*Contains spoilers and insights!
In today’s text I’m going to talk a little about the family dynamics of the Ushers and how the relationships we cultivate have the power to influence various spheres of our lives.
Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where power takes precedence, love is lacking. One is the shadow of the other”(JUNG, OC 7/1, §78).
This sentence by Carl Gustav Jung invaded my mind as soon as I finished the eight episodes of the series directed by Mike Flanagan, which is also the farewell production of the director’s partnership with Netflix streaming. The Fall of the House of Usher series, despite taking its name from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in 1839, is built from a mixture of several of the author’s stories that form an unpublished work. It’s almost like a love letter from Mike Flanagan to Edgar Allan Poe.
But beyond the title, the short story also gives the series its central structure: Two siblings, Roderick and Madeline Usher, have to deal with the decay of their home, because in both stories, the family line will die with them. Except that in the short story the siblings are the last Ushers in existence and are both battling a terminal illness, while in the series Roderick has six children and a granddaughter.
In the series Roderick talks to the prosecutor Auguste Dupin, who is trying to hold the Usher family accountable for their crimes, in a house falling apart. His way of holding the prosecutor’s attention and that of the audience is that the millionaire promises the prosecutor that at the end of the story he will reveal how he is to blame for the mysterious deaths of all his offspring.
With the exception of Roderick’s granddaughter, Lenore, all his descendants are complicated people who have alarming difficulties in their personal relationships:
Prospero:
He is the youngest brother and has no friends or a significant love relationship with anyone. In the second episode, which ends in his death, his first appearance on the scene is naked in his bed, with four other naked people sleeping around him. There are sex toys scattered around. The closest thing he has is a young man and a young woman who follow him everywhere and help him in his plan to create an exclusive party. At breakfast at his house, Prospero wants to know where his eggs are, his friend replies that nobody cares, they’re just eggs. Prospero picks up a fork and threateningly holds it to his friend’s throat while explaining how special and rare the eggs he is looking for are for his coffee. This scene shows us how he relates to his closest of friends. On the basis of disrespect and fear.
Camille:
She is in charge of public relations for Fortunado and also for the Usher family, as she is very intelligent. During her time on stage we don’t meet any friends or significant relationships. She has two personal assistants who do the investigative work for her, including in one scene, when she is investigating her sister Victorine, since Camille suspects Victorine of being the Feds’ informer in Dupin’s case against the family. Camille even says to her assistants: bribe and threaten if necessary, which shows the viewer that she has no problem going beyond ethics and even committing crimes. We later learn that one of the functions the assistants have to perform is to satisfy Camille sexually. Not even her intimate relationships are intimate or disconnected from her work.
Leo:
He calls himself a video game developer, but in reality he pays people to develop for him while he abuses chemical substances. He lives in an apartment with his boyfriend, who seems to be a good person and provides him with a healthy relationship, but cheats on him when he’s not at home. Leo seems to be one of the few to maintain bonds with his siblings, as he has a good relationship with Prospero and Camille, and at one point even with his older brother Frederick. He protects his drug addiction at all costs, finding ways to justify his use, even establishing rules with his boyfriend, one of which is that his boyfriend should never challenge his use or ask him to cut down. In one scene, Leo thinks that he may have had an outburst while under the influence of drugs and killed his boyfriend’s cat. Rather than tell the truth and risk having his addiction scrutinized, he sets out on a journey to replace the animal and protect his addiction.
Victorine:
She is a doctor and seems to have a healthy relationship with his girlfriend and professional partner Alessandra. Of all of them, she has the most macabre job, as she regularly performs surgeries and loses chimpanzee patients. Rumors of her unethical professional practices spread through the corridors of her work and we later get the impression that Victorine and Alessandra’s union was based on Victorine’s interest in Alessandra’s project. Victorine even kills her girlfriend when she is thwarted by her.
Tamerlane:
She is the youngest “legitimate child” of Roderick’s marriage to his first wife, Annabele Lee. Tamerlane produces a health and exercise program of which her husband is the main star. Throughout the series we learn that she experiences her sexuality by hiring prostitutes who must stage a routine dinner with her husband while she watches. What she apparently enjoys watching is the intimacy between them, since she apparently can’t bond on the same level with her husband, as she sees him only as a product, an employee she has hand-picked for her career project.
