In the Flesh: The Curse s1e05 'It's a Good Day'

“The last thing this neighborhood needs is a spoiled rich girl whose parents bought her a house,” says Whitney (Emma Stone). Asher (Nathan Fielder) laughs, then abruptly falls silent at her tight-lipped stare. “I thought you were being self-deprecating,” he says sheepishly. If there’s one thing people should know about Whitney, it’s that even when she thinks she’s joking, she isn’t. Her “playful” back and forth with show tech Remi (Oscar Avila) is an interpersonal nightmare completely indistinguishable from her normal mode of interacting with her social inferiors. Whitney’s response to her contradictory desires and beliefs is to double down on refusing to understand that she’s in tension with herself. She takes foreclosed properties from her slumlord parents to flip for her insipid TV program, then tells them to fuck off when they show up for the closing. She demands professionalism from her underlings, then terrorizes them under the guise of goofing around. She sells elaborate houses on stolen Pueblo land and then berates the buyers for not signing toothless promises to respect Pueblo ownership until they pull out of the deal. She’s getting everything she wants, but the presence of other thinking, breathing human beings in the equation keeps throwing it off for her.

Stone is doing incredible work here. You can almost see the fault lines of Whitney’s conflicting impulses as she struggles to navigate success, obsessively moralizing at everyone but herself in the clearest imaginable instance of projection as she tries to square the circle of believing herself to be a progressive, moral person while scheming to profit off the gentrification of an impoverished Black and Latino community. She’s lit thoughtfully, too, her eyes often rendered flat and empty by subtle overhead lighting, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes picked out in minute detail when she squints and turns her head like a confused seagull (no pun intended) trying to determine whether something is food or a threat. They’re not exactly fixed or mutually exclusive categories. The people around her know it, even if she doesn’t, as when an uneasy retail employee tries to navigate an interaction with Whitney butting up against store policy, or when Picuris Pueblo artist Cara (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin) takes advantage of being brought into the show to flex by adopting the persona of an outrageously callous gentrifier.

Austin is a bit of a secret weapon here, delivering banger after banger as she floats through the troubled production. “That’s a disgusting habit,” Dougie (Benny Safdie) tells her, brittle with self-righteousness as only the deeply disturbed and compartmentalized can be, when he sees her smoking. “There are a lot of things about you that I find disgusting,” she replies without so much as a pause. The sexual vibe between the two feels surprisingly natural, an organic extension of their divergent forms of intimacy with pain and suffering. It’s compelling to watch Whitney’s white guilt start to break down and malfunction as she tries to cope with Cara intentionally bombing her walk-on role, a deft analysis of image and fictionalization dovetailing neatly with the collapse of first one on-set relationship and then another due to Whitney’s rigidity and anger. In the end she has to sell the house to an oddball Blue Lives Matter weirdo (Dean Cain, more or less playing himself), a decision she promptly offloads responsibility for onto Asher. She’ll cash the check, but someone else is always going to foot the bill.