The link between ‘The Curse’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Arriving four months late, the Emmys came and went in the midst of awards season, handing out plaudits to predictable winners, including The Bear and Succession, airing just one day after one of TV’s most extraordinary finales left audiences open-mouthed. Devised by the awkward jester Nathan Fielder and filmmaker Benny Safdie, The Curse went from being a pin-point piss-take on contemporary reality television to a self-reflective study on existentialism.
Set in the barren flats of Española, New Mexico, The Curse sees the married couple, ambitious TV presenters, and retail ‘experts’ Asher and Whitney try to imprint their environmentally-conscious ‘passive home’ onto the largely unwilling residents. Believing that their efforts are entirely righteous, the pair go about changing the area to their will, encouraging residents to buy into their homes and frequent their sustainable coffee shops and clothing stores.
It’s the dream of contemporary capitalism crumbling before your very eyes, with the insecure Asher bending to the will of his wife and of contemporary society’s demands and Whitney embodying the kind of smiley TV presenter that has been churned out of a studio board meeting with nothing but self-interest going on behind her eyes. Yet, their crusade is complicated by their own fractious egos, with Asher being ‘cursed’ by a young girl copying a TikTok trend.
Such creates a swirling storm of distrust between everyone Asher comes into contact with, including his wife, who begins to see him as a ball and chain restricting her from properly thriving in her life and career, with this only changing once he essentially sacrifices himself to her: “If you didn’t want to be with me and I actually truly felt that I’d be gone, you wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it, and I would disappear”. This very much comes true in the finale, when Whitney’s newborn baby provides all the love that she was previously getting from Asher, sending him flying into the sky, no longer of use to his wife and the world.
Many consider this baffling final note to be a victory for Whitney, with the show showing her final moments cradling her child with a smile, caring little for her husband, whom she previously left clutching to the branch of a tree with his life in the balance. Yet, while this certainly may be the case, it is also true that this ending is liberating for Asher – finally, he is free of the anxieties and social pressures that made his life such a tense tinder box of emotion, especially if you consider the finale to be entirely metaphorical.
His final scene in the show sees him float effortlessly away from the world and into the stratosphere, where, finally at peace, he has an opportunity to be reborn and redefined in his own image. Indeed, very little can be compared to the remarkable finale of The Curse, yet the concluding shots of Asher cradling his own body in space certainly recall the image of the star child seen during the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This ending was, for Kubrick, also entirely metaphorical, intended to be representative of humanity’s rebirth into a new era of life rather than to be taken at face value alone. As Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis in regard to the fate of his protagonist at the end of his enigmatic 1968 movie: “He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny”.
Poking fun at the very TV and movie industry it was partaking in, deconstructing how shows like Rachael Ray operate, as seen in the finale, as well as in its very marketing material, which took joy at highlighting the absurdity of the new Sydney Sweeney movie Anyone But You, riffing off and pastiching the history of the industry is built into the DNA of the show.
Fielder also displayed his fondness for this in the opening episode of 2022’s The Rehearsal, comparing his efforts of artificial creation to that of Willy Wonka and his world of ‘True Imagination’. So, the 2001 reference works two-fold, as a genuine expression of metaphorical rebirth for Asher and as one final punchline for a show that never ceased to pay tribute to the fakery and self-importance of contemporary culture.