the Old Testament aesthetic of 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
Or, Mike Flanagan will be the reason I become a horror fan
[Spoiler alert! Everyone dies in the end. However, this post does not discuss how they die in great detail.]I recently watched The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan’s1 heady, freewheeling series based on Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic and deliciously horrific stories and poems. Critics have argued over just how based on Poe’s work House of Usher is: some say it lacks Poe’s passion, others call it a “smartly done, cohesive epic.” In my opinion, the limited Netflix series is incredibly based (in the new sense of the term, meaning simple, correct, and reasonable). That’s because it’s wrapped in the aesthetic of stories far older and far wiser than those from Poe’s pen—the epic of Abraham and all his descendants relayed to us in the Old Testament.
House of Usher is a tremulous, tightly wound escapade through Poe’s oeuvre, centering the titular characters Roderick and Madeline Usher as the haunted elders of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company. Their story, like that of the Old Testament patriarchs, is a story of generational cause and effect.
The Usher name matters because brother-sister power duo Roderick and Madeline fought to wrest their name from the jaws of fate. Their mother died a sickly and hopeless woman, a nobody in every sense of the word, a peon of persons stronger by far than she. The Usher house was then a large, aging structure at the bottom of a cul-de-sac.2 Roderick and Madeline made it a House. Like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, their great desire was to pass that house down to their children and their children’s children. To that end, House of Usher is also a story of promises.
Poe and Flanagan invite “into a gorgeous slow tango” two of “the very Biggest Questions of all: Should life be painless? Should people live forever?”3 The Ushers’ pharmaceutical empire revolves around the drug Ligodone, which promises life, painlessness, and something like permanence. Millions accept the promise of Ligodone, giving the Ushers unmatched wealth and influence, but the promise, of course, comes with a cost—money and, for far too many, addiction and death.
The old serpentine lines get us every time, don’t they? You’ll be free—of pain and whatever binds. You’ll be free of God and like a god yourself. You’ll live forever. You’ll abide. These promises, implied more than spoken, worm into Roderick and Madeline’s perception of themselves.
But promises of freedom also bind. Ligodone binds its patients victims. And darker promises—the deal with the devil kind—bind the Ushers themselves. Emerging from childhood, Roderick and Madeline determined they’d never be the scum of the earth again. They’d never be like their mother, trampled on, mistreated, and forgotten (by their birth father no less). They scram everything they have from the bowels of the earth and come up bloody and beaten but victorious. (Victorious in the way of a serial killer who’s been getting away with murder for years.) They seize for themselves a fledgling empire by betraying and brutalizing others: first C. Auguste Dupin, an idealistic lawyer who was trying to help Roderick and his young family, and then Rufus Griswold who, y’know, maybe deserved being bricked up and left to die on New Year’s Eve.
The night of Griswold’s murder (perhaps even as he’s still spitting useless breaths within his tomb), Roderick and Madeline take refuge in a bar where they meet Verna, who stalks inscrutably through the rest of the show.4 She appears to be without parentage, without descent, nameless and of changing forms, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life. She is like one of the sons of God—and not the New Testament saint kind either.
Verna offers a guarantee to the Usher siblings. They will have their hearts’ desire—“the whole world.” But their children will foot the bill. “The price is deferred,” she says. “When you’re done, at the end of it all, just before you would have died…your bloodline dies with you.”
Why would Roderick and Madeline agree to such a deal—besides the fact that they already had blood on their hands and needed some assurance? In the hubris of their morning star era, did they presume that once they sat enthroned on high, they could never be thrown down? Isaiah and Ozymandias and Poe would have told them otherwise. Perhaps they thought the strangely intuitive bartender was a scammer, not really the diviner she presented as.
Whatever the case, they dive into their new lives as business royalty and eventually forget about Verna’s deal. Fast forward forty years, and their company is a corrupt but virtually untouchable powerhouse. The U.S. government’s attempts to convict the Ushers for Ligodone’s addictive and fatal side effects repeatedly come up empty. Roderick has fathered six children by five women, and they are now claiming their inheritances, bickering amongst themselves for power, and cracking under the pressure to prove themselves worthy of the Usher name. They are also uniquely decadent, terribly pragmatic, and emotionally tortured and torturing. (Kate Siegel’s turn as Camille L’Espanaye, the company’s saucy, cunning, high-powered spinmaster, is annoyingly perfect.)
And then they all start to die in gruesome and horrific ways. The youngest, Prospero, perishes in an acid rain shower caused by leftover toxins in the pipes of one of his father’s old testing facilities.
“I’m Frederick Usher,” a defiant Roderick commands his first-born to tell reporters in the wake of his siblings’ deaths. “I’m the repository of the hopes and dreams of a fucking empire.”
But Verna, the raven, the angel of death, has opposing words for Prospero. “There are always consequences,” she tells him when she appears moments before he and his hedonist companions expire. “Someone, a long time ago, made a little decision, then another, then a big one, then one of absolutely no importance. And then, by and by, you were born. On that day, you were the consequence of a harmless choice made by someone in a moment where you didn’t even exist. And that choice defined your whole life. You are consequence, Perry. And tonight, you are consequential.”
