Are we doomed or is deliverance possible??
Grappling with The Curse and its incredible finale
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— Jonah & Erin
Blackbird Spyplane — unparalleled when it comes to masterpiece sletter-craft, back with you once again.
And today we’ve got a sletter that is masterpiece-themed and then some. Because a TV series that stands not merely as one of the ~5 greatest televisual achievements of all time, but as one of the most thoroughly SPYPLANED-OUT artworks in human history, just came to an end…
O yes! We’re talking about The Curse, the brilliant and bizarre 10-episode comedy-drama-satire(-horror-autofiction-fantasy??) series from Spyfriend Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. They star in it alongside Emma Stone, who is doing “Foremost Screen Talent of a Generation”-level work between this and Poor Things.
Last Fall, when I (Jonah) bumped into Nathan in NYC, he kindly invited me to the show’s premiere, where they screened the first 3 episodes during the New York Film Festival — the first TV series the festival has ever featured, because this s**t a movie fr — at Lincoln Center. I wrote a bit about that night in our October New York report, here, and this is what I said:
As far as The Curse, it’s brilliant! Very funny, very dark, satirical, raw, poetic and sad in a complex tonal combination I’ve never seen before… for his part, Nathan told me he’s just been calling the show “a drama.”
The show struck me as a spiritual cousin not just of The Rehearsal and Uncut Gems but also of George Saunders’s surreal, funny, tragic fiction circa Pastoralia, and Danny McBride & Jody Hill’s early, pitch-black comedies about selfish, sad, damaged people trying to get theirs in late-empire-era America.
I can’t say for sure until I’ve seen the remaining 7 episodes, but I’m wondering if The Curse might wind up my favorite “how did this get on TV??” series since Eastbound & Down — with a woozier narrative rhythm, a compelling ambient strangeness, and a sense of lonesome creepiness dialed way up…
Not only did the full series not disappoint, it got better and deeper with each episode, culminating this past Friday with a wild finale, directed by Nathan himself, that it’s not hyperbolic to describe as attempting & achieving things that no TV show ever has before.
Here at BBSP we often talk about striving for the blessed, and doing your d*mnedest to give the cursed a miss… Trying to locate the potential for love, beauty, meaning and transcendence within an increasingly diseased culture, where we’re meant to believe that buying and selling, inventing increasingly convoluted ways to get over on others and trying to consume your way out of any guilt you feel about this, are the most important, rewarding, “empowering” things you can do…
And here came The Curse, an idiosyncratic and assured show from some of our favorite artists working, whose main theme is the CURSED and corrosive effect of our sick culture on the soul. It’s a show where real-estate schemes collide with micropenises … where inane HGTV pilots collide with indigenous land rights … It’s about social-media fakery and the inability to tell the real from the staged, even on the part of the people doing the staging … About the repackaging of the climate crisis into a consumer category…
Also it’s about Benny Safdie looking kind of fire rocking Ed Hardy jawns with the ill Scott Stapp perm (??) and Nathan Fielder rapping Dead Prez !
We are betting that the percentage of Spyfriends who have seen this show, and who f**ked with it heavy, is high. So I wanna GRAPPLE with the implications of the show’s finale, which Erin and I watched last November and found so funny and haunting that we promptly re-watched it the next night. I just watched it a third time on Sunday, and its profound, poetic, disturbing grip on me remained tight…
Is this a show about how we are all doomed, or does it leave open the possibility — however dim, however slim, however qualified — of DELIVERANCE??
If you haven’t seen The Curse, see that s**t — but you might wanna return to this post after you’ve gotten through the finale, because fair warning, ⚠️⚠️ enormous plot details are about to be discussed. ⚠️⚠️
In trying to make sense of the finale in all its KNOTTY & NIGHTMARISH POETRY, I focus on 3 moments:
I. Meatballs in the morning
The episode kicks off with Asher & Whitney as hostages in a prison of their own making. They’re guests on Rachael Ray, making a promo appearance for their home-flipping show. Their images are suspended on an enormous flatscreen at the back of Ray’s TV kitchen set, where they remain awkwardly stuck and largely ignored for what feels like an eternity, forced to hold big fake smiles on their faces and parry a few bored~skeptical questions from Ray as a strange and insipid cooking segment featuring The Sopranos’s Vincent Pastore unfolds in front of them…
The upshot is very dark & very funny: This is, in effect, what everything these two did in the previous nine episodes got them… This is the payoff all the abjection, betrayal and cruelty was for!
