The Fall of the House of Usher is an eight-part series streaming on Netflix. The show, written and partly directed by Mike Flanagan (four episodes), is an extremely complex, ingeniously plotted family drama, a horror-movie parody of HBO's Succession. Usher is funny and fantastically gory -- it's good-natured hokum that doesn't take itself seriously; even the most ghastly stuff is presented with tongue-in-cheek panache. The series is a strange combination of very low-blow scream-scene effects (about five "jump scares" per hour-long episode) and immensely learned allusions to the complete works of Edgar Alan Poe. While contriving monsters that lunge out of the shadows and into the frame, accompanied by sudden percussive bursts of fright-music, the film also manages to deliver a high-brow discourse on Poe's writing and periodic satirical arias of high rhetoric on social media, late capitalism, and our debased consumer society -- one digression by Roderick Usher on "making lemons from lemonade" is Shakespearian in its ambition and, already, legendary across the internet.. I characterize The Fall of the House of Usher as an "anatomy" -- referring to such works as The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and other similarly satirical and highly mannered forms of Menippean satire (for instance Apuleis' Golden Ass and Petronius' Satyricon). An "anatomy" is defined, broadly and inconsistently among authorities, as a large work that combines grotesque social satire with a perverse and elaborate rhetorical structure: the purpose of such works is to "anatomize", or dissect into pieces, various forms of folly. The genre is intrinsically gruesome in that it involves all sorts of hacking, cutting, and rending -- individual parts of the body of the world are flayed and exposed for the horrified delectation of the reader (or viewer). The Fall of the House of Usher consists of an elaborate exposition on all sorts of bad behavior: greed, lust, drug addiction, gratuitous cruelty as illustrated by the conduct of a family of rascals who have made an immense, incalculable fortune selling opiates. The show's intent is to wallow in depictions of depravity while simultaneously condemning the conduct of the vicious beasts that we see on-screen. Usher involves among other things a critique of capitalism, attacks on high-fashion, and a meta-critique of itself, that is, the horror genre in which Flanagan has made his fortune, an enterprise that is, perhaps, not so different from peddling opiates -- Flanagan's work traffics in raw sensation with doses of terror delivered in predictably startling injections, that is, "jump scares." Heroin is sometimes called "junk"; Flanagan is a purveyor of "junk" as well although in a highly literate and densely plotted format.
The Fall of the House of Usher is a sort of anthology of Poe's horror stories (with bits of his essays and comic writing interspersed). In this respect, the movie resembles the old Roger Corman films bearing the titles of Poe works, but, generally, adapting several of the writer's short stories into one rather loosely plotted picture. In this case, Flanagan builds his plot on elements from the HBO hit Succession, an ostensibly realistic, but obviously satirical, melodrama about family members jockeying to assume the role of leader of a far-flung media empire (modeled on enterprises operated by Rupert Murdoch and his children.) In Flanagan's show, the premise is that the Justice Department is prosecuting the Usher family for its alleged unlawful conduct in promoting dangerous opioid medications resulting in the addiction of millions of people (a crime also resulting in the creation of a vast fortune). The first day of trial, involving the appearance of Roderick Usher, the pater-familias and his formidable sister Madeline, allows Flanagan to briefly introduce Roderick's six acknowledged children, three of them illegitimate. Roderick is married to a bizarre clown-like woman who seems to have a prosthetic limb, a tiny dwarfish woman with a white face and red lips and an unbecoming Beatles haircut. (She's intended as some sort of allegorical embodiment of addiction -- the other family members abhor her and Usher's attraction to this grotesque figure seems inexplicable.) Usher's children are all either ambitious scheming rogues or drug-addicted feckless fools. Something is wrong with Usher's brain and he is prone to sudden, ghastly hallucinations -- he both foresees in visions the deaths of his children (the so-called "Fall" of the House of Usher), but, also, hallucinates the presence of their bloody accusing corpses appearing suddenly in the courtroom or all around him as the show progresses. Usher's dementia allows the show to spook the viewer with startling, unexpected eruptions of horror -- the so-called "jump scares" to which I have alluded. Only Usher and the viewers can see his horrific premonitory (or guilty) visions -- thus, we generally see the action entirely through Usher's eyes. This is true even in scenes in which Usher is not physically present but which are dramatized for us as part of an extended framing narrative in which the protagonist "confesses" his crimes to is lifelong foe, Auggie Dupin, an African-American lawyer who has brought the charges pending against Usher and his family members that are the subject of the trial scenes. Dupin, whose name refers to the hero of several of Poe's pioneering detective stories (for instance, The Murders in the Rue Morgue), has been working with (and against) Usher for fifty years, commencing with an investigation conducted by the man, then, a Medicare fraud agent, against