What they do to us
Fargo, The Curse, and the 2024 election
Sean T. Collins returns today to write about the finales of two of the best TV series of the year – The Curse and Fargo – as well as the presidential election. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it in full. It's good! Here's a very handsome discount:
Collins previously wrote for Hell World about Sexy Beast, vampires and class warfare; Godzilla Minus One and the trauma of war; and the surveillance cinema of The Curse, The Zone of Interest and Skinamarink.
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
He writes today, in part:
It’s this collapse of meaning that frightens me the most about The Curse. The idea of falling into the sky is a common enough fear for anyone who’s laid back and looked up at the blue yonder and suddenly found themselves gripping the grass a little tighter. Once it starts happening to Asher, he and Whitney and their employees come up with a series of rational explanations and practical solutions, none of which mean anything in the face of a power capable of flinging a human being clean off the face of the earth and into the frozen space beyond. Everything Asher believed was true ceased to be true, in the most rapid and complete way imaginable.
Fargo slams the breaks on all that. There’s a version of this season that ends with a happy suburban family systematically executed by a supernatural entity whose only moral code is that debts must be paid, a version in which everything that spousal abuse survivor Dorothy Lyon was able to put together for herself and the new husband and child she loves is dumped into that metaphysical garbage can by a psychopath. In the case of this television program, anyway, that’s not the version we got.
I just think it's nice! That's all. Just wanted you to know.
High Hopes
by Sean T. Collins
I don’t like it when two roads diverge in a wood. I do not, personally, want to decide which way, Western man. Contra Yogi Berra, if there’s a fork in the road, I’d prefer not to take it. Call me a lib if you must, Gandalf, but I’d just as soon not be given the time when the fate of the One Ring to Rule Them All is decided. I’m a freelance television critic with two special-needs teenagers, man, I’ve got enough on my plate. If I could primal-scream one thing at the universe, it would be this: Whaddaya want from me? So it was with some alarm when, in January of this now-dying year, I watched two of the best shows of 2023 air their final episodes and realized Uh-oh, the future’s a real coin toss, isn’t it?
On January 14, 2024, director Nathan Fielder and his co-creator/co-writer Benny Safdie aired Green Queen, the finale of their Showtime/Paramount+ series The Curse, a horror movie in cringe-comedy’s clothing. The drama’s ominous arc culminated in its socially liberal, economically exploitative reality-show star Asher (played by Fielder) being flung magic-realistically upwards into the sky to his death — even as his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone, kicking off a hell of a year) greets the birth by cesarean section of their baby. Life goes on for her, as he is flung into an infinitely worsening fate.