For Its Finale, The Curse Ascends to Another Level in Expressing Absurdity and Sorrow

By Tara Bennett  |  January 16, 2024 | 12:13pm
Photo courtesy of Paramount Plus
Comedy Features The Curse
For Its Finale, The Curse Ascends to Another Level in Expressing Absurdity and Sorrow
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The absurdist ride that is Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse came to a close on Sunday with “Green Queen,” an episode that blissfully continued to confound its audiences to the bitter end. Watching Asher Siegel (Fielder) float into the stratosphere as an unmoored body inexorably rising towards the stars was, dare we say, almost magical? And perhaps the only earned moment of sympathy we have for Asher. This baffling occurrence is then tempered by the Siegels’ neighbors’ certainty that his ascension was just a stunt for their reality show. There’s the show’s thesis on a plate: We live in a world so oriented towards presenting the most successful, most enviable, and highly constructed versions of ourselves, that most of us can’t tell when something true and incredible is really happening in front of us. That, and maybe a curse, can become real if someone is so unhappy—i.e. Whitney (Emma Stone)—that they will it to happen. 

Much like the eight episodes that came before this one, The Curse’s finale is a melting pot of ideas and inclinations, a character study of insecure people who are desperate to sink their claws into something that is “important” and claim it as their own. But it’s also been a masterclass in comedy that is black as tar. The episode opens with a Hollywood insider’s look at the idiocy that comes with “selling the soap” on vapid chat shows where no one cares what you are promoting.  Months after the events of “Young Hearts,” the Siegels are virtual guests on what seems to be a zombie resurrected The Rachael Ray Show, to hawk their rechristened, and demoted to HGTVGo, series Green Queen. 

As they nervously wait to share on a national platform the show that has been the center of their universe for a year, Ray ignores the pair in favor of a meatball cooking segment that is painfully weird and horny. After watching this trainwreck of a cooking segment go on and on, the Siegels get maybe two minutes to talk, with Whitney taking point as a frozen-smiled Asher sits in silence. Were they successful? Who knows, but it’s a fitting reminder that the eco-initiative these two idiots have been obsessed about doesn’t even generate a ripple of care from the outside world.

But would the world, or even Whitney, care if Asher woke up from slumber on the interior ceiling of their hermetically sealed bedroom? The answer is a resounding…maybe? In a sequence that painfully pushes the limits of our patience, Asher and Whitney come to embrace that Asher is defying gravity with the urgency of a couple trying to clean a red wine stain from the carpet. Initially, it’s kind of hilarious to watch Asher thrash at the rafters, desperately trying to climb back in bed like he’s segwayed into a Jerry Lewis film. And it goes on and on, as Whitney goes into labor and has to be taken to the hospital by someone not defying physics. 

As neighbors gape in confusion and Dougie (Safdie) arrives thinking Asher is faking it. The stakes of the situation only really become harrowing as Asher desperately clings to their outside tree and begs the fire department to tie him to the tree and not make him release his arms from the trunk. So, they cut the bough he’s wrapped around and everyone watches him—not even in horror—just float away. Because of course he does. For a show that has always implied that Asher believes the dark forces evoked by young Nala (Hikmah Warsame) in her curse are true, this outrageous outcome is the payoff to that promise. 

But here is where I posit that Asher’s “Rocket Man” moment isn’t Nala’s manifestation, but Whitney’s. At the end of the last episode, when Asher hysterically appeals to Whitney that if he ever believed that she didn’t want him in her life, he would leave…his fate is pretty much the perfect scenario for a woman who isn’t able to convey anything sincerely to anybody. She has plenty of moments in this episode where she stares into the middle distance as Asher hovers terrestrially near her and it looks like she’s wishing herself into another existence. Maybe months of silently cursing Asher away from her pays off in this bizarre way. Hence, why she’s neither freaked out nor upset about losing Asher to the winds of New Mexico, because that’s all she wanted since she married him. Whitney’s content look post giving birth to their child, sans Asher in the delivery room, is both bleak and priceless, which is in keeping with this crazy show that hasn’t attempted to adhere to any norms in its storytelling. 

Even the camera that leaves the hospital and painstakingly captures the route back to the Seigel’s mirror house makes you wonder if the curse is now corporeal. The voyeuristic camera style of the entire series has implied an “other” observing the Siegels outside of their reality TV cameras. Perhaps there’s been a supernatural invocation, born out of the incredibly disrespected Indigenous spirits the Siegels have wronged in Española, that dealt Asher his fate. Will Whitney come home to her own reckoning, or will the cameras just capture the flawless facade she’s perfected in selling to everyone around her? It’s a bit chilling to ponder, but that unexplained, lingering mystery is part of the ludicrous appeal of what Fielder, Safdie, and Stone have wrought with their funhouse take on gentrification by horrible people. 

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

 
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