In this essay, writer Elly Belle examines The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix and how it explores greed, justice, and how we clean up the wreckage of our wrongdoings. Some spoilers ahead.
At first glance, Mike Flanagan’s modern retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is all about seemingly mysterious deaths. If you look more closely, however, as if at a haunted I Spy picture riddle, there’s something much more ordinary than mystifying going on. The anthology, which takes its title and loose premise from Poe’s short story first published in 1839, follows a family that feels part Spellman from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and part Roy from Succession — only it’s all a lot more queer and a touch more sinister.
The Usher family (played by Bruce Greenwood, Mary McDonnell, Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, Katie Parker, Crystal Balint, Kyleigh Curran, Kate Siegel, and Sauriyan Sapkota) owns and operates a pharmaceutical company called Fortunato, which makes health potions and pills that prevent any disease, decay, or aging. Their products range from a type of pacemaker to a supposedly non-addictive Opioid called Ligodone. When we meet them at the beginning of the story, the family is navigating a huge public trial over Ligodone having killed thousands of people and deepened the substance crisis and epidemic in the United States. The show is set up immediately to be fundamentally about people’s fears of disability and mortality, desires as downfall, addiction not only to substance but to power, and powerful people’s chickens coming home to roost.
As we’re introduced to each of the family members — primarily through the stories of their sudden murders in the midst of the trial — it becomes clear to see that while they are indeed all respectively wealthy entitled assholes, the villain is not necessarily any one person, or even a person at all. The real villain here, as it turns out, is greed and ego. The audience is taken through the unique ways in which greed gets the best of each Usher in moments when they could have made life choices that centered on connection and care for other people, instead of their own selfish desires. You could expect nothing less from a story dreamed up by Poe, author of other gothic horrors such as the infamous Tell-Tale Heart, and whose works always beg us to look at how learning to be vulnerable as human beings is actually the most terrifying thing of all. We cause our own demises through missteps we could’ve avoided had we only been honest — with ourselves or others.
Stemming from many complex situations involving multiple layers of marginalization as well as coercion and force, Usher asks us to question which consequences are truly necessary and for whom. It asks: What is justice actually? Is it the death and destruction of individual people? Or should it be more? What can we accomplish in accountability? In that indictment of the system itself, it provides a more clearly abolitionist framing than we get from most stories solely focused on personal redemption and responsibility.
Throughout the series, none of the members of the Usher family die in regular ways but instead go gruesome into that good night. Each of their deaths is symbolic of their specific hubris and what their weaknesses are. As a family and as individual people, they’re all collectively and respectively so ensnared in their own personal fears of mortality that they’ve each quite literally dedicated their one precious life to inhuman immortality. None of them can face their shadow selves or dark sides in the mirror, really, yet all of them desire to live forever — just not actually facing their truths at all. Truth, then, serves as the obvious enemy of the main villain Greed. And every one of them runs screaming from it, quite literally to their tragic deaths.
By the fourth episode, multiple members of the family have been murdered, and everyone is scared about who might be next. Yet it doesn’t stop any of them from acting selfishly, out of fear. Flanagan’s modern retelling of Usher does an excellent job at holding a magnifying glass to the ways that terror of the unknown, desire, and yearning — much like how Daedalus and Icarus’ egos in the Greek myth cause them to fly too close to the sun and melt their man made wings — makes us do foolish, messy things.
Within this premise, Flanagan hones in on building a queer world, in all senses and meanings of the word. The gothic horror includes many queer characters in a refreshing way, reminiscent of 90s and early aughts media like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Jennifer’s Body, two similar stories interwoven with horror and fantasy that also grapple with hubris, greed, and redemption.
In Usher, queer characters like patriarch Roderick Usher’s son Prospero (who goes by Perry, played by Sauriyan Sapkota) and Napoleon (who goes by Leo, played by Rahul Kohli) borrow the familiar but not often done well trope of “The Bad Gay.”
In the last few decades, queer media — even stories created by queer and trans people ourselves — has fallen victim to being washed over with wholesomeness. Pieces of media that have most recently grappled with and attempted to deconstruct that include Joel Kim Booster’s 2022 smash success Fire Island, alongside new champions like the recent queer teenage rom com slash fight movie Bottoms, or Rivkah Reyes’ messy queer short film Gianna. But much of the queer media from the last decade revolves around or orbits characters who are meant to be sweet, perfect angels who deserve the world specifically only because they aren’t messy. And that value judgment can’t be untangled from their queerness or transness. Some queer media attempts to argue that queer and trans people are good and pure and only victim, that’s why we deserve full lives and human rights. But that creates a harmful supposition that we don’t deserve those things if we make mistakes or have been “bad” in any way — and that position is inherently flawed, and messy itself.
There’s been much conversation around this trend cross-generationally within queer spaces. This has included constant discourse online in spaces like Twitter and on TikTok picking apart how much sex is “too much” in media, and whether showing people causing harm is inherently encouraging and validating of people’s harmful behavior offscreen. Some queer and trans people demand wholesomeness, hurt by decades worth of transgender people as punchline in movie after movie, for example. Others have voiced that queer and trans characters on screen and in stories, much like queer and trans people in real life, deserve to get to be messy without it being an indictment of or definition of their queerness. In that regard, Flanagan’s retelling of Usher accomplishes the presentation of queer mess strikingly so.
