Upstream - [TEASER] Nathan Fielder's "The Curse" w/ Carlee

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

You can listen to the full episode "Nathan Fielder's 'The Curse'" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. What happens when the contradictions of living under late capitalism—both internal and external—are revealed in excruciating detail? What happens when our performances break down, when they break us, when they break those around us? What happens when you take all of this and wrap it up in a faux reality TV show which is itself about a reality TV show?  Well, you get The Curse—the latest masterpiece by comedian, actor, writer, director, and producer, Nathan Fielder. You may know Nathan from his satirical docu-reality comedy television series, Nathan For You. You may know him from his more recent TV series The Rehearsal. Or you may not know him at all—it doesn’t really matter, because in this episode we’re going to explain everything you need to know about how Nathan Fielder produces masterful media and art—and we’re going to do so by taking a deep dive into the 10 episode mini-series The Curse, written by and starring Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie—and also starring Emma Stone.   And to have this conversation, we’ve invited on friend of the show and TV & film enthusiast Carlee. You may recognize Carlee from our episode on Capitalist Realism, or you may recall a couple of Patreon episodes ago when Robert read her piece, “The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire.”   In this conversation, we discuss Nathan Fielder’s “The Curse”—walking you through the plot and the characters before analyzing and presenting a wide variety of scenes from the show and discussing what they tell us about our individuated, isolated, tortured, exhausted, and often performative lives under neoliberal capitalism. It really is a great show and this is a wide-ranging discussion that will have value whether or not you’ve seen the show. It’s also a lot of fun.  Further resources: Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire, by Carlee Related episodes: Capitalist Realism w/ Carlee Sex, Desire, and the Neoliberal Subject Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship

Just a quick announcement before we jump into this Patreon episode. We've partnered with our friends at All Power Books in LA to host a live podcast event on Saturday, August 24th with journalist and activist Abby Martin from The Empire Files. We've thrown a link to the Eventbrite in the show notes. If you're in the area and available, we'd love to meet you and see you there. Okay, now here's Robert with this week's episode. I think the show is really about the suffocation of this performance and the suffocation ultimately of living under late capitalism and believing yourself to be a good person and how fundamentally at odds that is when your version of being a good person still ultimately operates within the consumer framework the system has set up

and therefore doesn't ever fundamentally change or challenge the system. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond. What happens when the contradictions of living under late capitalism, both internal and external, are revealed in excruciating detail? What happens when our performances break down? When they break us? When they break those around us?

What happens when you take all of this and wrap it up in a faux reality TV show, which is itself about a reality TV show? Well, you get The Curse, the latest masterpiece by comedian, actor, writer, director, and producer Nathan Fielder. You may know Nathan from his satirical docu-reality comedy television show, Nathan for You. You may know him from his recent TV series The Rehearsal or you may not know him at all. It doesn't really matter because in this episode we're going to explain everything you need to know about how

Nathan Fielder produces masterful media and art and we're going to do so by taking a deep dive into the 10 episode mini-, The Curse, written by and starring Nathan Fielder and Benny Softie, and also starring Emma Stone. And to have this conversation, we've invited on the one and only Carly from the podcast, HitFactory. You may recognize Carly from our episode on capitalist realism, or you may recall a couple Patreon episodes ago when Robert read her piece The Puritanical Eye, hypermediation, sex on film, and the disavowal of desire. In this conversation we discuss Nathan Fielder's The Curse, walking you through the plot and characters before analyzing and presenting a wide variety of scenes from the show and discussing what they tell us about our individuated, isolated,

tortured, exhausted, and often performative lives under neoliberal capitalism. It really is a great show and this wide-ranging discussion will have value whether or not you've seen it. It's also a lot of fun. And now here's Robert in conversation with pit factories, Carly. Carly, it's wonderful to have you back on the show. It's so wonderful to be here, genuinely. I am caffeinated. I am feeling cursed. I put a curse on my laptop this morning and a curse on the studio that we're recording

in. So I hope that you feel some of that curse. And I hope that my two cups of cold brew coffee are not too annoying as we go through this. I'm probably gonna be talking really fast. I am also sufficiently cold brewed while I'm getting there. Nice.

