Yesterday I watched James Watkins’ remake of Speak No Evil (2024). Because of their fear of appearing to cast unfair aspersions, two parents (played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) bite their tongues and make excuses when a charismatic psychopath (James McAvoy) and his girlfriend slowly erodes the couple’s boundaries despite being very clearly unhinged. In the original Danish-Dutch film from 2022, I understand that this refusal to rock the boat has grimly tragic consequences.
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Friends and loved ones* tell me their reasons for not standing against Israel. One tells me that protestors should just hold back until Kamala Harris wins. Another tells me that he saw a video of IDF soldiers trying to reason to an Israeli kid who was throwing stones and, because he had a gun, their killing him was defensive. They tell me it’s complicated and that they feel they can’t take sides and that people are just going on protests in support of Palestine because it’s the fashionable thing to do and I really shouldn’t be going along because it’s risky and these protests are violent and etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
And these are decent and loving people, but I can’t help but think it’s just noise made to block up their own ears to stop hearing the uncomfortable truth that our government is supporting a genocide.
Do I think protesting or writing articles works? I have no idea. I know that Roger Hallam has been jailed for five years for planning a protest. I know that journalist Sarah Wilkingson was arrested by sixteen men wearing balacalavas for tweeting in support of Palestine. I know that the laws that allowed these arrests to take place have only been on the books for a few years, notably years in which unprecedented numbers of protestors have taken to the streets of Britain and across the glove. I also know that the supposedly liberal-centrist parties currently in power in the UK and US have either been behind or else supported these changes in law, operating hand-in-glove with the right-wing parties they nominally oppose.
The curse of liberalism is wanting to appear balanced, sensible and decent… and, in so doing, allowing – with milky white grins – atrocities to take place. And how dare we? The satantic gumption of our fetid complacency.
Since I watched HBO’s The Curse (2023) months back I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. I think this is because in an incoherent way the corrosive liberalism of the main characters rhymes horribly with the West’s reaction to Israel genocide in Gaza. While I don’t think it was Nathan Fielder’s intention to make a show about Israel, I believe he (along with Benny Safdie, Emma Stone and the Zellner brothers) has produced the most morally scathing satire on liberalism I have ever watched.
In his previous series, The Rehearsal (2022) Nathan, playing himself, hires Miriam, a Hebrew tutor, for his “pretend” son, having found himself at odds with his ultra-Christian “pretend” wife, Angela, who doesn’t want “her son” growing up Jewish. Miriam gives Nathan decent advice on raising “his son” (possibly not realising that this son is a surrogate Nathan will only be raising for weeks) and the pair seem to have found common cause against Angela… until Miriam raises the topic of Israel. Miriam scolds Nathan, “That’s part of being Jewish, supporting Israel”, telling him that Palestianians who have been bombed were given fair warning, but the media still blames Israel. Nathan (playing himself) clearly disagrees, but hems and haws to avoid directly contracting Miriam while music remisicent of that used in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2024) plays.
In The Curse Nathan’s character, Asher, is also ethnically Jewish, but his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone) is not. However, she decides to convert and, in so doing, is much more vocal about her new identity than Asher, using the small amount of Hebrew she knows and eating traditional Shabbat meals. In doing this it is clear to the viewer that Whitney wishes to distinguish herself from her white, non-Jewish slumlord parents, possibly in the hope of claiming a persecuted identity for herself.
Now, I want to make it clear that neither Asher nor Whitney map directly onto Israel in any allegorical sense. Indeed, I don’t believe The Curse is about the Israeli government nor the IDF per se, though Reddit threads by H3110Kitty, mdmgok1988 and Additional-Tip-6233 have all made this argument pretty eloquently.
More centrally, The Curse is about educated white liberals (in which I am including myself because, frankly, what is a socialist without radical praxis?) and our desire to feel good about ourselves while failing to do much of anything to stop exploitation and injustice, save from hemming and hawing.
Asher and Whitney are the self-styled and self-promoting hosts of a (prospective) HGTV show called Flipanthropy, which follows their development and sales of eco-homes in Española, New Mexico. What follows is a series of iniquities and self-congratulatory gestures that fail to paper over harms done to local residents like Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) and his daughters Nala (Hikmah Warsame) and Hani (Dahabo Ahmed).
Abshir and his family are squatting in a property that Asher and Whitney have bought. Asher and Whitney are so keen to not be seen as gentrifiers that they let Abshir and his daughters continue living in the house and, eventually, gift them the property free of charge. While this is of clear material benefit to the family, Asher and Witney (and Safdie’s character Dougie) can’t seem to bring themselves to just leave the three alone; constantly turning up uninvited to their house, asking inappropriate questions, all but begging for reassurance.
Indeed, it is difficult not to think of how white folks like myself (and others) can interact with writers of colour blogging on Palestine or, indeed, at pro-Palestine protests… bringing with us a background neediness; an ambient desire to be scrubbed clean of our white guilt.
[I definitely saw this tendency in display in a lot of Goodreads reviews by fellow white folks of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, which I read this month!]
Witney, wanting to be seen as favouring police abolition, decides to not charge shoplifters for any thefts from her jeans store (since she has the money to cover the thefts, especially if she borrows from her parents). Unfortunately privileged frat kids get in on the game and her policy inevitably increases the level of petty crime in the neighbourhood, upsetting Fernando (Christopher Calderon) who Witney has hired as a security guard.
In the first instance, what Witney needed to do long ago was to directly stand-up to and refuse to accept money from her slum-lord parents who are directly responsible for a lot of the suffering in the neighbourhood she is now helping to gentrify.
In the second instance, Witney needed to actually support her Pueblo and Mexican staff with confronting the white shoplifters.
However, Witney and Asher always take the option to save face (even if on the surface they give their money and occasionally say the right things!)
When The Curse premiered Freddie deBoer wrote that he didn’t get the point of it, arguing:
[M]y concern is that this is simply a parody of a particular kind of person that’s being presented to an audience full of that exact kind of person, who can then derive self-satisfaction as they chuckle at the foibles of people made in their image.
However, with its Lynchian cinematography and relentlessly unsettling score by Oneohtrix Point Never, The Curse rarely allows self-satisfied viewing, let alone chuckles. To degree that television allows, I think it prompts guilty self-reflection. However, whether guilty self-reflection ever translates into concrete action is another matter…
*I’m not singling anyone out here. Most just read what the mainstream Western press publishes on the issue. The only person I will single out positively is my girlfriend who sees clearly on these matters and does a lot of work for vulnerable Muslim girls.
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//Spoiler for the end of Speak no Evil//
When the liberal-bourgeois parents finally ask the psychopath why he is murdering them and kidnapping their daughter (a crime he has committed against countless other parents) he replies matter-of-factly: “Because you let me.”