WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FINALES OF THE CURSE AND FARGO SEASON 5

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 wrote about the January 2024 finales of Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie’s The Curse and Noah Hawley’s Fargo Season 5 as two contrasting visions of the future for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World. It’s a subscriber-only piece, so subscribe!

The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!