In the 2021 Danny Strong adaptation of the non-fiction book Dopesick about the opioid crisis and the Sackler family’s involvement in it, Michael Stuhlbarg plays Richard Sackler, chairman and president of Purdue Pharma. His portrayal is unsettling – Sackler comes across as deeply disconcerting and weird, detached, obsessed with proving himself but with none of the charisma that you would expect from a man who has successfully gamed medical regulators into giving his highly addictive drugs a stamp of approval that would eventually cost the lives of thousands of people. Some reviews reference The Simpson’s eminent capitalist Monty Burns, a man closer to 19th century robber barons (perhaps also in age) than the 21st century’s version of a successful businessman.
It was an interesting precedent to have in mind for Mike Flanagan’s final project at Netflix (whose own adaptation of a non-fiction book on the opioid crisis, Painkiller, I have no seen, but it sounds like Dopesick is the superior offering anyway). The Fall of the House of Usher adapts many of Edgar Allan Poe’s works – some short stories very literally, while others remain allusions only, in character and place names. It also merges the titular tale of twins doomed along with the decrepit mansion they inhabit with the history of Oxycontin, fictionalising it as the drug Ligadone as discovered (in its completed state – nobody in this family, as one of the illegitimate children later points out, has ever truly made anything new) and brought to Fortunato Pharmaceuticals by Roderick Usher (played as a young man by Zach Gilford, later by Bruce Greenwood). The show jumps back and forth in time and unravels as Usher, after the death of all six of his children, recounts his life history and his possible culpability in events to C. Auguste Dupin (Malcolm Goodwin and Cal Lumbly – playing a character who is notably, historically, a predecessor to all great detectives), a former medical fraud investigator and now DA who has been trying to mount a successful lawsuit against Fortunato for decades. Roderick Usher reveals early on that he is confessing now because he is expecting that his own death is imminent, and his narration is in no way chronological – we frequently return to an earlier point in time to connect the dots, not unlike a detective story would as more evidence emerges. Usher suffers from vascular dementia, a condition that may explain the frequent hallucinations he has of his dead children (who, he claims, are demanding that he tell their story correctly, explaining how he has insight into events he has not personally witnessed), but he might also simply be haunted by the deaths that he admits he had a hand in, even if that responsibility doesn’t become obvious until we return to a fateful New Year's Eve in 1979 again.
Greenwood’s Roderick Usher is far from Stuhlbarg’s Richard Sackler. As the head of his company, he appears ruthless, forcing his children into constant competition that keeps them from aligning themselves against him (it is perhaps an ironic point in time for the show to come out, just as Lachlan Murdoch has won that race in a different, equally powerful family). The man Dupin faces, in the ruined house that Usher has kept to remind him of his past, seems changed – haunted, grieving even but not for the six children whose death he recounts in his tale. In a show filled with characters who feel far removed from empathy, whose fated death, which always occurs in artfully and horrible tableaus (it reminded me of Final Destination, or maybe even the Saw franchise), is not meant to evoke pity, Usher is a man who could draw sympathy in those scenes with Dupin, but perhaps that is mainly Greenwood’s performance and not necessarily something that Flanagan intended for the character. It is hard to feel anything at all for this man, especially when the final piece of the puzzle is revealed – a pact with the devil (or some other ancient demon, who has been around forever and has been making these kinds of pacts much longer than photography can trace it back through history). In 1979, fresh off their first great play for power, twins Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald and Mary McDonnell, respectively) and Roderick Usher came to a bar to have an alibi for a murder they committed earlier in the night. They are, we find out early in the story, the illegitimate children of the original head of Fortunato, and obsessed with reclaiming that birthright, and so they have entombed the man (a cruel and horrible man) who stands in their way. At the bar, an enigmatic bartender (Carla Gugino, the same through the ages) offers them a deal: no lawsuit will ever touch them, they will achieve whatever they set out to do, and their payment will be deferred to the next generation. Once they die – in old age – their entire bloodline will die with them. These descendants will live in luxury, without the anxiety of poverty in America, before their demise. Neither of them hesitates to take the deal, even though Roderick already has two children and a wife who loves them (Annabel Lee, played beautifully by Katie Parker as the opposite of their ambition, and therefore someone doomed to leave the story early on). A man who would so willingly sell the lives of his children is difficult to feel sorry for later when the bill arrives, and it takes both him and the viewers a while to realize that “bloodline” includes the only person in his family he loves and has tender moments with, because she has inherited her grandmother’s heart.
Gugino’s Verna is a glorious foil to Roderick through her many incarnations. The fateful night fades in the minds of Madeline and Roderick, as quickly as the bar of NYE turns into an empty storefront behind them – by the time they drive off, they’re unsure of what happened and whether it was real. He only seems to remember once his children begin to die and the same face appears mysteriously in security cam footage and photos near their demise. Verna appears to feed off the blind ambition that might make someone sell their children for gold, but at the same time, as far removed as she literally is from humanity (she is, as she points out in one scene, not a woman), her actions appear to be informed by personal judgements on the character of others. She seems regretful when the inevitable deaths are crueller than they could be to children who perhaps have transgressed less than others (it’s a subtle regret with Kate Siegel’s Camille L’Espanaye, who is mauled by a chimpanzee, and young Perry, who dies in an acid bath along with other revellers at one of his debauched parties, but a much more obvious one when she finally has to take the live of Usher’s granddaughter Lenore, who has proven that she is capable of good deeds and empathy). Conversely, she appears to revel in the deaths of the children who have truly transgressed, especially oldest son Frederick (Henry Thomas), who spends his last days on earth tormenting his severely burned wife after a perceived transgression. Verna’s judgment on character does not influence whether or not she collects her payment, but it is the closest the show comes to a moral judgment on relative evil.
