What they do to us
Fargo, The Curse, and the 2024 election
They're saying it's finally time to put some damn pants on. That I can't wear shorts and a hoodie when it's 32°. They told me that. I will not comply in advance.
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.
Says here in the newspaper that the beloved Newburyport, MA Pink House is going to be saved (for now) once again.
There is no shortage of beautiful houses along the coastline north of Boston: houses with graceful white columns and gleaming granite stairs. Houses with sparkling bay windows and manicured gardens.
The Pink House, perched alone above a sprawling salt marsh at the edge of Plum Island, has none of those features. Decrepit and uninhabited — grungy, even, by now — the house is scarred by peeling paint and missing windows. When an auction in the summer drew no bidders, it was scheduled for demolition.
And yet, for reasons that defy easy explanation, the 99-year-old Pink House is beloved by artists, locals and summer visitors to this windswept marshland just south of the New Hampshire border. Since its owner, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, announced in August that the house would be torn down, an uprising among its admirers has led to a $1 million dollar gift from an anonymous donor seeking to preserve it and an intervention by Gov. Maura Healey.
The governor — who grew up a dozen miles away, in southern New Hampshire — stepped in just before the cupola-topped house was to be razed this month, asking for more time and dialogue to reach an alternate solution. For now, the demolition is on hold, and talks are underway, a spokeswoman for Ms. Healey said.
Some of you may remember the house from this story of mine excerpted here in Protean Mag which goes in part like so:
They drove north and east to go look at the ocean and then along the road over the salt marshes passing by the dilapidated but still striking pink house.
People are drawn to this house in part because of the story about its spiteful construction in the early 1900s. The tale goes that a rich man’s wife insisted he build them an exact replica of the home they were currently living in but this time nearer the water and so he did without explaining that it would be in the middle of nowhere and set her up there before divorcing her and cleaning his hands of the whole mess.
The house has been slated for demolition numerous times over the years but local groups have regularly come to its aid hoping to save it. Nobody seems to be able to agree on exactly what to do with it though and so it sits there frozen in time taken over by wildlife and slowly giving way to entropy.
Some people just like it because it’s pink and the way the setting sun reflects off of that pinkness and that’s also fine.
The beach was chilly and the water was brackish and cold but not Massachusetts cold although he would have gone in either way because when you trek to the beach you go in the water that’s just how things are done.
She always asked him not to swim out too far from where she could see even though it’s what he was compelled to do. He felt unsettled this time and so he stayed close and bobbed near the shore waving back every now and again.
One has to be careful to not to do the I’m drowning wave. It’s a different motion than the I’m still here wave.
It was also the cover art of a song of mine a few years back.
Luc Max
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.