Currently thinking about how the portrait of Isabella de’Medici was transferred from wood panel to canvas and then altered to fit Victorian beauty standards by a man named Francis Needham so that a buyer would be more attracted to it, and hundreds of years later we only know what Isabella really looks like due to Ellen Baxter, the conservator of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, discovering that the cracks in the painting were smaller than cracks in old canvas usually are, thus leading to the discovery of the Victorian version of photoshop done to her-

(Victorian canvas transfer on the left, original wood panel on the right)

Here is, at last, an itemized list of my various problems and thoughts with The Fall of the House of Usher. Before you block, unfollow, report, and make a callout post, please be aware that I have an extensive blackmail list. Grazie

Flanagan is flanagan and incapable of not being moralizing and didactic. I think he takes one of Stephen King's problems to the nth degree which is a kind of... sentimentalism and a belief that Good Can Come From Horror. The need for horror to be meaningful and redemptive and in some capacity... joyous? Or at least morally Useful in the fashion of Victorian lit? doesn't make amazing art

He needs to let go of constantly casting his wife and their friends. Every time he brings in someone who's not in the "inner circle" they contribute more strongly and effectively than everyone else.

Case in point, Mary McDonnell. I know I came into the show liking her due to BSG Brainrot and Laura Roslin Pussy Disease, but frankly she can be inconsistent especially with bad directing; whereas here I think she actually provides a very strong foundation because, even though she's working with substandard material, she doesn't have to stretch herself very far to play Steely, Soft-Spoken Matriarch so she does ok--and "ok" is better than a lot of the rest of the cast. Same thing with Mark Hamill: he was such a bright point in this show and it was a great use of his skills in transforming physically as well as vocally. Carl Lumbly similarly did his absolute best with shite material and his role as being functionally a prop/occasional commentator in the frame narration.

The same thing happened when he brought in T'Nia Miller in Bly Manor and she blew the roof off that show. But now she's folded into the inner circle and she does amazing with what she's got, but pLEASE free her.

STOP. CASTING. KATE SIEGEL. PLEASE!!!!! And STOP casting that man playing Young Roderick, he gave NOTHING to the role, he contributed NOTHING. Mr. Gerald's Game literally carried the Roderick characterization all on his own. Can we say if he did well? Perhaps he didn't. But he was putting in the work.

There is an obsessive need to do too much, all at once, that really kills whatever minor crumbs of decent writing or atmosphere they manage to sprinkle around. Why do we need so many references to Poe that have so little to do with the original stories? Wouldn't it be more effective to pick 2-3 and do them right in a more tightly written story than to swing the bat at 8-10 works and maybe only hit 1 or 2 out of the park?

😭 listen, I'm not a genius nor can I or would I ever claim to understand the Black experience. But I certainly doubt a gay Black man in a government job in the 1970s would namedrop his male partner to a complete, white, heterosexual stranger, not even as a manipulative technique to create false intimacy or camaraderie. (Similar thing happened in Bly Manor where a Black woman who wanted to be a high-powered lawyer(?) took a job as a lawyer(?)'s NANNY to try to get a career opportunity with him? Um?) (Question marks after each instance of lawyer because I remember VERY little about the show honestly.)

The treatment of bisexuality as this decadent bourgeois predatory sexuality is actually INSANE in Usher. Please believe me when I say I am pro "bad rep," but Flanagan does not have a good history of thoughtful treatment of sexual minorities, especially female ones (cf. treatment of Trish [also an example of exoticising and marginalizing racism] and Theo [and to some extent Nell] in Hill House, the Jamie/Dani storyline in Bly Manor). And the way sex overall is portrayed and handled is soooo Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny.

There is this problem with all of Flanagan's adaptations, and Bryan Fuller does the same thing (I've seen it in both Hannibal and American Gods), where they just wholesale poach lines from the author's narration or other works and give it to their characters as dialogue. In this one they even have the grotesque indecency to have Roderick be the "author" of multiple of Poe's poems. HOW? WHY? HOW? WHY? Additionally, when they do this with the narration, it doesn't make sense as dialogue. Human beings don't talk like that except in very rare instances or if they're very pretentious. It just doesn't make sense. It's a failure of writing and imagination on the adaptor's part because they're not confident in their ability to visually create the atmosphere that the written line conjured and it's actually pathetic.