or Why some media other people find deep feels so shallow

You ever watch a movie or a series that everyone else is gushing about, and you just can’t help but wonder…why? So then you try to find review sites you respect to explain what everyone’s getting out of it, and you find these effusive reviews about how complex and insightful the show is? And you read all those reviews and the examples that keep coming up are ridiculously simple things like, “Did you notice that Verna is an anagram of RAVEN?”

Well, it happens to me a lot. In particular, it has happened with every single thing I have watched from “horror auteur” Mike Flanagan. (Yes, people call him that. No, I do not agree.) And while it is tempting for me to just have a rant about how I think Flanagan is overrated, I wanted to glean something more broadly applicable from this experience. So I am using this opportunity to talk about why reasonable people can have different views about the depth of the same work.

I call it “the 101 effect.”

Media, Discourse, and Personal Experience

In high school, I had dabbled in Existentialist literature, so when I got to college I made sure to take a course on it. I got to deep-dive into Camus, Sartre, and Dostoyevsky. That course was an A-level at Northwestern, meaning it was aimed at introducing content to beginning students. Most other universities would have referred to it as a 100-level course, perhaps even “Existential Lit 101”. And yes, I thought I was deep because of it. But as I continued to expand my understanding of literature and history not only at the turn of the 20th century but across wider and wider time spans, as I explored the contexts of politics, economics, and art, I began to understand how Existentialism fit into larger questions about the changing world. I understood that it was connected to work that had come before and would come after. I understood that my supposed depth was fine for the time, but insufficient once I had expanded my awareness.

Now, to be fair, I still think a focused discussion of The Plague would be worthwhile within that larger context. I think that great art has value at many levels of depth. My point here is my own personal understanding. If I were right now to listen to myself as that college freshman who thought he was so deep because he was really into Notes From the Underground, I probably would be a little impatient with some of his assertions. And if that 101-level version of me had written something (side note – he did), I would now look at it as fine but not as valuable to the person I am now.

And this may all seem like a very obvious explanation – we know that some works can be more immature in their approach to themes and content when the creators have less experience or exposure to the art. How is this news?

Well, the issue comes in when we are dealing with topics that are of universal interest but VASTLY differing levels of experience. Especially when these differing levels of experience have less to do with age, so it is entirely possible to be (for example) an inexperienced middle-aged adult. Topics like race, gender, sexuality, religion, grief, and more – these are things everyone interacts with at some level, but some people have to deal with them much more frequently than others simply by virtue of their own life experiences.

Two Quick Examples

1. I have mentioned in the past that I had multiple early and intense experiences with grief and loss that have shaped my life. As a result, I am sometimes bothered by media that takes a superficial, 101-level understanding of grief. But I sometimes see friends or reviewers talking about such a scene as very moving even though it feels inauthentic to me. They’re not wrong, they just have different experiences. I would never berate someone for not understanding grief the way I do, I just won’t engage as much with media that does that. (And I will engage with and praise media that expresses grief and loss in ways that DO feel authentic to me.)
2. You may remember a while back that I did a goofy little exploration of masculinity, trying to explain the ways I saw it as multi-faceted rather than monolithic. Back then, I still had a Twitter account and interacted with numerous game designers and other game industry folks. One of them was a trans man who made fun of me for creating such a “straight” matrix of masculinity. And that’s fair – I was specifically trying to deconstruct my own experience, which was nowhere near as intense and detailed as his. He was definitely looking at gender on what one might call a graduate level. My 101-level discussion was not useful to him, and others who did find it useful were mostly approaching the topic at a similar level to me.

Mike Flanagan’s 101-Level Theology

I have not seen all of Mike Flanagan’s work, but I have watched several things that other people really liked, including some of the pieces widely regarded as his “best” (although tastes do seem to vary about that). In particular, I want to talk about Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher. Spoilers for both below, in case that’s something that concerns you.

