The Curse (2023)
If you haven’t watched The Curse yet and you intend to do so, you need to know upfront that I don’t pull punches in terms of spoilers. I don’t couch them in vague terms that will only make sense to those that have watched the show. I will straight up be spoiling the ending of the show.
You have been warned.
Thaumiel
There is a thing done in pieces about Nathan Fielder where the opening lines is some variation on “Who is Nathan Fielder?”
It’s an understandable instinct. Here is this strange, awkward man doing strange, awkward things and you want to ask “Who is this?”
But it’s the wrong question. As Super Eyepatch Wolf states, the question is actually “What is Nathan Fielder?”
For many of us, Nathan Fielder arrived fully formed when he made Nathan For You. But no one actually arrives fully formed. He has had an extensive career that goes back to being a segment producer on Canadian Idol (and before you wonder if that was some parody of American Idol, it was not. It was just a Canadian version of it that had some comedy skits in it). He had an on screen role (as “Nathan”) on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Then he made Nathan For You.
Nathan For You was an almost parody but not parody reality show where “Nathan Fielder” provided business advice to small businesses. The advice was generally ludicrous. He convinces a frozen yoghurt store to sell a poo flavoured yoghurt. He suggests to a bottle shop that they sell to under age customers, but the purchases will be held on lay by until the customer turns 21. He realises that trademarked names can be used by other businesses if it is for parody, and so Dumb Starbucks is born.
The show manages to find the sweet spot between an episode premise absurd enough to keep the audience entertained, while within the bounds of normalcy just enough that he can find a small business owner that will try the idea out for a day.
The results are hilarious. The results are cringeworthy. It is tension comedy at its finest.
And it says something about the lengths that small businesses will go to to have a chance at getting exposure. Which means that, at least in its early seasons, it can run a little cynical. “Look at these buffoons, being taken in by these ridiculous ideas,” we say to ourselves.
But then there is a trend towards empathy. “Nathan Fielder” helps a Bill Gates impersonator track down his long lost love. “Nathan Fielder” goes to great lengths to support the people on his show through challenging parts of their lives. Including posing as a listless 20 something and walking across an elevated tight rope, so the people on his show can achieve their goals.
So while it is a pretty crazy indictment of capitalism, and how often people will do most about anything if they are on camera, it is also a show that is striving to say something about connection. That maybe, those small businesses create communities and that situating ourselves within those communities is how we survive and thrive.
And we think we know who “Nathan Fielder” is. Sure, it’s reality TV but he is playing a character. We know he is a TV guy, he writes, produces, acts a bit. It’s like Ali G (and Fielder would go on to work on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who is America?). We know that this really isn’t a reality show about a guy that dispenses bad business advice to people. It isn’t not that but “Nathan Fielder” is just a character.
Ghogiel
“Isn’t that the ‘Nathan For You’ guy?” she asked as we flicked through streaming one night.
I looked at the picture…
It was Nathan Fielder. I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the picture but just mashed the button and started watching The Rehearsal.
Look again at that picture. Everything except for Nathan is fake. Which maybe suggests that even Nathan is fake.
The Rehearsal begins as a spiritual sequel to Nathan For You. Instead of bad business advice, “Nathan” has devised a system wherein a person can rehearse all possible permutations of a situation so one can rehearse them and ultimately successfully navigate said situation.
It’s bonkers in a Dirk Gently type of way where to resolve situations in your life, you need to try and solve the universe around them.
And so it goes for the first half of its six episode run. The guy who lied to his quiz night team that he had a Masters and wants to come clean. The woman that wants to rehearse raising a child. The man that wants to speak to his brother about their father’s estate.
Then Fielder straps a hand grenade to the format and explodes what reality TV even is.
Satoriel
It’s strange to think of what a towering film Synecdoche, New York is and yet how devastating to Charlie Kaufman’s career it was. Despite it making multiple top ten lists (both of the year and decade variety), people were simply not interested in going to see it. So much so that despite Kaufman having had one of the great Hollywood runs to that point (any CV that contains Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation is one of the all time greats), he largely had his career evaporate overnight.
His stuff had always been weird. This was too much.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a theatre director who is provided with a MacArthur Fellowship. His life is a shambles, his wife has left him. His house is eternally on fire.
So he stages an autobiographical piece with a brutal commitment to realism. The production becomes increasingly elaborate because without staging that reflects reality how can you properly convey reality.
