‘The Curse’ Finale Reveals The Pulsating Core of Deep Sadness At The Center of Nathan Fielder’s Oeuvre

In the nine episodes preceding the finale of The Curse, the A24 / Showtime collab has regularly flexed its surrealist muscle through a subplot concerning Nala (newcomer Hikmah Warsame, armed with a stare that could bore through metal), a young Somali girl who may or may not possess ESP. Even after she comes clean that a hex she put on her landlord Asher Siegel (co-creator Nathan Fielder) is just a TikTok prank, he holds onto an inkling that she can do things others can’t, validated by her ability to guess how many nails he’s hidden in his hand or make a gym class bully hurt herself during recess. Asher’s tormented by the difficulty to discern the difference between something true and a trick at his expense, the same needling tension that’s drawn viewers to and repelled them from Fielder’s conceptual playhouses Nathan For You and The Rehearsal in equal measure.

As he sweats the supernatural, the show stops to linger on traces of the banally bizarre: a performance art installation involving sliced cold cuts, multiple flashes of micropenis, funhouse distensions of faces reflected on the mirror-walled “passive homes” Asher and wife Whitney (Emma Stone) hope to push via their HGTV pilot Fliplanthropy. Fielder and co-creator Benny Safdie (also playing Dougie, medium-functioning alcoholic and unscrupulous producer of their show-within-the-show) shot in New Mexico for tax purposes, but they coax an organic eeriness from the arid expanses of desert flatland by scoring them with John Medeski’s sparse, sinuous synth lines. During a post-screening Q&A for the sixth and seventh episodes at Lincoln Center, Safdie spoke about how they used Alice Coltrane’s Sanskrit-language worship song “Jagadishwar” to mark moments of extra-human profundity, as if her untranslated words channel an immense force beyond our understanding.

Something’s going on in Española, and yet these whiffs of the uncanny couldn’t have prepared viewers for the full-on break from the laws of narrative and actual physics that comes halfway through the final hour. Just as everything’s finally happening for Asher and Whitney, their series set to premiere and their hard-conceived child coming any minute now, they awaken to find that the effects of gravity have inexplicably reversed themselves on Asher. The twist would scan as whimsy if not for the pragmatism with which the couple goes about trying to get him down, methodically eliminating a logical progression of attempted fixes. The concluding scenes isolate the main couple as Whitney heads to the hospital to deliver while Asher clings to a tree outside their house, a divergence that hints at the rationale behind a confounding make-or-break gambit. Fielder’s characters play their vulnerabilities close to their chest until they explode into view, and so does his latest work. At once the most open and inscrutable display of feeling in a career measuring how far a profoundly withdrawn man will go to bring the world into his bubble, the conspicuous symbolism translates a terrible fear of falling — whether out of love, or into the sky.

“Green Queen” drops a telling clue early on with a segment in which Asher and Whitney make a remote appearance on Rachel Ray’s talk show with guest Vincent Pastore, the actor best known as Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero of The Sopranos. Though he’s playing himself, his presence steers the mind toward memories of his series’ second-season finale “Funhouse,” which brought Buñuelian dream-logic short of going full Twin Peaks to the small screen. Feverish visions incited by food poisoning reveal to head honcho Tony that trusted lieutenant Big Pussy has gone rat and needs whacking, a bitter pill forced down Tony’s throat by his subconscious. Psychological self-confrontation likewise motivates Asher’s shift into this oneiric mode, wherein insecurities can take on unfamiliar shapes that soften them for acceptance. 

While the series offers critical commentary on documentary ethics and greenwashed real estate development, as a character piece, it focuses on the dissolution of Asher and Whitney’s union as they realize they’re moving (metaphorically, and then suddenly, quite literally) in different directions. An early glimpse of the cuckoldry roleplay comprising their sex life suggests one major fault line, that her position as dominant and his as submissive may not be purely for demeaning fun. The following episodes air the rest of their dirty laundry with excruciating discomfort, exposing her as a ruthless, exacting narcissist and him as a weak, ineffectual weirdo. She constantly humiliates Asher, and he receives it all like a test of his devotion. When she and Dougie recut Fliplanthropy to change the premise from “fun-loving couple makin’ it work” to “competent wife held back by her awkward, thoughtless boob of a husband” and retitle the project Green Queen, Asher sees the ultimate challenge, and pledges his undying commitment to her as if proving his strength.

The wedge issue driving them apart is Asher’s lack of people skills, an interpersonal ineptitude Whitney would rectify by sending him to a pathetic night class that teaches the terminally unfunny how to casually joke around. (Never great at reading a room, Asher winds up forcing a trainwreck one-liner about his smaller-than-average anatomy that causes others to voice their offense.) The problem boils down to a reluctant detachment that can’t be helped, the tragic flaw in Fielder’s creations heretofore sharing his name. In Nathan for You, he went to absurd extremes to help others, invariably revealed as a rigidly structured emotional exercise for his own benefit; for The Rehearsal, he hermetically sealed himself deeper in his mind, filling a soundstage or vacant field with social settings he can control down to the most minute detail. In either case, he wants to connect but doesn’t know how, and develops an elaborate internal framework to simulate the normalcy that comes naturally to everyone else. 

Romance in particular stymies him, an elaborate code of cues and intuitions he can’t parse. (We see this in the Fielder-produced How To with John Wilson as well, another portrait of a personality ensconced in his own ideas. In the pilot, he mentions losing a recent girlfriend for being incommunicative, then has a meaningful yet ephemeral interaction with a stranger at MTV Spring Break.) Up to this point, this tension has formed the basis of thumbscrew-level cringe comedy as well as a genuine pathos that moves to the fore in The Curse’s concluding minutes. After Whitney has seen herself through a frightening emergency C-section and the doctor asks her if she’d like to see her husband, the muted surprise in her answer of “sure” betrays that she’d forgotten he even exists in that moment. As she moves forward into a rich and full life, entering the most honest and intimate dynamic one human can have with another, Asher rises into low orbit with the speed of a reverse skydive. Up there, above everything, he can see all. He is also frozen solid and utterly alone. 

Fielder’s most ardent opponents charge him with a callous smarty-pants-ism, that he’s roped unsuspecting marks into his elaborate experiments and exploited them for his own condescending amusement. The Curse removes the unscripted variable from the equation, and reveals the core of grasping sadness that’s always been there. The melancholy close-ups of Asher gliding through the cosmos a lá the Starchild from 2001: A Space Odyssey sound out like a cry for help, readily mapped onto Fielder’s own experience getting a divorce from a children’s librarian one year after Comedy Central introduced him to America’s TV-watching public. Even so, any exposed wounds have been tucked away in a puzzle box already inviting a wide array of interpretations. It can be turned back into another cerebral gotcha, preempted by the final lines of dialogue — “So it’s for TV?” “I think so.” — muttered by onlookers at the scene of Asher’s ascent. If we want to search for a literal fan-theory-type explanation, that Asher really has been cursed by young Nala, this can be processed as mystical comeuppance. But the haunting voice of Alice Coltrane calls to somewhere deeper, somewhere farther inward as it sings the show out. The only real curses are the ones we cast on ourselves.  

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.