Passive Homes in Nathan Fielder’s The Curse
Thanks to thermal bridges, Emma Stone is Emma Stone-ing harder than ever before
By Haniya Khalid | May 2024
In Nathan Fielder’s show The Curse, Fielder and Emma Stone play a slightly mismatched upper-class American couple. Whitney and Asher Siegel are filming a home renovation reality show in Espanola, New Mexico, where they have recently moved. Whitney designs and sells passive homes – including their mirror-wrapped Espanola house. Their home-reno show follows the couple as they convert traditional Espanola homes into passive ones, preaching the environmental benefits of carbon-neutral housing. Off the air, this can sometimes be at the risk of evacuating the tenant. To add a layer of complexity to their moralistic business model, they hire the displaced residents of the houses into businesses they themselves have started to boost Espanola’s economy.
Directional schematic of the Siegel business model
At the start of the show, a young girl named Nala, played by Hikmah Warsame, is selling sodas outside a grocery store. Following a misunderstanding over payment, she proceeds to “curse” Asher, referencing a fictional Tik-Tok trend popular among children: you give someone a “tiny curse”, a kind of incantation of the digital world. Asher spirals into a spell of paranoia that lingers throughout the rest of the season, signifying one of the many themes of the show: are curses self-fulfilling?
It’s an incredibly ambitious series: it explores cultural appropriation, gentrification, third-wall Truman-esque perspectives, evil eye across different cultures (Asher is Jewish and Abshir, Nala’s father, is presumably Muslim), and perhaps most topically, the sinister nature of greenwashing and just how pervasive and harmful it can be to our immediate environment. In characteristically satirical, absurdist fashion, it asks the question: what is an environment? Is it the planet we reside in? Is it the social or spiritual space we occupy?
Or is it simply the house we live in?
What is a passive house?
Passive homes have existed since the 1970s but became official in 1996 when the Passive House Institute was started in Germany. A passive house is a building constructed with high-quality materials to make it airtight and insulated; it is designed to be “passive” in its utilization of energy. In the show, Whitney describes a passive house like a thermos that can maintain the internal temperature with little energy input. This can save up to 60% energy consumption with the added benefit of lowering your monthly utilities bill, though I am not quite sure how that would stack against the approximate 5% per square foot increase in cost1,3.
What are the key constituents?
• Thermal – insulating the house depending on location and size and minimizing thermal bridges. A thermal bridge is a spot in the house heat can enter or escape.
• Solar – controlling how much sunlight enters through the windows to maximize solar energy
• Air – designing the house to be airtight. This means controlled ventilation to expel contaminated air while filtering fresh air
• Passive house standards can be found on the official Passive House Institute website2
What does the show get right?
• Mirror wrapping – the design of a house doesn’t have anything to do with it being qualified as passive
• Stove – during an episode of The Curse, Whitney panics when a resident installs a gas stove in his passive home; she claims it means it no longer qualifies as passive. This isn’t the case; you can have gas, induction, or standard electric stoves in a passive home as long as the ventilation accounts for the expelled air3
• Airtight – airtight doesn’t mean literally airtight as shown in the show; it means having no uncontrolled airflow into or out of the house
The Curse is eerie and surreal, with Fielder’s trademark cringe humor sprinkled through the extremely awkward and thoughtfully paced dialogue. The score is outstanding, the design is a dream made of Pueblo pottery and desert plants – and Emma Stone, with her dizzying mood-switching, passive aggression, masked rage, and positively manic desire to be seen as an eco-activist / revolutionary artist – is Emma Stoneing at her very best. In the article about sustainability by contributing writer Rehan Aneksha, he touches upon systems thinking and the need to solve problems as part of a larger system. In The Curse, eco-warriors are solving an undeniably important problem – house-by-house energy consumption with the onus on solely on the individual, but are they considering the larger system that the houses operate in: one of governance, culture, heritage, and economic feasibility?
If you’re at all interested in investigating these topics, then give The Curse a try. If for nothing else — the ending is probably the most outrageous ending of any show I’ve ever seen. I finished the show months ago, and I’m still recovering from it.
References
1 https://www.sunset.com/home-garden/what-are-passive-houses#
2 https://passiv.de/en/02_informations/02_passive-house-requirements/02_passive-house-requirements.htm
3 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-13/what-showtime-s-the-curse-gets-wrong-about-passive-homes
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