Even as reality begins to break down. Actors shift through multiple roles. There are hints that the world outside the world inside is decaying. Hoffman, who had been playing the theatre director, changes roles and watches as someone else plays his role. Then he dies, never having properly understood what controlling this universe that he built was designed to illuminate.
It is a masterpiece. It is maddening. It is understandable that like The Fountain it would kill career.
Gha Agsheblah
TV by its nature is a passive medium. Right this minute, I have Curb Your Enthusiasm playing in the background. I’ve seen this episode before. It’s the one where Larry writes the obituary for Cheryl’s aunt (yeah, that one). I know the beats of this one. I can write this and tune in and out of it.
It’s how we watch TV now. We glance at our phones. My wife refuses to watch things she doesn’t want to watch, even though she will scroll Instagram for most of the time anyway.
The Rehearsal wants to bring us in. It doesn’t want us as passive observers. The show is constantly reframing the people (the characters?) on screen so that we must watch or we will miss the point.
The back half of the run goes full Synecdoche, New York. “Nathan” moves in with the woman from earlier in the season and they rehearse raising a child together. It is something that “Nathan” would like to explore to see if it is something he would want to do in real life.
The bar from the first episode, used to rehearse telling a pub quiz night team about a lack of a Masters degree, a set built for the show, is opened to the public. “Nathan” goes there to drink sometimes. The bar sits in a huge warehouse.
Child actors of varying ages are brought in to take the role of “Adam”, “Nathan” and Angela’s child. The child grows, they go through major milestones as a family together.
Angela, a fervent Christian, and “Nathan”, a not so practising but maybe a bit practising Jew, don’t see eye to eye on how “Adam” should be raised. They argue over what religion he should be raised. Their relationship breaks down, Angela moves out.
Then the show decompresses again. Remy, a fatherless child actor who played “Adam” at age 6, can’t let go of “Nathan” as his father. The two weeks of acting in the show seems to have done genuine psychic harm to the kid. “Nathan” tries to explain that it is just acting that they were doing but Remy can’t let go. His heartbreaking reply, “I don’t want you to be Nathan, I want you to be daddy.”
“Nathan” decompresses in parallel. He goes back to a moment he shared with Remy and starts to repeat it. Using different actors, standing in for different roles. He wrestles with a doll and says Remy’s lines. All trying to smash his system of rehearsal into this moment of truth to see where it all went wrong.
He has become the god of this universe that he has created and he is unable to find the way out.
The Rehearsal pushes the audience into a maze without a map and hopes that they will lean in and work their way out. It is also caustically funny. “Nathan” is one of the great tension comedy characters. He is a Jewish Canadian, not quite so confident Alan Partridge.
It is a messy show. One that interrogates such things as reality, empathy, the self, religion, interfaith relationships, and fake snow. The show is searching for an insight into other people. “Nathan” is clueless to how other people work. He doesn’t really understand their emotional responses. But he thinks he has found a way of working out other people and what is inside them, his rehearsal system. Because through rehearsing, through shifting roles, can’t we all gain an understanding of the people around us?
Perhaps there is something to that, at least in a bonkers fashion.
The show is about how empathy breaks down barriers between us, while also leaving us open to pain. That which keeps us from others, that lack of understanding of their interiority, is how we consume TV. These are characters presented to us. Ones that we think we understand after a line or two. Angela is the Crazy Christian type, all fire and brimstone and skirting the line of QAnon, and yet even she contains multitudes. She can be very funny. She is actually rather kind to “Nathan” at points when he is in need of empathy. She likes violent movies.
And we wonder if this is actually reality TV, or it just looks like it. “Nathan” is surely a character, perhaps “Nathan Fielder” tuned to this particular TV reality. Or Nathan Fielder turned up to 11. But again we think we’re in on the joke. Because “Nathan” is a character, and everyone else is real. Or “real”. It’s a bonkers universe created by “Nathan” the god head. Like some increasingly complex hidden camera show.
But if that is the case, then we wonder if the show is crossing ethical lines. What occurs to Remy could lead to long lasting emotional harm. Is Fielder just using these people, who wanted just to be part of a reality show, in an increasingly cruel joke that has real world impacts? Particularly here where the show ultimately seems to be a meta textual therapy session for Fielder to work through what went wrong in his marriage.