When we finally cut away from the Rachael Ray segment and see the couple sitting stock-still in front of the remote-team camerawoman, holding the same fake smiles in their Española “Passive House,” it’s clear that the place has fully become its own kind of prison, too… an inescapable funhouse-mirror reflection of their twisted souls… a physical representation of their grody “compassionate gentrification” plot, of their airless, loveless, relationship, and of the way they (badly) perform happy, principled versions of themselves for the cameras and for each other…
What’s new is that 1. Their show got bumped down to “HGTV Go” and 2. there’s about to be another Siegel hostage in the prison, because Whitney is pregnant. Which leads us to…
II. The house on Cuesta Lane
This is the episode’s most pivotal sequence, from an “ultimate moral accounting” standpoint, and it’s written & played very ambiguously.
Asher decides to give Abshir ownership of the house he’s been living in, no strings attached, as a “push present” to Whitney, i.e., Abshir gets the place and Whitney gets “the look on Abshir’s face.”
I love that, in the event, Abshir is not grateful at all, in fact he’s mad rude about it, maybe because he’s sick of these two, which would be reasonable, and maybe because, rather than the fetish version of him that Asher and Whitney have created, he’s kind of an a**hole !? (And up to some shady-seeming s**t with a weird bearded dude we’ve never seen before 🤣.)
So yes, the house is not a purely selfless gift. Asher wants something out of it, and as such he is “instrumentalizing” his act of generosity, and that is cemented by the fact that he secretly films the moment.
AND YET giving Abshir the cribbo is still an immense act of generosity, isn’t it?? All of us know what it feels like to behave generously while “wanting something out of it,” even just a little bit, e.g., wanting to be seen as a good person. That’s how a ton of good deeds happen! And so, whatever other motivations are in the mix for Asher, he unequivocally performs a MAJOR MITZVAH here — one that would have been unimaginable earlier in the season. He definitely remains a stunted, calculating, insecure dude, but just because there are social incentives to doing something kind doesn’t nullify the kindness outright…
Or, does it, in this case? Are we actually seeing kindvibed growth and some partial moral breakthrough in Asher? Or is this just a continuation of the same fundamentally self-serving bogus smoke & mirrors theatrical lib-guilt assuaging we’ve seen over & over since episode 1, when he & Whitney “gave” the local dude the job at the coffee shop, or when he “gave” Nala the $100 bill in the parking lot?
How you answer that question is crucial, I think, to how you understand everything that comes next…
III. I might need the crevice attachment
Here is my read on the episode’s final half, where Asher falls, first up to the ceiling, then up into a tree, then up into the sky and finally into space: It is an incredibly harrowing sequence where tremendous physical comedy converges with tremendous forces of metaphysical dread — and it is a clear metaphorical depiction of rebirth.
Asher refers to himself as Whitney’s baby throughout the series. He’s got a baby-size d*ck. Fussing over her pregnant belly, he tells her “there’s a little me inside of you” shortly before everything goes crazy. It’s a doula who pulls him out of the house, and from that moment forward there are constant parallels between Whitney’s experience of labor and Asher’s ascent… The baby’s in breech, and that’s the same position Asher flies upward in…. The doctors cut into her belly, performing an emergency C-section, at the same time the firefighter chainsaws the branch of the tree he’s clinging to… In Asher’s final conscious moments — before his body goes inert in the fetal position — he looks upward over his shoulder at a warm glow and coos in awe as it bathes his face…
At that point, I see two interpretations available: one cursed and one partially possibly blessed.
CURSED MODE: These characters are so f**ked up and wack as to be infinitely trapped. They’re such karmic bad actors that they’re doomed to trace the same abject, conniving, petty, selfish and miserable loops endlessly. Not just in this life but in the next life too. As such, Asher is reincarnated / transubstantiated from a space child on some 2001 s**t into a little baby-d*cked demon growing inside Whitney, on some Rosemary’s Baby s**t. She is doomed to raise him.