Midnight Mass, for those unfamiliar, is a story about a small New England island town in decline. The townspeople fall under the sway of a charismatic priest who starts healing them with miracles that (as it turns out) are thinly-veiled vampiric rituals. Like much of Flanagan’s work, it can get very chatty, but most of the positive reviews and comments I have seen consider that part of its appeal. The critic’s consensus on Rotten Tomatoes calls it “an ambitious meditation on grief and faith,” and here is where we run into problems.

You see, grief and religion are two topics that I know VERY well. And the religious discourse in this show is what I would call 101-level. From the basic premise (“oh hey, communion is kind of like vampirism”) to the detailed monologues about faith, forgiveness, and the afterlife, everything here is stuff that might have felt deep to me when I was just beginning my own religious explorations. But for someone who was raised a pastor’s kid, who can explain the historical and doctrinal differences between many of the major Christian denominations, who has spent (and continues to spend) his life studying, discussing, and comparing a multitude of faiths, practices, and relationships with the divine, the questions this series raises are just not useful or even all that interesting to me. They don’t feel deep from my perspective because they are not new to me. They’re a fine starting point, but I passed that point a long time ago.

However, I don’t expect most other people to have the intensity of experience I have had. Many people – whether or not they have left their faith – may have grown up in a church, but that’s just not the same. It would be like saying that I buy fresh meat from the butcher every week and therefore understand what it’s like to work in a slaughterhouse. I don’t. Flanagan has that kind of consistent but limited awareness that comes from growing up in a religious family, and because that’s a common experience to many people, the themes of this series are more likely to be broadly relatable. I’m the weird one, and I acknowledge that. But it does mean that I can’t really enjoy the series the way others seem to.

Side note – the grief and loss conversations are slightly better but still not great, which is surprising because they end up so much worse by contrast than some of the ones in Haunting of Hill House. That series doesn’t always get it right, but it does get it right a decent amount of the time.

The Flimsiness of a Poe Pastiche (Poe-stiche?)

I tried to go into Fall of the House of Usher with an open mind. I knew from reviews and from Flanagan’s not-really-an-adaptation approach to Haunting of Hill House that I shouldn’t expect to see direct retellings of any of Edgar Allen Poe’s work. But so many people were praising how much it supposedly captured Poe’s spirit that I was perhaps a bit too hopeful.

I need to diverge for a moment and talk about the use of pastiche. I have complained about pastiche frequently when it comes to history, especially how it is used in many steampunk settings. But it turns out that pastiche of fiction can also be highly unsatisfying. When you include the trappings of a story (or author’s entire body of work) but miss many of the core themes, it ends up feeling even more hollow than if you had just written your own story without any references. It’s like a bad cover of your favorite song – it might be fine if it didn’t constantly remind you that the better version exists. And that’s what Usher feels like to me.

On the surface, Usher seems to be calling on the overarching theme of “consequences for one’s behavior,” something that fits nicely with many of Poe’s stories. However, it manages to undermine this repeatedly, while also missing important themes of exactly which behaviors are deserving of consequences. This begins right away with “Masque of the Red Death,” the second episode of the series and the first in which the deaths begin to rack up. The highly telegraphed conclusion seems to be suggesting that the characters are punished for…hedonistic decadence? or maybe their tacked-on blackmail plans? Whatever it is, they die for it. But for me, this was missing the point of the original story so much that it took me out of this one. The original Prospero’s great crime was not the party but the isolation. He hid away from a plague and then succumbed to it anyway, thinking he was safe. And in a series chock-full of on-the-nose references to current events, Flanagan’s failure to stick to that original framing seems intentional. The COVID pandemic is right there, Mike. Seriously. In a very loose sense, the two versions of Prospero share a strong sense of arrogance, but that’s the most positive thing I can say about the adaptation. For me, “party where everyone dies” is an extremely superficial reading of Poe’s “Masque,” so it is not terribly satisfying.

