Aug 20, 2024
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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.
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