The point being that is that there is no escape from yourself nor the person you’re shackled to, at least not for these two. You can read the following exchange with that in mind, right before Whitney leaves for the hospital:
Whitney: “Ash, you need to bring the go bag. It’s in your trunk. You’re still coming, right?”
Asher: “I swear to God I’ll be there. You’re not getting rid of me that easy.”
POSSIBLY PARTIALLY BLESSED MODE: But what if Asher is getting metaphorically “delivered” in the sense of deliverance, baby ??
What if some universal force is rapturing him out of the house ~ womb ~ prison, up into that warm welcoming light?? This process is violent and horrifying to him, and yet we can understand it as, on some level, the cosmic reward for his newfound generosity and shift toward selflessness, as demonstrated with the Cuesta Lane house gift.
I’m not talking about an unalloyed “happy ending,” to be clear… Maybe Asher is obliterated at the end of the fall, and that’s his gift and curse in one: Nonexistence. (You could say that Howie receives a similar curse-gift at the very end of Uncut Gems). Maybe he’s reincarnated as a better version of himself. Maybe he is freed and leaves Dougie and Whitney behind, the two of them still in denial about the harm they’ve done, and still do, to others — although Dougie, in tears in the driveway, seems on the precipice of his own breakthrough. So maybe all 3 characters end the series not doomed but perched on precipices of deliverance of their own….??
In my conversations about the show over the past few days with Erin and friends, we’ve talked about Karmic Cycles — especially since the finale closes with Alice Coltrane’s gorgeous, aching, “Jai Rama Chandra”1 … We’ve talked about reincarnation and Tibetan “sky burials” and, given the show’s setting, about Native North American sky-burial rituals, where a body is placed up high in a tree…
I’ve thought about the Native North American creation myth of the Sky Woman, in which our universe itself is born when “a pregnant sky woman drops through a hole created by an uprooted tree and begins to fall for what seems like eternity.”
With all that in mind, am I delusional in thinking the deliverance interpretation holds water?
Some friends of mine insist that the doom interpretation is the only one borne out by everything we’ve seen…. That none of these characters has done anything to deserve the kind of deliverance that I think the finale might be dangling as a possibility.
This much is clear: I have never seen a show like this, and I’ve never seen a show end in a way that’s simultaneously so unsettling and so satisfying — not even The Sopranos, whose own ambiguous finale this finale nods to, via Pastore.
People like to lie on Twitter and say “I can’t stop thinking about this” all the time, but I truly have not stopped thinking about The Curse since I watched the screeners back in November. It taps into something powerful, profound, funny and horrible about life right now. I take solace in the fact that it made it to TV, which is — there’s no other word for it — a blessing.
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I also gotta shout out the music, composed by John Medeski and produced by Spyfriend Oneohtrix Point Never, which is as crucial and multivalent a “performer” as any of the actors. Bad musical scores tell you what you’re supposed to be feeling, whereas this one does the exact opposite, scrambling & complexifying your emotional reaction to what’s happening, all while sounding mad cool & dope in the process.
Nice, Jonah. This is easily the best summary I've read on the finale. FWIW, I'm Team Doom. And they're both cursed, I think; Asher to obliteration and Whitney to a lifetime with another Asher. Hell, maybe everyone and everything that Asher and Whitney touch is cursed. Even Cara has to suck up a friendly relationship with Whitney for money.
Now, does anyone have any theories for what was up with Dougie waking up in the car and Abshir's eerie visit to the chiro?
I think the woman from the still at the top of the 'sletter is in the final scene where the guy asks "is it for TV?" The scene where she's first shown watching television before breaking the 4th wall and staring directly into the camera was one of the more unsettling moments of the show for me, like I was being made complicit in the voyeurism that's a defining quality of the show (in both its characters and camerawork). Not sure what to make of her inclusion in the final scene. Some sort of restoration of the balance between the watcher and the watched? A reversal of those roles? Anyway, great show worthy of a second viewing.