I’m not convinced any of these people have ever behaved inappropriately with a corpse!
What does it mean to adapt Poe for the modern age? Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix series, The Fall of the House of Usher, a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe short story, certainly fits in many of the familiar nouns — each episode references one or more familiar Poe works in combinations that can feel like a trip through junior high English class. The problem is that the tone is all off.
For starters, if most people know any one thing about “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it’s that the titular downfall is about incest. The Netflix adaptation, however, proposes: What if it were about the opioid crisis instead?
The story follows a cold, distant pharmaceutical industry scion watching each of his children die horrific deaths in the waning days of his empire. Over the course of the show’s eight episodes, Flanagan creates a kind of Poe Cinematic Universe, borrowing ideas from Poe’s best-known stories and working them into a mostly original tale of greed and family destruction. But in between the epic family drama, the insistence on Poe-ing up the joint frequently becomes muddled and even distracting. Is naming a character Annabel Lee and then having your protagonist randomly recite Poe’s famous poem to her enough to convince us of his undying love? Probably not!
But this is the approach the show relies on, and the result is a choppy mismatch of subject and mood. House of Usher, despite moments of intrigue, seems to lack the most central element of all Poe’s works: Passion. The characters of Usher may be dying like they’re in a gothic horror, but they’re not living like it.
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Eike Schroter/Netflix
Note: The following review contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher.
In theory, Poe ought to be a perfect vehicle for Flanagan. The rising auteur wrote and directed this series, as he has with each of his previous Netflix adaptations, The Haunting of Hill House (2018), based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), based on Henry James’s gothic novella The Turn of the Screw. He also co-created 2022’s The Midnight Club, based on Christopher Pike’s teen horror novels — and he’s adapted, far more faithfully, two different Stephen King novels into acclaimed feature films: 2017’s Gerald’s Game and 2019’s Doctor Sleep. Flanagan has gained a loyal fanbase both for these and for his original works, which range from his indie debut film Absentia (2011) to the sleek thriller Hush (2016) and the religious horror Midnight Mass (2021). He nearly always writes the screenplays for his works, and usually directs the hell out of them.
As writers, both Poe and Flanagan are moody, more than a bit shameless, and obsessed with psychological and philosophical questions about death, grief, and loss. Poe’s infamous short story that provides a basis for this work possesses an additional affinity with Flanagan because it shares his obsession with family. As anyone who has spent any time with Flanagan’s work knows, the only thing he likes more than a solid jump scare or a reflective monologue is a chance to ruminate on families — what holds them together, what tears them apart, what pulls them back together again — because in the worldview of Mike Flanagan, even at his most cynical, there’s always hope for a family reunion or a family redemption.
Flanagan tends to work with a core rotating ensemble of actors, similar to American Horror Story’s anthology approach to recurring casts. This series, they all commit themselves completely to the conceit that they’re in some kind of Poe-ian shadow world, effortlessly dropping off-kilter lines from Poe poems and novels alongside zings and barbs about NDAs and PR spin. Each episode owes something vaguely thematic to a different well-known Poe short story, with the manner of death unfolding in a Final Destination-like hodgepodge of calamity. The gruesome deaths of the Ushers (a clear analogue of the Sacklers) are supernatural retribution for America’s opioid crisis, which Usher helped, um, usher in. The ghastliness of the epidemic seems to have summoned a supernatural Lady Death, a.k.a. Carla Gugino, OG member of the Flanagang, who dons a series of personas in order to hasten the Ushers to their fates.
This setup allows the show to flit between ongoing references to well-known Poe themes and episodes focused on a specific story. For instance, references to the famous poem “The Raven,” the classic revenge story “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the titular short story occur throughout. Other works get referenced mainly through character names (e.g. Auguste Dupin, a detective-turned-prosecutor played with admirable aplomb by Carl Lumbly, shares the name of an investigator from Poe stories like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”) or through casual asides or even direct quotes inserted into dialogue. This litany of allusions ranges from blatant to coy, clever to annoying. At one point, Roderick’s stone-faced lawyer Pym (a superb Mark Hamill) mentions having a guest for dinner, a reference to the original Poe narrative in which another Pym cannibalizes said guest. One character even bears the name of Poe’s real-world enemy, Rufus Griswold.
