If there’s one part of the city that embodies the idea people outside New York have of Manhattan, it’s Midtown. You’ve got Times Square, Broadway theaters, person after person either trying to sell you a knock-off Gucci product or get you to give them money because they’re dressed up like some cartoon or Sesame Street character your kids love, except the costume is dirty and falling apart, so Elmo or Mickey Mouse looks like a leper when they’re coming towards you. It’s also the part of town where I tend to see people rushing the most. I don’t know why this is. I assume it’s because Midtown has the heaviest concentration of things one could be late to (business meetings, musicals, shrink appointments), but I think that the secret to a longer life might be trying to cut down on the number of times you rush down 34th past tourists looking up at the skyscrapers or past MSG yelling for drunk Rangers fans to get out of your way. It’s stressful. You do it too much and I think your heart will hate you.
I also thought I’d learned my lesson about getting off a subway train and deciding a taxi would be faster to get to Midtown after, for whatever reason in their infinite wisdom, the MTA turned my C train headed towards 168th Street into some undefined line that seemed to be a mix of R and 2 trains in the middle of my commute. But no. That never works out. I was 30 minutes late, we hit Columbus Circle, and there was something going on in the street causing a blockage that the driver chalked up to “A fucking protest or maybe an accident,” so I got up and started rushing to meet my friend who was waiting at PJ Clarke’s by Lincoln Center, not paying attention to the 10,000 things that happen every second around you when you’re in that part of the city. I texted him to order me fish and chips as I was running down the street. We had about 25 minutes to eat before we were supposed to go see the premiere of The Curse. As I sat down and stuffed my face with fries, my friend mentioned there was going to be added security at the event because there was talk of a “Global Day of Terror” as if the last few days hadn’t felt like that.
I didn’t want to give into the very unspecified, post-9/11 “War on Terror” type threat, but the truth is that in my head I couldn’t help but think, Great, I’m going to die seeing the premier of a show starring Nathan Fielder and a Safdie brother. I will live and die a very specific bit. Super.
My friend and I sat and talked about how shitty everything had been feeling. I think one of us delivered the “It’s not easy being a Jew” line, but also talked about how it’s just getting more difficult all the time to be a human being who just doesn’t want to see death and despair happening on a daily basis. And sure, I try not to buy into the news, especially anything that sounds like The terrorists are going to poison the water supply, then blow up town hall, then set off a dirty bomb on top of the ashes of the town hall, but it’s hard not to worry. That sort of fear is already laced into my DNA thanks to all the Russian and German soldiers who terrorized my ancestors, so when I hear about it in conversations or see even the dumbest person on all of social media posts about it, it can be hard to kick the idea that something bad might happen out of my head.
Thankfully, I was going to see the premier of a show I’d been excited about since the second I’d heard about it because, like I said, I’m a living, walking bit. You tell me Fielder and either Safdie are involved and I ask you to just tell me when and where I have to be. In this case, it was a New York Film Festival screening where somebody from Showtime told my friend that the event was three episodes each an hour long. I heard that just as I was noticing Sarah Sherman standing right next to Ari Aster and I was thinking about how much I’d love to see them work together, and maybe it’s because I was playing dream casting, but it took me a few moments to realize what I’d signed up for. I think it dawned on me as we were walking into the theater and I heard a popping sound and noticed it was coming from Eric André. He was holding a balloon and either doing whippits or making balloon animals, but I know there’s a third answer here and it’s he was possibly sucking down nitrous oxide and making balloon animals. Either way, he was there, and that’s when I realized things were going to get weird.
And that’s also when I decided what I was going to write about. At first, I’d considered maybe I’d write about the show itself, or maybe the event. Maybe I would pitch one of my editors and I could, you know, get paid to interview somebody connected to the show or something. I’m still open to doing that (Hi to all my editors), but as I sat there watching the first episode, with its Oneohtrix Point Never & John Medeski score that sounds a little like something Ariel Marx or Colin Stetson might produce (eerie, screeching, forbidding “A24 sounds” as I like to call them) and this dueling idea that something bad could actually happen but nothing probably would, it dawned on me that I was seeing a new Nathan Fielder thing in both the best and worst possible situation. I almost felt like I was in one of his shows.
Without spoiling anything about The Curse, it’s totally different from the other shows Fielder has starred in (Nathan for You and The Rehearsal), in that it’s a scripted story starring Fielder, Emma Stone, and Benny Safdie, but the feel of the whole thing is somewhere between them. Like Fielder in Nathan for You, Fielder and Stone’s characters play people who make a television show that’s set up to seem like they’re helping people. But I also kept thinking about The Rehersal, how it starts out as something funny, but then starts to unwind itself into something strange and a little twisted in a way that makes the viewer worry something bad could happen at some point. Maybe not life-threatening, but definitely cringey as hell. Through the first few episodes, The Curse burns slowly. You’re waiting for something big to happen, but you aren’t sure whether it will or if it’ll just be death by 1,000 awkward cuts.
I thought a lot about The Rehearsal after it came out. I didn’t think I would, but I find myself looking back on the episodes of The Curse I saw in a similar way. Part of it is the situation I saw it in, which was a far, far, far more stressful environment than the one I watched his previous show on (alone on my couch). That added to the experience, but even if I’d watched The Curse in my office on my computer, I’d still likely feel the same way. Stone is great, and Safdie still continues to surprise me with how good he is on screen, but Fielder has this way of getting in my head in a way I don’t know I’m entirely comfortable with. I noticed that after The Rehersal, and how the conversation around the show was how manipulative people thought Fielder was being with some of the people on the show. Some friends were telling me he must have had iron-clad NDAs, while others just chalked it up to being “fake,” the way they might with professional wrestling or “reality TV.” I thought the second idea was the more interesting one, the way Fielder has people actually wondering if something is real or not in the 2020s, a time when everybody is supposedly connected to all the information, and everybody is an expert on everything. He’s either a genius, an anti-comic of the highest order, or people overthink things that are supposed to be fun. The answer is probably all three of those things.
I couldn’t get through all three episodes of The Curse. Not because I didn’t like it, but because my mind was mush from the last few days and my anxiety still perks up high when I’m around too many people. I snuck out of the theater and walked down Broadway with my friend at a much slower pace than the one from earlier in the evening. It was a nice night out. A little chilly. People in tuxedos and dresses were leaving the opera, the hot dog carts had lines of people waiting for a late dinner, somebody was playing saxophone in the distance, and things felt like what I always associate with a “normal” night in New York City. We walked a few more blocks, and I caught sight of something that made me stop. It was a bunch of flyers wheat pasted to a wall, pictures of people who had been taken hostage by Hammas a few days earlier. I looked at it and thought about all the news, about the war taking place that is going to leave innocent people dead or displaced, rumors of attacks in America, the fact that a lot of people I know feel the need to share take after take, no matter how contradictory they might be, and how I could feel myself becoming numb to anything I saw online and needed to stop scrolling. I wondered how this is reality, how we keep finding new ways to make bad things even worse, and worrying that we’re only getting stupider even when we have the tools at our disposal to be better than ever. Nathan Fielder is really onto something, I thought. He seems to understand that everything in our supposedly “real” world is made up by somebody, a narrative constructed by a person or group of people that snakes its way into our brains, and he figures out a way to twist that ever so slightly to make it something that seems strange and funny at first but then starts to make a lot of sense the more you think about it.