The first time I was really aware that a story was trying to be an updated version of a classic tale was Romeo+Juliet back in the 1990’s.
That film was not an updating in any real sense, though. Sure, the swords are replaced with pistols and anachronisms abound, but it’s all window dressing. The story remains essentially unchanged by the passage of centuries rather than being firmly updated.
That is not the case with The Angry Black Girl And Her Monster.
The film follows many of the beats of Frankenstein, but they are grounded in a thoroughly modern society. The neighborhood looks like many I’ve seen across the United States, particularly when I lived on base housing in the Army. No longer are we following an eccentric rich white aristocrat, but a working-class family being ripped apart by racism and financial hardship, fighting to stay together and afloat, no matter the cost.
The gender- and race-swapping of Vicaria from Shelley’s original Victor is pivotal to grounding the tale completely in the modern day, eliciting the same horror that the original tale of a posh mad graverobber would have when it was written. At one point, Vicaria is asked, "How could you do this to Black bodies?" The question elicits all the horrors that have been committed on Black bodies in the United States (Tuskegee’s just the beginning, y’all), evoking a very audible gasp from my amour. For Vicaria to perpetuate that callous disregard of Black lives and bodies — no matter how "good" her goal was — drives home the full thrust of Shelley’s original, making this a worthy successor.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher is a miniseries that takes the most prominent works of Edgar Allen Poe’s canon and melds them into what is clearly meant to be the Sackler family, the uber-rich pharma family bears the lion’s share of the blame for the opioid epidemic, and, much like the real Sacklers, avoids any repercussions of consequence. As the bill comes due for the fictional Ushers, they begin dying in horrible ways, usually due to the worst aspects of their nature, with the bloodline finally scrubbed from the Earth.
There is some degree of catharsis in watching the stand-ins for the "most evil family in America" pay for their crimes, The Fall Of The House of Usher does not flinch away from reminding us that such karmic payments are the exception, not the rule. The Ushers do not, ultimately, pay because of what they did — but because of the deal they made to get there. The millions and millions of deaths they were responsible for … simply did not count.
This is not the visceral hubris of Vicaria; she at least meant well. The Ushers — along with their real-world counterparts — are a type of banal evil where the consequences of their actions are abstracted behind disclaimers, NDAs, and aggressive corporatespeak. It is a cold, uncaring evil, one where others simply don’t matter.
That kind of unsettling evil is why I want to mention one more show — even though it is a documentary. Escaping Twin Flames is a documentary that looks at "Twin Flames Universe" — a weaponized hybrid of multi-level marketing, religion, self-help, and a utterly terrifying level of narcissism by its founders.
At first blush, it seems like TFU is one of a dozen vaguely "spiritual" organizations with a questionable way of making money. In theory, TFU exists to help people find love. In practice, TFU sells a deliberately unattainable promise of relationship bliss, using the most manipulative tactics from multi-level marketing, organized religion and cults, and carefully twisted advice that ensures its adherents will be kept off-balance, tightly under the control of its founders, Jeff and Shaleia Ayan (down to the choice of curtains and what gender their followers are). Jeff and Shaleia Ayan deliberately set up an intricate, self-reinforcing pattern of control, creating a situation where their followers are always seeking positive reinforcement and approval, but may get yelled at in a group meeting instead.
The problematic and worrisome aspects of TFU are widespread and common, even in "mainstream" organizations. The only real difference is that — at least a first — TFU created a weaponized conglomeration of those problematic elements.
Although the stated goal of TFU was to help people find their "twin flame" (e.g. "soulmate"), what it really exists to do is to groom hurt and upset people to be the prey of the narcissists running the whole thing.
In terms of scale, Ayans and the Sacklers — excuse me, Ushers — are nowhere near the same weight class in terms of the number of lives destroyed. But for the Ayans, their victims were not collateral damage, or rows of figures on spreadsheets. They looked their victims in the eye and deliberately, systematically, groomed them.
Which is more "evil"? The banal erasure of lives with the stroke of a pen, or the systematic, personal destruction of someone just to keep them under your thumb?
So ultimately, even Escaping Twin Flames is an updated, perhaps more sophisticated version of the evil tactics used by con artists, cult leaders, marketers, and demagogues for many decades.
But unlike the fictional Ushers, the Sacklers and their peers continue to evade meaningful consequences, and Twin Flames Universe — along with the many, many other cults and grifts out there today — are still active. Still recruiting, still harming.
The odds are good that none of them will face any meaningful form of justice for the deliberate, callous, damage they have caused.
And that is perhaps most terrifying of all.