The references mostly tick all the boxes. The “Murders in the Rue Morgue” episode features death by primate. The episode named after “The Masque of the Red Death” becomes a modern-day bacchanal that goes horribly wrong. The “Gold Bug” episode features a gold bug. As our titular story demands, someone does get buried alive. Apart from serving as fun Easter eggs, however, most of these seeded references rarely amplify the main storyline — and the main storyline itself suffers from a disconnect between the stories it’s referencing and what the narrative is actually doing.
Flanagan takes a kind of mix-and-match approach to his biggest references that frequently makes their origin stories nearly incidental. For example, the Poe short story “The Black Cat” is originally about a murderous addict who succumbs fully to his violent impulses. But in the House of Usher episode “Black Cat,” that aspect of the focal character is almost entirely absent because we barely spend any time with him before he’s battling his furry demon. Instead, that psychology gets handed to the subject of the “Pit and the Pendulum” episode. As a result, that episode has little in common with its origin source, while “Black Cat” lacks any of the depth and murderous intensity that makes Poe’s story so memorable. And so on and so forth.
What’s more, the underlying reason for these deaths — the reason we spend eight episodes watching Usher and his family be stalked by Gugino’s Lady Death — turns out to be essentially Faustian, with everything spelled out and conveniently moralistic. There’s nothing of Poe’s lingering mysteries, the giant unresolved questions of internal motivations and dreamlike logic that hang over his stories and their subjects.
We do get some fabulous creative moments, like Flanagan’s gleeful edit of an opening montage that introduces us to all members of the Usher family through witty cross-cuts and overlapping dialogue. And the murders — the murders! Decadent, melodramatic, gory, deliciously horrific. If what you came for were eight cycles of impending doom counting down to their garish conclusions, you’re in luck.
But the narrative mostly lacks the poetic sensibility and depth of feeling, the weight of profundity that makes Poe such a perennial favorite. Poe’s stories teem with shadows, with turgid, feverish imagery; they evoke the confused turbulence of nightmares, hallucinogens, and madness. The dreary moodiness of Flanagan’s Midnight Mass combined with the looming background ghosts of Hill House would have served this subject well, but instead the production opts for a boardroom sensibility. The settings, like the characters, read as cold and clinical. The gothic insertions from Poe feel forced and sanitized amid the halogencore vibes of our satirical family of squabbling billionaires. Even when characters are succumbing to delusions or dropping like flies, the tonal approach stays detached, as if we’re still, like Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), locked into a bird’s-eye view of human suffering from an indifferent corporate tower — not plummeting endlessly through the fever dream where Poe would have us.
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Netflix
Another thing this adaptation lacks is any hint of Poe’s psychosexual turbulence. There’s plenty of kink, sure, but in keeping with the show’s overall tone, it’s always presented as clinical and dispassionate and even distasteful: One character hosts an orgy, but only as a business strategy; another manipulates her personal assistants into purely transactional sex; a third outsources all intimacy with her husband to sex workers. And again, there’s not even a hint of sublimated incestuous lust between our two Usher siblings, which is half the reason anyone reads “The Fall of the House of Usher” to begin with.
You sense that none of these characters has ever laughed maniacally over a fallen enemy or clawed their way out of a grave or inappropriately interfered with a dead corpse, or any of the other excesses of personality that make tales of the gothic so irresistible. Roderick and his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell, never better) would presumably have trauma over the premature burial of their mother, who does indeed claw her way out of a grave in the opening episode. Yet that plot gets dispatched without much lingering impact, and soon the two siblings go right back to burying people alive. And even that feat, which should be the Amontillicious climax, becomes little more than a perfunctory business transaction. Where is the exultation, the rage, the hysteria, the long-suppressed release of emotion that finally erupts in the frenzied unthinkable act? Where is Poe?