So we tell ourselves that surely not. Because this is too good, and there is no way that the creator of such an incredible TV experience could possibly have such monumental ethical blindspots.
Or perhaps us asking that very question was the intent all along.
Golohab
Everyone always says Uncut Gems is the Safdie Brother’s best work. For my money, Good Time is better. Benny Safdie puts in an incredible performance (helped by not being such a recognisable face at the time) and Robert Pattison gives the sort of performance that blows away any sort of preconceived notions that we may have had given his previous status as a heartthrob.
But Uncut Gems is a wonderful film. A Sandler film that reminds you that Sandler can act. Like Punch Drunk Love and Happy Gilmore. There is a parallel universe out there that around 2000, Adam Sandler just started making stuff like that all the time. It must be glorious there.
In many ways, Uncut Gems is the gateway drug to the Safdie Brothers. It’s how you hear about them the first time (assuming that you haven’t been paying attention), and how you hunt down their back catalogue.
Then Benny Safdie starts showing up in a lot of stuff you watch. You’re watching Oppenheimer and trying to get into the swing of it, and Benny Safdie shows up and you’re like '“Cool, Benny Safdie is great” and he is great it in a not so great film but you realise that he is on screen enough to distract you and not on screen enough to really elevate the film in the way he could.
Tagimron
It had been announced that there would be a second season of The Rehearsal. Which was a fine enough idea, and the show seemed to be watched enough that there was some sense to it. But in many ways, like the world “Nathan” crafted around him, the show was hermetically sealed. A second season would be an unnecessary flourish. But sooner or later, I knew that we’d have something new from Fielder, and when that happened and whatever it would be, I knew I would turn up for it. The Rehearsal had put me in the pocket, he could bank just about any cheque at this point.
So naturally, he, and Benny Safdie, gave us The Curse.
It may seem odd to spend so much time on what came before The Curse but it’s instructive to place the show within Fielder’s larger body of work. In the same way The Rehearsal is an evolution and then subversion of Nathan For You, The Curse is clearly a descendant of The Rehearsal.
Though the format of the show may have changed, no longer is this a reality show (if ever its antecedents were truly that) instead it is now a drama. Or comedy. Or elevated horror show. The jury largely remains out. But though that format has changed, the who presented is a thematic maze without a map and without a clear indication of where the path may lead the audience.
In the early days of the golden era of TV, there was a saying that you needed to get through the first four episodes of The Wire before you could really get into the show as those four episodes taught you how to watch the show.
In many ways here, The Rehearsal teaches you how to watch The Curse. It wants the audience to lean in, to take note, to consider. It wants to reveal itself at its own pace.
Gharab
“Just what are we watching?” she asked, half an hour into the first hour long episode.
Indeed.
The Curse tells the story of Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (“Nathan Fielder”), a somewhat newlywed (what’s the statute of limitations on that term? They’ve been married for about a year) who are filming a home renovation reality show where they spruik the benefits of passive houses. The show is called Fliplanthropy. Asher’s best friend (or childhood tormentor), Dougie (Benny Safdie), is along for the ride as the producer of the show (previous credits of his include Love to the Third Degree, a reality dating show about a burn victim).
Situated in Espanola, the couple wants to make sure that the local community (which they are clearly trying to gentrify) benefits from their presence and their aim to build passive homes. The first scene (in which Asher utters “Jesus” and then sees a cross on the wall) involves the couple offering a job to local resident Fernando who has clearly struggled in life and cares for his sick grandmother.
The Curse is about:
Passive houses
Marriage
Judaism
Entopic pregnancies
Native land rights
Native casinos
The shit that casinos do to keep patrons gaming
Whistleblowing
Native American art
Gentrification
Art
Curses (real, question mark)
Micro penises
Vigilante justice
Slumlords
Racism
Dean Cain being kind of who you imagined but not who Whitney imagined
Curses (imagined, question mark)
Drink driving
The kink of fantasising about another man fucking your wife
Sliced turkey
Curses (metaphorically, question mark)
Dread fills the air. The soundtrack is minimalist and leaves you feeling sick to your stomach, certain that something is about to happen.
The inciting incident - Asher and Dougie are trying to get some B roll. Dougie thinks it would be good if Asher was to give a young girl, standing in a car park selling cans of soda, some money as a gesture of his generosity to the local community.
