“It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug”
Love it or hate it, no one could credibly call The Fall of the House of Usher a subtle series. From the very beginning, the show has opted for a more-is-more approach, taking the most lurid bits from Edgar Allan Poe’s best-loved stories and using them to spin a splattery revenge story engineered to give a few cathartic thrills to anyone who has spent the past few years outraged that the richest, most powerful people can be as rapacious and amoral as they want with no discernible consequences.
But even by the show’s own template, I’m not sure I needed yet another takedown of self-styled wellness gurus, even if the kind of blandly luxurious, calorie-free lifestyle porn Tamerlane is selling fits squarely into the Fortunato empire.
The irony in “Goldbug” comes when you contrast the life Tamerlane is living with the lifestyle she’s selling. Despite positioning herself as a patron saint of self-care, Tamerlane is running herself ragged. She’s so stressed about the Goldbug launch that she’s lying awake in bed at night and passing out during random intervals of the day, sometimes waking up to something she doesn’t even remember beginning to do. No kink-shaming here, but even Tamerlane’s marital maintenance isn’t really about her marriage. Instead, she creates a little tableau and watches her husband cook and converse and hook up with a sex worker who pretends to be her, keeping actual marital intimacy at a comfortable distance.
This is a situation ripe for Verna’s brand of meddling, and meddle she does. Having slept with Bill-T as one of Tamerlane’s surrogate Tamerlanes, Verna pops up in Bill-T’s fitness videos just often enough for Tamerlane herself to suspect an affair she didn’t sign off on. The result was the previous episode’s nasty fight, but even when Bill-T tries to walk it back in the morning, she’s still raging at him, reminding him their prenup will leave him with little more than the clothes on his back. It’s only after a little introspection that she admits she’s tired and scared and alone … and looks up to see that she really is alone, with Bill-T’s house keys resting on their kitchen island. Somehow, she didn’t even notice he was gone.
Does it even matter if Verna is responsible for all the time Tamerlane has begun to lose? Having spent so much time pushing a false public idea of Tamerlane Usher — and having invited a series of different false Tamerlane Ushers into her private life — Tamerlane has no idea who she is or what she’s doing anymore. There are notes she doesn’t remember writing, conversations she doesn’t remember having, and even a walk in the park Bill-T swears he took with her and she swears she saw him taking with Verna. Like Victorine, Tamerlane was already trending toward a fatally toxic combination of vanity and exhaustion. It didn’t take much to push her over the edge.
In fact, all Verna needed to do was show her face. Tamerlane’s Goldbug launch is, predictably, a disaster — but significantly, it’s a disaster that largely unravels in Tamerlane’s head. No one else sees Verna standing at the microphone, showing up in the PowerPoint slides, or sitting in the crowd, and no one else reacts to the sex tape that pops up on the screen. No one even seems to notice Verna except Madeline, who grabs at her only for Verna to literally disappear in a cloud of smoke. When the headlines are written, no one will describe a weird woman named Verna tormenting Tamerlane; they’ll describe Tamerlane inexplicably unraveling, destroying years of a carefully curated public persona in just a few minutes. As one reporter says in one very on-the-nose piece of dialogue, Tamerlane Usher is over.
Having taken such a light touch with Victorine, I’m a little surprised House of Usher dropped so much Verna into Tamerlane’s final moments. As Tamerlane stalks around in a very Napoleon-like fury, Verna taunts her from mirror after mirror, spinning a weird story about a twin she absorbed in the womb while warning her that she needs to relax and take a deep breath. In the end, it’s the mirror over the bed that does it. Seeing Verna staring down at her, Tamerlane smashes it with a fire poker and ends up impaled by both. It’s unsettling, but I’m not sure why Verna bothered. At that point, Tamerlane already seemed to hate the sight of herself so much that she might have smashed the mirrors on her own.
Five children down, one to go. But while Tamerlane’s drama is taking center stage, the elder Ushers, with the help of Pym, are closing in on Verna. In a sequence that takes House of Usher’s eat-the-rich ethos and dials it all the way up, Pym uncovers photographic evidence that Verna has been hovering around the rich and powerful for at least a century: William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, but also, more recently, Mitch McConnell and Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump. Like I said, love it or hate it, no one could credibly call The Fall of the House of Usher a subtle series.
Bumps in the Night
• The story Roderick tells about Arthur Pym’s involvement with the Transglobe Expedition, which was a real thing, is also a clever way to riff on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe’s sole completed novel, a high-seas adventure that does include cannibalism, murder, and the revelation that the Earth is hollow. Pym’s unwillingness to discuss what happened at the North Pole may be a reference to the novel’s famously anticlimactic ending, when a strange figure in white approaches Pym and his companion before a brief postscript that reveals Pym has died, taking the end of his story with him.
• Arthur Pym also mentions having dinner with Richard Parker — a name pulled directly from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which might be more familiar to modern readers because Yann Martel borrowed it for his own shipwreck novel, Life of Pi.
• Like the Usher children, I haven’t spent a lot of time worrying about Juno, but I like her tragic little arc here — doing her best to support Tamerlane only to believe, wrongly, that Tamerlane hates her so much she blew up her own product launch just to attack her. I hope she’s okay.
• Twosret, whose tomb Roderick plunders to get those sapphires for Madeline’s birthday, was an actual pharaoh whose reign ended in a civil war. Given Mike Flanagan’s penchant for embedding little easter eggs into his stories, I’d take that as a hint for where this all might be going.
• After Morrie and Lenore finish Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum — not, for the record, currently available to stream on Netflix — one of the recommendations for what to watch next is Flanagan’s own Gerald’s Game.
• In his conversation with Lenore, Roderick quotes from two Poe works: the poem “A Dream Within a Dream” and the short story “Eleonora.”
• Tamerlane’s customized Goldbug box includes French energy oil made with black diamond truffle extract, Crème de Lune made with green caviar algae and South Sea pearls, and at least three other things that, sadly, we don’t get to hear her describe before everything goes to hell.
• Tamerlane’s pre-bedtime pill routine includes Ambien and melatonin — but not, notably, Ligodone or any other Fortunato drugs.
• But Juno seems to take about 20 Ligodone pills in the morning.
• “Men. When they think they’re immortal, all they want to do is fuck, and when they figure out they’re going to die, all they want to do is fuck.”
