The Fall of the House of Usher

Mike Flanagan's Netflix original series The Fall of the House of Usher is a riveting, yet disturbing, gothic-drama anthology adapted from various works by Edgar Allan Poe, including a short story of the same name. Adroitly using the crossover technique, Flanagan creatively and imaginatively interweaves numerous unrelated characters, events, references, and motifs from Poe's life and works into a harmonious unity of dramatic composition. Throughout eight interconnected episodes, the show follows a nonlinear frame narrative structure, where the protagonist, Roderick Usher, the CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, discloses to his old friend-turned-adversary C. Auguste Dupin, an assistant U.S. attorney, the entire story behind the rise and tragic downfall of the Usher family from 1953 to 2023. He also uncovers to Dupin the appalling and cryptic mysteries surrounding the tragic demises of all six of his children—Prospero, Camille, Victorine, Napoleon, Frederick, and Tamerlane—and the loss of his granddaughter Lenore within a fortnight. The compelling spectrum of tragic horror culminates with the ultimate doom of Roderick and his twin sister Madeline, "the last of the ancient race of the Ushers" (M 2:404).The outer story, set in the sitting room of the twins' childhood home, presents itself as a sequence of tableaux vivants, evoking a soul-uplifting sense of timelessness. In this frame story, the director masterfully employed a number of tableau shots to compose hauntingly beautiful scenes that bear a striking resemblance to classical painting. This cinematographic technique adds depth to the story, captures the pent-up emotions of characters, conveys the gloomy mood of the setting, and transports the audience into a Poesque realm of picturesqueness, "Out of SPACE—out of TIME" (M 1:344). To achieve these visual effects, Flanagan utilizes a few static shots to arrange characters and objects within a single frame, highlighting low-key lighting and symmetrical balance. Flanagan's living pictures take place in a dimly lit room, wherein the strong contrasts between light and dark create a chiaroscuro effect that reflects the murky thresholds between truth and illusion. At the heart of the room, an antique fireplace on the central wall acts as a dramatic point of symmetry between the positions of Dupin and his foil, Roderick; the two are statuesquely seated opposite each other, respectively personifying righteousness and wickedness. Throughout the framing story, the camera maintains minimal movement, immersing the audience into a mesmerizing painterly sense of stillness.The show opens in media res. The opening scene of the first episode, titled "A Midnight Dreary," begins in 2023 during the funeral service of Roderick Usher's children. The title of this episode, which is a phrase borrowed from the first line of Poe's poem "The Raven" (1845), is a foreshadowing of the inciting incident that takes place at a bar on New Year's Eve of 1979, when Roderick and Madeline commit an atrocious misdeed before making a pact with a mysteriously omniscient woman called Verna (whose name is an anagram of "Raven"). The opening sequence of the show sets the tone for the entire drama. It begins with a priest delivering a gloomy homily that is a sublime compilation of short extracts taken respectively from Poe's "For Annie" (1849), "The Spirits of the Dead" (1827), "The Premature Burial" (1844), and "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845). The priest's poetic and melancholy voice, accompanied by a somber soundtrack, takes the viewers into the mental world of Roderick, who seems to be tormented by "the spirits of the dead who stood / [i]n life before [him]" (M 1:71) and haunted by the supernatural presence of the shape-shifting Verna. As the events play out, it becomes apparent that these are not mere delusions, but "[a] mystery of mysteries" (M 1:73) that portends an imminent downfall on the horizon.Flanagan's drama bears the echoes of a classical tragedy in an awe-inspiring manner. Through his vivid imagination, Flanagan envisions and crafts the original tragic flaw that has led to the downfall of the Ushers. Roderick and Madeline are portrayed as Faustian figures par excellence, since they have struck a bargain with "a thing of evil" (M 1:368), Verna, who has promised them impunity and wealth in exchange that they would endure the extinction of their bloodline prior to their own passing. Every episode from 2 to 7 is named after a short story by Poe and revolves around the tragic death of one of Roderick's six children. In episode 2, titled "The Masque of the Red Death," Prospero meets his demise during a masquerade orgy that he has arranged, disregarding Verna's warning to abandon the idea. Despite his predetermined fate, Prospero is paradoxically given the freedom to exercise his own choice, highlighting the irony of the situation. Except for Lenore, all members of the Usher family, like many characters of Poe, are tragically and impotently driven by perversity, mental disorders, or