Mark Hamill's The Fall Of The House Of Usher Character Is A Horror Deep Cut
Spoilers for "The Fall of the House of Usher" follow.
As horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan has gone from production to production, he's assembled a wholesale acting troupe along the way. Kate Siegel (his wife), Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carl Lumbly, Michael Trucco, Rahul Kohli, Annabeth Gish — they're all in Flanagan's latest, "The Fall of the House of Usher," and if you look back through his filmography, you'll recognize their faces somewhere.
That said, Flanagan always includes a few actors who are new to him, and "House of Usher" is no different. One of those new faces is one that's otherwise eminently familiar: Mark Hamill. Like the rest of the main cast, Hamill's part is named after an Edgar Allan Poe character. In his case, the eponymous protagonist of "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket."
In Flanagan's "House of Usher," Pym is the titular family's ruthless lawyer/fixer; his nickname is "The Pym Reaper." Hamill dispels with his natural warmth and the exuberance he shows when voicing The Joker. Instead, he makes Pym a colder kind of sinister, one who only uses his voice when necessary. It's a performance that reminded me quite a bit of Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut in "Breaking Bad" (high praise, to be clear).
Why "Arthur Pym" though? What is this horror deep cut and what does Flanagan and Hamill's Pym Reaper have in common with Poe's original text?
The Trans-Globe Expedition
"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" is an 1838 novel (Poe's only work with the form — he otherwise stuck to poems and short stories). The lead is the grandson of a wealthy New England lawyer, who feels a call to the sea over his family's objections. This sounds like the premise for a typical boys' adventure book; Arthur shares the same yearning for adventure present in later heroes like Hamill's defining role, Luke Skywalker. However, Edgar Allan Poe, being the writer that he was, made something much creepier.
Arthur stows away on a whaling vessel and across the story, he suffers everything from a mutiny to a shipwreck. On a trip to the South Pole, the ship that Arthur sails in arrives at the island of Tsalal, home to savage tribesmen and labyrinthine tunnels. Poe's story was inspired in part by Jeremiah N. Reynolds (a defender of the Hollow Earth theory) and inspired later authors itself; from Herman Melville ("Moby-Dick") to Jules Verne ("Journey to the Center of the Earth"), the latter of whom actually wrote a "Pym" sequel called "An Antarctic Mystery."
Tying Poe together
The "House of Usher" version of Pym is kept purposefully mysterious; after all, his role in the Ushers' service is to know all secrets and speak none of them. If you're familiar with the original story, it can seem like Flanagan just named his shady lawyer character "Arthur Pym" to fit the Poe naming motif.
Until Episode 6, "Goldbug." Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) reveals that in Arthur's youth, he partook in "The Trans-Globe Expedition," a sailing mission that traveled to every corner of the world from 1979 to 1982. Usher implies that Arthur saw the same terrible things at the North Pole that his literary counterpart did, but the man himself will only talk about them "to a point." Roderick suspects murder and/or cannibalism, and apparently, Arthur once told a young Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan) that the Earth was hollow.
We see no flashbacks to Arthur's journey and only one more hint of it. When the Pym Reaper meets the Grim Reaper Verna (Carla Gugino) in the finale, "The Raven," she asks if he remembers her. This could be a nod to the story's ending, where Pym meets a mysterious white figure and possibly his doom along with it.
"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" is rather divorced from Poe's other Gothic tales. Keeping its events as backstory and reworking Pym himself was definitely the right approach. Pym may not have been a true Usher, but I hope we see Hamill become a full-fledged member of Flanagan's troupe.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is streaming on Netflix.