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Photo: Searchlight Pictures, SHOWTIME
Warning: Like, the biggest spoilers.
The Curse is probably Nathan Fielder’s most divisive work to date — as in, people are divided between frustration with the show and having the keen eye to recognize that it rules. Perhaps no moment in the show’s ten-episode run has emboldened both sides of this divide more than the series finale, which debuted today and defied audience expectations by taking a hard veer away from the show’s oftentimes verite style and flinging Asher (Fielder) into space like some kind of reverse Therese Belivet. But it’s not Asher’s trip past the Earth’s atmosphere that’s so shocking (we’ve seen characters go to space recently on The Morning Show, What We Do in the Shadows, and Interview With the Vampire). It’s all the business leading up to it.
Asher awakens one morning like a character in a Kafka story and finds himself untethered from gravity. He’s not just floating off the ground — he seems to be actively pulled upward, away from Earth. Meanwhile, his wife Whitney (Emma Stone) goes into labor, and the chaos that ensues is absurdist and funny, particularly the way Fielder traverses the ceilings of their home and clings to a tree limb like a lost cat. But it’s also visually impressive and acted in a way that’s improbably believable and, above all, genuinely scary and anxiety-inducing. Whitney gets to the hospital while Asher, coaxed out of the house by the birth doula, ends up clinging to a tree limb and relying on Benny Safdie’s Dougie (scary!) to call the fire department to get him down. They decide to saw the whole branch off but fail to adequately tether Asher to the fire truck, so he shoots off into the sky while Whitney gives birth to a baby boy, blissfully unaware of her husband’s fate. If this is the curse the series has been building up to, why does Whitney get away scot-free? As some brilliant Redditors have posited following the finale: She doesn’t. The fascinating theory posits that Whitney’s baby is Asher’s reincarnation; the finale intercuts between his death and her delivery because they are cosmically the same event. He’s the baby now.
In a post-episode discussion thread on the r/TheCurse sub-Reddit, user ramobara wrote, “Do you remember the snake necklace they gave the paid couple on their show? It was a snake which symbolizes rebirth. Maybe Asher was reborn as their newborn. The synchronous timing of it all makes sense. Also Ash said, ‘You have a little me in there!’” Other Redditors latched onto the theory and found more evidence. A few mention he dies upside down and in the fetal position, while the baby was born breech. “And they cut Whitney to deliver the baby at pretty much the same time they cut the branch Asher was on,” added user carbomerguar, drawing a connection between the C-section scalpel and the chainsaw cutting the “cord” to which Asher desperately clung. By this logic, their hermetically sealed, temperature-regulating house would be the womb.
A few users also found foreshadowing in all of Asher’s joking about being a baby and going “wah wah.” User northwesthonkey (lol) suggested Asher gifting the house to Abshir was the final act of self-actualization that allowed him to move on to his next life. All of this would mean that Whitney was cursed after all, having given birth to the husband whom part of her wanted to get far, far away from — an entity even clingier than Asher already was.
The reincarnation theory gets even spookier when you think about Stone’s other major role this year, as Bella Baxter in Poor Things. In that film, Stone plays a woman who was excised from her mother’s dead body as a still-alive fetus, the baby brain of which was cut out and implanted in its mother’s skull. Bella is her own mother and her own baby, like how Whitney’s baby is also its own father. Like Whitney, Bella’s mother was a wealthy, fundamentally unhappy woman married to a smothering man (although smothering in the near-opposite way from Asher). Like Whitney, Bella grows frustrated and bored with her partners and makes foolish, naïve attempts to fix societal injustices she knows little about. Bella’s a much more likable character than pretty much anyone on The Curse, but still, Emma Stone starring in two projects about ouroboros-style reincarnation-as-oneself is a weirdly specific trend. What could it mean? Are we all trapped in an endless simulation? Is whiteness an eternal prison? No clue, but props to Stone for finding such a cool metaphysical niche. She should play Jesus next.
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