The series goes on like this – “Murders in the Rue Morgue” takes away only the murder by chimp and not its status as one of the first detective stories ever written. And even though there’s a character named Dupin in Flanagan’s series, he is nowhere near the proto-Holmes of Poe’s Dupin. (This episode was really where I started to compare it to bad steampunk stories that use the names of countries but gloss over everything but their cultural trappings.) “The Tell-Tale Heart” starts off suggesting that only the murderer can hear the heart, but that changes in the end because there is actually a physical heart that can be heard. And the only reason it seems to go from imagined to real instead of the other way around is so that we can get an extremely gruesome conclusion. “The Goldbug” is probably the thinnest of references to its source material (which may be for the best considering the rather offensive characterizations in the original), and by the time I reached “The Pit and the Pendulum,” I knew not to expect any particular complicated connection to Poe’s story. And yes, the only connection of any kind is a pendulum death – a death that doesn’t even happen in the original story.

But none of this is as egregious as the overall framing device, the deal with the mysterious character Verna, played by Carla Gugino. (Did you notice that Verna is an anagram of RAVEN?) As the series progresses, we come to understand that the terrible things happening to this family are all because of a deal made years ago to this ageless supernatural being that is now coming due. But the more we learn, the more the contradictions pile up. Verna seems to offer each of the children a way to avoid their fate, but there’s no indication that she would allow that to happen, especially because she straight up kills Lenore, the pure one, just to fulfill the bargain. What would have happened if any of the adult kids of the Usher family had turned back before the end? Would they just have died a different way? Would that break the deal? It’s unclear.

And then we discover that maybe the deal itself wasn’t even necessary. The original Usher twins (Roderick and Madeline) have already committed their crime by bricking up a dude in a wall with cyanide-laced Amontillado (of course), and Madeline in particular has shown sufficient cleverness that there’s no evidence that they need supernatural intervention to help them escape suspicion and achieve their goals. It really seems like they don’t even need Verna. And then there are the questions of why it’s suggested that lawyer Arthur Pym (played masterfully by Mark Hamill) went on an expedition that might have caused Verna to “wake up” when they also provide 150 years of photographic evidence that she’s been active the whole time. Verna’s motivations and actions make less and less sense as the series goes on, and the mystery box of exactly what she is could not have been answered in any way that made that better.

But as I find myself getting more into the weeds on the specifics, I want to return to the most important point – this is all not a great representation of Poe. Again, it’s that 101-level depth, with a LOT of references that turn out to be largely superficial and a good deal of confusion about the central themes of the stories being referenced.

The Mike Flanagan Piece I Will Recommend

Okay, obviously I had some particularly harsh feelings about Usher. The thing about it is that the acting is phenomenal. Everyone does a fantastic job, and that made much of it enjoyable even as I was fretting about the thin adaptations. And if you watch much of Flanagan’s work, you can see why great actors want to work with him. He provides huge monologues and plenty of opportunities to just chew the scenery. He’s an actor’s director who gives actors tons of space to work their craft. And the things that succeed in these two series are largely due to the actors doing just that. But in terms of story and theme, Flanagan’s writing in these series just feels 101 to me.

The other Flanagan series I have watched is The Haunting of Hill House. And while the series as a whole is not something I would recommend – it frequently sounds like someone wrote a book of dramatic audition monologues and then filmed it – there is a moment in there that I think is fantastic. The sixth episode, “Two Storms,” is filmed as a series of extremely long single-take shots with a roaming camera that actually adds to the horror and tension instead of just seeming contrived. The acting is great and the writing is much more dynamic than usual to keep the perspective moving. This episode is probably the best 60-minute chunk of horror I have ever seen, and I wish it was the only thing Flanagan filmed for this title. I don’t think you need any context from the rest of the series (which is barely based on the book anyway), so I only recommend this one episode. Watch it if you haven’t. And try watching it without the other episodes. I would be curious how well that works.

Final Thoughts

Rather than trying to persuade anyone to take my views on these series (if you’ve gotten that impression, I apologize), the real takeaway I want people to have here is that our experiences impact our perception of media. I’d like you to think about the topics where you are similarly “done with the 101,” and consider how that affects what media you think of as shallow even when others do not. And maybe we can also use this understanding to grow in empathy for how others perceive media differently.