Table Of Content
An unnamed narrator approaches the house of Usher on a “dull, dark, and soundless day.” This house—the estate of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher—is gloomy and mysterious. The narrator observes that the house seems to have absorbed an evil and diseased atmosphere from the decaying trees and murky ponds around it. He notes that although the house is decaying in places—individual stones are disintegrating, for example—the structure itself is fairly solid.
Plot
It's the how and the why of their deaths that plays out over the course of Mike Flanagan's new horror anthology series, now streaming on Netflix. Through the years, the siblings convinced themselves that this simply couldn't have actually been real. They shared a traumatic event at a formative time in life, and had been drinking quite a bit—their meeting with Verna must have been a shared delusion, and for years, they wrote it off as such. And as Roderick Usher got sicker and sicker in real life—his rare form of vascular dementia gave him horrific hallucinations, including Griswold's Jester costume and his various children's dead bodies—his bill came due, and all of his children died in front of him.
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The story explicitly ties the physical House of Usher to the Usher lineage, stating that the peasants in that domain use the phrase “House of Usher” for both. However, the connection between the house and the family runs deeper than linguistic shorthand. The narrator observes the house as having an almost human-like quality, describing its windows as “eye-like.” Just as Roderick appears to radiate his own melancholy, so too does the house have a depressing air. Furthermore, the house, despite holding together as a totality, shows signs of physical decay, like crumbling stones, dead trees, and mushrooms growing from the masonry. Madeline herself is dying of a wasting disease, showing physical deterioration.
Henry Thomas
Described by Frederick as “Gucci Caligula,” Perry is the youngest of the Usher children. Having only recently been thrust into the life of the ultra-rich, Perry’s goal is to make life one big party, and he’s hoping to use his family’s money to achieve just that. Napoleon “Leo” Usher is a video game patron and the closest to a socialite the Usher siblings get.
Fall of the House of Usher: Is Mike Flanagan's Poe adaptation as scary as his other Netflix shows? - Slate
Fall of the House of Usher: Is Mike Flanagan's Poe adaptation as scary as his other Netflix shows?.
Posted: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
While Madeline tried to skirt the system by having Roderick overdose on his own Fortunato meds, Verna wasn't letting that happen. And so Roderick invited Madeline over to their childhood home, where their mother once died (and rose again, only to strangle a man to death before finally dying herself), to share a drink. By doing this, Roderick was briefly arrested for perjury, but earned goodwill with both Griswold and the larger Fortunato community; he was willing to take one for the team.
To that end, Roderick's deteriorating condition speeds his own torment and eventual death. From his arrival, the narrator notes the family's isolationist tendencies, as well as the cryptic and special connection between Madeline and Roderick, the final living members of the Usher family. Throughout the tale and her varying states of consciousness, Madeline completely ignores the narrator's presence. After Roderick Usher claims that Madeline has died, the narrator helps Usher entomb Madeline in an underground vault despite noticing Madeline's flushed, lifelike appearance. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it.
Learning at Los Angeles
Poe’s writing helped elevate the genre from a position of critical neglect to an art form. “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands as one of Poe’s most popular and critically examined stories. Within a few hours of the narrator’s arrival, Roderick begins to share some of his theories about his family. Much to the narrator’s surprise, Roderick claims that the Usher mansion is sentient and that it exercises some degree of control over its inhabitants.
The Fall of the House of Usher Is More Than Just Scary Succession - GQ
The Fall of the House of Usher Is More Than Just Scary Succession.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
He listens to Roderick play the guitar and make up words for his songs, and he reads him stories, but he cannot lift Roderick’s spirit. Soon, Roderick posits his theory that the house itself is unhealthy, just as the narrator supposes at the beginning of the story. In November 2023, Roderick Usher, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, loses all six of his children within two weeks.
“The Haunted Palace”
We then flash back a few weeks to when the Usher clan were on top of the world, having become Sackler-esque billionaires peddling opiates that have inflicted untold misery on the American public, and begin to watch their painful demise. When one steps back and looks at the whole narrative of the season of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it sags in places. Most of the flashbacks to a young Usher and Dupin are thin, especially compared to the wicked fun on display in the fates of the Usher children. It feels like padding to get episodes to a full hour when Flanagan and company could have leaned even more into the episodic structure that highlights a single Poe per chapter.
Roderick Usher’s children are getting what they deserve, not merely because they are the fruit of a very poisoned tree but because they have made horrific decisions to stay in the shelter of wealth and privilege. The narrator is mysteriously trapped by the lure of Roderick’s attraction, and he cannot escape until the house of Usher collapses completely. Characters cannot move and act freely in the house because of its structure, so it assumes a monstrous character of its own—the Gothic mastermind that controls the fate of its inhabitants. Poe, creates confusion between the living things and inanimate objects by doubling the physical house of Usher with the genetic family line of the Usher family, which he refers to as the house of Usher.
When the young and trendy Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) decides to host an exclusive sex-and-drugs party at one of dad’s old factories in an abbey, readers of The Masque of the Red Death will know it’s going to be a gruesome scene. However, Flanagan is smart enough to shift the Poe narratives ever so slightly for a modern audience. His version of The Tell-Tale Heart is a modern gem, and “The Gold-Bug” is reimagined as a new brand for the Usher company. But the themes remain the same—guilt, obsession, vengeance, and a supernatural sense of justice.
A “playboy” with a drug for every occasion, Leo welcomes the ability to numb the pain of his reality, but his drug use has started to become a problem for his boyfriend, Julius. Whether the reader is trapped by the house or by its inhabitants is unclear. Poe uses the term house to describe both the physical structure and the family. On the one hand, the house itself appears to be actually sentient, just as Roderick claims. Its windows are described as “eye-like,” and its interior is compared to a living body. On the other hand, there are plenty of strange things about the Usher family.
Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion. While Roderick clearly felt lots of remorse for the collateral damage that his successes had caused through the years—Verna explicitly showed him the deaths he was responsible for—Madeline felt absolutely none. She instead blamed "the consumers," the people whose lives are made worse by taking in the products that they (and others) make available. Not when he drugged Madeline's drink, just as she drugged Griswold's all those years earlier, and not when he cut her eyes out, mummifying her with the sapphires she so valued in her time on this earth. That left only two Ushers—the ones who entered the world together, and had to go out as well.
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