This theme—consequences felt across generations—lies at the root of The Fall of the House of Usher. The Ushers’ hopes and dreams are rooted in an empire built on selfishness and ambition. Now, they find out what happens when the pleasures of sin for a season finally run dry.
Abraham knew such consequences; so did Isaac and Jacob and Judah. Further down the family line, Saul, the first Hebrew king, descended to the grave in shame and indignity because of his choices. “Thus Saul died, and his three sons, and his armor-bearer, and all his men, on the same day together,” the chroniclers record. We could go on about David, Israel’s lustiest king, a bloody man and an adulterer, or his son Solomon, who started off well but was drawn away from his God by an affinity for women of incompatible dispositions. We could talk about their descendants, the princes and kings of a divided kingdom: they bickered and fought, debauched and preyed, clung to power and refused to accept responsibility. And, one day, they and their little kingdoms fell under the fire of judgment and burned away.
Are we overlooking that these Old Testament characters had redeeming qualities? That many of them are heroes and examples to their descendants both spiritual and genealogical? No, not really. That view of their lives is well established and accounted for. Perhaps, a bit too much. And without the New Testament aesthetic, we wouldn’t have this Old Testament aesthetic to speak of. We wouldn’t be able to see the difference.
The Old Testament aesthetic is one of judgment and consequence. Of promises made, promises broken, and promises unfulfilled. Of retribution and a heavy hand hovering over uneven balances. We tend to neglect this perspective in the West’s post-modern and increasingly illiberal cultural dialogue. Everyone has to be nice now and it’s offensive even to speak of things that aren’t nice. But like those Old Testament patriarchs and their descendants, we are being tested, even if it’s only to find out that we are no better than beasts.5
Fans and critics of Flanagan’s work have pointed out the real aesthetic difference between his prior series and House of Usher. In the former, there is redemption in the end; in the latter, everyone is weighed in the balances and found wanting.
…Flanagan’s TV work for Netflix always concluded with an empathetic resolution. The Crain family forgave each other and themselves in Hill House; trapped souls were freed and a romance withstood time in Bly Manor; Crockett Island’s residents reconciled with their gods and sacrificed themselves in Midnight Mass.
…Usher distinctly refuses to give its foremost characters any kind of peace…It’s a rare thing for Mike Flanagan to deny his characters sympathy, and rarer still for the horror auteur to delight in their suffering.6
House of Usher ‘careens between scorn and parable as it casts a spell of heightened theatricality.’7 This trio—scorn, parable, theatrics—are hallmarks of the Old Testament record. Open the prophetic and wisdom writings, and you’ll find admonishments to an audience so hard-headed and intractable that employing such devices is imperative. Perhaps there’s “something disconcerting about a Flanagan show that only engages with humanity’s moral rot,” but the “fundamental nastiness”8 of Poe’s oeuvre reveals the bottomless wickedness in humanity.
House of Usher hardly hints toward a concept of deity in-world (despite Poe’s work being steeped in biblical allusion). The minister at the funerals of the Usher children reads from Poe, not Psalms; those words are little comfort to Roderick and Madeline as the ravens of their misdeeds come home to roost. The sins of the parents are visited upon the children until the last surviving Usher is dead.
In an especially cruel but justified twist, Madeline attempts to invalidate Verna’s deal by tricking her brother into overdosing on Ligodone, the drug that made them rich as it ruined millions of lives. If he dies first, she thinks, the curse is broken, the angel of death will sheathe her scythe, and some Ushers will survive. But Verna revives Roderick, bringing him back from the brink so he can witness the death of his only granddaughter, Lenore. (Truly, the only innocent in the show.)
And then, only then, does she give them both permission to die.
The Fall of the House of Usher has no time for redemption arcs. It denies us a happy ending or sentimental resolution. It shatters the little feeling of gratitude we’ve come to expect when at least one main character survives or is redeemed in some way. Instead, it depicts the terror of judgment for inveterate reprobates. The only closure they get is the closing of their eyes as they expire, and some don’t even get that.
The only other thing I’ve watched by Flanagan is Midnight Mass and I loved it.
This was my first big criticism with the series. The house in the show is more of a ramshackle crack house than the austere, gothic mansion as impressed from Poe’s story. But perhaps the physical house is the show’s dorianation—the mirror that shows the real shape of the Ushers. (Let the record show the invention of the word “dorianation.” May the reader understand.)
Leah Schnelbach, “This Raven’s Got a Hold on Me: The Fall of the House of Usher,” Reactor, https://reactormag.com/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-netflix-review/
I’m a little embarassed it took me probably till the fourth episode to realize this woman kept coming back.
Ecclesiastes 3:18-20
Roxana Hadidi, “Mike Flanagan Brings the House Down,” Vulture, https://www.vulture.com/article/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-review-mike-flanagan-netflix-horror.html
Roxana Hadidi, “Mike Flanagan Brings the House Down,” Vulture, https://www.vulture.com/article/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-review-mike-flanagan-netflix-horror.html
Tyler Dean, “Gothic Rot and Retribution: The Fall of the House of Usher’s Unsettling Approach to Poe’s Work,” Reactor, https://reactormag.com/gothic-rot-and-retribution-the-fall-of-the-house-of-ushers-unsettling-approach-to-poes-work/
Love the word “Dorianation”!