There’s been much said about the finale to Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s black comedy send up to liberal hypocrasy, The Curse. Understandably, there’s much confusion about the supernatural elements of the finale, what it was trying to say, and how it connected to the rest of the show’s story. The story followed a dysfunctional married couple played by Fielder and Emma Stone (doing maybe her best ever work) through the work of getting their eco-conscious reality show about buying and flipping property on the air, the contradictions of such a premise, and how the couple’s venear of liberalism clashed relentlessly with the people around them, creating a series of very awkward, very revealing conversations and encounters.

Stone plays Whitney Siegel, the scion of ruthless slumlords, who tries to reinvent her image through making a liberal reality show (first called Fliplanthropy, then eventually, Green Queen). Ultimately, Whitney turns out to be just as amoral and ruthless as her parents, except perhaps even worse due to her willingness to lie to herself about who she really is. Fielder plays Asher Siegel, who only really needs one word to describe him: Pathetic. He’s a socially awkward, former tech guru at a casino, who fully commits himself to maintaining Whitney’s self-delusion while doing his best to fit into the fraudulent image she has of herself and them as a couple. Still, the main thing to know about him is that he’s a pathetic cuck with a micro-penis. It sounds harsh, but understanding that he’s a pathetic nothing of a man is key to understanding this show’s core themes and how they tie into the finale. His father in-law bluntly tells him at the beginning of the season, that despite being a shy guy with a small dick, he can still be attractive as long as he’s confident and funny (he says this speaking from experience). It’s a base scene, that I’m sure crosses some lines about body positivity, but the underlying point is about self-respect. Asher’s tragic flaw is that he lacks self-respect, and this defines his fate. The show isn’t exactly subtle about it either between the recurring mention of his tiny penis and the his dramatic cuckold fetish.

All season long, we see him compromise his own interests and feelings for the sake of his narcissitic wife. Having a reality show, being a “charitable” person, even pretending to be one; none of that comes naturally to him. For the sake of Whitney and her delusions, he compromises his friendships, and antagonizes strangers and colleagues in weird faux-machismo outbursts that shock of shocks, Whitney finds pathetic anyway. If Asher was really living his best life, he’d be coming up with technologically innovative ways to scam casino players with his co-worker buddies and flipping properties on the cheap. It’s not “good”, but in the universe of the show, it’s at least respectable because then Asher would be doing what comes naturally to him, and not contorting himself to fit the mold of a woman that hates him.

Whitney uses her money to bulldoze several people throughout the season into compromising themselves for the sake of reinforcing her delusional and narcissistic self-image as an artist and a philanthropist, with Asher pathetically contributing to that every way he can. It all comes to a head in the penultimate episode when Whitney, growing tired of her loser husband, planned to use the show as a vehicle for divorcing him on air in dramatic fashion and start a new “chapter” for herself. The network rejects this angle, seeing their marriage as the main source of fun, relatable, dramatic tension they could in their show. Still, Whitney shows this cut footage of her castigating him and all but saying she wants to dump him and move on with a series of cruelly edited clips of their interactions. Asher’s response to this is what seals his fate. A scene like this would typically be a breaking point for most protagonists, but Asher is actually so pathetic, he responds by compromising himself further and agreeing with her warped vision of their marriage, vowing to become nothing but a perfect expression of her whims and promising to disappear if he ever so much as displease her. It was harrowing to watch, and Whitney, craving nothing more than someone that will feed her bottomless appetite for adulation and approval, actually reciprocates his feelings.

In the final episode of The Curse, Asher flies into space and dies in a horrifying sequence in which gravity is inexplicably reverses for him. The show fully crosses the threshold into the supernatural here, and the question on everyone’s mind is “Why?”. The show hinted at supernatural elements before, with the titular curse being placed on Asher in the first episode by a little Somali girl. It’s also brought up again when Dougie, an old frenemy of Asher’s and the show’s producer, places a curse on Asher towards the end of the series after a particularily insensitive comment on Asher’s part. More insight is provided from the Somali girl’s father, played by Oscar winner Barkhad Abdi, when he warns him that the belief in curses is what gives them their power. The curse that sends Asher into space didn’t come from the Somali girl, Dougie, or his own self-loathing, it came from Whitney and his deep atunement to her needs. In the final episode, in one last display of his impotence, Asher magnanimously gifts Abdi’s character a fully paid off home to impress Whitney. Watching their faces process the total lack of gratitude or emotion engendered by this gesture was almost as brutal as Asher’s terrifying death scene.

In an emotional sense, Asher being cast out into the cosmos is a logical conclusion to everything. This is a show about self-perceptions and their consequences, and Asher doesn’t respect himself. He’s a literal small-dicked wannabe cuckold that can’t please his wife, and who promised to disappear if he ever displeased her. The titular curse of the show ended up being the effects Asher’s marriage to Whitney started having on Asher. He has shrunk, debased, and destroyed himself on behalf of a woman that doesn’t like or respect him, and has given him many opportunities to move on from her. At every turn Asher just shrunk himself more and more into a faker and more grotesque version of himself, until he is eventually flung into space, spouting more faux-macho utterances into a literal void, winding up dead and frozen and curled into a fetal position, just like the baby Whitney gives birth to. One of the very last shots of the show is a close up of the blissfully smiling face of Whitney as she hears the nurses still can’t find her husband. Her wish, or her curse, finally came true.