Flanagan does give us two character arcs that get it right. Each captures the chaotic conflict of a tortured violent psyche, and each works because the show takes the time to establish their characters and then lets us see their gradual mental collapse and demise. The first win belongs to T’Nia Miller as Victorine, the heart research scientist whose pursuit of a miracle medical technology drives her into complete psychosis. When it does, the result is a wondrously bloody, pitch-perfect display of the macabre. The second belongs to Henry Thomas as Freddie, the maligned eldest child who channels his familial resentment and insecurity into malevolent domestic abuse as his siblings start dying, culminating in a classic, shall we say, stroke of irony.
These two Usher arcs are so well-considered and well-executed, however, that they highlight the weaknesses of all the others. It’s as though Flanagan drew a line from Poe’s fabled love of opium to the modern opioid epidemic and ran with a thought experiment without giving too much more thought to the emotional essence of Poe’s work. (Poe probably wasn’t even an opium addict.) Perhaps that’s because a part of Flanagan would rather be writing his own stories. House of Usher contains many moments of pure, undiluted horror, stylish and masterful. But the show drowns in its uneven grasp of the source material, when it needn’t have relied on source material at all. The key to the ideal Flanagan series likely lies not with more cherry-picked adaptations, but with more stories that are entirely Flanagan’s own.
Zoos say they’re leaders in protecting wildlife. But is it true?
This week, a leading wildlife conservation group declared that zoos play an essential role in protecting wild species from extinction.
“Zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens are critical conservation partners, and their role should not be under-valued, under-recognized or misunderstood,” the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a nonprofit that’s assessed extinction threat levels for more than 150,000 species, announced in a new position statement. “For anyone who questions the value of zoos in the modern age, IUCN’s position is clear — zoos are essential.”
It’s a bold statement from an authoritative voice on wildlife protection, but is it true? An examination of how zoos spend their money suggests that, despite branding themselves as champions of conservation, they devote far more resources to their main, original prerogative: confining animals for entertainment and profit.
“The way that zoos have been trying to justify their existence for quite a few years now is pointing to conservation,” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “But the reality is that it’s really a very small fraction of their funding that is going to field conservation.” (Disclosure: This summer, I attended a media fellowship program at Vermont Law and Graduate School.)
In 2022, most of the 238 zoos and aquariums accredited by the nonprofit Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) spent a collective $252 million on field conservation — efforts to protect and preserve wildlife habitats. That’s serious money for the broader conservation movement.
“That puts them collectively among the world’s largest contributors to conservation,” Daniel Ashe, president and CEO of the AZA, told Vox. However, it’s just 5 percent of how much zoos and aquariums spent on operations and construction alone in 2018.
Similarly, an analysis of scientific papers published by AZA member institutions from 1993 to 2013 found that only 7 percent were related to biodiversity conservation.
Zoos argue that in addition to their conservation efforts in the field, their very existence contributes to species conservation. By breeding animals in captivity, and preserving their genetic material in “biobanks,” the argument goes, they’ve created a stock of animals — known as “insurance populations” — who could be released back into nature if wild populations dwindle to alarming levels.
Emma Marris, an environmental writer and author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World, wrote in a 2021 New York Times opinion piece that it’s “as if they might be called upon at any moment to release them, like Noah throwing open the doors to the ark, into a waiting wild habitat. But that day of release never quite seems to come.”
“I’m very skeptical that a lot of these captive breeding programs have any practical relevance to conserving species in their natural habitat, which, in my view, is the point of conservation,” said Mickey Pardo, a behavioral ecologist and postdoctoral research fellow at Colorado State University who studies elephants in the wild. The reason, Pardo says, is because reintroduction stemming from captive breeding programs is incredibly challenging and thus rare, and it’s not the primary goal of most captive breeding programs to begin with.
There are some exceptions, Marris notes, in which zoos have played a starring role in reintroducing threatened and endangered species to the wild, including the California condor, the Arabian oryx, and Black-footed ferrets, among others. Ashe told me zoos have played a role in dozens and dozens of reintroduction programs, though he didn’t have a specific number. It’s important work and should be celebrated, as should zoos’ contributions to field conservation. But, Pardo says, it doesn’t justify AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums keeping wild animals in captivity who are not part of any current reintroduction program nor likely to become part of one in the future.
