Ideologues and perpetual political warriors do get tiresome, and both ends of the ideological divide are guilty. On Newsbusters, the conservative media watchdog, Stephanie Hamill goes after the latest Netflix horror series by Mike Flanagan (not to be confused with the Baltimore Orioles ace of the late Sixties and Seventies). Her indictment: a liberal agenda “is both overtly and subtly promoted throughout the show’s eight episodes, starting with the incredible amount of LGBTQ characters.” My defense: Oh, lighten up. All Stephanie has is a hammer, so a clever and complex Edgar Alan Poe mash-up that only brushes up against political issues—and, I would say, in a tongue-in-cheek manner—seems like a progressive screed to her. That’s too bad: she can’t enjoy a quality show because she’s so intent on finding signs of Hollywood wokism.

Flanagan is a genuine horror auteur, and he has found his metier in the streamed, multi-episode series. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is his fourth (and last, apparently, for Netflix: he is moving over to Amazon). Nothing is likely to top the writer/director’s re-imagining of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” which might be the best horror movie ever made, but “Usher” is still a blast. Using almost all of Flanagan’s large rep company (which includes Henry Thomas of “E.T.” fame), the series is an Edgar Allen Poe fan’s dream, challenging us to recognize the myriad references familiar and obscure. which range from names to plots to poems. Since the conceit of the show is to make the Usher family the thinly disguised avatars for the infamous Sackler clan that brought us the opioid crisis, Flanagan is naturally hard on the corporate mentality….and the Sacklers deserve the abuse if anyone does. In addition, his greed-busting results in some of Flanagan’s best writing: I already highlighted the instant classic monologue by Bruce Greenwood as the dying, damned family progenitor.

I too am fairly sick of DEI casting in 21st Century productions, but I don’t comprehend Hamill’s complaint that the almost entirely kinky Usher brood is a form of LGTBQ propaganda. Virtually all of them are horrible people and die miserably: what kind of endorsement is that? Clearly, Stephanie doesn’t understand the cognitive dissonance principle at all.

Sure, I thought placing the one male character who could be called decent in a same-sex marriage was gratuitous, but maybe Flanagan wanted to make sure he wasn’t accused of suggesting that gays are sociopaths, since so many of them are in “Usher.” Besides, the most sinister character in the story is arguably a lawyer, played by a nearly unrecognizable Mark Hamill (no relation to Stephanie).

Here’s the kind of thing that bugs the hypersensitive Newsbusters critic:

In the very first episode, Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel) takes a swipe at Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox host Tucker Carlson during a scene where her publicity team strategizes how they will handle a highly-publicized trial involving the family’s corrupt pharmaceutical company:

Camille L’Espanaye: We’re not swinging, we need front facing stuff, like Fox. Hannity knows what side his dick’s buttered on, he’ll be friendly.

Tina: Tucker?

Camille L’Espanaye: I’m sorry I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Yes, call Breznican at Vanity Fair, see if he wants a profile on Leo. We can let Leo help out for a change. He can talk about his Jordons and his charity work.

Stephanie whines, “Notice the negativity aimed at conservative leaning hosts in this scene. It makes you wonder why the creator of the show would choose to go in this direction? Why didn’t the character ‘throw up in her mouth a little bit’ over other hosts from any of the other networks?” Well, to begin with, both Hannity and Tucker Carlson are easy and deserving targets that everyone will recognize. Then there’s this:

Camille, played by Flanagan’s wife, Kate Siegel, is a horrible character (she ultimately has her face ripped off by lab chimpanzee). For literally every viewer, Camille resides near the bottom of the scale, deep in negative territory. When a disliked character announces opposition to someone or something, they rise on the scale”: thus held the cognitive dissonance scale’s inventor, Dr. Festinger. What would have been insulting to Tucker and Sean would be if such an evil character announced that she liked them.

Hamill also got upset over what I thought was genuinely funny. A murderous shapeshifting demon occasionally appearing as a raven is stalking the Usher children, and Usher fixer Arthur Pym (that’s Luke Skywalker) finds photos of her, stretching back decades, with other successful people who have evidently made deals with the devil. Mark Zuckerberg is in one photo with the Raven; so is Prescott Bush, Randolph Hearst, Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, and the founder of Monsanto. One photo flies by with the man standing by the Raven unidentified: it’s Brett Kavanaugh. I laughed out loud, and I’d hope Justice Kavanaugh would too. In one speech, speaking of the damning deals she has made in the past, the Raven recalls that she promised one recipient that he could “shoot someone at high noon in Times Square” without adverse consequences. So it’s a Trump joke. Big deal.

There is one rant in the series that is overtly progressive: Roderick Usher’s diabolical and Machiavellian sister seeks to justify her own ruthless ways by arguing that “everybody does it”:

Madeline Usher: “Get around to funding AIDS research, diabetes and heart disease just as soon as we figure out how to keep our geriatric dicks hard, for a few more minutes. What’s the market share on limpy dicks, Roderick? Sixty to seventy percent of the healthcare industry. The pentagon spent $83 million on Viagra last year. Meanwhile the Supreme Court, the fucking Supreme Court does its part. Tears the autonomy, rips the liberty away from women, shreds not just their choice, but their future and their potential. It turns men into cum fountains, and women into factories. Cranking out what? An impoverished workforce there for the labor and to spend what little they make consuming. And what do we teach them to want? Houses they can’t afford, cars that poison the air, single serve plastics, clothes made by starving children in third world countries. They want it so bad, they’re begging for it, they’re screaming for it, they’re insisting upon it. And we’re the problem? These fucking monsters, these fucking consumers, these fucking mouths, they point at you and me, like we’re the fucking problem. They fucking invented us. They begged for us. They’re begging for us still.”

Stephanie complains that the rant “fails to mention other important details, like the fact that the SCOTUS decision ultimately sent the authority to regulate and restrict abortions back to the states. But why let pesky facts get in the way of a dramatic monologue, right?” Right! This isn’t a documentary, fool, and a large number of people who aren’t evil sociopaths like Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell) believe that stuff. Again, Flanagan put his woke speech into the mouth of a terrible human being who soon after meets a gory demise.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is well-acted, neatly written and cleverly plotted horror with the bonus of being an Edgar Allen Poe “Guess the reference!” game. You can find compendiums of them all over the web: here’s a good one. If you’re going to let a little tweaking of conservative sacred cows bother you when it’s all in good fun—and it is—then you are going to face a grim entertainment landscape indeed.

As a special bonus, “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” reminded me of one of Poe’s best and creepiest poems: “The City in the Sea”….

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.