Prospero (aptly named for the Latin word meaning fortune or abundance and borrowed from Shakespeare’s The Tempest), for example, who is a queer man in a polyamorous triad, meets his untimely demise because of the massive orgy he throws. He’s selfishly thrown the party out of hedonism and lust, but mainly so that he can get secret footage to blackmail people, and out of spite and rebellion against his father and family. His greed, like that of his family, ultimately gets the best of him when he’s the first member to be taken out by his own folly — pulling a sprinkler system to rain down what he thought was water on the party but ends up being deadly chemicals, killing not only himself but everyone else in attendance. It’s a fitting framing of the ways that our own hubris often brings others down with us, and not us alone. Meanwhile, his brother Leo, a messy bisexual who we first meet cheating on his husband Julius (who goes by Jules, played by Daniel Chae Jun) with a woman obsessed with his fame and fortune, believes himself superhuman, and that’s where he finds his downfall.
Because none of the Ushers want to or are capable of living in a world that they build better by caring for each other — and are so obsessed with pill-popping the pain away and how material objects and technology can “cure” everything — their egos destroy them. It’s both a beautifully constructed indictment of the turmoil and suffering that wealth causes on a global scale as well as a personal one, and an examination of human nature beyond binaries like rich and poor, though these binaries and extremes are examined well.
Halfway through the series, in a flashback, we see the first day that a younger Auguste Dupin (played by Malcolm Goodwin), who in present day is the Assistant United States Attorney trying to bring the Ushers to justice in the current day trial, and a younger Roderick Usher (Zach Gilford) first met. Dupin has shown up at Roderick’s door with information on Fortunato’s wrongdoings, and forged documents with Roderick’s signature. When Roderick refuses to give context or information to Dupin and says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Dupin gives a speech that perfectly summarizes some of the key points of the show. Dupin’s character digs into the roots of poverty and how the fear that stems from it can make us protect people who don’t deserve our protection — the other side of the coin of excess and greed, which causes people to abandon others who do deserve our protection.
“You’re a lower rung guy, I know that much. Me too. And I get it, you say the wrong thing or she says the wrong thing it could knock you right off that rung, out of the job even,” he says, invoking the poverty he knows they live in. “I see that baby. I see those homemade toys. Someone knit those dolls, carved that train. You guys go hand to mouth just like me.” He observes that they’ve been using homemade remedies for one of their sick children, and says, “You’re good parents who can’t afford the medicine, so yeah, you’re smart not to recall. You don’t want to risk it. Can’t afford to say the wrong thing. Hard to say the wrong thing. Even harder to do the right thing,” before leaving dramatically.
Following his speech in the flashback, we see Roderick go back to Rufus Griswold (Gris, played by Michael Trucco), the head of Fortunato, to confront him about his crimes. In his office, Gris turns the table on young Roderick and accuses him of not being a team player for simply wanting to tell the truth, once again the truth is made into an enemy and not a virtue from the perspective of a wealthy character. Gris gives a speech about material possessions that counters Dupin’s; Roderick has the angel and the devil on his shoulders. Roderick’s choice here is the pivotal moment, we come to find out, because it’s the moment when he decides between truth and ego, or greed. “You play your cards right and one day all this could be yours, Charlie Bucket,” he says to Roderick, making a Willy Wonka reference.
While in the moment Roderick pretends he’s all in for protecting the company to rise in the ranks, we later see him come home to panic about how he can possibly participate in such evil work. But he’s fearful that Gris would completely destroy his reputation. The complicated layering and context here is, of course, that people who come from poverty and trauma don’t make so-called bad decisions or harmful decisions because they’re morally lacking. Instead, their hands are forced by powerful systems and people who know the positions they’ve put them in and how they can maintain control.
The retelling of Usher doesn’t only examine queer mess. It looks at human mess in general, and all the ways we hurt and sometimes harm each other because of our own fear of vulnerability. In the end, The Fall of the House of Usher begs us to look at ourselves not through binaries of identity in the form of labels — queer or not queer, man or woman, rich or poor, disabled or not disabled — but purely through actions. When your back is up against a wall, will you choose kindness and connection to your fellow human beings, or will you choose greed and cruelty?
When you add in the other layers of marginalization that many of the characters in Usher experience — including queerness and disability, the latter of which we see in Ruth Codd’s character Juno’s circumstances after a near death experience that informs future exploitation by current day Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) — the show paints an ominous picture. It shows that the powerful have always and will always try to wield money and material possessions against the most systemically at-risk people in order to control and abuse them. In that vein, it’s worth contextualizing marginalized people’s “badness” as often being much different than that of those with resources and status. One misbehavior comes from lack of control over circumstance, the other from weaponizing power.
The show brilliantly cuts through these themes, asking us to look at our own desires that lead us astray, who has influenced us and why they have power over us, and what the true meaning of karma is, all from an abolitionist perspective. It pushes us to ask what rehabilitation and accountability actually look like, and whether or not true justice means death.
The answers are never simple. There is no clear cut way to define good or bad for anyone in this show, the same way that it would be false to claim definitive statements about what makes anyone good or bad in real life. Everyone is messy and everyone is human, regardless of sexuality or gender identity. Each character makes mistakes and harms people, and each of their inner struggles that cause this harm are laid bare and disinfected with sunlight.
And isn’t the dream we all have deep down somewhere that we can be imperfect, messy, even do bad things sometimes, and still be worthy of humanity and love, redemption even? To be forgiven for our sins, our greeds, and our missteps? For them to not define us completely? In the end, the brilliance of the tale is that no one can really be indicted fully after all — not in the Ushers’ trial, or in our lives. To be human is to cause harm and make mistakes and fall victim to our hubris. The questions that Usher asks us so poignantly are these: how will we clean up the wreckage of our wrongdoings? And once we learn who we are at our cores, can we face ourselves in the mirror long enough to heal our own bullshit, give up our egos, and truly build a better world?
