There’s been much said about the finale to Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s black comedy send-up of liberal hypocrisy, The Curse. Understandably, there’s plenty of 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 narrative follows a dysfunctional married couple played by Fielder and Emma Stone (doing perhaps her best work to date) as they attempt to get their eco-conscious reality show about buying and flipping property on the air. It exposes the contradictions of such a premise and highlights how the couple’s veneer of liberalism clashes relentlessly with the people around them, creating a series of deeply awkward, highly revealing encounters.

Stone plays Whitney Siegel, the scion of ruthless slumlords, who tries to reinvent her image by creating 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 needs one word to describe him: spineless. He’s a socially awkward former casino tech guru who fully commits himself to maintaining Whitney’s self-delusion while doing his best to fit into the fraudulent image she has crafted of them as a couple. Still, the primary takeaway about Asher is that he’s a pitiable cuckold with a micro-penis. It sounds harsh, but understanding that he is a meek nothing of a man is key to grasping the 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 penis, he can still be attractive as long as he’s confident and funny. It’s a coarse scene that surely crosses some lines regarding body positivity, but the underlying point is about self-respect. Asher’s tragic flaw is his total lack of self-respect, which ultimately defines his fate. The show isn’t subtle about it either, balancing recurring references to his anatomy with his overt cuckold fetish.

All season long, we see him compromise his own interests and feelings for the sake of his narcissistic wife. Starring in a reality show, being a “charitable” person—even pretending to be one—does not come naturally to him. For Whitney and her delusions, he sacrifices his friendships and antagonizes strangers and colleagues in weird faux-machismo outbursts that, shock of shocks, Whitney finds pathetic anyway. If Asher were truly living his best life, he’d be coming up with innovative technological ways to scam casino players alongside his co-workers and flipping cheap properties. It’s not “good,” but in the universe of the show, it is at least honest. Asher would be doing what comes naturally rather than contorting himself to fit the mold of a woman who despises him.

Whitney uses her money throughout the season to bulldoze people into compromising themselves to reinforce her narcissistic image as an artist and philanthropist, with Asher willingly contributing in every way he can. It all comes to a head in the penultimate episode when Whitney, growing tired of her husband, plans to use the show as a vehicle to divorce him on air in dramatic fashion and start a new “chapter.” The network rejects this angle, viewing their marriage as the main source of relatable, dramatic tension for the series. Undeterred, Whitney shows cut footage of herself castigating him, featuring a series of cruelly edited clips where she all but says she wants to dump him. Asher’s response is what seals his fate. A scene like this would typically be a breaking point for most protagonists, but Asher reacts by lowering himself further. He agrees with her warped vision of their marriage, vows to become nothing more than an expression of her whims, and promises to disappear if he ever so much as displeased her. It is harrowing to watch, and Whitney—craving nothing more than someone to feed her bottomless appetite for adulation—reciprocates his sentiments.

In the final episode of The Curse, Asher flies into space and dies in a horrifying sequence where gravity inexplicably reverses for him. The show fully crosses the threshold into the supernatural here, leaving viewers to ask why. The series had hinted at supernatural elements before, starting with the titular curse placed on Asher in the first episode by a young Somali girl. It is brought up again when Dougie, an old frenemy and the show’s producer, curses Asher toward the end of the series following a particularly insensitive comment. More insight is provided by the Somali girl’s father, played by Oscar winner Barkhad Abdi, when he warns Asher that a belief in curses is what gives them power. Yet the curse that sends Asher into space didn’t come from the Somali girl, Dougie, or even his own self-loathing; it stemmed from Whitney and his deep attunement to her desires. In the finale, 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 is 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 the story. This is a show about self-perception and its consequences, and Asher does not respect himself. He is a literal small-dicked wannabe cuckold who cannot satisfy his wife and who explicitly promised to disappear if he ever displeased her. The true curse of the show ends up being the physical effect Asher’s marriage to Whitney exerts upon him. He has debased and destroyed himself on behalf of a woman who does not like or respect him and who offered him numerous opportunities to walk away. At every turn, Asher diminishes himself into a fake, grotesque version of a man until he is eventually flung into space—spouting faux-macho utterances into a literal void—where he ends up dead, frozen, and curled into a fetal position just like the baby Whitney gives birth to. One of the final shots of the series is a close-up of Whitney’s blissfully smiling face as she hears the nurses say they still can’t find her husband. Her wish—or her curse—finally came true.