Currently, AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums have about 780,000 animals.
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Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Kira Mileham, IUCN’s global director of strategic partnerships, disagrees with the argument that field conservation is all that matters. Mileham told Vox captive breeding programs at zoos do more than just create insurance populations, and that they contribute to field conservation by providing opportunities for researchers to learn about species’ behavior, nutrition, veterinary needs, and more. Mileham added that zoos also play an important role in temporary rescue and “head start” efforts by, say, taking animals and/or their eggs that are facing a serious, temporary threat out of the wild, and then returning them when it’s safe.
Zoos undeniably do some good work for species conservation; however, that work can obscure their dark side: the suffering of animals in captivity.
Life at the zoo
Animals who, in their natural habitats, would travel great distances are resigned to living in film-set versions of lush rainforests and vast savannas while surrounded by city noise. As a result of the lack of stimulation and small environments, some animals will develop “stereotypic” behavior, in which they engage in repetitive motions that are rare in the wild.
Researchers call it “zoochosis,” a play on “psychosis,” though making enclosures a little nicer and providing “enrichment activities” to animals both help, as do pharmaceutical drugs.
There was Gus, the Central Park Zoo polar bear who would swim figure eights in his pool for sometimes up to 12 hours a day (his enclosure was just 0.00009 percent of his range in the wild), and Sukari, the giraffe at Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, who for hours would lick steel cables, walls, and gates. Other animals pace, rock back and forth, and head-bob, or engage in self-harm, like pulling out their hair or biting themselves. There are many stories of escape attempts.
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David Handschuh/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Despite it all, AZA-accredited zoos keep acquiring more animals, either from other zoos, breeding them on their own, taking them from the wild (how 80 percent of animals at AZA-accredited aquariums are acquired, Ashe told me), as rescues, or from a number of other sources, such as private breeders and hunting ranches.
Mileham refutes the notion that many zoos are just acquiring animals at the expense of their welfare, however: “I don’t think [leading zoos] kind of flippantly trade off the welfare of species for the sake of having them in their facilities,” she said. And not every welfare matter is black and white, Mileham said. For instance, some animals in zoos might have come from areas with high levels of conflict with humans. “We can’t pretend that an animal in the wild always has a perfect life and has no welfare compromises just because they happen to not be in human care.”
Ashe assured me that “when you see animals at AZA member institutions, you’re seeing animals that are thriving there.” He went on to say, “I understand some people just don’t like the idea of any animal in a state of confinement, and in those cases, we just have a fundamental disagreement.”
When Marris asked Ashe about the constraints of captivity, Ashe largely shrugged the problem away, saying that, well, everyone has constraints put on them: “We are all captive in some regards to social and ethical and religious and other constraints on our life and our activities.”
I asked Ashe about this quote, and he said, “It’s factually true — we all live with constraint in our social life and we agree to constraint so we have social order.” He’s right, of course, that it’s true for humans, but there’s a glaring omission in his response: Animals can’t agree to the constraints we impose on them.
I can’t think of a more dissatisfying answer to the ethical dilemma of putting hundreds of thousands of wild animals behind glass. But it does reveal that the ideology undergirding earlier zoos and aquariums largely persists today — that animals are here for us, not with us.
Zoos: What are they good for?
Zoos justify their existence not just through conservation, but also by their educational work. Their actual impact in that domain, however, is likely minor.
The AZA says one of the “superpowers” of its 238 accredited zoos and aquariums is that they have “the opportunity to influence and inspire the 200 million people who visit every year.” On its face, it makes sense: If everyone could just see the beauty of the animal kingdom up close and learn about the plight of threatened species, they might be inspired to support or get involved in conservation work. Surely, zoos have that effect on some, but there’s no evidence it’s the case for many.
