to work as much extra he can before going to India later this month.
Shobhit had his half of the pizza I prepared (which was not a huge amount of food and apparently still, the three slices alone, amounted to 23 Weight Watchers points . . . damn), and I got ready for bed.
So really, that was it: I just had a
The Curse evening. I'm kind of glad just to be through it now. Maybe next time I have an evening to myself I'll just watch a movie.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सत्तर-सात —
[posted 12:32 pm]