There is no question that each of the children has been deeply corrupted by the influence of Roderick Usher and all the money and power he has amassed in the years since the pact. He reveals that he tempted his two children with his wife Annabel away from her with promises of wealth (and Annabel, unable to live without them, committed suicide). He also fathered four other children, frequently called bastards by their half-siblings, in spite of the pact he made (Madeline, on the other hand, had an IUD fitted, as if perhaps she either remembered or cared more). They have each chosen their own paths through capitalism – PR, their father’s footsteps, a video game company, planning debauched parties, medical research, a Goop-rip-off lifestyle company, and very much like the immoral characters that this year’s Dead Ringers portrayed, their concern rests solely with maintaining their status and proving their worth, regardless of the suffering they cause. The most literal suffering is connected to what appears on paper to be the most deserving cause: T’Nia Miller’s Victorine LaFourcade has conned her way into medical research, mainly by dating the surgeon performing in, and is ruthlessly killing chimpanzees with a medical device that seems to be doomed to fail – but it can’t fail (and so she fakes her data, and almost cons a woman into becoming her first human test subject – except unfortunately for her, it’s Verna), because it is her father’s only hope to extend his life.
The way the children are portrayed – ruthless, without any extenuating traits save an occasional moment of horror at the death of their siblings – feels very far removed from Flanagan’s other works, as if the moral wrong of the opioid crisis, the bodies literally piling up in a final moment of the show, when Verna shows Roderick what he has wrought (he is in her top five, she says) necessitates that there is nothing about them that could inspire pity. They are of course seen through Roderick’s eyes, in his recounting of their lives to Dupin, and so perhaps this is a choice to showcase how far removed from them he is – but it is a departure from The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. The effect of that artistic choice is interesting especially in light of the fact that Flanagan likes to collaborate with the same actors again and again – whatever trace of sympathy you may feel for Victorine and Napoleon feels rooted in what T’Nia Miller (whose The Altar of the Dead in Bly Manor is my favorite episode that Flanagan has ever created) and Rahul Kohli accomplished with Hannah Grose and Owen previously, and the same is true for many of the other actors here (including Zach Gilford, both for his performance in Midnight Mass and, forever, Matt Saracen). If anything, the siblings are thrown in stark relief by the people they are surrounded by, as almost every one of them has one person near them that personifies the humanity they lack. This is most obvious with Roderick himself, who has granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) and second, much younger and much-maligned wife Juno (Ruth Codd, who was so good in The Midnight Club), whom he loves mainly because she consumes the largest dose of Ligadone recorded daily, like she is some kind of Frankenstein monster proof of concept (she is one of the only character who reacts to the death the way you would expect a human being to react, and luckily, she survives, both the curse and the Ligadone).
But the corruption causes destruction beyond the Ushers alone – there is the suffering of the thousands if not millions from the effects of Ligadone, there’s the death of Lenore and the prolonged suffering of her mother, the horrible death of Victorine’s partner (a truly awful adaptation of the Tell-Tale Heart). There’s Arthur Gordon Pym (a very good Mark Hamill), the Pym Reaper, the family lawyer who has witnessed the crimes and prevented a reckoning over the decade. To be an effective shield, he has cut off anything that would give others leverage over him, and therefore foregone anything that resembles a meaningful life for himself (which also means that there is nothing that he could give Verna in exchange), existing solely for the Ushers – a life as grim as that of the man he is based on, who drifts towards the South Pole and finds only death there.
All of Flanagan’s previous works were meditations on death, guilt and grief, but their beating heart was the human connections between the characters – the deep love between siblings, romantic love, even when it was doomed, the love of parents for their children. Selfish acts still wreaked unspeakable havoc – remember Peter Quint in Bly, trying to cheat death and capture privilege by stealing the body of a child – but even then, the reasons were deeply human. The characters of The Fall of the House of Usher feel far removed from that, beyond empathy and beyond saving, as they would not extent that courtesy to others. Roderick Usher, in pitching Ligadone, claimed to be able to put an end to pain - in her attempt to use AI to create a perfect copy of a person, Madeline is trying to cheat death. If there is any conclusion to draw from Flanagan's previous work, it's that a meaningful life without pain and death is impossible, that they are inherent parts of the human existence. In the end, Dupin fails in his quest to hold the Ushers to account, thwarted by the deaths, but at least he can go home to his husband, children, and grand-children. He is the man with the riches in the end. This is a haunting tale about the dehumanising effect of absolute capitalism, but it won’t haunt me the way that Flanagan’s previous stories did.
2023, created by Mike Flanagan, starring Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carl Lumbly, Mary McDonnell, Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, T’Nia Miller, Zach Gilford, Willa Fitzgerald, Michael Trucco, Katie Parker, Matt Biedel, Crystal Balint, Ruth Codd, Kyliegh Curran, Mark Hamill, Kate Siegel, Sauriyan Sapkota.
