Nathan Fielder’s Micro Penis on ‘The Curse’ Premiere Will Haunt You Forever

Yeah, you could definitely say I’ve been haunted by Showtime and A24‘s new series The Curse. I dutifully watched the nine episodes available for review last week and have hitherto found myself grappling with the genre-bending program’s commentaries on gentrification, environmental living, colonization, reality TV, and relationships. However the single scene that has been burning its way through my psyched the most comes in The Curse Episode 1 “Land of Enchantment.” Ironically, I haven’t found my thoughts harried by the memory of Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) snatching money from a child, nor have I been focused on the girl’s subsequent, titular curse. Rather, I can’t get over the reveal of Asher’s micro penis, followed immediately up by his father-in-law Paul’s (Corbin Bernsen) tense conversation comparing penis size to tomatoes, crescendoing with Paul showing off his teeny tiny penis.

It’s not so much the full frontal male nudity that’s thrown me off as much as the central role Asher’s insecurities about his penis have. Well, that, plus the fact that Paul Rhodes might have forever reprogrammed my brain to think about penises when I wander by the tomatoes in the produce section of my local Key Foods.

“People are a lot like tomatoes,” Paul says. “You have your big old beefsteaks.. and you got your little tiny cherries. They’re very different, but once you slice up a cherry and you put it in a sandwich, it tastes great. Once you put it between the bread, it’s all the same.”

Much like everything else about The Curse, it’s an uncomfortable moment that offers the viewer a lot to unpack…

The Curse is a new limited series created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie that focuses on a pair of newlyweds, Asher and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone), who are trying to conceive a baby while filming an HGTV pilot. Things take a dark turn for the couple when Asher snatches back a $100 bill he gave to a young girl in a parking lot, only for the girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame) to curse Asher. This kicks off a wild saga of twists, turns, and increasingly uncomfortable revelations.

We hear about Whitney’s family before we meet them in The Curse Episode 1, “Land of Enchantment.” They are described as “slum lords,” whom Whitney is horrified to be associated with. However, as is quickly apparent, the relationship is a bit more complex. Whitney and Asher happily visit Paul and Elizabeth (Constance Shulman)’s home, where body shaming jokes are made and Asher’s Jewish heritage is tolerated as a sort of whimsical favor. 

After a telling scene in which Whitney engages with her parents’ cruel humor, we cut right to an extremely small penis peeing in the privacy of a bathroom. This is Asher. (It’s not as though he’s any classier than his in-laws, because he doesn’t wash his hands.) And if you thought it was just a bizarre gag for laughs, it soon becomes apparent that the scant size of Asher’s penis is big wedge issue between the newlywed couple. 

Whitney’s father uses the after-dinner clean-up time to corner Asher. He starts things off by offering Asher a beefsteak tomato grown in his garden. His secret, he says, is adding a fish and his own urine to the soil. Then he takes his son-in-law to the garden for a life lesson or two.

“Asher, people are a lot like tomatoes. You have your big old beefsteaks over here, like you just had, and you got your little tiny cherries. They’re very different, but once you slice up a cherry and you put it in a sandwich, it tastes great.” 

“Once you put it between the bread, it’s all the same,” he adds with a wink.

Things mellow for a moment until Paul declares it’s time for him to pee in the soil. He uses this time to get blunt with his mortified son-in-law.

“Asher, I just want you to know that I understand what you’re going through with my daughter,” Paul says, still urinating off camera. Asher uncomfortably says he doesn’t know what his father-in-law means.  

Paul reveals that he had the same issue, but look at him now! He got over it and now has a “lovely family.”

“Be humiliated. Embrace it,” Paul says. “You say it once. You say it to a complete stranger. ‘Hello, I’ve got a small penis.’ You think they’re going to laugh at you, but they’re going to laugh with you because life’s a fucking joke.” 

Paul goes on to say that his father didn’t deal with his own small penis and lived a sad life. He insists his daughter doesn’t care about Asher’s size. To hammer home the point, he adds, “I’ve loaned you like a million bucks. Look at what I’m working with here.” 

And then The Curse shows us a second micro penis. This time on Corbin Bernsen. 

“Be the clown. It’s the most liberating thing in the world,” Paul says before coming in for a hug. “Look at us. We’re the cherry tomato boys.”

In another series, this awkward moment would be treated as a sweet, comic bonding opportunity. In The Curse, however, it’s absolutely chilling. That’s in huge thanks to frequent Safdie Brother-collaborator Daniel Lopatin’s dissonant score. As soon as the men enter the garden, a place usually depicted as a sanctuary, Lopatin creates a tense soundscape cut out of a horror film. As the episode’s director, Fielder chooses odd angles that allow the audience to watch this encounter take place through a window pane or askance view. There can be no real connection made between the two cherry tomato boys in such a tensely framed scene. Hug or no hug, this scene was an attack on Asher.

We get further confirmation of this as soon as the show cuts to Asher and Whitney’s drive home. Asher maintains he’s not bothered, but the defensive quiver in his voice and Whitney’s apologetic tones say otherwise. Indeed, it’s made obvious that even though everyone’s saying they don’t care about Asher’s tiny pee-pee, they do. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many roundabout, fraught, and unsettling conversations about it.

Nathan Fielder’s prior work revels in mining the uncomfortable to find a deeper truth. In the past, he’s used his detached persona to highlight the need for human connection and the challenges our inane society has set up to stop that. In The Curse, though, Fielder is leaning hard in the opposite direction, illustrating how social niceties barely cover up the darkness festering inside of us all.

The Curse forces the audience to confront Asher and Paul’s respectively small penises and their very different ways of dealing with them. Paul wants to laugh at it, while Asher is seemingly suppressing a scream. And while the beefsteak vs. cherry tomato comparison is darkly funny in a way that would usually make me laugh, Fielder’s choices as a director made me so discomfited that I’ll never look at tomatoes the same way again.