What It Means to Live Without Pain
What does it mean for us to not feel anything?
We feel with our sense of touch. We feel as a result of nerve endings running through every square centimeter of our body, and we feel with our range of emotions. It is impossible to imagine life without feeling something.
The firmness of a pen in our hands. The sensation of the sun’s warmth. The fiery rage in a moment of anger. As humans, we agree to take the good and the bad. We cannot feel love without also feeling loss (of the fear of loss). We cannot feel the pleasure of physical intimacy without also feeling the pain of a papercut.
Unless you are a child of the House of Usher.
I do not typically write about a new release, and the rich layers of Mike Flanagan’s latest (and final) Netfilx series deserve far more time to be rewatched and enjoyed, yet, here we are. I treated myself to a binge watch and cannot skip over a gift like The Fall of the House of Usher.
I also cannot possibly write about its humanity without spoilers.
Be warned, all ye who proceed, spoilers await…
It is clear, early on, that the fate that awaits the Usher family is non-negotiable.
Similar to Hereditary, we must accept that there is no option, no escape. We the audience, are here to bear witness. May it serve as a cautionary tale.
Roderick Usher, CEO for a pharmaceutical giant Fortuna, and overseer of Ligadone, a stand-in for the variety of real-life concoctions resulting in our opioid epidemic; does to his bloodline what he will do to the world at large – trade away their ability to feel pain for a lifetime of dependency and death.
His wealth can seemingly eradicate the experience of pain and suffering for their lifetime. They live in a world that numbs their experiences, dulls all sensations, so that even a life of luxury is as empty and cold as Roderick’s heart. And with all consequences removed, they cannot even learn things the hard way.
The deal Roderick made isn’t a huge surprise, the series alludes to it and builds towards it from the very start. How it happens, well, that is a different story.
Let’s focus on the outcome first.
The result of his bargain, a life devoid of pain and consequence, turns his bloodline into a microcosm of the Ligadone epidemic.
Roderick buys his children, literally.
Just as the doctors and industry pushers offer a life free of pain, Roderick dangles the Usher fortune and lifestyle to his existing children in order to tear them away from the loving, nurturing home of their mother.
They are too young to understand the consequences of replacing human connection and goodness with hollow riches. Over time all of their humanity is stripped away. The trade-off is replicated with each known child, as they mature to the point of being considered an adult. Legally they meet the requirements of being sound, though they are too immature to fully grasp the significance as they sign the dotted line.
The Usher family becomes a blight that spreads across the farm field. Rotting everything that is good. Tainting whatever lives they touch.
Everything, as they have been taught, is transactional. Spouses, lovers, friends, family. All serve a purpose – something gained, nothing lost – with the details tied up in an ironclad Non-Disclosure Agreement. Anyone who isn’t under an NDA will be handled deftly by Camille’s spin machine.
For every transaction, a fee.
When anything that can be bought, will be, there is little surprise to witness the result is an inability to form human connection. There is no intimacy. No whispered fears shared with a spouse. For every adult member of the family, sex is removed from the context of love and vulnerability. People exist only to be devoured for pleasure, or for pain. There is no true partnership. No true friendship. Living life as a series of transactions, the Ushers are mindless vessels of poison destroying the people in their way and peripheral lives in their wake.
Most of us do not require the threat of severe consequences to avoid a life of destruction. The fear of jail or the death penalty aren’t what prevents us from killing one another. Or from being cruel. It is our ability to feel guilt, to feel shame, to know, deep down that it isn’t right to take a life except in the direst – and rarest of circumstances.
When your father is viewed as the reason for thousands of deaths, when he escapes all consequence year after year, the life lesson is quite different.
Carl Lumbly and Bruce Greenwood. Neither of them are enjoying this fireside chat.
Remove the ability to feel, combine it with a life devoid of meaningful consequence and you create soulless abominations.
That is the only creation in the family.
Other than the granddaughter Leonora, there are no families. None of the other Usher kids seem to have procreated. Which, I must say, for Napolean and Prospero to not have any children seems highly unlikely. Regardless – outside of Lenora, the Ushers do not create anything of substance.
No meaningful contributions to society. They do not build, assemble or manufacture anything beyond Fortuna’s initial offering. Victorine latches onto Alessandra because she can possibly turn her idea into a reality. Even then, her wish isn’t to save lives, it is to become famous for saving lives.
An influencer, a wannabe night club owner, a trashy magazine gossip spinner, and a son growing into the family business. They give the world nothing and in return take everything they can. Using it up until only ashes remain.
At first, it seems as though there is a morality tale at play. The Raven (Verna) appears to offer the Usher children a choice to avoid death. Change their ways, make one single decision in a single moment, to unlock a different life by altering the path they are currently on.
It is all a head fake.
Before we reach the finer details of Roderick’s deal with Verna, it becomes clear the end-of-life choice never includes avoiding death. The choice is a death free of pain and full of purpose, or one that reaps what they have sowed.
Which brings me to the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, 1980.
The two Usher siblings finally hear Verna’s offer after a few hours of strange conversations and forced revelry at the bar.
This is no Faustian Bargain with the devil.
How could it be? They already sentenced a man to death before they meet her. There is no moral ground for them to concede. In fact, it is likely that their meeting with The Raven occurs as a result of their actions earlier that night.
While I wasn’t surprised by the deal, I thought Madeline would be the driver. She was the one with the ideas and insight. She had the clear goal for what her future would be without supernatural intervention. She would find a way to live forever, and never have her success be tied to a man.
For me, the surprise was her hesitation, and what it meant at the moment.
Roderick, already a father to Fredrick and Tamerlane, doesn’t even consider the downside. When offered the chance for himself and his entire bloodline to live a life of decadence (what else to call a consequence-free, painless existence?), he says yes immediately. Even knowing it would doom each and every one of his children. Trap them to a fate of dependency and ultimately their death.
He reveals himself to be the true monster. As uncaring to the future his children will inherit as he is assuming the helm of Fortuna, knowing his drug condemns patients to a similar fate. He is not the victim of a game of chance. He wasn’t tricked into stating a hypothetical choice in a game of make believe.
We see he is crystal clear on the opportunity laid before him, and he seizes it.
In Madeline’s hesitation, two realizations play out.
First, currently childless and planning to keep it that way, she states the obvious: she doesn’t carry the same amount of risk as Roderick. To her, the choice seems easier.
Until the swiftness of the second realization hits. By agreeing to Verna’s proposition, Madeline does discover a way to live forever, though it is not her life that continues on. She also realizes that by agreeing to the terms, she inadvertently acquiesced her success, her fate, to a man. In her one moment of weakness, she surrenders her guiding principle.
Is it any wonder she never forgot what transpired that night?
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