"The Tell-Tale Heart"
Okay so I want to preface this that I have not read much Edgar Allen Poe so I will be missing those layers in my perspective, but anyways something that really struck me in "The Tell-Tale Heart" episode of The Fall of The House of Usher was the moments after Victorine throws the book end at Ali.
Before this, we're presented with this version of Victorine who may be stressed and pressured but ultimately does not actively appear to be amoral. She's just being put in a bad position by her shit father; she wants to do good and develop a life-saving medical device, and she just has to cut corners to stay afloat. It's only Camille who seems convinced Victorine is some awful person.
Then, the bookend. Another cut corner. Instead of talking things out with Ali or being patient, she acts impulsively and immediately to stop the problem. It's just like the first time she dosed the chimpanzee with epinephrine during surgery in a panic when she realized the device wasn't working. She hits Ali in the head and, on realizing the severity of her actions, runs over to her.
Ali is bleeding out on the floor, her body writhing horribly and she lets out these awful choked noises. Victorine goes to her and seems immediately horrified and brokenhearted. Then, the security guard checks in through the door. The guard is concerned over the scuffling noises overheard.
And Victorine fucking says to him, "Have you never heard a woman getting eaten out before?"
Her girlfriend is dying by her hand, and she pretends the sounds of her dying are the noises of sexual pleasure. This to me is the reveal, this is when the audience truly sees that Victorine does not have and never had a heart. The love she's shown, for her passion, her girlfriend, her device, is nothing more than mistaken greed. It's a mechanical heartbeat, it sounds almost like a heartbeat, but it's a pale imitation to anyone who pays attention. And like with Ali's corpse, the mechanical heart of Victorine is just keeping a soulless body alive.
The Fall of the House of Usher structurally represents the family itself: it begins with the announcement of the deaths of all the children. The children are dead from the beginning of the show. And as Annabel points out, the children in the story were dead from the start, killed by greed and wealth. And then we learn that they were literally dead, as Roderick and Madeline had already sold their lives for wealth before they were even born. We're not seeing the family die, we're seeing the final moments of corpses decomposing. We're seeing the dilapidated house finally collapse. The Fall of the House of Usher is not about death, it's about the walking dead, like the visions of Roderick. A family kept alive with a mechanical device just going through the motions.
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Can we talk about how perfect the prop design is in The Fall of the House of Usher?? Because like??
If you've read The Tell-Tale Heart, you'll look at Victorine's implant and probably go "OH SHIT IT'S THE EVIL EYE." I flipped my shit
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I'm lucky to be experiencing prose of Edgar Allan Poe for the first time those days and it strikes me how precise his macabre tales are. How much they are like an essence of a novel, crystalised form of prose just like haiku is of poetry. A complete story, each with it's own characteristic mood, atmosphere, feel, all within more or less ten pages. I know immediately that I will be returning to individual short stories when under influence of a certain caprice, something that is much harder to achieve when looking for a specific paragraph of a novel.
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UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; SIDE D
Narrator of Tell Tale Heart propaganda:
The OG, the meme, he has it all
He is so so so sure that he is not insane because of his high intelligence and planning skills, also his increased sense of hearing is DEFINITELY NOT because he’s insane but because he can just hear well :) yeah he can hear the old man’s heartbeat after he’s dead, what about it? also he is under the impression that killing the old man is justified because he has a weird eye
Marvin propaganda:
this bitch is crazy you can't trust a thing she says!!!! but um seriously he is neurotic and while recounting his childhood everything is wack and doesn't make sense and ummm. Idk the man lies he withholds information (such as names of main characters he deems unworthy or important details) he makes he presents his fantasies like actual canon events (how marvin eats his breakfast, rape of ms goldberg) he tries to convince himself and therefore us that he's straight ummm he's just a little freak and an attention whore and a liar and a fugly slut and i love him. Heart
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