So compact and affecting in its horror without needing to rely on much spectacle. Again, it’s my favorite opening of the series. “Tamerlane, you’ve got to sleep.” It’s a harrowing sequence for anyone who has ever struggled with acute insomnia. Then she lays in bed, wide eyed, her own reflection staring back at her in the mirror on her ceiling. She concludes she needs to sleep, so she takes a bunch of pills to help. A Goldbug subscription box sits on the counter, and when she opens it, it’s full of rot, decay, actual bugs. She moves through her empty apartment, and the camera moves ahead of her, settling on the kitchen, where there’s no one. She sees a body that looks very much like her own, in the hallway, walking slowly around a corner but lingering just long enough to unsettle. She nods off with a full mug of coffee in her lap, wakes up to it empty, wakes up to notes she has scribbled all over her Goldbug launch speak, including erratic scribblings that say things like FUCK BILL. She sets a kettle on the stove, stares at it, and then wakes up to its whistle, but the kettle is on the counter now. She looks in a mirror and slams her head against it, as if falling asleep standing up. We see Tamerlane see her own reflection in a framed photo of her and Bill. It’s fitting for Tamerlane, whose life is built around voyeurism, both in the outward sense of her brand but also when it comes to her inner most desires of watching sex workers pretend to be her with her husband. We’re introduced to one of the central motifs of the episode, too: reflective surfaces and mirrors. But she has essentially become stuck in a time loop of exhaustion and fractured memory as she continues to nod off at odd times. She hasn’t been sleeping we already know this. We’re confined to Tamerlane’s apartment for it, as she wanders around its empty halls preparing for the launch of Goldbug, her health and wellness brand that’s essentially a souped-up version of Goop. The horror of it is so effective, and it’s almost its own short story in and of itself. This is hands down my favorite opening of the entire series. Others have suggested it could be reference to the eight asteroids named in the prose poem “Eureka,” but I also found myself thinking about how in Roman mythology, Juno is the wife of Jupiter, but that seems like a stretch, too.) (I haven’t been able to satisfyingly break down what Poe reference Juno’s name in the series is attempting to make. It’s also one of Poe’s more overtly racist stories: The depiction of the Black servant Jupiter is riddled with racist stereotypes. There’s a cipher/cryptogram element to the story. Legrand is convinced this bug holds the key to getting back his family’s fortune, which he lost. The unnamed narrator of the tale is a friend of Legrand, who Legrand’s servant Jupiter summons upon fearing Legrand has gone mad. “The Gold-Bug,” I’ve since learned in my research, is an 1843 story about a man named William Legrand who becomes obsessed (Poe loves to write a man overcome by obsession) with a, well, gold bug. But the episode titles up to this point have largely referred to his most known works, many of which I was taught in high school lit classes. ![]() Of course I haven’t read all of Edgar Allan Poe’s massive body of work I won’t pretend to be an expert. Truth be told, “Goldbug” was the first episode title of the series I was unfamiliar with. We’re in the home stretch of the final three episodes! You’re reading the recap for The Fall of the House of Usher episode six, “Goldbug,” which serves as Tamerlane Usher’s deathisode. I’m writing daily episodic recaps of the very queer, very wicked new Mike Flanagan series The Fall of the House of Usher. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
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