Netflix’s House of Usher’s lemon speech is full of the show’s flaws

Monologues are Mike Flanagan’s specialty. From his earliest movies, he’s loved to let characters wax poetic about their motivations, the supernatural, or honestly just about anything. Of course, when he turned his focus to television You can also find out more about the following: started making miniseries, he got even more room to let his penchant for speeches run wild, and for the most part he’s made the best of it, especially in Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. However, his Netflix show is a different story. The Fall of Usher’s House, contains his worst-ever monologue (and perhaps one of the worst monologues ever committed to paper) and shows that he, and the series, aren’t great at writing about wealth.

The monologue in question, which happens in the middle of the show’s third episode, belongs to the story’s de facto narrator, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood). About halfway through confessing all of his many crimes and the secrets behind his children’s deaths to Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), Roderick launches into a long and winding description of everything wrong with the idiom “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Roderick responds in detail:

Make lemonade when life gives you lemons? No. It is best to start with a multi media campaign that convinces people that lemons have become scarce. But this only works if the lemons can be controlled and you are prepared. Lemon is the only way to say “I love you,” the must-have accessory for engagements or anniversaries. The roses are gone, and lemons take their place. Billboards that say she won’t have sex with you unless you got lemons. You cut De Beers in on it. Lemon bracelets with yellow diamonds, called lemon drops. You get Apple to call their new operating system OS-Lemón. A little accent over the “o.” You charge 40% more for organic lemons, 50% more for conflict-free lemons. Lemon lobbyists pack the Capitol, and a Kardashian is asked to put a wedge of lemon in a leaked tape. Timotheé Chalamet wears lemon shoes at Cannes. Use a hashtag to promote your campaign. Something isn’t “cool” or “tight” or “awesome,” no, it’s “lemon.” “Did you see that movie? Did you attend that concert? It was effing lemon.” Billie Eilish, “OMG, hashtag… lemon.” You get Dr. Oz to recommend four lemons a day and a lemon suppository supplement to get rid of toxins ‘cause there’s nothing scarier than toxins. Next, you patent seeds. You write a line of genetic code that makes the lemons look just a little more like tits… and you get a gene patent for the tit-lemon DNA sequence, you cross-pollinate… you get those seeds circulating in the wild, and then you sue the farmer for copyright infringement when that genetic code shows up on their land. Sit back, rake in the millions, and then, when you’re done, and you’ve sold your lem-pire for a few billion dollars, then, and only then, you make some fucking lemonade.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

There are so many problems with this monologue that it’s difficult to know where to start, but before we get to them, it’s important to note how the show frames it. The monologue plays entirely on Bruce Greenwood’s scowling face with a slow zoom and a thunderstorm behind him. There are no pauses for laughter or smirks, it’s just pure “thundering” bravado and confidence. And when we cut back to a rapt Auggie, he’s shocked by the power of Roderick’s insight into how capitalism They are a great way to get started. works.

The whole thing is embarrassing. The show could have easily been an extended, bad joke on the unfounded confidence of the super-rich. But because the show treats it with utmost seriousness, seemingly giving Roderick credit as a cunning business genius, we’re forced to reckon with its actual text and what it means for the characters, and the show’s version of wealth and capitalism.

Let’s start with Roderick’s comparison to roses, which is way off. Roses can’t really be considered a fad, because they have been a symbol of love and affection dating back to at least ancient Greece. The comparison with diamonds, a status symbol whose main value lies in its over-marketing and strict control of production is a good one. Unfortunately, that’s the last time he’ll make much of a coherent point, particularly as the tone grows more insistent amid a barrage of “real world” references.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

Those more modern nods don’t make any sense: On top of it being generally silly to suggest product placement in a sex tape as a prime influencer of culture, the bit about a leaked Kardashian sex step is a rather gross assertion for the show to make about Kim Kardashian, and generally about female celebrities who have private content leaked against their wishes. If we’re being charitable, we could say this is just something Roderick thinks because he’s an asshole; but again, we’re supposed to believe he knows business and monopolies extremely well. It’s also just a reference that feels more than a decade out of date, not unlike him saying Billie Eilish should say “hashtag Lemon” as part of the promotion. That’s a suggestion so out of step with the singer’s brand and online presence that it would likely have the reverse effect Roderick is suggesting (not to mention the ever decreasing relevance of hashtags or the website that helped popularize them). And then he’s on to Dr. Oz, for some reason, whose reputation as a health guru kingmaker fell off long before his Senate campaign drew even more negative attention to his work.

Each and every real-world example here is like an early draft of a story that should have been fact-checked, but was instead forgotten. It’s ridiculously out of step, both with the real-world promotion these celebrities often do, but also with the way endorsement culture works in 2023. Influencers and celebrities have been using sponsored content for over a decade. Paid endorsements are also commonplace. You don’t need devious manipulation: The culture’s mostly onboard with their favorites selling them stuff already. If you used devious manipulation it wouldn’t look like what Roderick gave as examples.

And again — worst of all — it’s just bad writing. It’s comical hyperbole that makes the show’s main character, who its whole premise rests on us knowing as a smart, calculating, and cruel person, sound totally out of touch. Auggie letting any of this pass without even a laugh drags him, too.

This whole lemon business undercuts a lot of what Flanagan was trying to convey about corporate greed or wealth. Making a healthcare CEO who got rich on opioids into a caricature of evil because of the way he’d sell lemons is easy, but it also obscures the insidious and more straightforward ways corporations actually You can also find out more about the following: Roderick’s exploitation of markets or the fact that he consciously pushed a highly addictive painkiller to make more sales.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

It is impossible to understand the world in its entirety without this confusion. Usher The story is about Roderick, his wife and children. Their wealth and power is merely an indicator of status — the Ushers have the vague trappings of wealth, but the show doesn’t seem bothered with examining how being wealthy changes them, beyond the toys and spaces they have access to. Their rich-kid degeneracy is primarily expressed through their “hip” jobs or even (alarmingly) their sexualities, seemingly letting queerness stand in for decadence for almost all of Roderick’s children. It never achieves the relaxed and silly hedonism that was so prevalent in the original. Succession’s characters dining on endangered birds. There is nothing in the show that’s half as funny and evocative of Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth wildly miss-guessing the price of a banana.

This flippant flattening and boredom could be excused if The Fall of Usher’s HouseIt was often the show that it flirts with: a deliciously arch, dark comedy about an evil supernatural being bringing a family of rich monsters to their knees. Instead, it is a show that insists on saying something and being. It is important to note that. The finale’s biggest set piece has Verna’s (Carla Gugino) god-like force lecturing Roderick on all the evil he’s brought into the world, for goodness sake. A keener sense of humor would have carried this show much further in its vision of what the wealthy monsters of the world look like — even if its lemon joke still wouldn’t have landed.