All Asher has is $100 bills which seems a bit too much for a few cans of soda, so once the cameras stop running, Asher takes back the money promising that he will go to an ATM and get out $20. As he goes off, the young girl curses him (real, question mark).
This being tension comedy (or tension drama), Asher is hampered in his quest and once he has the money, the young girl is nowhere to be found and he remains cursed.
As we get deeper into the story, we find out that the young girl (who lives with her father and sister in a property that Whitney and Asher have purchased and plan to convert into a passive home) was just mimicing a TikTok trend. Except she wanted Asher to not have chicken when she cursed him, and his chicken was missing in his microwave meal. And in a later episode she curses the mean girl at school who eventually ends up getting hurt.
Samael
Recently, I started rewatching Twin Peaks; The Return. I had plans to maybe write something about it, and yet I just ended up finding myself enveloped in its world. The critical part of my brain debated during the first few episodes whether the show is anti-audience. Certainly it’s anti-nostalgia. But I’m not sure it is actively seeking to repel the audience. It may in fact be that it just simply cares little for the audience. Either the audience gets on its wavelength and is swept away for the ride, or they bounce off it hard. Depending on the audience member, it may take longer before they bounce off than others but there will come a point if they aren’t vibing with what it is offering up.
In many ways, The Curse is the same. It wants to engage the audience in a different manner than most shows. It isn’t against the audience but it does expect that the audience will meet it on its own terms. There is a peculiar rhythm to the show, that alf way through you will rarely even notice but is so glaring in the early episodes that it will be hard for many to even get started with the show.
About 30 minutes into the first episode seems like a relatively good amount of time to beg the question “just what are we watching?”
But the show does reveal itself in its own way over time.
Whitney is the sort that believes in things. She is, at least on the face of things, a cultural appropriator extraordinaire. So it comes as little surprise that she would believe that Asher has now been in fact (real, exclamation point) cursed by the young girl. Thus Asher must set out on a night time endeavour to track down the young girl and her family to have the curse lifted. Of course he is unsuccessful because as becomes quickly apparent across the show’s run, Asher isn’t much good at most things.
While Asher drives around night-time Espaonla, Dougie and Whitney watches dailies for the reality show. Dougie coaches Whitney through voice over she is doing and starts talking about his aspirations for what the show could be. While Whitney, and to a lesser extent Asher, have firm ideas of what the show should be (passive homes and community benefit), Dougie thinks the show needs to zero in on the married couple’s relationship. That the show needs to focus on Whitney because people will want to watch her specifically. It’s here that we start to think that we have some idea of Dougie. Supposedly Asher’s friend, he reads as though he is putting the moves on Whitney. At the very least he seems like he might be a snake in this paradise that Whitney hopes to create.
Asher stops by a homeless shelter, assuming that the black family selling sodas in a parking lot must be homesless, but comes up empty. So of course he lies to Whitney that he tracked the young girl down who was more than happy to lift the curse and so there is nothing to worry about anymore. Whitney of course is grateful to hear the news.
There’s two things to take note of at this point as they set up so much of the tenor of the show.
First, the conversation between Asher and Whitney happens in the hallway of the hotel (motel?) where Dougie is staying and is filmed through a peephole. Notably it is not the peephole from Dougie’s room but seems to be the room across the hall.
Second, the final moments of the episode where Asher returns into the room. He has a smile that seems happy but laced with a hint that he knows he has lied and that may have set something in motion. The camera holds on his face longer than we would expect (though by now with the show trying to bring it into its rhythm, perhaps this is as long as we should expect a shot to hold). Then the film spools off the reel and through the camera gate and the image of Asher flips upside down for a moment before we cut to the credits (of course, there is no film and the show is shot on digital but that is the effect being mimicked).
That first point requires deeper interrogation. One of the things the show does explicitly through how it is imaged is keep the audience at a remove. In the same way that The Rehearsal suggests that there is great difficulty in ever knowing the interiority of another person, so The Curse has a barrier between audience and characters. The majority (though not all) of the show is shot in a manner that apes the reality TV style. Shots are blocked in a way that parts of the frame are obscured by parts of buildings (interior and exterior), plants, cars, camera equipment. Often a scene will be shot from within a car. In particular Whitney and Asher are often blocked in a way that they appear to have barriers between them. Shot in the kitchen of their passive home, they are in the same space but the door way into the room obscures one or the other. The look of the show is that of a reality show about the making of a reality show.