So it was almost a year ago that we had you on to talk about the classic text, Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. I do have to say that was one of our most popular episodes and also personally one of my favorite episodes ever. I really could not be more excited to be doing this with you and to be having this conversation with you about a show that we've been sort of texting each other back and forth about for a few months now.

And that I recently rewatched just for the very purposes of this interview, and I'm really glad I did because I got so much more out of it the second time through, The Curse by Nathan Fielder. And so I wanted to bring you on specifically to talk about this. And when I was watching The Curse, all I could think about were many of the conversations and the exchanges that we've had, both on that episode that I mentioned earlier, but also just in life. It really feels like a fertile ground for some of these ideas that we've been talking about and sort of bouncing back and

forth with each other to sort of like talk about the themes of the show, the characters, and then apply it to a lot of these things that we've been talking about. So I guess just to start, before we get into the show itself, I just want to give you a little bit of time to introduce yourself for anybody who missed the Capitalist Realism episode. Maybe just introduce yourself if you want to talk about your awesome show with your co-host Erin, Hit Factory, or anything that you want to just say by way of introduction. Yes, I am the co-host of a film podcast. We call ourselves kind of like an anti-nostalgia podcast, but that's maybe a bit of an undersell. The podcast is Hit Factory.

We talk about movies and culture and politics of the 90s specifically, and discuss how those things interact with culture, films, politics of today and in history and I co-host it with my partner, Aaron. And he is like the reason the show is great. I just like come on and yell about stuff, but we have had a chance to have some really great

conversations about really fantastic and not so fantastic films and also meet some really great people, really fantastic and not so fantastic films and also meet some really great people, including you and Della from Upstream. And it's something that keeps my brain functioning. So I really enjoy doing it, even though sometimes I get sick of movies, but that's a whole other story. Well, I have to say that you definitely do a lot more than just yell. Sometimes.

I really love Hit Factory and some of the coolest conversations in a podcast forum that I've ever heard have been on that show and some of the most profound insights into life that I've come across have come out of your yelling mouth on that show. So, yeah. Thank you for that. Honored. All right. Let's for that, honored. All right, let's get into The Curse. I thought it would be maybe helpful.

Like I don't really, you're kind of the expert here. I don't do episodes on shows really. So like, I guess the first and most important thing to say is like, if you haven't watched the show, there will be a lot of spoilers. So like either watch the show first or if you don't care about that then you can totally obviously just jump in. You don't have to have seen the show in order for this to make sense because I think we're going to try our best here to like contextualize

everything. And on that note, I thought maybe it would be a good place to start by asking you, Carly, to maybe just describe the show, the plot, the characters, and anything else that you'd like to highlight to sort of set the table before we get going. Yeah, absolutely. One of the coolest things about this show is I feel like you could describe it 87 different ways. And like all of those ways would be accurate. Because it's just that kind of show. So the show is made by Nathan Fielder, and Benny Softie, who is a filmmaker. And it is a show that's shot like a reality show, a la the faux reality shows of The Office

and things of that nature, about a couple, Whit and Asher, who within the context of the show are shooting their own show that is also a reality show for HGTV with their producer friend, Dougie, who is played by Penny Softie. But importantly the show, Nathan's show, The Curse, and the show within his show which has various names they end up calling it Green Queen is like patently not a

reality show which is part of what Nathan Fielder, the creator, is playing with. And it's something that has always interested him in his work. Other shows he's done are Nathan for You and most recently The Rehearsal, both of which are playing with concepts of reality television in really interesting ways. And his project, one of his projects

is sort of like this purposeful conflation, reveal obfuscation between reality and artifice. And this runs through all of the shows that he's worked on and in his comedy too. And particularly in the medium of television and media that's related, like stand up. So the course is about this couple's attempts at making their own show, Green Queen.

