(NOTE: Many spoilers from The Curse follow.)
The final episode of The Curse opens a few months after Asher and Whitney’s relationship exploded and Asher vowed to transform. Their marriage limps forward: Whitney is now pregnant. Over many episodes their reality TV show becomes increasingly curated and performative until even their marriage is a performance.
There is increasingly less space for Asher in their HGTV utopia. The show’s focus groups found him repellent and he became even more tragically awkward after taking a corporate comedy class. Big dick energy is something Asher did not possess. As Whitney became conscious of how the world viewed her husband, she began to seal him out of the story, switching the title of the show to Green Queen and weaving a narrative of marital issues - a spell that comes true.
Through the show, Whitney and Asher want the world to “see who they really are,” constructing flat characters around their idealized selves.
Whitney tries to divorce her public image from the reputation of her father, a slumlord who preys on poor immigrant families. His last name is Rhodes, evoking Rhodesian infamy. When he first appears on screen, he’s puttering around his hippie kitchen in a rainbow silk Uzbek kaftan. Whitney wants to project a purified version of herself, using the Native American artist Cara as a cover for her privilege. By the last episode, we know that Whitney is not any better than her father. She’s been wearing Cara like a silk kaftan.
Meanwhile, Asher hammers himself into the square hole of Whitney’s vision, but he is petty, secretive, and a bad actor. Perhaps the only thing that keeps them together is his willingness to be dominated.
By the last episode, we know that the marriage is over. Asher plays the role he is expected to play, giving the rental house away to their tenant Abshir as a gift, but Whitney’s reaction shows that she is emotionally checked out and just as repulsed by Asher as the focus groups. Whitney isn’t in love with Asher - she’s just trying to be a good person.
In Franz Kafka’s “Bucket Rider,” it’s winter and the narrator’s coal bucket is so light it can levitate. He squats inside the coal bucket and rides it like a steed to the house of the coal dealer, which is so well-heated with premium coal that warmth gushes from the open door.
His pleas don’t quite reach the compassionate ear of the coal dealer. Instead, the coal dealer’s wife, Frau Coaldealer, comes to the street to meet him.
Maybe the worst moments of our lives always seem unreal, like a nightmare we might wake up from at any moment. But the nightmare keeps unfolding and its consequences are palpable and permanent.
The final episode of The Curse rapidly accelerates from realism to Kafka. Asher wakes up on the bedroom ceiling with the sensation that he is “falling up.” It’s a new day in a new world and we learn the new rules along with him. Is there an air pressure control issue in the passive home? Is it limited to the bedroom, to the house itself? Whitney crawls on the floor to avoid getting sucked upward, but this gravity issue is limited to Asher. When he drags himself through the front door, he clings to the awning to avoid being ejected into the atmosphere. When he leaves the safety of the awning, he is propelled into the branches of a tree.
This shift opens up possibilities that were not previously available. The characters might have otherwise remained comfortably imprisoned in their marriage, but now they are jarred into behaving in truly authentic ways.
Realism is claustrophobic. As soon as we decide what is and is not possible, most of the doors close around us. How many people spend their whole lives operating within those narrow confines? Which miserable person in your life has tried to define the “real world” for you?
When you leave the safety of the real, the worst becomes possible. Asher is cut from the safety of his tree and careens into the sky.
“Bucket Rider” concludes with a ripple of Frau Coaldealer’s apron, which creates a gust of wind that carries the narrator and his bucket away:
“And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost for ever.”
Perhaps rejection doesn’t literally waft us into the ice mountains, but that’s sure what it feels like. We long for the comfort of our familiar but unfulfilling lives when the alternative is being alone.
Asher also ascends into the ice mountains and in the final scene is frozen in space, curled into a fetal position.
The next day I opened a newsletter about the Hanged Man tarot card from one of my herbalism teachers, Kathryn Solie. She wrote:
“It is as though we would like to re-enter our mother’s womb and hide there forever, so that we could avoid being born. When we are afraid of waking up and afraid of experiencing our own fear, we create a cocoon to shield ourselves from the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. We prefer to hide in our personal jungles and caves. When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thought, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us. We are so afraid of our own fear that we deaden our hearts.”
For a moment, I thought she was writing about the final episode of The Curse, but it turned out to be a quote attributed to Chogyam Trungpa from the book Shambala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.
I thought about Asher clinging to the womb of the passive home where he is no longer welcome. When the Jewish doula Moses tries to pry him out, he clings to the awning, then to the tree branch. Meanwhile, Whitney heads to the hospital to deliver their baby, who is also upside down. The rescue team severing the branch that keeps Asher tethered to the Earth is juxtaposed with the incision in Whitney’s belly. Maybe Asher’s death is really a rebirth.
If you look at a placenta, you will see the shape of a tree embossed on its surface. The placenta mediates the flow of nutrients and protects the fetus from pathogens. Imagine the horror of being born, of losing the comfort of your personal cave. Imagine the tragedy of being severed from the only source of nutrition and protection you’ve ever experienced. Even if you were out of room to grow, even if you weren’t being nourished anymore. If we knew what it entailed, none of us would choose be born at all.
For the Hanged Man, the world is turned upside down. His face is neutral and meditative. The Hanged Man poses like a dancer, embracing his discomfort. He knows that no one is coming to save him, but from this new perspective he can see more clearly. More becomes possible.
Nourished by Trees
Trees are our allies when we need a force to guide us into adulthood. They are literally our elders, predating humans by hundreds of thousands of years. Trees have survived extinctions. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer shares a story about tapping a maple tree. She is touched to see her children drink maple sap directly from the tree and writes , “they are nursed by a maple - as close as they can come to being suckled by Mother Earth.” Like the villous trees of the placenta, maple gives us its blood.
In certain European traditions, elder is the tree of life. Its medicine guided children to adulthood by helping them survive a barrage of childhood diseases in an unforgiving climate.
(This was originally shared in a February 2024 newsletter. To receive the most current biweekly newsletters, you can subscribe here.)