Frederick:
He seems to be the most functional, with a good relationship with his wife Morella and daughter Lenore. Throughout the series we come to understand that he only seeks his father’s approval, the rest is almost as if he’s just putting on an act of affection, because underneath the appearances we can see how, in reality, he’s bound by feelings of possession towards his wife and daughter, rather than love. This becomes clear in the last few episodes.
Although we don’t have access to the childhoods of Roderick’s four children outside of his marriage to Annabel Lee, the series shows us scenes from the late 1970s, when Roderick and Annabel were still married, and dialogues in the last episode shed light on what might have happened to make the children the way they were.
In one scene, Roderick tells Dupin that when he and Annabel separated, she had custody of the children and Roderick couldn’t stand it. He says that he waited for them to grow up a bit and then started bombarding them with money and what their lives could be like if they stayed with their father. When they finally chose their father, Roderick says he saw in his eyes that whatever good they had inherited from their mother had been killed by money.
This scene is followed by Roderick’s encounter with Annabele Lee’s fastasma in the church after her children’s funeral, in which she tells him:
” ‘He’s rich’, that’s what I used to say to people when they asked me how you took them (the children) away from me. ‘He’s rich’ and you don’t understand what that word means. They were young and they only knew appetite. And then you come along and say ‘here, come with me and stuff yourselves’. How could I compete with that? But you didn’t feed them, did you? You starved them. They became less and less what they were until one day they were empty. They were drained. And then you began to fill them up, to supply them with… With what? What did you have to supply them with? Because you weren’t rich, were you? All this time I thought you were a rich man, but now I understand you. I look at you and I see you. The poverty inside you”
So it’s clear that wealth in this context is not about money, but about love, empathy, respect, affection, good values and principles. And that Roderick didn’t have enough nutritious and healthy psychological and emotional food to share with his children; on the contrary, what he did have was toxic and made them sick.
“Our brains are built to ensure that we follow the beliefs and values of those around us” – Matthew Lieberman
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book ““, said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. Assuming we spend just 20% of our time thinking about other people and ourselves in relation to others, our standard neural network would be busy at least three hours a day. In other words, our brains worked 10,000 hours making us experts at social relationships before we were ten years old.
A child’s brain is programmed to grow and mature, but it takes more than two decades to complete this task, making it the last organ in the body to mature anatomically. Throughout this period, the major figures in a child’s life – parents, siblings, grandparents, teachers and friends – can become active ingredients in brain development. Like a plant adapting to rich or poor soil, a child’s brain molds itself to fit into its social ecology, accommodating itself particularly to the emotional climate of its environment, which is forged by the people who populate that child’s life.
The human brain is designed to transform in response to accumulated experiences.
Michel Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, discovered that rat pups who were raised by devoted mothers who licked and nurtured them a lot were less stressed when faced with an unfamiliar or stressful situation. Pups that were not as well cared for by their mothers had more difficulty dealing with mazes, for example, the equivalent of the human IQ test. The worst results in the experiments came from puppies who were separated from their mothers prematurely. The trauma of separation activated protective genes which left their brains vulnerable to toxic floods of stress molecules. They grew up to become easily frightened rats.
The human equivalent of nurturing and licking is empathy, attention, care, respect and physical touch. This means that the way our parents treated us did or did not activate the genes they passed on to us through our DNA. And the way we treat our children will in turn modulate the way their genes are activated or not. This finding suggests that small acts of care in parenting style can have long-lasting consequences and that relationships have the power to guide the ways in which the brain will adapt.
Relationships are one of the most important aspects of our lives. People who are more socially connected to family, friends or their community are happier, physically healthier and live longer, with fewer mental health problems than people who are less connected.
It’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a serious relationship, but it’s the quality of your close relationships that matters. Living in conflict or in a toxic relationship is more damaging than being alone.
Here are the books mentioned with the link so you can buy them:
- Outliers– Malcolm Gladwell
You can also listen to mypodcastPsyche in Words, where I explored this topic:
