Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (10 page)

In the world of
Six Feet Under
, as in real life, the mortuary trade plays an important role in managing death pollution. One of the ways is to make the formal arrangements for having the body removed, and to organise the rituals and/or religious ceremonies accompanying its removal. Each week finds the Fishers, along with restorative artist/embalmer and later business partner Rico Diaz, as well as apprentice Arthur Martin, dealing with a corpse and its disposal; and David in particular has specialist knowledge of a range of funerary rites and burial customs. Managing death pollution is strongly articulated in
Six Feet Under
through the visual control these men have over the dead body. In the first instance, this is represented by the cosmetic and quasi-surgical procedures they use to halt the inevitable decay of the corpse and make it presentable for public exhibition. Most funerary sequences in
Six Feet Under
, the rituals and the mourning, take place in the euphemistically named ‘slumber room’, where the recently bereaved are able to view the deceased in an open casket. The process by which the rotting body is made fit to be seen is articulated in the opening credit sequence with the beakers of embalming fluid, and the shot of a dead woman’s brow being wiped with a swab. Within individual episodes, scenes often take place in the prep room, where David and Rico work hard to make dead bodies acceptable for viewing. In cases where individuals have died in particularly gruesome circumstances – like Thomas Romano (John Capodice), who is chopped into pieces after a colleague accidentally switches on an industrial dough mixer he is 41

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

cleaning (‘The Foot’, 1:3), or Chloe Yorkin whose skull is completely shattered after colliding with a cherry-picker platform (‘Crossroads’, 1:8) – Rico takes great professional pride in his artistic ability to reconstruct mutilated faces and bodies for public presentation. His wife Vanessa on several occasions compliments him on his restorative talents, and calls his faultless reconstruction of Chloe Yorkin his

‘Sistine Chapel’. Chloe’s friends (Lori Harmon and Pat Destrocs) are also impressed, seeming less concerned with grieving over their dead friend than inspecting her corpse, which now bears no marks of her traumatic demise.

The second way in which the pollution of death is visually and physically managed in
Six Feet Under
is in the separation of the unacceptable dead body from public space. In this sense the prep room is a place where the preparation of the abject body takes place away from the public gaze. For the most part, the Fishers adopt a professional attitude to the dead bodies in their care. It is this professional practice that manages death pollution by keeping the dead body separate from public space – hiding its grotesqueness, making it acceptable for public viewing, and finally arranging for its disposal. The visual control of the dead body, by its sequestration of its troublesome properties from public gaze, and by its ultimate cremation or burial, powerfully articulates a simple but significant cultural proposition: ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

Such a space is subject to strict codes of professional and personal conduct. In ‘The New Person’ (1:10), for example, the Fishers fire their new mortician’s assistant Angela (Illeana Douglas) because she wears revealing tops to work and has telephone conversations about sex while preparing dead bodies for viewing. As Nate tells her: ‘You know, Angela. My brother likes a certain decorum when you’re working with someone’s loved one.’ The Fishers must deal with spot inspections, such as in ‘The Last Time’ (2:13), when Inspector Gerson (Larry Drake) pays them an unexpected visit. Finding Rico and Vanessa eating their lunch in the embalming room, a full fridge and Aaron Buchbiner’s decomposing body as well as blood oozing out from the drains, results in a written citation and the threat of closure if the drainage system is not replaced in two weeks. It confirms wider social beliefs that disrespectful behaviour towards (or around) the dead body constitutes a form of desecration. Revelations about an infestation of rats at a Los Angeles County morgue, for example, 42

DEATH, LIMINALI T Y AND TRANSFORMAT ION IN
SIX FEET UNDER

with bodies being ‘nibbled’, were considered the ‘ultimate sacrilege’

(Wade 2002: 3).

The inappropriate treatment of dead bodies violates taboos, often spilling over into humour. In the episode ‘The Foot’ (1:3), Nate has difficulty lifting Thomas Romano’s dismembered body onto the trolley.

