In the Flesh: The Curse s1e06 'The Fire Burns On'

It’s frightening to watch a narrative emerge in real time from the dead skin of reality, splitting desiccated scales to uncoil new and glistening and wholly independent of its inventors. Whitney (Emma Stone) and Dougie (Benny Safdie), confronted with the lifeless, airless void that is their first episode’s rough cut, decide to make Asher (Nathan Fielder) their engine for generating conflict within the fiction. You can see their real world opinions shifting as they settle on the new approach, and of course it’s such an appealing option because it’s the path of least resistance. Asher is awkward and unlikeable. He is a strange, aggressive, unpleasant man. The sense that unfolds over the rest of ‘The Fire Burns On’ is that they aren’t so much inventing a story as acknowledging one, giving themselves permission to voice what they’re already feeling. We’ve always hated Asher, haven’t we? Doesn’t it feel good to turn and whisper to one another that he’s such a schmuck? Such a fucking idiot?

Elsewhere, a white chiropractor paid by Whitney takes charge of Abshier’s (Barkhad Abdi) perception of reality as he repeatedly ignores his patient’s cries of distress and requests to stop, assuring him “You’ve got this” as he performs radically unsafe adjustments on Abshier’s injured neck. The tension is suffocating, and Fielder, behind the camera, pushes in on Abshier’s obvious anxiety and discomfort until all we can see is his gaunt, bony face and the chiropractor’s callused hands twisting him first one way and then another as his skeleton pops and crackles like bacon in a skillet. Whitney knows better than he does what his own body needs. The chiropractor knows better. Everyone but Abshier can be trusted to manage Abshier’s body. It’s a disturbing visual, an acute and unavoidable representation of what the Siegels are doing to this man and his family, the hands of the masked and faceless pseudo-medical huckster pushing, pulling, snapping, crushing with irresistible force.

The third and perhaps most important story taking shape is Asher’s growing belief that Nala (Hikmah Warsame) may have some sort of paranormal power. At an interlude the show films at a local fire station Asher finds raw chicken in the bathroom and is unable to determine who left it there. Later, he fearfully asks Nala to guess how many screws he’s holding in his hand or hiding under his bucket, his mounting horror as she guesses right again and again an almost palpable sensation, like his racist paranoia is pushing against the bounds of the show’s structure and genre. He ends up tearing his palm while trying to befuddle her by holding dozens of screws at once, and her childish apology, clearly derived from her having sensed the discomfiting vibe, seems to push him even further. Here’s a grown man convincing himself in real time that a child has used witchcraft against him, letting his suspicions flow down that path of least resistance until the story has a momentum of its own, a sense of terrible inevitability. I can’t wait to see where it leads.