Now there are metatextual reasons to film it in this way, it’s easier to integrate into a location. It’s cheaper. It’s faster. But there do some to be textual reasons to shoot this way. Both as above to show the remove between characters, and to keep the audience at bay.
Because we think we know these characters from the jump. Whitney reads as the prototypical cultural appropriating hipster. She’s all about passive homes and climate change. She loves other cultures, or at least she says she does but we know that she probably just likes being able to point to those things as badges of honour. She is “friends” with local Native American artist, Cara who seems less than warm in their “friendship” because of course they aren’t actually friends. Whitney talks about the homes she designs as art (because I guess having them covered in mirrors, which of course leads to birds flying into them, makes them striking if nothing else) because of course she’s entirely full of herself and the role she plays in the world. She has of course converted to Judaism in marrying Asher. She believes that Asher could be cursed.
Asher reads as cowed by his wife and out for little more than money. He wants kids, she seems ambivalent. He is awkward (because he is ultimately “Nathan” or at least some variation on him, my head canon is Asher is being played by “Nathan”). He thinks he’s funny but he isn’t. He is untrustworthy. He says what Whitney wants to hear but then in conversation with Whitney’s father reveals that his aim is to buy up plots around Espanola, have the reality show lead to the value of those plots jumping, and the profit.
Dougie seems like a hot shot Hollywood producer that has designs on Whitney.
But Whitney is actually friends, to an extent (or at least the relationship seems to be something like acquaintances plus plus), with Cara. As much as Whitney comes across as domineering and forcing a relationship on Cara, Cara does reciprocate in a way. And Whitney does actually have an interest in other cultures. Her conversion to Judaism is full throated. She is well intentioned, she just doesn’t really know how to properly deal with other people. She genuinely wants to extricate herself from the influence of her slumlord parents and their money (which seems to be largely funding the play into passive homes in Espanola). When the local clothing store that they are trying to support by providing free rent for six month is experiencing a wave of shoplifting, she provides her credit card details to the shop assistance so that if a pair of jeans is ever stolen her card can be charged rather than the shoplifter facing charges.
Asher meanwhile may seem primarily motivated by profit but he mostly just wants Whitney to be happy. His great fear and the driving force behind almost all his actions is that he will never be able to satisfy her. It’s why he runs off into the night to get the curse lifted, and subsequently why he then lies. Based on later episodes, he doesn’t actually seem to be so vested in turning a profit so much as he thinks he needs to to be able to please Whitney. Yet, at the same time, there is a rage that lurks in him. When pushed he lashes out in ways that are thoroughly unproductive. When Fernando brings a posse to the house, enraged that Whitney has essentially been subsidising crime in the area through the shoplifting-credit card debacle, Asher does his best impression of being alpha and it’s ineffective to say the least. Whitney accuses him of only doing good things because she pushes him to. Left to his own devices he’d probably still be working at the local casino where he devised strategies to keep patrons gaming longer and helped the casino dodge laws regarding banned gamers from entering the casino. He is a veritable piece of shit but he is also complex.
Dougie for all his slick aura is actually just a mess. He plays the role of provocateur, the snake in the garden but ultimately doesn’t seem to have intentions towards Whitney that extend beyond the show and possibly making her see that her marriage is something she should give second thoughts to. He’s a drunk, almost certainly responsible for the death of his wife in a car accident but unwilling to accept the blame for that. And while he happily will drink drive, he also has a pocket breathiliser in his car and will pull over and walk if he blows over. For all his bluster and cruelty, he is clearly hurting inside, destroyed by his wife’s death and feeling alone in the world. Late in the series he begs the young girl, tears in his eyes, to curse him. He wants, no needs to be cursed for what he has done with his life. At one point he confides (or winds up, pinning down the motivations of characters is difficult at the best of times but not in a bad way, we just are not privy to their interiority by design) in Asher that he believes in cruses because he is cursed.
