A jump ahead in time finds the Siegels almost seeming happy, or at least faking it well enough. Then something absolutely bonkers happens.
Season 1, Episode 10: ‘Green Queen’
Certain kinds of surprises are de rigueur in television. The shock of when a character unexpectedly dies, for instance. It’s jolting, sure, but it’s nothing too out of the ordinary. Television writers do it all the time.
And then there is whatever just happened in the final episode of “The Curse.” Since watching this hour-plus of television, my mind has been reeling as I try to figure out what to say about it. Should I attempt to determine what actually occurred, even though I don’t think there’s an explanation? Should I just marvel at its weirdness? Should I try to unpack symbolically the intentions of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie? Sure, I guess, to all of it. But I also think the pure bizarreness is sort of the point.
All I know is that the final episode of this first season (but perhaps not the only season) of “The Curse” is one of the most bonkers, baffling, creative and I think brilliant episodes of television I’ve watched in a long time, the kind of thing that challenges what TV can do.
Because here’s what happens at the end of the episode: Asher is sucked into space. Not metaphorically. Literally. The last image of Asher we see is him frozen, floating above the Earth into the stars.
Before that, “Green Queen” begins like a normal episode (if “normal” is a word we can even use with this series). We’ve jumped ahead in time about eight or so months. Whitney is visibly pregnant while she and Asher go on “The Rachael Ray Show” to promote their series, smiling awkwardly on a video stream as Ray seems far more interested in the man making meatballs in her kitchen, Vincent Pastore (who played Big Pussy in “The Sopranos”) than in the couple onscreen.
Things seem to be going relatively well for the Siegels. Sure, maybe it’s hard to find “Green Queen” streaming on HGTV GO, but the network has ordered a second season, which will include their baby, an addition they think will draw attention. Asher and Whitney are doing a solid job at playacting as the happy couple over a Shabbat dinner when Asher tells her he has a “push present” for her, using the (gross, in my opinion) term for a mother-to-be gift.
He wants to give Abshir and his family the Questa Lane property for good. Their joy in the Siegels’ generosity will be a memory Whitney can cherish forever, Asher believes.
But when they arrive, Nala and Hani are not present, but some stranger is, and Abshir is terse. He isn’t groveling with gratitude. He just wants to know if they will pay the property taxes for the rest of the year. This is his chance to have the Siegels out of his life, and he takes it. You can see the disappointment on Asher’s and Whitney’s faces when they get back into the car. All they want is for their altruism to be rewarded by the acknowledgment that they are good people. Abshir refuses to give them that, and it’s crushing.
We get no tender full circle moment between Asher and Nala. Just a closed door. Does that unresolved tension explain what happens next? I truly don’t know.
Because one morning, Whitney turns off the alarm on her phone, and the camera pans upward to show Asher, not in bed next to her, but on the ceiling, his body facing her from above. It’s one of the most disorienting images I’ve recently encountered. But it’s not a dream sequence. Asher’s body has somehow become untethered by gravity.
The explanation he comes to is that the house has turned on him. They have installed a climate controlled room for the baby — because they fear their passive house could kill their newborn — which has perhaps unbalanced the pressure inside the structure, sending Asher skyward. But opening doors and windows doesn’t work, and even if Whitney tries to pull him down he keeps being pulled in the opposite direction by some unknown force.
What follows is several incredible, disturbing sequences of physical comedy from both Fielder and Stone as they try to solve this mysterious problem. Fielder moves his body like an alien, his limbs heavy as he tries to maneuver around the skylight and tasteful wood beams. He pants and struggles and stretches. Stone is reduced to crawling on the floor for fear she will get sucked up too.
In their most bravura moment, she hands him a vacuum that he then uses to try to retrieve her phone, which she left behind in the bedroom. As he struggles upside down, she starts going into contractions.
There’s something almost sweet about the way we see them truly working together. Whitney and Asher have been so deeply in conflict throughout the series that we haven’t seen much of this until now. As he tries to secure the phone with the vacuum, he starts counting to determine the length of her contractions. They really are a family now, bound together by these ridiculous circumstances.
But then that connection between them is shattered because Asher truly cannot come down. The doula (Elliot Berlin), who has arrived to help Whitney get to the hospital, tries to pull Asher off the underside of the portico. He is successful, but instead of returning to Earth, he winds up stuck in a nearby tree, clinging for dear life to a branch, where he stays until Dougie arrives to help. Whitney is whisked away for a C-section.
Having not seen his initial flight, neither Dougie nor the firefighters believe his concerns as he grows more and more frantic. Dougie thinks Asher is panicking about the baby, and he sees this as great material for the show. But when the firefighter saws off the tree branch, Asher is sucked into the sky, high above Española. As he floats up, Whitney’s baby is extracted from her abdomen, one Siegel replaced by a newer model.
Dougie is distraught, crying on the ground, realizing that his carelessness has lost him another person. Whitney, having given birth, smiles tenderly at her baby, seemingly unconcerned about Asher’s whereabouts. And Asher, well, Asher is gone past the clouds, his body frozen in space.
And what are we supposed to make of all of this? Are we supposed to take it literally? I think, on some level, yes: This is what happens in the context of this world we’ve been watching and its many ambiguities. It is also unmistakably surreal, and arguably mystical. Alice Coltrane’s “Jai Ramachandra,” which we also heard at the end of Episode 3, plays over the final minutes, the sound of her Sanskrit prayer accompanying these sad people.
“The Curse” has always played with the idea that maybe some level of magic is real, and there’s an argument to be made that Asher’s ultimate journey is the result of the hex Nala placed on him, his punishment for the indiscretion of snatching that $100 bill from her hand. But I think there’s something too pat about that explanation. I think we’re left instead with a question about the nature of both television and reality, themes that have been persistent preoccupations of Safdie’s and Fielder’s.
The final words of the episode are delivered not by our protagonists but by some of the onlookers. A man remarks: “What movie they filming? How did they do that?” A fellow lookie-loo explains, “That’s the guy from HGTV.”
Their exchange goes as follows:
“Huh, so it’s for TV?”
“I think so.”
“Huh.”
“Huh” is right. The questioner clearly believes — or at least finds it easier to believe — that Asher’s disappearance is just a bit of Hollywood magic. And in some ways it is. But if you look at this conversation in the context of what came before, it takes on a sadder bent.
Asher, Whitney and Dougie consistently tried to fudge the truth of their lives for the cameras in the name of good TV. Now their truth is stranger than anything they could manipulate, and just as easy to disregard.
Notes From Española
Given that it’s the 25th anniversary of “The Sopranos,” I’ve been thinking about that show a lot, so I was tickled to see Pastore turn up.
Cara quit art and was profiled in The New York Times. I’d like to see that write-up.
Whitney casually remarking, “I’d have to say it was a statement about the Holocaust or something” sent shivers down my spine.
So did “There’s a little me inside you” from Asher.
Safdie has said a second season is “not off the table,” but I can’t really imagine what a follow-up would look like.
I can’t wait to read a million post-mortems about how they accomplished the upside-down sequences. Did they build an upside-down version of the house?
Thank you for reading. It’s been a ride.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
