Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For

Reading
Six Feet Under

Reading
Six Feet Under

TV TO DIE FOR

edited by

Kim Akass & Janet McCabe

Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

www.ibtauris.com

In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, 2005

All images © Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, 2005, unless otherwise stated The right of Kim Akass and Janet McCabe to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 1 85043 809 9

EAN 978 1 85043 809 0

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available

Typeset in Goudy by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London CONTENTS

Contributors

ix

Regular cast list

xv

Foreword: Reading
Six Feet Under

xvii

Mark Lawson

Introduction: ‘Why do people have to die?’ ‘To make contemporary television drama important, I guess.’

1

Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

PART 1 – MEMENTO MORI: SPECTACLE, THE SPECULAR AND

OBSERVING THE DEAD

1

‘It’s not television, it’s magic realism’: the mundane, the grotesque and the fantastic in
Six Feet Under
19

David Lavery

2

Exquisite corpse: death as an odalisque

and the new American gothic in
Six Feet Under
34

Mark W. Bundy

3

Death, liminality and transformation in
Six Feet Under
39

Rob Turnock

4

Sex, shocks and stiffs:
Six Feet Under
and the pornography of the morbid

50

Lucia Rahilly

PART 2 – MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA: AMERICAN CULTURAL

CRISIS AND RECOVERY

5

American gothic: undermining the uncanny

59

Mandy Merck

6

Buried lives: gothic democracy in
Six Feet Under
71

Dana Heller

7

Politics, tragedy and
Six Feet Under
: camp aesthetics and strategies of gay mourning in post-AIDS America 85

Robert Deam Tobin

8

Americanitis: self-help and the American dream in
Six Feet Under

94

Ashley Sayeau

PART 3: POST-PATRIARCHAL DILEMMAS (I): MAKING VISIBLE THE FEMALE SUBJECT

‘Emily Previn, 1954–2001’,
Peter Wilson

109

9

Mother knows best: Ruth and representations of

mothering in
Six Feet Under

110

Kim Akass

10

‘Like, whatever’: Claire, female identity and growing up dysfunctional

121

Janet McCabe

11

Desperately seeking Brenda: writing the self in
Six Feet Under
135

Erin MacLeod

PART 4: POST-PATRIARCHAL DILEMMAS (II): MASCULINITIES RECONSIDERED

‘Nathaniel Samuel Fisher, 1943–2000’,
Peter Wilson
149

12

Fisher’s sons: brotherly love and the spaces of male intimacy in
Six Feet Under

150

Joanna di Mattia

13

Queering the Church: sexual and spiritual neo-orthodoxies in
Six Feet Under

161

Brian Singleton

14

Revisiting the closet: reading sexuality in
Six Feet Under
174

Samuel A. Chambers

15

I’m dead, wow, cool: the music of
Six Feet Under
192

Peter Kaye

16

Playing in the deep end of the pool

207

Thomas Lynch

Episode guide

217

Film and TV guide

227

Bibliography

231

Index

243

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would first like to thank the authors – Mark Lawson, David Lavery, Mark W. Bundy, Rob Turnock, Lucia Rahilly, Mandy Merck, Dana Heller, Robert Deam Tobin, Ashley Sayeau, Peter Wilson, Erin MacLeod, Joanna di Mattia, Brian Singleton, Samuel A. Chambers, Peter Kaye and Thomas Lynch – for turning in such fascinating contributions, adhering to strict deadlines and changing the way we see this series.

Special thanks go to Philippa Brewster. Once again, her wise counsel, warm friendship and outrageous humour have helped us enormously through this project. Thanks also to Susan Lawson, for holding the reins when Philippa was away, Deborah Susman and Isabella Steer, as well as those who have supported the project at I. B. Tauris and Palgrave Macmillan. Thanks to Robert Hastings for being an excellent project manager and guiding the project through its final stages.

The editors would like to acknowledge the following libraries: Trinity College, Dublin; London Metropolitan (especially Crispin Partridge); the British Film Institute library; and the Billy Rose Theater Collection, at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts. Special thanks goes to Eydie Wiggins and Idelsa Peńa at the Billy Rose Theater Collection whose sterling work on the photocopier saved the day before a flight home to London. Their good humour and willingness to help is much appreciated.

