‘The Curse’ Season 1, Episode 5 Recap: Performance Art

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘It’s a Good Day’

Emma Stone’s performance as Whitney so far has been a master class in, well, performance. Whitney is a person who is nearly constantly “on.” She’s always trying to say and do what she perceives as correct in both her business and her relationship with Asher. It’s hard to tell if she ever really says what she means. Occasionally, Stone gets a glint behind her eyes that might suggest Whitney’s true feelings, but then she shakes it off, smiles, and goes on performing.

We can see this early on in this week’s episode, when she is ostensibly joking around with a camera person. Their ribbing seems deadly serious, but each beat is punctuated by uncomfortable laughter. At one point, Whitney tells him, “You need to show me the respect I deserve.” Then her straight face breaks after he apologizes, and as she giggles he says she “got” him.

Even with their collective laughter, it is hard to tell how much she was actually kidding.

And yet this installment offers a tiny peek into what’s really going on inside Whitney’s head. The action is almost entirely centered around the disastrous production of “Fliplanthropy,” now that it has been picked up, as Whitney attempts to find the perfect couple to feature as potential buyers for one of their homes. This proves harder than she seems to expect.

The first pair — a Black woman and a white man — are primed to actually purchase the property, but problems start to arise. On camera they have issues with the house, one being that the toilet and sink water in the bathroom are connected. (“Kind of like a prison,” the woman says.) They also want to install air conditioning, which would mean the house would no longer be certified as “passive,” an alteration that is understandable given how much the guy is sweating.

But the biggest conflict comes when Whitney tries to get them to sign a letter of support for the San Pedro Pueblo’s ownership of the roads and easements in the area. They refuse, and Whitney lashes out. “If you don’t want to live here, no one is going to force you to,” she says.

Then starts a mad hunt to find someone to at least pretend to want to live in one of Whitney’s passive homes. Whitney tries to recruit her supposed friend Cara Durand, who accepts the gig, but just uses it to not so subtly make fun of the whole enterprise and then, later, flirt with Dougie. When Whitney decides to head to Santa Fe to do street casting, she lands a guy who decides to do a rendition of “Stand By Me” while the cameras are rolling.

The comes an unexpected visit from her parents, who want to throw her father a 70th birthday party on the property. Whitney shoos away from set and into their car, where she proceeds to throw a temper tantrum. Her parents’ faces indicate they’ve seen her act like this countless times before.

“The reason I came back from California was that you said these properties could be mine,” she whines like a toddler talking about a toy, adding: “Española is mine.”

This is the Whitney we haven’t seen before: The spoiled kid whose parents are the ones actually bankrolling her projects. All of her desire to be seen as a good person fades away in this moment — alone with her parents, she reverts to the little princess they have clearly indulged time and again. For all of her talk about respecting the Española community, she is possessive over it because it is something that was given to her.

Stone lets Whitney’s carefully constructed mask slip here. She doesn’t have to appease her parents as she does everyone else. She can just be bratty and insolent.

At this point we still don’t know much about Asher’s background, but it is clear that he and Whitney have different ways of looking at money. Asher is worried about actually selling the house and making a profit; Whitney has no financial urgency. She is concerned about selling it to the right people.

So who are the “right people”? That first couple looked the part but didn’t match Whitney’s rigorous terms. She doesn’t want to sell to a college student whose parents would be buying the place for her because she doesn’t want “the neighborhood filled with people whose rich parents bought them houses,” a comment that Asher thinks is self-deprecating but doesn’t actually seem all that self aware. And the other interested party, a man named Mark, isn’t, at least on the surface, woke enough for her with his bumper sticker of an American flag with a Blue Lives Matter stripe.

And yet when Asher finally convinces her to let Mark take a look, under cover of night, her assumptions are challenged. Yes, he supports law enforcement, but he is also quick to support the Pueblo — his great-grandmother was Apache. He also genuinely loves the house and all of its passive details, including the toilet, which he uses while Asher and Whitney are still standing there.

In a way, he’s the ideal buyer. Something is still nagging at Whitney who gets withdrawn and quiet. Back at home, Asher asks if she is upset. “If I was upset you would know it,” she says. But would he? Maybe Whitney doesn’t even know if she’s upset. Her brain is trying to compute the way Mark challenged her perceptions — perceptions that have only a tenuous connection to reality — and the way in which Asher turned out to be right. People are ultimately more complicated than Whitney would like to admit. Whitney is more complicated than she would like to admit.

Notes from Española

• Whitney’s focus on Fernando and his gun once again seems like foreshadowing — or it’s just yet one more sign of her confused values. She wanted to help Fernando, but his insistence at carrying a weapon doesn’t align with her ideas of the kind of person she wants to support.

• Whitney’s line, “I can’t always tell what’s real or not when we’re shooting,” is like a mission statement for “The Curse.” It is maybe a little too on the nose.

• Mark, in a wild bit of meta casting, is played by Dean Cain. The actor has been outspoken about his support of Donald Trump, which, to Whitney, would probably be more offensive than a truck sticker.