It's also about their lives, their beliefs, their personal, professional, political histories. It's also really importantly about their visions of themselves and who they are, who they really wanna be, who they really don't want to be, and how all of that interacts with systems of power and control that patently benefit them, wit and Asher, and actively hurt others, and often at the hands or the actions of wit and Asher, despite the two

of them being really well-meaning and them being two finger quotes well-meaning people is a really important part of the show. And I could say more about what I think the show is about, but that's sort of at its core what it is. And, you know, we get to see sort of like behind the scenes, candid shots of them making the show and their personal lives and all of that. And one of the important things too,

is that we don't ever really know like who's shooting them in the context of the show. It's not positioned like the office where we know explicitly that like there is a camera that is documenting these people. Nathan purposefully obfuscates that. So he often will remind us that they are being shot. He'll have these shoots of like us seeing Whit talking candidly with someone behind the scenes

of their show and we're seeing her like through a plant. So he's reminding us that like there is an apparatus and there is someone or something situated looking at her, taking this shot in, but we don't ever know who or what that is, which I think is important for the experience of the show. That's so fascinating. I actually had not thought about that element at all.

I was going through the show just sort of being in that space of watching them and not thinking about the fact that that was actually potentially a part of the show itself and playing around with that as a director. So that's, yeah, that's a really interesting insight that you had. And also, I just wanna add too, I think that if you're familiar with Nathan's work, you know how uncomfortable it can be to watch the show.

And I just wanna, I wanna really appreciate you, Carly, because when I first told you about The Curse and asked you to check it out, I don't know when I first told you about The Curse and asked you to check it out, I don't know if I had told you about my secret plans of having you do a show at that point on the show, but you found it quite uncomfortable. And it took me a little bit of convincing almost to help you sort of continue to watch it, because it just felt like you had a really hard time with, I guess we didn't really talk about specifically why.

I assumed it was just because of how uncomfortable the scenes are. And again, if you know Nathan Fielder, you know what we're talking about. It's just very awkward and uncomfortable. And so was that something that you really felt viscerally when you were watching the show? Yeah, and we'll get into this more later, but I actually think it's a really core part of

What Nathan is doing not just because it's like his finger quotes brand of you know comedy or or entertainment but also What the show itself is a mechanism for but But I, I mean, one thing to know about me, and you know this well, it's like, I, you know, I feel things very deeply and very viscerally on a regular basis, whether I can help it or not. And I think that's a good thing. A big thesis statement of mine is that like,

we need to be okay with just like feeling things more and being in the discomfort. And so I appreciate you encouraging me to like keep watching. And I wasn't gonna not ever finish the show because one thing we should say about it is that despite it, you know, doing all of these like interesting things and Nathan being a person who operates really comfortably in discomfort,

it's also still really compelling television. Like it's not hard to watch in the sense that like I was, you know, I was never bored. But there are many moments of the show that are utterly literally excruciating. And I think that Nathan is really, he is someone who is really well versed. And I think often, I don't know if this is the right word, celebrates the fact that being human is often incredibly uncomfortable, incredibly embarrassing, and like incredibly messy, and incredibly messy, and sometimes excruciating.

Yeah, yeah, no, beautifully put. I could not agree more. I feel like I see myself as a person who doesn't feel really deeply because I close that off a lot, and it's there. It just, I have a little bit more of like, I don't wanna call it an ability because it's not like I'm trying to do this,

but I just, I definitely have to go down and find the feelings. Like sometimes things will just emerge out of my control, but I feel like I'm pretty hardened a lot of the time. But even with like how I sort of like have that tendency, this show really was incredibly evocative. And it made me feel probably just as uncomfortable as you and others that watched it at times.

But it's also hilarious. Like it's just so funny and sad too, you know? Like we'll probably get to a lot of the other stuff further on in the interview here, but like, yeah, there were scenes where it was hard not to cry. Yes. So a wide range of like emotions and definitely like just really a testament to Nathan's, his ability to just evoke so many different things from you as you watch. from you as you watch. On that note, sort of with the awkwardness, though,

maybe one of the best places to start the opening scene is very characteristic of the tone of the show. And so I thought I would maybe just like describe the scene and sort of talk about it unfolding to give us a little bit of like a jumping off point. And I think it just really sets the tone for the show and it'll Set the tone for some of the discussions that we want to have So as the very first scene in the show pilot episode opens

