Sixty-nine million people eat at McDonald’s every day. They consume about nine million pounds of French Fries in a twenty-four-hour period. Three billion pounds in a year. Seventy-five burgers are sold every second.
That does not mean McDonald’s is real food.
Not in the sense that broccoli is real food. Or kale, or avocados.
If Netflix is to be believed, The Fall of the House of Usher was viewed by about fourteen million households in its first two weeks of streaming. I’m still seeing effusive posts about its “artistic merits” on social media nearly a month since it premiered. There are fewer people in my social circle who haven’t seen it than who have.
That does not mean The Fall of the House of Usher is real television.
Not in the sense that The Sopranos is real television. Or Mad Men, or Succession.
“This isn’t good,” my girlfriend said to me about halfway into the first episode (painfully titled “A Midnight Dreary”). “It’s terrible, actually. But I can’t stop watching it.”
I muttered in agreement, my voice lulled into a low-vibration trance. My eyes were beholden to the disaster on the screen.
Think about the last time you consumed McDonald’s. If you’re an American, there’s about a ninety percent chance you ate there at least once within the last year. Did you enjoy it? I mean really enjoy it. The way you’d enjoy a meal that didn’t push you closer to a premature coronary embolism. Or did you sort of turn your brain off so you could more efficiently shovel that greasy, processed sludge down your throat?
The same goes for watching Mike Flanagan’s latest miniseries. Pay too close attention, and you’ll notice the blandly anonymous framing of each shot, the cringey and self-indulgent monologues, the didactic “commentary” and “symbolism,” and the eye-rolly references to Poe that are always delivered with the same wink-wink-nudge-nudge as an Easter egg in the latest Marvel slop. You’ll clutch your head in exasperation if you think too much about the lazy writing and the vaudevillian acting, just as you’d clutch your stomach in disgust if you thought too much about the ingredients in those McDonald’s fries.
Don’t think.
Just swallow.
Read the headline; the story doesn’t matter. React only to what you are told. Don’t backtalk to your parents. Yes, officer; no, officer. Iraq has WMDs. Jet fuel melts steel beams. Every vote counts. All are equal under capitalism. Genocide is okay with the proper context. Silence is violence. You can’t joke about that. Ticket me, tax me, tell me what to do.
Show me what is good and what is bad.
It’s not hard. It’s how we’ve been trained.
Sort of like how we’ve been trained to think Edgar Allan Poe was a good writer. When’s the last time you’ve read Poe? We have this societal amnesia about the quality of his work, which amounts to little more than pulpy trash. His stories—like Flanagan’s series—have some arguably neat ideas, but the execution is so amateurish and puerile that the end result is—like those McDonald’s French fries—artificial goop.
When I was writing Dead Inside, I was thinking about a specific Poe quotation one of my middle school English teachers had incorporated into her lesson plan. I remembered it as, “There is nothing more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman.” Imagine my chagrin when I looked up the exact line and found it was a wordy, overwrought mess: “The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
Need more evidence? You’re not going to do your own research, so I did it for you. The titular story from which Flanagan’s series takes its name contains this banger:
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—and with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.
Is that a real passage from a Poe story, or did I make it up to prove my point? Did you even read the entire thing?
It doesn’t matter.
Don’t think.
Just swallow.
No different than any other goth kid with a mood disorder, I was really into Poe as a child. I was told his work was dark and scary and morbid. And sure, it’s all of those things to varying degrees. But there’s other stuff out there that’s dark and scary and morbid that is also readable and stylish and good. Poe’s stories aren’t any of those things, but no grade-school teacher was going to point me in the direction of Dennis Cooper or A.M. Homes. At some point I got hip to the lie that Poe is the pinnacle of dark literature. I needed more nutritious reading material. Poe is subversive only in the safest of ways.
I ate McDonald’s when I was a kid, too. I do not eat it anymore.
To Flanagan’s credit, his series is faithful to the source material in its uneconomic use of language and the characters’ penchant for taking all the live-long day to get to the point. If you’re among the alleged fourteen million people who’ve watched the show, you’ll remember the lemon monologue in which Bruce Greenwood launches into an insufferable (that is to say, without relief from any of that half-pleasurable or poetic sentiment) diatribe equating corporate marketing schemes to making lemonade. I’ve abridged it here because the whole thing is about 300 words long:
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade? No. First you roll out a multi-media campaign to convince people lemons are incredibly scarce, which only works if you stockpile lemons, control the supply, then a media blitz. Lemon is the only way to say ‘I love you,’ the must-have accessory for engagements or anniversaries. [...] 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. You pack the Capitol with lemon lobbyists, you get a Kardashian to suck a lemon wedge in a leaked sex tape. Timotheé Chalamet wears lemon shoes at Cannes. Get a hashtag campaign. Something isn’t ‘cool’ or ‘tight’ or ‘awesome,’ no, it’s ‘lemon.’ ‘Did you see that movie? Did you see that concert? It was effing 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. Then you patent the seeds. [...] 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.
I’ve seen a lot of social media posts citing this very speech as evidence of Flanagan’s writing prowess. This is like unironically posting a picture of a grease-stained McDonald’s wrapper with the caption, “Eat better, live better. #getonmylevel”
The lemon monologue may seem incisive/insightful to someone who doesn’t know how modern advertising works because they’ve spent the last fifteen years under a rock, but in 2023 it comes across as silly and ham-fisted. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a 2000s-era teenage tryhard who recently discovered Nietzsche and Marx and sits in the back of the class scribbling Trent Reznor lyrics in his algebra textbook. Corporatization and market manipulation are nothing new. Flanagan isn’t breaking any fresh ground here. It’s not just fast food; it’s leftover fast food, reheated in a cheap microwave and still cold in the middle.
Be that as it may, why does it have a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes? Maybe I’m a contrarian crank. Maybe I’m out of touch. Maybe I’m a snob and Usher truly is effing lemon, man.
But assuming I’m not wrong here, isn’t it terribly convenient for the Fat Controller that critics are propping up such greasy, fattening schlock? Take a big bite of this artless junk because we said so. Stay stupid, stay slow.
Even the “satire” is a state-sanctioned criticism of the opioid crisis, a topic everyone agrees is a Very Bad Thing, Indeed. We are told the guilty parties have been appropriately punished, as they are in the miniseries. It applauds itself for its alleged subversion, but can something this safe actually be subversive?
It's worth noting that the average Netflix user earns less than $50,000 a year. McDonald’s has a target audience of working-class people earning between $48,000 and $65,000. Care to guess which socioeconomic classes are prescribed opioids at a disproportionately high rate?
That teenage tryhard I mentioned earlier would proudly tell you that Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses. There’s no need for religion anymore. We have fast food. We have trash TV. We have actual opiates.
The problem with swallowing all of this McDonald’s-coded entertainment is that there are better alternatives. Ones that satisfy instead of leaving you feeling simultaneously bloated and empty. Robbie Banfitch made one of the most terrifying movies I’ve seen in years with The Outwaters, and in a just world, that would have fourteen million views (or whatever the real number is) on Netflix.
But there’s a reason McDonald’s doesn’t sell three billion pounds of kale salad annually.
I’m not saying The Fall of the House of Usher shouldn’t exist. I’m not saying fast food shouldn’t exist. When we conflate Usher with art, though, Netflix is going to keep selling us Usher as art.
Don’t think.
Just swallow.
Stay stupid.
Stay slow.
McDonald’s would change to a health-centric business model in a heartbeat if there were sufficient demand for it. A better world is possible.
We just have to stop buying so many goddamn French fries.