‘The Curse’: The greatest TV finale that no one saw
Tucked away in the corner of Paramount+, fighting for elbow room alongside Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and the latest, wrinkled series of Geordie Shore, lies one of the most curious oddities to hit contemporary TV in quite some time, a series of tumultuous panic and existential anxiety. In equal parts a sharp satire and a gut-punching tragedy, The Curse is one of the most inexplicably melancholy pieces of entertainment released this side of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Created by the awkward comedian Nathan Fielder and the celebrated director Benny Safide, who previously cut his teeth with the excitedly intense 2019 film Uncut Gems, The Curse takes the very best filmmaking talent and creates a timely reflective drama that makes us weep and laugh in equal measure. Trailing the coat-tails of Whitney, a dogged egocentric TV presenter played with disturbing ease by Emma Stone, and her husband Asher, a pathetic template of a man who can barely function as a human being, the show follows the pair’s efforts to make a gentrified-focused house-flipping show.
Despite being presented in the fictional show ‘Flipantropy’ as figures worthy of equal respect, it soon becomes clear that this dream is Whitney’s and hers alone. Backstabbing and degrading her husband any chance she gets, Whitney is the hero of her own story, while Asher is quite happy to be the punching bag, or, as it’s later stated, the ‘jester’ to Whitney’s ‘queen’.
Make no mistake, Asher isn’t a victim in all of this, possessing no backbone at all while being shaped and formed by everyone around him, allowing himself to be ridiculed into whatever prop of punchline people want him to be. Controlled by Whitney, his source of infatuation, his producer Dougie (played by Safdie), and even a young girl he is supposedly ‘cursed’ by, despite her insisting it’s merely a silly TikTok trend.
As desperately insecure in his own body as he is in his own home, Asher defines his life through Whitney, with his unhinged rant in the penultimate episode well summarising this state of mind: “I won’t be guessing, because I know you baby. If you didn’t want to be with me and I actually truly felt that I’d be gone, you wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it, and I would disappear”.
The finale takes place about one year after this explosive argument. Whitney is pregnant, and Asher’s love for her will soon be superfluous. So, Asher, indeed, becomes surplus to requirements and ceases to be. Yet, he doesn’t simply keel over and die; The Curse proves to be just as fiendish and exploitative as the very TV industry it’s exploiting, making Asher its final punchline, plucking him from Earth itself as if he was a figurine in a board game.
Seemingly so fed up with his existence, gravity itself fails on Asher, with the protagonist first being unable to ground himself from the ceiling of his house before flying out the door and, finally, through the sky and into the stratosphere. Scored largely by the haunting vocals of Alice Coltrane’s ‘Jagadishwar’, the moment is emotionally bewildering, culminating all the comedy, surrealism and tragedy into one moment of eerie Kafkaesque horror.
So often lampooning contemporary life’s fakery and social performance, the finale offered a moment of silent solitude in which the show stripped away its layers and exposed the fragility of the human beneath the surface. It’s an ending that offers peace and liberty for Asher, who, indeed, didn’t feel all that comfortable on earth, but it also provides freedom for Whitney, who is no longer lumbered with this strange caricature of a husband.
Summarising such a baffling conclusion is no easy feat, and the duo behind the show aren’t interested in giving you the answers either, with the titular ‘Curse’ that has simmered beneath the surface of the series technically coming true in the end. After all, Dougie was the last person to set a curse, with his last word to Asher being “fly”.
Rather than take it entirely at face value, it makes a little more sense to see the weightless curse as one last act of cinematic performance for the show itself, serving instead as the perfect metaphor for Asher’s new life as a father who will inevitably become estranged from his wife who now has a new being to infatuate over her. Whitney is his life, as is the show he has plunged so much time and money into; without them, he simply ceases to exist.
How nice then that for one moment before his ‘demise’, he is at peace, finally removed from the discomfort of life as he floats in space like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 baby, a symbol of a great new beginning for God’s lonely, anxious 21st century man.