So the show follows this swirling morass of emotionally complex character motivations through the show. An instructive moment comes early on at Cara’s art installation. Part of her show is that she sits in a teepee and carves slices of turkey which she then presents to one person at a time as they enter the teepee. Then she screams. And that is the piece. Reactions vary between characters, the governor of the local tribe looks at Cara and simply asks “Is that it?”; Whitney eats the turkey and then wonders if she wasn’t supposed to because of course Whitney does. Later in the series, Cara explains the piece to Whitney (as Whitney is fairly clueless when it comes to understanding a lot of things, including art). The shaving of the meet represents Native Americans forever peeling strips of themselves off and offering them up to others. What the participants in the art piece did when the turkey was offered to them was up to them. So of course Whitney would eat it because that is what she does, she consumes other cultures and other people.
Which is in a wider sense what the main relationships of the show are about. Everyone is shaving strips of themselves off and being consumed by the others. Nowhere is this more the case than Asher and Whitney’s marriage, where they are tearing each other down and extracting concessions from each other as their love language.
Gomaliel
The last time Emma Stone was on TV (at least in the sense of a recurring or main role on a series, I’m sure she’s doing bulk talk show TV all the time) was Maniac. I feel like we’ve memoryholed Maniac but that show was phenomenal. Cary Fukunaga’s direction was something special and something not usually seen on TV (of course, his previous work on True Detective being an obvious antecedent and similarity). Jonah Hill showed a side of his range that often is ignored in his film roles. Justin Theroux fucking went for it, in the way that he often does when given good material (see: The Leftovers). Then there was Emma Stone, who absolutely overdelivered. Maniac demanded a lot of its cast, with multiple roles per cast member across multiple realities, and all were great. Emma Stone was streets ahead of them all.
I note this as Stone is so rarely on TV, so when she is its something to take notice of. Especially now with Poor Things out and The Curse on TV, its almost like she has risen to a new level (on a scale of “bombed out Garland” to “Streep”, her current level is probably a 9).
She is, without question, the best thing about The Curse. She is giving a performance that is essentially the Fry meme but “shut up and give her all the awards.”
Benny Safdie being good in a thing should come as no surprise to anyone anymore, even if most people can’t necessarily place his name. So it is here.
But Stone. It is a tour de force performance (an overused term to be sure but one that is nothing but apt in this case). Whitney needs to be an absolute mess of contradictions. Conniving in one moment to get what she needs to from the show, an innocent the next when confronted by her slumlord parents informing her that her gentrification project is pushing people into their apartment blocks. One that rages against Asher, then turning on a dime to hint at the genuine affection that may exist for the man she shares a bed with.
It is a masterclass in micro adjustements in real time. While the script she is given is without doubt demanding, without a performance of this calibre it would lead to mushy confusion. Instead, in her hands, the audience is able to read her in just about every moment of the show, while also being kept at arms length.
Perhaps more illuminating than her performance though is that somehow, Fielder is able to go toe to toe without her throughout the show. Which is a relief as the show would suffer if he was not up to the task, there is simply too much where they need to be playing off one another that if he wasn’t able to keep up then it would just result in a bad case of “my god that performance, shame about the show.”
In many ways, it shouldn’t be as surprising as it is. Nathan For You and The Rehearsal made us believe we knew who Nathan Fielder was, but that was all “Nathan Fielder.” He has been playing a part for so long and in such a naturalistic fashion that we forgot he was acting and just assumed we were watching the man. Being able to inhabit Asher, then, as fully as he does. A character that is, again, “Nathan Fielder” turned up to 11, is not a stretch.
Take a moment near the end of the ninth (the penultimate) episode. Asher and Whitney are sitting with Dougie in his hotel room, watching the assembly cut (they don’t call it that but its what it is) of the first episode of Fliplanthropy (now renamed to Green Queen). In many ways it is an attempt by Whitney to tell Asher what she thinks of him in a way that she has tried but not entirely succeeded in doing through the run of the show.
Whitney has been filming pieces to camera about Asher and how she really feels without him knowing. Dougie has put them in the assembly cut.
As they watch, Whitney seems to chicken out. She doesn’t want Asher to be witness to all the things she has said as they will like entirely explode their marriage. But Asher wants to see the full cut.
So they watch, and it is brutal. Whitney knows how devoted to her he is and is suffocated by it. She hates that he has no real respect for other cultures. It is a declaration of war in the way that only marriages can have.
And so he storms out.
And then he comes right back in and he is applauding in a manic fashion.
And launches into a speech about how he loves her. How all he wants to do is make her happy. That she needs him. That everything is for her. That if there ever comes a time that she no longer loves him, she won’t have to tell him, he’ll just be gone.