Usher's first employer, the Fortunato Company, a predictably evil big Pharma enterprise run by a predictably loathsome Harvey Weinstein-style executive officer -- this guy is named Rufus Griswold, invoking the loathsome clergyman who became Poe's executor and spent the second half of his life calumniating the writer. (At various points in the show, we see Usher brooding over a brick wall in the cellar of the Fortunato company headquarters -- it's pretty obvious that Usher has immured the vicious executive alive in that wall in homage to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado.") The "confession" that Usher presents to Dupin, telling the story in rotting house where Roderick and Madeline were raised by their psychotic and violent mother (the secretary and girlfriend of the vicious Griswold Fortunato CEO) brackets the various horrors that the show inflicts upon the viewer. -- the action starts merrily with a "premature burial" for instance. And, of course, this structure is analogous to Poe's short story featuring Roderick and Madeline Usher in which the hyper-neurasthenic Usher narrates his tale to the story's unnamed interlocutor -- in the story, Usher is suffering from synesthesia and nightmarish insomnia and has buried Madeline alive in the family crypt. In the TV series, Dupin has alleged that one of the Usher clan is an informer and will testify for the government. This leads to frantic family powwows, after the manner of the family councils in Succession, and all sorts of vituperative accusations and cross-accusations among the siblings and their spouses. There are frames within frames in the series, as well as various flashbacks, and Flanagan manages the exceedingly intricate narrative with masterful aplomb -- we always know, more or less, what is going on, although, of course, the whys and wherefores are concealed for later revelation as the show advances. It's normal for programs of this length and intensity to flag and mark time; it's not easy to fill eight hours of screentime with grotesque and alarming events. But Flanagan manages this feat effectively; each episode, primarily derived, from one of Poe's horror stories, has a shapely narrative arc and the action, although repetitive, is convincingly suspenseful and cleverly staged. Until the overlong last episode, "The Raven", the story moves at breakneck pace and there's no dead time. Flanagan delivers the goods -- he ties up all the narrative strands in the last ninety minute show, but this finale feels about 15 minutes too long.
From the outset, we learn that all six of Roderick Usher's children have died in hideous ways within the two weeks of the protagonist's confession to Dupin. Dupin suspects that Usher is having his children killed to prevent them from cooperating with the government in the criminal trial. The truth, as it happens, is far stranger and more sinister. In fact, a mysterious woman, some sort of spirit of destruction who never ages, has contrived the deaths of Usher's children. We see this woman in pictures with David Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, and other plutocrats dating back to Prescott Bush and William Randolph Hearst and before. (She blithely remarks that one of her "clients" wanted total impunity so that he could "shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue" and that "no one would care.") This ageless spirit haunts the Usher family and her siren song, as it were, destroys Usher's children. Prospero (nicknamed Perry) is a depraved and handsome young man who plans to market a series of pop-up drug and sex orgies. He holds his first orgy in an abandoned factory with the idea of causing the water from the fire sprinklers to rain down on the participants in the debauchery at midnight. The strange, beautiful woman, wearing a death's head mask, comes to the party, stalks about (as in "The Masque of Red Death") and, then, departs before the waters in the sprinkler system are unleashed -- as the viewer expects (Flanagan isn't subtle about telegraphing his plot points), the fluid is acid and melts everyone into pinkish goo. Among the hideously disfigured victims of the acid is Morrie (short for "Morelo" I suppose) the wife of Usher's feckless son, Frederick, who has been enticed into attending the orgy by Prospero. This woman is horribly injured. Freddie pretends to be solicitous, but, in fact, he gets her released into his custody so that he can torture the poor, motionless, heavily bandaged and skinless woman. (Morrie likes to bowl in his one-lane bowling alley, a little detail that is similar to scenes in There will be Blood -- Flanagan promiscuously alludes to all sorts of things; the film is rife with pop culture references.) Napoleon, another of Usher's sons who is a drug addict, lives with his boyfriend. His boyfriend has a black cat. Napoleon hates the cat, kills it, and, then, acting on the premise that all black cats are fungible, goes to an animal shelter where the mysterious woman, the family's nemesis, gives him an identical animal. The cat turns out to be some kind of demon and you can figure out the rest. (A scene in which Napoleon uses a convenient sledge hammer to knock down the walls of his luxury apartment echoes a noteworthy scene in Better Call Saul in which a man hypersensitive to electro-magnetic radiation smashes down all the walls in his candle-lit house.) Victorine, one of Usher's daughters, is the girlfriend of another woman, a gifted medical researcher who is developing some kind of apparatus to keep damaged hearts beating. The doctor is experimenting on chimpanzees. Usher's other daughter goes to the Morgue