Additional thanks go to David Lavery for giving invaluable advice and Ashley Sayeau for sending us the ‘Stiffs of the Week’. We would like to thank Richard Marvin for taking time out of his busy schedule to speak to Peter Kaye and to Anne Hogan for the introduction. We would also like to pass on our appreciation to T. Cribb and Sons, especially John Harris and Marcus for giving generously of their time and taking the trouble to show us around their funeral home. Gratitude for letting us use their images as well as allowing us to take photos. Thanks to Neil Dutton for help with the photos.

Heartfelt thanks go to Tamméé Greeves for her wonderful drawings and continued friendship and support.

vii

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

Janet McCabe would like to thank the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund at Trinity College, Dublin, for supporting this project, and awarding her a grant to travel and research in New York. Kim Akass extends her thanks to the Research Committee at London Metropolitan University for awarding her the same.

As always, we have to say thank you to our families for supporting us through this project. Thanks to Mike Allen for offering invaluable suggestions and advice, and for alcohol and food, which just appeared during writing sessions. Thanks to Jon Akass for keeping the children amused and the home fires burning, and to Daryl and Caitlin for being patient.

We dedicate this book to our husbands, Mike and Jon, with love.

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

KIM AKASS is a senior lecturer in film studies at London Metropolitan University. She has written articles on motherhood in American TV, and (with Janet McCabe) co-edited and contributed to
Reading
Sex and the City
(I.B.Tauris, 2004). She is currently researching representations of the mother and motherhood in American TV drama.

She is a member of the editorial board for
Critical Studies in Television
.

MARK W. BUNDY lives in Southern California, where he is completing work on a Ph.D. in English as a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow, with emphases in lesbian and gay studies, the Gothic genre and contemporary American poetry. Most recently, he has published an article in
Reading Sex and the City
(I. B. Tauris, 2004), and his writing will be featured in a collection of critical and creative pieces on the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking theoretical discourse, which is due for release in 2005.

SAMUEL A. CHAMBERS teaches political theory in the Department of Political Science at Penn State University. His work has appeared in journals such as
Political Theory
,
American Journal of Political Science,
Theory & Event, Angelaki
and
Contemporary Political Theory
, and his first book is
Untimely Politics: Taking on the Political
(Edinburgh and New York University Presses, 2003). He is currently working on a manuscript on the political theory of Judith Butler.

JOANNA DI MATTIA received her Ph.D. from the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, Australia in 2004.

Her thesis,
The Hard Body Goes Soft: Anxious Men and Masculinity
in the Films of the Clinton Era,
explores the trouble with masculinity in the nineties. She has recently published an essay in
Reading Sex and the
City
(I. B. Tauris, 2004), and two entries for
Men and Masculinities: A
Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia
(ABC-Clio Press, 2004).

When she isn’t watching television, she is developing a research project that examines the challenge posed to hegemonic masculinity by the increasing visibility of queer men in the mainstream.

ix

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

DANA HELLER is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Old Dominion University. She is author of
The Femin-ization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures
(University of Texas, 1990),
Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995),
Cross Purposes: Lesbianism Feminists
and the Limits of Alliance
(Indiana University Press, 1997) and editor of
The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity
(Palgrave Macmillan), which will be released in spring 2005.

PETER KAYE has been professionally pottering around the music business for 35 years, including performing, songwriting, record production, music editing and mostly composing for film and television.

But, as his career plunged from the tee-hee of Paul Morrisey and yuk-yuk of Cheech & Chong to the most banal of television, he started becoming more interested in the medium itself. In the last few years he has been researching modern common practice of music and moving image, hoping to develop new didactic tools for aspiring

– or perspiring – composers.

DAVID LAVERY is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches courses on American literature, science fiction, modern poetry, popular culture and film. He is the author of over 60 published essays and reviews and author/editor/co-editor of six books:
Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1992);
Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to
Twin Peaks
(Wayne State University Press, 1994);
‘Deny All Knowledge’: Reading The X-Files
(Syracuse University Press, 1996);
Fighting
the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2002);
Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of
Tomorrow
(Wallflower Press, 2002); and
This Thing of Ours: Investigating
The Sopranos
(Columbia University Press, 2002). He co-edits the e-journal
Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies
, has spoken on television in Australia, Germany, Ireland and the UK, is a member of the editorial board of
Studies in Popular Culture,
Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, Intensities: The Journal
of Cult Media
, and
Critical Studies in Television
. To learn more about him, visit his home page at www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/.