We watch Whitney’s reaction to the monologue, a speech so impassioned and yet so needy and possessive that it is terrifying. She is ecstatic. She is overjoyed. She is terrified. We can see her realising the implications of this speech. The implications that if she says yes, if she accepts this man, what that will mean for her and her life. Her reaction plays out exquisitely on her face, ever minute piece of the performance fully realised.
We cut to the credits.
If this was a visual novel, we would call this the true ending of the show.
Lilith
I debated with myself for a substantial time whether to talk about the final episode. The penultimate episode does serve as something of a finale. All the thematic threads have crescendoed. The fate of Whitney and Asher’s marriage is uncertain but there is enough that the audience can play out a future off screen. Dougie has served as the serpent to removes the scales from their eyes. Cara has made clear her position on her friendship with Whitney, her art and what she is willing to do for it (namely, she won’t sell pieces to art dealers), we have the contours of what the show looks like, the major conflicts and crises have reached a point of denouement.
I have long subscribed to the idea that spoiler warnings are a foolish idea. Not because things can’t be spoiled but because more often than not (at least with the best of things), the journey of the story is what should be experienced not the spoilerific plot beats. If that is all story is to you, then you may as well consume your media by reading wikipedia plot summaries. It’s the telling that matters.
Take for instance, the recent Doctor Who specials. Much of the internet knew that David Tennant was going to regenerate but not regenerate. But knowing that didn’t mean that it wasn’t worth watching to see how that actually occurred within the telling of the story. Much like telling someone about Emma Stone’s performance takes nothing away from being witness to it.
But with The Curse I found myself with a dilemma. To properly speak to the show and the story it tells, there is no way to ignore the ending. But this particular ending, which I will describe and it will not hit you in anyway like the experience of viewing it, is so singular that it threatens to consume everything that has come before.
We open some months later (at a guess, around 9 to be precise). Asher and Whitney are being interviewed (in the most dismissive of manners) on Rachael Ray. Whitney is heavily pregnant. The couple appearing over satellite feed to the studio (which is clearly in the middle of the pandemic based on their distancing and masking, yet another thread to pull on with this show) looks happy.
We know this must be an act. There is no way the couple at the end of the last episode would be this serene. We assume there is something more afoot. Chances are that they have split up and the baby is someone else’s (perhaps Dougie’s, perhaps they actually did end up bringing another man to bed, but we know it can’t be Asher’s).
Such is theorycrafting. For pretty much the run of the show ever since the last shot of episode one mentioned above that the show would end with someone yelling cut off screen, proving that it had been a reality show about the making of a reality show. The reality style of blocking had become more pronounced as the show show went on. In episode 8, there is a now familiar shot from inside a car but now the car starts driving from their home to the location of shooting that day. If this isn’t a show about a show then it’s a show about a voyeur watching people making a show.
But it appears that it is not an act. Asher’s outpouring of codependence at the end of the last episode seems to have righted this ship. There still are slight cracks in their marriage but they seem to be mostly external, like needing to retrofit their passive home with air conditioning so the baby can stay cool in summer.
There they are having shabbot and all seems to be well. Whitney seems happy, though she is still jealous of others, noting that Cara got a write up in the New York Times for quitting art. Asher gives a long rambly speech about the Holocaust, The Producers and art, none of which makes complete sense but may be a thematic statement for the whole show.
They decide they will gift the house on Questa Lane (the one where the young girl with the cursing powers and her family live) to the family there. Asher noting that he loves seeing Whitney’s face when she is happy. The gifting is not the triumph they hoped for but they still seem pleased. And so the day ends.
The next morning, Asher wakes on the ceiling. Whitney is starting to have contractions. Asher cannot get down from the ceiling, it is though gravity is reversed. They think it is to do with the air pressure in the house, a result of the retrofiting. Nothing they do seems to work. They think it may have something to do with the weather, a stray pocket of air that Asher has been caught up in and that Whitney must desperately avoid.
It is hilarious. It is terrifying.
The reality show style blocking across the run suddenly pays off dividends. It makes this situation, one getting more tense by the moment, incredibly grounded. And in grounded something so absurd, it becomes horrific because as they characters start to realise what this may mean, the audience starts to realise what this may mean. Asher is being pushed away from the earth.
