The MCUification of Edgar Allan Poe
The Mike Flanagan TV show The Fall of The House of Usher is, first and foremost, not a modern retelling of the famous Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name — at least not only that. How could it be? The original short story was at most 12 pages.
For those unfamiliar, The Fall of The House of Usher short story is about an unnamed character coming to visit his sickly friend. Most of the story is about the mood — how Poe describes the decaying architecture of the Usher house and the deteriorating mind of its master, a failing Roderick Usher. The story ends with Roderick meeting his untimely end and the house collapsing as the friend flees.
Some of the significant beats remain the same in the Netflix show, such as a "friend" visiting Roderick Usher in the house (although the nature of the relationship has completely changed). Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, also tries to kill him. However, these elements are reshuffled to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Many components are also added, a major one being multiple Usher children, with the Usher estate being decentered to focus on this latter development.
Instead of a recreation of The Fall of The House of Usher story, the title is used more as a vehicle so Mike Flanagan can guide the viewer through some of Poe's greatest literary hits, all within one self-contained universe. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the narrative template for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) — the property that has dominated the US box office for over a decade — and it leads to some complications.
A brief aside on the MCU & Storytelling
The MCU hardly needs an introduction: a retelling of the Marvel comic characters on TV and film where every story exists within the same cinematic universe. So, theoretically, the events of one story can have wide-reaching consequences within the next.
Some have argued that this is taking the season-wide arcs of television with seasons (or "phases," in MCU lingo) and bringing them to the Silver Screen, but it's actually more complex than that. Sans anthologies, television shows, although having wider arcs and characters, will still be loosely connected from one season to the next. If you have watched some of House or BoJack Horsemen, or whatever, you will still understand the gist of any episode, even if there is an adjustment period as you come up to speed.
Conversely, the MCU relies on a much larger meta, both within the text and outside of it, where subsequent seasons and sequels are entirely incomprehensible unless you have been following the entire cinematic thread. For example, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness cannot be understood easily if you watch the first Doctor Strange alone, but only if you consume the Avengers Infinity Saga, the TV show WandaVision, and the TV show Loki for good measure.
This leads to very structured and arguably stilted storytelling where creators not only have to factor in the beats of their current story but the larger beats of the MCU, as well as the narrative history of Marvel characters overall. You cannot merely do anything with Dr. Strange. The director and creator have to balance their work with the wishes of the MCU's showrunners and producers, as well as "honor" the source material.
It leads to a type of filmmaking where the text is constantly alluding to and referencing people and concepts either within that larger cinematic universe, will be within it, or could be. You see a character referenced in one movie, and although it has nothing to do with the story, it alludes to what is possibly coming down the horizon. It's storytelling that is first and foremost referential to not its own story but its metatextual brand.
Back to Poe
I bring all of this up because a very similar set of constraints was visible in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of The House of Usher. Most episodes are a recreation of a famous story told within the meta-narrative of Flanagan's Poe Universe (although episodes A Midnight Dreary and The Raven are both references to the same poem). In The Masque of the Red Death, the show is loosely recreating the deadly party of Lord Prospero (though in this retelling it's an orgy). In the Tell-Tale Heart, the character Victorine Lafourcade experiences the same general beats of guilt and paranoia for killing someone as the nameless protagonist in the original story. And so forth (although the episode Goldbug has nothing to do with the original story except for the name).
We don't get an anthology but a world where all these stories live together, so the Poe fan, like the MCU fan, can point to the references they remember reading. In some cases, this is done even when the narrative hasn't built up to the same catharsis as in the story, but it's done anyway because that's what the original IP did. We are honoring the larger meta at the expense of the current story.
For example, in the original The Fall of The House of Usher, Roderick keeps hearing noises because he accidentally entombed his sister Madeline alive. The noises he hears are real, and so when she tries to kill him, it makes perfect sense. But his sister isn't entombed alive by mistake at the show's end. Roderick mutilated her eyesight on purpose because he wanted her to be "like a queen." There is no doubt he did this, unlike in the story, so instead, the noises and sights he witnesses are now visions of his dead children. He feels guilt for the Faustian deal he made with a supernatural figure (more on this later).
But then, why replicate this dynamic with his sister at all? Well, because it happened in the original story.
The same critique is valid with the house collapsing at the end. The entire short story was as much about the house as it was about the eponymous Usher family. The Usher line is associated with the house in the short story, so much so that Roderick has not left it in years. Its decline is linked to him, Roderick's friend recalling:
“He believed that plants could feel and think, and not only plants, but rocks and water as well. He believed that the gray stones of his house, and the small plants growing on the stones, and the decaying trees, had a power over him that made him what he was.”
In the Netflix show, the house doesn't have this emotional weight. The Usher family is more concerned with the survivability of their company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals than some abandoned property that only Roderick and Madeline know about. There is no storied history with the house. Roderick grew up poor and had to build himself up (and make a deal with a supernatural entity) to gain success.
And yet, the house still collapses in the show because it did in the story, and it just comes off as contrived. We didn't need the house to literally fall in the show because it does not have the same emotional weight, and unlike in the story, we have an entire family and company to play with. Their destruction is narratively enough, but again, we have to get the reference: the nostalgia for the property we have already consumed, the fall of the house of Usher.
Then there is the force tying these recreations together in the same world: the Raven from Poe's arguably most famous poem. We learn that the brother and sister, who in this retelling are recast as stereotypical "greed is good" business tycoons, made a deal with some supernatural entity (i.e., the Raven, a loose stand-in for death) to get a head in the world. The agreement is that Roderick and Madeline will bear no accountability in life in exchange for the lives of all their children.
This Raven entity, who has come to collect on the Usher's debts, is the narrative vehicle allowing us to recreate old Poe stories. She kills Roderick's children in fantastical ways because she is a fantastical figure. The first story (The Masque of the Red Death) reads almost as a morality play as the "depraved" bisexual trope Prospero leads to his own undoing by unwittingly dumping toxins on his partygoers, but many of the other characters die just because they need to: driven crazy because the plot is forcing all these characters to recreate the beats of Poe's stories. Because the Raven is making them.
And this would be fine if we were experiencing a modern anthology, but as an extended universe, it all feels a little pointless. By the death of the second Usher child, we know what is going to happen, and so we are just left with this push forward as we watch these stories recreated, regardless of whether they fit in the context of the world. The story was built to move in one direction, and that's where we are going.
A dreary conclusion
I can see the pitch for The Fall of the House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe meets American Horror Story (another extended universe so similar I had to stop the screen and make sure Ryan Murphy was not an executive producer). We are given a story assembled from the loose threads of Poe, cramming as many references as we possibly can, including a partial recreation of the poem The Raven.
It's a type of storytelling I find enjoyable sometimes (I have watched most of the MCU), but must everything be this? Are we just going to place all existing stories within a cinematic universe where we must connect every reference together for the sake of brand completionism?
Call me old-fashioned, but I am okay with a bit of separation in my stories: only this and nothing more.