idle gaze 063: the discomfort of uncurated life
unpacking our aversion to the unedited, unordered world.
Earlier this year, comedian Nathan Fielder (of Nathan For You and The Rehearsal fame) and director Ben Safdie (one half of the Safdie brothers, the duo behind modern classics like Uncut Gems and Good Time) united to create one of the most excruciating TV shows I’ve had to endure in a long time. It’s also quite unlike anything else I’ve seen before.
Titled “The Curse”, it follows the Siegels, a married couple, as they attempt to launch their reality home renovation show, ‘Flipanthropy’, in which they do “good deeds” for the largely uninterested people of the city of Española, New Mexico.
These good deeds also happen to incorporate marketing for the Siegels’ ecohome business, which is built on a model of buying cheap properties and flipping them for great profit, boosted by their attempts to gentrify the area with whitewashed minimalist coffee shops and artisan retail locations.
The characters are all highly unlikeable and the plot is propelled forward at a slow, unsettling pace, combining Fielder’s trademark flavour of cringe-core comedy with the Safdies’ knack for creating overwhelmingly moody and tense atmospheres.
The unnerving magic of the show largely comes down to its rhythm and editing. Instead of stitching together a rapid, attention-sustaining narrative out of many different disconnected moments (typical of reality TV shows), The Curse instead features many long, drawn out segments full of inaction, with scenes that go on for several beats longer than they should, like a rubber band about to snap. Even though it’s a difficult watch, it’s ultimately a much closer representation to how things really happen in life; a reality made up of awkward silences, filler moments and mundane interactions.
Why is reality, served raw, cold and unseasoned, such a difficult watch? Film critic Thomas Flight does a good job of answering this in his incisive video essay dissecting The Curse, where he talks about the “discomfort of uncurated life”. He makes the case that media in all its guises is first and foremost about providing a distraction from not only reality, but ourselves: “we use media to escape the boring uncomfortable parts of life, to not have to explore our own boring annoying self-consciousness”.
When you understand that media was, and always will be, about escapism, you begin to understand why apps like BeReal, hinged on the pursuit of unedited authenticity, are destined to fail. Despite all the talk about wanting ‘real’ life, at the end of the day, users never actually wanted pure, unadulterated authenticity. What they really wanted all along was a curated, performative version of real life (more on this in idle gaze 026). As Amelia Stout for Dazed observed in her analysis of BeReal’s death back in October:
“The boredom users experience when confronted with the mundanities of their friends’ lives also exposes a fissure in our wider cultural appetite for relatable content: although relatability is celebrated ‘intellectually’ or as a concept, as consumers we prefer relatability’s prettier, more polished cousin.
A dimly-lit picture of an unmade bed, for instance, is too real. The Molly-Mae Hague brand of realness, however – the one that’s dressed in designer loungewear and filmed in a spectacular multi-million-pound home – now that is a winner.”
Even the most ordinary, straightforward reflections in life are distorted and moulded in ways we don’t even realise. A couple of years ago, the True Mirror went viral on TikTok: a mirror that reflects ‘reality’ back at the viewer. In contrast to regular mirrors and selfie cameras that invert images, the contraption offers a unreversed “true image reflection”, showing you exactly how you look to others. It’s so confronting that people have reported the experience triggering depressive episodes when they don’t like what they see in the mirror. But for some, it’s an uplifting experience instead; it’s like they’re viewing their real self for the first time. John Walter, the inventor of the True Mirror, argues that seeing the ‘true’ reflection can feel like such an unusual experience, because in a world filled with image-reversed images, we never get to see our real selves or make real eye contact, “right eye to right eye, left eye to left eye” – sparking a newfound sense of connection with ourselves.
We stand to learn a lot from directing our gaze towards the parts of life that we want to cut out. To sit in the discomfort of awkward silences, the mundane moments, reflections of reality, unedited and unordered.
Writer J.E Petersen once described in an essay about weaning himself off the comfort of “digital dope”, the difficulty of staying put in the messy chaos of the everyday life, fighting through the withdrawal symptoms that make you want to escape into the curated cocoon of the digital world:
“Sometimes it's harder, sometimes there are moments where you're like, man, I really wish I could escape this moment and go check Instagram or something, but instead I'm just going to sit here and my kid's crying and dinner's terrible because the kids are just being total jerks and I'm tired and not feeling great and my wife is upset because she's had to deal with this all day and I wish so badly that I could escape this moment but I'm just gonna have to sit here.”
But then it also means that there are these sublime moments, where so much of the substance of just being alive starts becoming available, and you realize that just being alive is this miraculous, beautiful experience
If every digital medium and mirror surface has conditioned us to see life as a reality TV show, the one and only remedy is exposure therapy. To force ourselves to sit with the boring uncomfortable parts of life. To make peace with crooked noses, asymmetrical eyebrows and uneven fringes. And to finally reconcile with our annoying self consciousness.