Whitney makes it outside and Asher goes out the front of the house where nothing changes for his predicament. Her contractions getting closer together, Whitney calls the doula who promptly arrives and attempts to rescue Asher from under the eaves of the house. This has the effect of Asher shooting up into the air and getting caught in a tree.
But the contractions are still coming and so Whitney needs to go to the hospital. She’ll send Dougie.
Dougie thinks Asher is talking in metaphor of his fear of becoming a father. He feels like he’s being pushed into the air, like he can’t hold on. Sure, replies Dougie, that’s normal.
Dougie’s obliviousness to the seriousness of the situation, and his immediate instinct to get footage for a second season of Green Queen delivers on the promise lurking all season that this is a horror show.
The fire department arrives and hoping to have him fall (because no one believes Asher because it is far too absurd, and those that have seen him fly into the tree assume it is some special effect for the show), decided to cut the branch of the tree. The saw goes in, the tension rises, and Asher is flung at escape velocity to the stratosphere. Dougie sobs to himself that he didn’t mean to curse Asher, he didn’t mean it, he’s always done everything to serve himself. And Whitney gives birth to their son, and she smiles in a way that is content and at peace. It is a look that we have not seen during the show.
It may just be the most singular episode in TV. It is bizarre. It is terrifying. You feel it in your stomach as the moments go by. It is hilarious. It is baffling. It would be the moment that people bounce off harder than they have bounced off anything before except that if you are bouncing off this show it happened episodes ago.
There is an obvious textual read of the ending. Asher’s speech at the end of the last episode, where he said that if she was happy and didn’t need him anymore, he’d be gone and she wouldn’t even have to say anything. The cross cutting between her giving birth and him shooting into the sky makes this read pretty loud.
We have never seen Whitney this happy. She looks right down the camera and she smiles in a way that seems genuinely happy. It is the pay off to Asher saying that what he wants is to see her when she is truly happy. It is the pay off to Dougie cursing Asher.
And it is a pretty ugly read if I’m honest. Sure, it’s right there in the text. Whitney has been going to great lengths, both in what we have seen and what we understand prior to the start of the show, to do things of import, of value. She strives for that, to give back, because she believes it will make her good and therefore happy.
But in this moment of childbirth, that all falls away and she is joy. As though the one thing that she truly had always been searching for was a child to bring her happiness. Which given her earlier ambivalence to children is quite the turnabout. Don’t get me wrong, children do bring joy and for many people are a source of great fulfilment but this clearly seems to be indicating that Whitney just needed a kid and then she would have been ecstatically happy. Gross.
The matetextual reading of this ending is that this is the core image that Fielder and Safdie had when devising the show. Supposedly the show is based on a real life incident where someone cursed Fielder but that doesn’t mean that was the driving visual for them. This reads like something that they both feared (it is actually a fairly common fear that manifests in dreamstates) that they wanted to work into the show and they were going to whether it entirely made sense or not.
Or, if we were to be less generous, it is indicative of them losing their way in this story. Just because the show is a monumental achievement for most of it, doesn’t mean that it is perfect and perhaps this is just a moment that in a vaccum is astounding but as part of the larger whole is a nonsequitr.
I also read a theory about how they are sitcom characters that find themselves in the real world and they entirely don’t understand that real world and that sitcom physics still apply to them. I like that one.
Belial/Daath
So where does that leave us?
I love this show. I am so pleased that it happened. All of it. Even if I think episode 9 is the end and episode 10 is a weird epilogue, it is a bizarre curio of a show that demands to be poured over and read extensively. It is about so much.
Yet for all that I love it and I know I will go back to it, I wonder if not all of it works all that well. It sets up a lot of themes and then doesn’t really interrogate them to a great extent. It pays off little, which is frustrating while also being part of the joy of the show. It holds its cards close, asks us to leans in and then whispers “micro penis” in our ear.
It is astoundingly funny, yet genuinely tense and heartrending. The fall out of the ectopic pregnancy is devastating. It is never not awkward.
The performances deserve just about all the awards during the next award season.
A friend mentioned the other day that with all the hype around the show, this could be the start of something new. I had thought the same thing about Twin Peaks The Return. Shows like this rarely are copied. It is too difficult and messy to try and copy these shows, and those that do invariably copy the wrong things. Shows like this demonstrate possible future paths for TV that we need to cherish in the moment because they are unlikely to ever be repeated.