On the contrary, most people don’t read the educational plaques at zoos, and according to polls of zoo-goers, most go to spend time with friends or family — to enjoy themselves and be entertained, not to learn about animals and their needs. One study found the level of environmental concern reported by attendees before they entered the zoo was similar to those who were polled at the exits.
While the educational value of zoos is dubious, there’s certainly one message zoo-goers receive, if only implicitly: That it’s perfectly fine, even good, to put wild animals on display in tiny enclosures for the public’s leisure. In other words, animals — even if they’re suffering right in front of us — can be objects of entertainment.
“It’s rooted in this notion that yes, we have this privileged right to observe these animals at any cost to [them] or to their species more generally, and it’s deeply troubling,” Winders said.
The idea that we must exploit some animals in order to protect others creates a bizarre false choice, even when there are much more humane paths taken by others in the wildlife protection movement, like animal sanctuaries.
What a more humane zoo could look like
Animal sanctuaries are like zoos in that they’re large properties where animals live in captivity, but they differ in every other way. For one, animals in sanctuaries tend to have far more space than animals in zoos, and they’re there to live on their own terms, not to be put on display for an entrance fee. Some sanctuaries are not open to the public, while others conduct small tours or have much smaller attendance numbers than the typical zoo. (Beware, however, that many operations call themselves sanctuaries but in reality are more like petting zoos.)
The Wild Animal Sanctuary, a 45-minute drive from Denver, Colorado, provides a compelling example of how animals can better coexist with visitors. The 1,214-acre operation, home to rescued bears, tigers, lions, wolves, and other species, was closed to the public for its first 20 years. But in the early 2000s, it began to open up to visitors, who can only see the animals from the sanctuary’s observation decks and more than 1.5 miles of elevated walkways, causing less disturbance than zoo-goers.
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The Wild Animal Sanctuary
Animals typically wind up in sanctuaries — the ethical kind, at least — because they were abandoned or injured, rather than bred, purchased, or taken from the wild. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, the animal sanctuary world’s equivalent to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, takes the position that captive breeding is only permitted if it’s done for eventual reintroduction into the wild — unlike zoos, which largely breed animals as insurance populations and to keep a steady supply to put on display.
Some critics have called for zoos to phase out keeping animals from species that aren’t either critically endangered or extinct in the wild, or for which there’s no viable reintroduction program. Additionally, they argue, urban zoos should either close down or set limits on how many animals they keep.
I would add one more thing that zoos — and sanctuaries, for that matter — could do: Stop serving meat and dairy in their cafeterias. There’s the painfully obvious point that an institution whose mission is to protect animals probably shouldn’t sell animal meat. But there’s also this: One-third of Earth’s habitable land is devoted to cattle grazing and growing corn and soy to feed farmed animals, which has resulted in mass habitat loss for wildlife and crashing biodiversity levels. Meat production is the leading cause of global deforestation, and thus the leading threat to wildlife habitats.
Reforming zoos won’t be easy, and arguably, a lot of conservation dollars might vanish if zoos looked different. But it says something about the conservation movement, and us, if one of the best ways to raise funds for wild animals is to put them in captivity. I don’t have the answers for how the conservation movement could supercharge its funding in lieu of the significant amount of funding zoos provide, but I think it’s clear, as Marris puts it, that zoos are not worth the moral cost.
As our understanding of animal sentience and their capacity for suffering has grown, our economy has slowly adapted. Fashion designers are replacing leather and fur with animal-free textiles, meat companies are now selling plant-based nuggets and burgers, and in 2018, the traveling circus Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey announced it would stop using animals, such as lions, tigers, and bears, in its shows. Zoos, too, could reinvent themselves for a more enlightened age by focusing on what animals need, not what the public wants to do on a Saturday afternoon.
Medicaid unwinding’s terrible toll, explained in 4 charts.
In the six months since states began double-checking the eligibility of people enrolled in their Medicaid programs for the first time in three years, more than 8.5 million Americans have lost their Medicaid benefits.
Based on enrollment numbers at the start of the year, that means roughly 1 in 10 people covered by Medicaid have lost their health insurance in a matter of months. After the US saw its uninsured rate hit historic lows during the pandemic, millions of the most vulnerable Americans are now falling off the rolls — with no assurance they will be able to find another form of coverage.