Laboratories, as they are called, to investigate claims of animal cruelty -- she wants to blackmail her sister. This turns out to be a mistake when the sinister female nemesis (masquerading as a security guard) releases the enraged chimps who proceed to eat the woman's face. Victorine starts hallucinating and murders her girlfriend, the research scientist. She rips open the dead woman's torso and installs one of the heart devices, a sort of pacemaker from hell, which keeps pumping blood through the rotting corpse of the girlfriend (a reference, it seems, to "The Case of M. Valdemar"). Tamerlane, another of Usher's daughters, is a cuckquean who makes her fitness guru husband have sex with prostitutes as she watches. Tamerlane is announcing a new lifestyle and beauty business called Goldbug -- this is a parody of Gwyneth Paltrow's "Goop.". The family's nemesis drives her mad and she uses a fire poker to smash glass out of mirror in which the sinister woman seems to stalk her. Avalanches of glass fall on Tamerlane lacerating her to death. Frederick who has gone insane with coke-fueled jealousy tortures the mutilated and helpless Morrie in some genuinely unpleasant scenes. He ends up disemboweled by a swinging pendulum of razor-sharp debris in a building that is being destroyhed. Roderick tries to commit suicide but fails (he's rescued by Verna, the enigmatic murderess stalking the family). There's a flashback in which we see Roderick and Madeline entombing Rufus Griswold in the basement wall and, then, Roderick, now half-crazed wanders back to the board room in his downtown skyscraper -- the mutilated corpses of his children, with glowing eyes, are now seated around the table. The air outside the skyscraper, already congested with a tempest, darkens with falling bodies: the victims of the opioid epidemic, plummeting down out of the skies like contorted, dark hail. And, so, it goes.
References to Poe are ubiquitous and, often, obscure. One of the Usher sister's assistants, the man in a bisexual couple whom she is sexually exploiting, is called "Tobie." This allows the character to repeatedly say "Tobie, dammit!", the name of a character in the story "Never bet the Devil your Head", an unfunny comic story that Poe wrote, that no one really reads anymore, but that was made, I should note, into an estimable short film by Fellini in the omnibus movie Spirits of the Dead. At the funerals of the dead siblings, the preacher quotes inexplicably from Poe's essays including "The Imp of the Perverse." Tamerlane's hunky husband is called Bill T (or "Billt" on the basis of his physique) -- I think his name is William Wilson, another character in a Poe story. The family's brutish lawyer is named A. Gordon Pym, and like the protagonist of Poe's only novel, he has sailed around the world, reached the north pole, and discovered that our earth is hollow. (Pym is played by Mark Hamill.)
The program's last episode is over-determined. It proposes no fewer than four theories for why things have gone so disastrously bad for Roderick and Madeline Usher. Most prosaically, Roderick and Usher are visualized as awful people whose bad acts compensate for a childhood of abuse and trauma at the hands of their mentally ill mother and, later, the sadistic Rufus Griswold. However, an elaborate and baroque speech by Madeline near the show's end posits them as victims of a consumer society that has grandiose visions of ending human suffering, mostly, it seems with the analgesic of consumer goods. This rather self-pitying harangue is powerfully scripted and acted and suggests that the fate of the Ushers is the result of a particularly corrosive form of late Capitalism. The series is sufficiently self-aware, however, to also insist that the Ushers must all die hideous deaths because this is required by the genre -- the characters are all entrapped in a violent and gruesome script, designed for Cable TV, and, so, of course, they must suffer as required by the screenplay. (In the seventh episode, Roderick in fact cites to the script that he is acting, suggesting that "here is where the screenplay requires me to" say this or that -- he also seems aware of the "jump scares" and suggests it's time for another fright of this sort. Instead, we see an ostensibly comforting vision of Usher's virtuous first wife, Anabelle Lee with his young son - a hallucination that morphs into the most horrifying image in the program). Lastly, there's a wholly supernatural etiology ascribed to the show's gory events -- the Usher's have made a deal with the devil and she is merely collecting on their debt to her. Accordingly, the action in the program can be interpreted as arising from psychological imperatives (the abuse of Usher and Madeline when they were children), from socio-economic forces (capitalism and its discontents), on the basis of the horror genre in which the events are presented, and because the devil is powerful in the world and manipulates events to serve her desires. The viewer can decide which of these causes best suits their view of the world presented in the show and, so, in the end The Fall of the House of Usher is open-ended, permitting various interpretations of the gruesome parade of horrors that it presents.
I can't recommend this show to most people. It's too gruesome and exploitative. But this is horror and the movie is true to the prerogatives of that genre and, so, if you can tolerate this kind of imagery with its attendant displays of raw depravity and savage cruelty, then I suppose you should take the time to see this program -- it is state of the art.
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