Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher should be a model of next-level literary adaptation. Rather than just using a particular text as the basis for the narrative, it weaves together quotes, characters and situations taken from Poe’s writings generally to elucidate a larger story.
The story it tells, moreover—the fall of the Sackler family—should be ideally suited for Poe-infused exegesis. The Sacklers owned Purdue Pharma and are notorious because of their development of OxyContin and subsequent responsibility for the opioid epidemic that has that gripped the world for the last twenty-five or so years. Poe himself famously struggled with addiction issues, and drunkenness and drug use are common features of his fiction.
The weird thing is that that the series doesn’t deal much with opiate addiction itself. An ongoing court case frames the narrative, and characters make occasional reference to the crisis, but this doesn’t figure in the story in any significant way: viewers never see anyone die from opiate use, and while two of the characters are purportedly addicts, both handle drug use fairly well. Really, the Usher family could be involved in the sleazy end of any other socially irresponsible industry (arms, oil, fast food, agribusiness, ad infinitum) and the script would be largely unchanged. Even the bodies that fall from the sky in the final episode (representing the people who have died from painkillers) are strangely detached from cause.
This omission is related to a second, equally odd omission, and this is Poe himself. Except for some visual quotations of famous Poe murder tableaux, the series doesn’t engage with his thought in any substantial way either.
This is also, however, where the show becomes interesting. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” was first published in 1839, and, like all literature, is an expression of its time. The story has also, however, become a part of culture in its own right, which means that there are periodic efforts to retell it. By noting how those iterations change, we can map movements in that culture.
This story, like much pre-Civil War literature, largely concerns the relationship between matter and spirit. On the level of surface reading, the plot doesn’t really make sense. Roderick Usher is the wealthy, isolated, neurotic scion of the Usher family, who lives in his family mansion with his sister, Madeline. Roderick seems to love his sister, but, when she becomes ill, has her entombed while still alive. He hears her efforts to free herself, but inexplicably takes no action. She then escapes and confronts Roderick; both collapse, and the house crumbles and disappears into the earth.
So, interpretation is required. Roderick and Madeline are twins, of a remarkably similar appearance, and the narrator notes that “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them.” The story is commonly understood as involving incest, but that reading doesn’t have much in the way of textual support and becomes reductionist insofar as it provides a too-pat explanation for Roderick’s situation. Characters in Poe (and maybe in real life too) tend to bury or entomb things they don’t want to acknowledge, and a richer approach to the story would be to begin by considering what it is Roderick is striving to avoid knowing.
This isn’t defined, but a suggestion is provided in the song Roderick composes after Madeline’s entombment. He sings of a “fair and stately palace” which is “monarch Thought’s dominion.” However, “evil things, in robes of sorrow, / Assailed the monarch’s high estate,” and the “Spirits moving musically / To a lute’s well-tunéd law” are transformed into “Vast forms that move fantastically / To a discordant melody.” If Roderick is anticipating his own collapse in these lines, Madeline must be associated with the “evil things” that assail him.
And what are these evil things? Again this is a matter of interpretation, but if we assume that Roderick aspires to be the “monarch Thought,” they would be what threatens this state: the embodied self and the material, carnal side of reality. The physical self, of course, is antithetical to the perfect order created by the mind, because it traps the psyche in a decaying body, subject to physical cravings and addictions (which include but are not limited to sexual instincts). So, when Roderick entombs Madeline, he attempts to transcend these aspects of the self; he fails, of course, and she returns, because he cannot escape his human condition.
By contrast, Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher is antiseptic, almost squeamish (please note: WE ARE NOW ENTERING THE LAND OF SPOILERS). Here, Roderick and Madeline Usher are the illegitimate children of Longfellow (a cute touch), the CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Fortunato. Obsessed with recovering what they consider their birthright, Roderick and Madeline take over the company through dirty tricks and murder, in the process also marketing an addictive painkiller that will earn a great deal of money but also cause millions of deaths. They then meet a daemon who offers them a deal: Roderick and Madeline are guaranteed long, successful lives and immunity from prosecution, but in exchange they agree that their bloodlines will die with them (meaning that none of their descendants will survive beyond them).
Each episode of the series focuses on the death of one of Roderick’s descendants, their gruesomeness more-or-less calibrated to that character’s degree of moral culpability. None of them are made to suffer because of their relationship to the pharmaceutical company, however—rather, they are punished simply for being bad people. Their collective moral vacuity is itself a product of their immense wealth and privilege, which is largely incidental to the nature of the family business. From this perspective, Poe’s stories only provide a lexicon of cruel deaths for the series (it should be noted that Madeline is interested in an immortality project involving virtual reality, but it is secondary to the plot).
This summary, however, does leave out one important factor that is true to Poe, which is the series’ vibe. Flanagan’s Roderick is haunted by a sense of doom, just as much as is Poe’s Roderick. Where Poe’s Roderick is tormented by the limitations of human condition, however, Flanagan’s Roderick is tortured by his awareness of past bills coming due: he can only watch as his empire dissolves in the face of some kind of intransigent and unappeasable cosmic justice, with a dread similar to Poe’s Roderick as he waits for Madeline leave her tomb and confront him.
And what is the doom that destroys the whole Usher family? I’m inclined to characterize it as late capitalist blowback—the collective consequences of all of the kinds of exploitation that are required to produce a vast fortune.
The one Poe story in the series that seemed textually apropos was Flanagan’s use of “The Masque of the Red Death” in episode two. In “The Masque,” a plague is running though the land, and the king and his court isolate themselves in a castle to escape contamination and, while the kingdom is dying, hold a massive party. Here, Poe approaches what we would consider class issues, specifically the fecklessness and selfishness of a ruling group that uses its power and privilege not to administer wisely, but to protect itself.
This isn’t Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but it is a story for today.
Travel Only By Night 