Nathan For You

Man Asher is an asshole and a bad husband but the shit Whit did to him in Ep 9 with the pottery video bombshell is still mega cruel.

And then he manages to do something to make me like him even less lol

Started in and am existentially bummed out because in the early 1990s I spent some time in the San Luis Valley/Southern CO/Northern NM territory and miss what it was like 30 years ago. The Rio Grande Cafe on the old Los Alamos Hwy in Espanola had the most amazing huevos rancheros.

HOLY FUCK the finale

How can you guys binge this?? I watched one episode and had to shower and take an anti-anxiety

i actually often would distract myself on my phone while watching.

leave it to Vanity Fair to have the worst take on the finale lmao

idk i kind of agreed w him

the part at the end where the doctor asks if Whitney wants to see if her husband has arrived and she hesitates and says "sure" was a great moment for Emma Stone. she was caught up in the panic of the horrific situation with Asher and being in excruciating pain but she feels free without him, he's an afterthought now that she has her beautiful baby, and won't be tied down by him and his desperate attempts to abase himself for her.

also the moment where Whitney mocks Asher for being such a nice guy and his 'there will be consequences' tough guy act was equal parts funny and devastating, like masterful moment from Emma Stone there as well

anyway I loved the finale. lot to ponder on, but the sheer absurd horror of it is something I'll not soon forget

I can’t say watching this show gave me noticeable anxiety? I binged without incident.

Haven’t read anything about the ending but did have some interesting convos about it. I keep thinking about all the things in the last ep, not the least of which was that charade about the house & Abshir.

they were so grossly patronizing to Abshir throughout the whole thing and he was one of the most normal people in the entire show

That model with the tiny figures of them waving outside…

I loved watching their faces when he asked about the property taxes.

yeah that whole sequence was great.

"it's ok if you need to cry"
"no, it's just dust"

they were so grossly patronizing to Abshir throughout the whole thing and he was one of the most normal people in the entire show

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Tuesday, January 23, 2024 9:07 AM bookmarkflaglink

yeah like sending him to a chiropractor that ignores his cries that he's in extreme pain and keeps working on him until he nearly passes out.

very much 'stop helping'!

I read the VF review and actually do not agree at all. I think it's easy to assume it was a Mad Men-style fantasy weirdo cop out, but then what to make of the final shot being almost identical to 2001, with the baby/star child floating in space in the same position as Asher?

I was trying to make sense of the lack of narrative resolution to so many of the threads and what i noticed was the one thread running throughout the show was ART. Whitney was convinced she was making art. She was different from her parents bc she was an artist and they were just bad landlords. In the final ep she angrily notes that Cara gets a NYT writeup for "quitting art" and she's stuck on reality tv. Architectural art, coffee art, fashion (jeans) art, performance art, art buyers and sellers, Native art, conceptual art, artlessness and artfulness, art and artifice (like the eye drops), art and activism -- I feel like I had a better thesis at some point but I do see a throughline from the beginning of the series through the last episode that seems very intentional, not lazy absurdism as the VF writer implies.

That sort of total dismissal is what's lazy.

precisely, and I never really felt like this was a tightly-plotted show, like a Breaking Bad that had you wondering what development was coming next - which was refreshing, because I could just watch and not fight my brain trying to figure out what was coming next.

Asher/Whitney were like a patch of weeds growing in the middle of a garden, growing larger while continuing to insist that they're not destroying the garden, and my "enjoyment" of the show was seeing them faceplant in handling challenge after challenge because their intentions aren't pure and that sullies everything they do. Española grows more tainted through every interaction with them, such as Whitney almost arriving at the right solution for the jeans theft ("we should be focused on de-escalating") but for the wrong reasons (wanting to keep crime in Española out of the press), which leads to a far-fetched solution nobody actually wanted, which actually makes things much worse for everybody involved.

I like your point about artifice because that's all it is - their marriage is stage managed by Dougie and HGTV! The shops can only remain open if the show is picked up, and to ensure the show gets picked up, they have to tread a fine line of creating enough fabricated friction to make the it interesting but not too much to where people don't like them, which leads them to make a lot of rash decisions that play well for a tv bit but make life worse for everybody long-term, including themselves.

Asher abases himself to atone for being Whit's curse, they seem to finally reach the finish line, and then their show gets picked up and it's not even a victory lap, they're second fiddle to Vincent Pastore on Rachael Ray, they're financially struggling to turn what they do into a living without the aid of Whit's parents, and their relationship is still fractured, even if Asher is a bit oblivious to it.

his last pickle being one he ultimately can't escape is kind of artistically brilliant - he can't get helped to safety because everybody misinterprets what's happening based on who he is and has been to this point (Dougie thinking he's shirking parenthood, for example), only to send him careening upwards to his death.

that VF article is pretty bad!
David Lynch has some ideas on that:
https://archive.org/details/ConsciousnessCreativityAndTheBrain around 00:13:00

I think one of the running threads is how Asher even fits into this other than being “the husband” and trying to use his incredibly limited social, sexual, and handyman capital never works out. He’s just a normal guy who is kind of a jerk but hey, he’s kept it level enough to get married and that’s the american man second act.

He constantly seems like he’s trying to not even be relevant, just keep himself tethered to this marriage, tv show, partial friendship with Dougie, but… his tethers all fail

I think that’s the second phase of the unfocused american man, the child (after the marriage, precluding a successful career) and as his child is born…

Working off of a very cliched stereotype of “american man” here, as reality shows will

I’m halfway through, and kinda squint-scrolling this thread so as not to spoil anything

This show gives me such anxiety, like Portlandia before it (I like this show better than Portlandia, so far, but it does feel like an extended sketch from that world). I described the show to my brother today as Nihilist Mon Oncle

Asher’s first visit to the comedy workshop reminded me of a game I invented years ago that I called Bob Saget, I just made it up at an afternoon picnic table party thing, you go round in a circle and plainly say a funny word, and then everybody votes out the loser (who doesn’t have to leave, but has to drink). The following round, the goal is to say an unfunny word, and the loser is who fails and inadvertently says something funny. As the loser drinks, everybody pounds the table and says “Bob Saget”

Anyway, the entire comedy workshop sequence reminded me of that game, that Asher’s contribution was so extremely unfunny, and it felt like this was in fact the format for much of Fielder’s comedy language, to set up a joke, and then deliver the least-funny imaginable punchline

I think if we retroactively look for signs of something supernatural going on, the comedy class is a possible example. It's a scene that unsettles a lot of people, me included. Asher is unable to contribute anything at all when it's his turn; his outburst has nothing to do with the rules of the game, and comes after he fails to come up with anything at all. It seems he's physically incapable of being a likable person -- the only person who seems to have ever found him funny and charming is Whitney, for reasons unknown -- and his reaction betrays some intense inner struggle.

At least Charlie Kaufman makes his intentions perfectly clear from the get go and doesn’t let you get 9 and half hours into a series to get metaphysical on your ass

He constantly seems like he’s trying to not even be relevant, just keep himself tethered to this marriage, tv show, partial friendship with Dougie, but… his tethers all fail

your analysis is interesting mh -- i have struggled to figure out how Asher fits into this at all as he seems to fuck up everything he touches and we have no idea where he comes from. i'll buy it!

i do get a strong whiff of "i married a women whose family has money and i am not letting this go without a fight" only he's bad at fighting and also at everything else

oops WOMAN

I think the end of the season is just a set up for S2 in which grown Asher plays baby Asher

Still fucking fuming about this