Asher is interviewing someone who has been unemployed for nine months and who is looking for a job and Is telling his story. We don't know that that's happening when the opening scene starts. We just hear this guy talking and we don't even know like we don't know that it's being filmed or anything. So he's telling his story and then suddenly we see Asher and Whitney, the two main characters. They're like sitting across the couch from him and they're listening and they have facial expressions that sort of indicate that they're like devastated to hear this guy whose name is Fernando. They're devastated. They're really feeling for him,

like talking about his struggles. And one point Asher, Nathan Fielder says, Jesus, when Fernando tells him that he's been unemployed for as long as he has, and you're caught up in this moment, it feels like, okay, there's these people having this heartfelt conversation, and Asher is really, he's there with this guy. And then suddenly Asher stops, and he says stop to the camera. And then that's when we realized that there's a camera there. And Asher says this because it turns out

he's actually worried about the fact that he said Jesus and that it might come off badly. I mean, I'm on my resume, but I don't hear back. And if I do get an interview, I walk to the door, they take one look at me. And...yeah. I'm sorry. I can't imagine how hard that's been for you.

Our hearts go out to you. Both our hearts. Thank you. How long has it been that you've been looking for work? It's been about nine months. Jesus. Actually, can we not use me saying Jesus? I don't want to, I just want to say a different response. And it's like this really funny moment because, you know, there's this thing going on where

Asher is like, so in his head about making assumptions about this guy Fernando and like his potential religious beliefs. And Fernando is obviously like working class poor. And Asher is like wanting more than anything to come off as like culturally inoffensive or whatever. But the most offensive part is him just abruptly asking the camera guy to stop rolling in the middle, literally in the middle of this very vulnerable moment where Fernando is talking about something very vulnerable. So right off the bat, we're introduced to this guy, Asher, who is very clearly so much

more concerned about the performance of principles and morality and the performance of kindness than he is about actually exercising any of those morals or that kindness to begin with. The fact that he would interrupt this guy's story because he was worried about saying the word Jesus It's just layer upon layer upon layer And so for Asher it becomes clear right off the bat that the performance matters and That's kind of like for me one of the main themes from the show is this idea of like performative Performative liberalism really but I'm wondering what you think of performative liberalism, really, but I'm wondering what you think.

Yeah, gosh, the opening shots in every episode are so important and seemingly so banal, which is another thing that Nathan is really good at. And the opening shot of the first episode of this entire series is, I think, one of the best ones because he's starting the show, he's starting our experience with the show, The Curse, and subsequently our experience with the show that Wit and Asher are making within the show, The Curse.

He's starting our experience with those things from a place of being complicated from the beginning and us thinking we're in a certain position and then changing that up on us. So he's immediately putting us, the audience, in a state of irresolution or perhaps complication, maybe confusion with what is real and what is not both within the world of the show and within our own experience of the show we're watching by Nathan Fielder. And it's brilliant. And he does all of this, you know, effortlessly through like that one break of Asher saying stop

and asking the cameraman, you know, if it's okay if he says the word Jesus. And this dovetails quite nicely into this concept of performance and what is performance and what isn't and who sees what aspects of our performance and who we care seeing what aspects of our performance and who we care seeing what aspects of our performance versus not.

And this is all wrapped up in this this one little moment. And I think demonstrative of something that the show is about more broadly, which is that, you know, pulling back, I think the show is really about the suffocation of this performance and the suffocation ultimately of living under late capitalism and believing yourself to be a good person and how fundamentally at odds that is when your version of being a good person still ultimately operates within the consumer framework the system has set up, and therefore doesn't ever fundamentally change

or challenge the system. And that's this question of, am I allowed to say Jesus, is like a really evocative flourish of this concept of like his concern over saying that word has no like material implication. It's just this kind of like, I know that this is something I need to think about, so I'm going to think about it. But my offending the person who's talking right now or belittling their experience by interrupting it

and asking about this other thing that is concerned with my own portrayal, that doesn't matter to me. And I think that that is what the show is about, like how kind of inhuman and cursed, frankly, that kind of experience is and how cursed that performance is. This was a clip from our Patreon episode, The Curse, with Carly. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an upstream Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three. Our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper

stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.