Worse, many of those losing coverage are losing it because of administrative hiccups and would otherwise be eligible — a problem that is disproportionately impacting children.
We won’t know until next year’s national insurance surveys how many people simply ended up uninsured and how many people successfully enrolled in another form of health coverage even as they lost their Medicaid benefits. But it is safe to expect that millions more Americans are now uninsured than were at the beginning of the year.
The health effects of this massive loss in health insurance will take years to be realized. But we know that having Medicaid means people are more likely to see a doctor and keep up with managing chronic conditions. The program helps people live longer. So losing coverage will make it even more difficult for a population that already struggles with its health to stay well.
Here’s why this is happening: During the pandemic, Congress approved an emergency provision that prevented almost anyone from losing their Medicaid coverage. Even if you had a change in income or life circumstances that in normal times would have led to you leaving the program, you were allowed to stay as long as that emergency policy was in place. But that provision expired earlier this year, part of the government standing down from its pandemic footing, and states were tasked with double-checking the eligibility of every person who was on their Medicaid rolls — a process referred to as unwinding. Starting in April, they could remove people who they found were no longer eligible.
So far, these are the aggregate enrollment losses by state, via KFF:
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KFF
Before unwinding began, the Biden administration and outside experts estimated that up to 15 million people could lose their coverage during the unwinding process. We are now more than halfway to that worst-case scenario, with at least six months to go in most states.
The fear is that many people would end up losing coverage not because they were actually no longer eligible for Medicaid but because they got caught in some kind of bureaucratic snag. States are supposed to do as much as they can to check people’s eligibility with data they have on hand (tax data, information from food stamps and other welfare programs, etc.) but states are limited in their actual capacity to perform those automatic checks. According to KFF, less than one-third of enrollment checks have been completed through automatic “ex parte” renewals.
If a person’s eligibility can’t be confirmed automatically, that’s when things get dicey. States have to make sure they know about the unwinding process in the first place, they have to have up-to-date addresses and contact information to get in touch with people, and then people have to successfully either log onto an online portal or send documentation through the mail to confirm their eligibility. There are plenty of places where the proverbial ball could be dropped, either by the state or the enrollee.
Based on the available data, that has been happening quite a lot. In most states, more than half the people who have been kicked off Medicaid have lost coverage for an administrative reason — meaning somewhere along the way, there was an issue with their paperwork, not that they were no longer eligible.
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KFF
Experts are particularly concerned about children losing coverage when they shouldn’t — and for good reason.
The Biden administration announced last month that it had detected a problem with how states were conducting their eligibility checks. A majority of states, as it turns out, were automatically disqualifying everybody in a family if they found that one person (most likely a parent) was no longer eligible for Medicaid.
That approach might simplify the process for states, but it risks kicking eligible children off the program. Most states have more generous eligibility rules for children than they do for parents. So while a parent may no longer qualify for Medicaid, their child still might. The administration has demanded states take steps to make sure they are evaluating the eligibility of each individual, to ensure children are not being unnecessarily removed from Medicaid
The data we have on how kids are faring during unwinding is concerning. Experts expect that most children who are legitimately no longer eligible for Medicaid should be eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in the states that run a separate CHIP program. (In other states, Medicaid and CHIP have been integrated.) According to the Georgetown Center on Children and Families, while more than 1 million children have lost Medicaid in those states over the past six months, CHIP enrollment has stayed relatively flat.
Altogether, more than 1.7 million American children have lost their Medicaid benefits this year:
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Georgetown Center for Children and Families
In states that are breaking out renewal data by age, children account for a substantial share of the people who are losing Medicaid benefits:
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KFF
Some coverage losses were inevitable during the unwinding process. But the US seems to be failing in the pursuit of minimizing the unnecessary losses, with the country’s children bearing a significant part of that failure. States and the Biden administration say they are trying to stop the bleeding. Time will tell if they can do so successfully — or if it’s already too late.