ghastly crimes. This complex pattern that permeates the entire drama brings to light the free will–determinism problem, a recurrent theme in Poe's fiction and poetry. One striking element of dramatic irony occurs when the Ushers are delusional that they are self-determined, although they are confined within a predetermined reality that would ultimately lead to their tragic end. The ultimate fate of the Ushers, prearranged by the Faustian pact with Verna, serves as a symbolic manifestation of the deterministic essence of human existence in a predictable universe. From a cosmic perspective, this idea aligns with Poe's cosmological worldview that the universe is a causal system, caught in an endless loop of creation and destruction. Near the end of the Usher tragedy, Roderick, in a dramatic moment of anagnorisis, discloses to his granddaughter that "[a]ll that we see or seem / [i]s but a dream within a dream" (M 1:452). Such a cosmopoetic revelation implies that the entire universe is a metaphysical plot with a "pre-established design" (H 13:153).A dominant theme in the miniseries is death, and particularly "the death . . . of a beautiful woman" (H 14:201). This idea finds its roots in both Poe's life and aesthetics. According to Poe, who experienced the loss of the women he loved, death is the "most melancholy of topics," and paradoxically, "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world" (H 14:201). Much like Poe, all the women in Roderick's life have passed away, namely his mother Eliza (bearing the same name as Poe's mother), his first wife and beloved Annabel Lee, his three daughters, his grandchild Lenore, and his twin sister Madeline. Drawing on Poe's aesthetics of death, Flanagan approaches each of these demises with a sublimely poetic sensitivity. The tragic deaths of Flanagan's female characters produce two forms of the Burkean dynamic sublime: sublime terror and sublime melancholy. On the one hand, the supernatural downfalls of Camille, Victorine, Tamerlane, and Madeline, respectively in episodes 3, 5, 6, and 8, invoke a paradoxical mixture of horror and wonder. On the other hand, the final episode offers two distinct cathartic scenes of death, in which Roderick poetically engages in two poignant soliloquies derived from Poe's poems "The Raven" (1845) and "Annabel Lee" (1849), lamenting the melancholic deaths of Lenore and Annabel Lee, respectively. On the whole, the common thread relating these scenes of death is their potential to awaken in the audience what Poe refers to in his aesthetic theory as "the poetic sentiment" (M 3:1271), which is the sublime elevation of one's soul.In Flanagan's works, which are heavily influenced by the gothic tradition, death is not an endpoint in itself but a gate that heralds the beginning of a new phase of existence. Throughout this show, the ghostly apparitions of the deceased Ushers continue to haunt and torment Roderick's wicked soul, lingering in a luminal space between the physical world and the domain of the dead. This idea is introduced to us from the very beginning of the drama, when the priest in the church, quoting Poe, says, "The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?" (M 3:955). This philosophical idea is also congruous with Poe's cosmological view that "the Material and the Spiritual [realms] accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship, forever" (H 16:244).In a tragic display of poetic justice, the universe of the Ushers acts as a self-destructive cosmos. Just as the eight planets orbit the sun, the eight members of the Usher family figuratively orbit around the corrupt Fortunato pharmaceuticals, encountering their own downfall. Roderick's second wife Juno, as her name suggests—an orbiting asteroid mentioned in Poe's Eureka—manages to steer clear of the dark "orbital" paths of the Ushers. Frederick's wife Morella, who is a literary symbol of rebirth in a short story of the same name by Poe, recovers from her burns, emerging as the sole survivor of Prospero's ill-omened orgy. The family's attorney Arthur Gordon Pym is arrested for covering up the unlawful activities of Fortunato. The show ends with an eerie scene of Verna reciting "The Spirits of the Dead" (1827), while placing a symbol on each Usher grave. Metaphorically, the souls of the Ushers are no longer radiant "stars" in "their high thrones," but merely "red orbs, without beam" (M 1:71).Although the dramatic connection drawn between Poe and Roderick Usher remains unclear, Flanagan should be given credit for being able to combine a number of dramatic aspects from Poe's life and oeuvre into a unified aesthetic expression. Unlike other screen adaptations of Poe, Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher can be, to a great extent, regarded as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—since it includes biography, fiction, poetry, drama, music, and the picturesque into a harmonious unity of cinematographic creation, thereby blurring the boundaries between different art forms, between the real and the imaginary, and between the Poean and the Poesque.