Instead, it falls to the floor in pieces. When he manages to pick up the bits he realises that a foot is missing. It later turns up in Gabe’s locker as retribution for telling his friends about Claire sucking his toes. At the Romano viewing later, Rico proudly confides to David and Nate that he substituted the missing foot with a leg of lamb stored in their freezer. The deception is almost revealed when the grief-stricken Mrs Barbara Romano (Sandra Purpuro) turns into a

‘casket climber’ – someone so overcome with grief that they try to clamber into the coffin. Thankfully, Rico and David manage to pull her back before she dislodges the foot. Such absurdity, at the expense of the bereaved and their desire to see the body complete and bearing no trace of the terrible tragedy which befell them, reflects a wider anxiety that the dead should go into the ‘afterlife’ with an unmarred physical body (Wade: 2002).

Dead bodies can be troublesome in other ways. In
Six Feet Under
the presence of ghosts heckling from beyond the grave suggests that the deceased might still walk among us. While death represents separation and the loss of loved ones, and grief an emotional coming to terms with that loss, the idea that the deceased might remain here on earth in some ghostly or judgemental form is something that induces anxiety (Wade: 2002). Reflecting this anxiety that the recently deceased can see and judge us, Ruth suffers an emotional breakdown in ‘Pilot’ (1:1) because she believes that Nathaniel now knows of her infidelity. ‘I’m a whore,’ she cries out to a stunned Nate and David. ‘I was unfaithful to your father for years. And now he knows.’ Such ghostly apparitions express liminal erosion between mortal and deathly spheres. Throughout the series, the dead ‘come to life’ and confront individual members of the Fisher family about their attitudes or failings. In season one, for example, the ghosts of Paco (Jacob Vargas), the gang member shot in ‘Familia’ (1:4), Viveca St John (Veronica Hart), the electrocuted porn actress in ‘An Open Book’ (1:5), and Marcus Foster (Brian Poth), the victim of a homophobic attack in ‘A Private Life’ (1:12), taunt David about his sexuality. They often appear in the prep room, still bearing the 43

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

physical scars of their death. Furthermore, being dead, they are freed from conventional propriety and the politeness of everyday life, and thus can utter uncomfortable truths. Challenging Paco for calling him a ‘born bitch’, David says, ‘You’re speaking like this at your funeral?’ Paco replies: ‘Damn straight. I say whatever I goddamn please.’ The dead cease to reappear once the funerary rites for their character have been completed, thus complementing the anthropological view that the death ritual brings an end to periods of liminality.

An important exception, of course, is Nathaniel Fisher Sr, who appears to the characters throughout the series despite his funeral in the first episode. Although Nathaniel’s continued presence contradicts the idea that the funerary rites exorcise the recently deceased, his appearance works as a narrative device to link the liminal experiences together and help articulate the dramatic transformations that the characters experience. As a dead person, he can speak difficult truths – utter what cannot otherwise be said – which the living are often reluctant to admit, even to themselves. Yet, unlike the deceased that the Fishers encounter in their professional lives, Nathaniel’s reappearance signifies a longer grieving process – that the Fishers miss him and wish he were there to support and guide them.

Significantly, although Fisher and Sons (and later Fisher and Diaz) are professional practitioners, their personal experience of grief erodes their separation and detachment from the business of caring for the dead. Within the liminal space of the series, and shaped by personal loss, this erosion means that the bereaved often touch a nerve with the main characters. With occasional exceptions, such as Nate’s distraction over Lisa’s disappearance when dealing with the bereaved of Dorothy Kim Su (Momo Yashima) in ‘Death Works Overtime’ (3:11), they have a deeper sympathy for their clients, both deceased and living. Rico cares for the corpse, Nate comforts the bereaved and David attends to the funerary rites with his knowledge of appropriate rituals for the different faiths. This personal touch means that they can provide for a wide range of funeral services and respond to individual requests. As Kevin Lamb (Dennis Christopher) says to Nate and David in ‘Nobody Sleeps’ (3:4), ‘I was told that you would be more open to accommodating certain requests’. Importantly, the depiction of the Fishers’ accommodating attitude to the funerary process represents a change in funeral cultural within contemporary 44

DEATH, LIMINALI T Y AND TRANSFORMAT ION IN
SIX FEET UNDER

Western society. In resisting the temptation to sell the business to Kroehner, they actively refuse to succumb to the impersonalised funerary ritual which characterises the ‘big business’ approach to modern, secular and industrialised funeral practice. It further marks an ongoing transition from modern approaches to death to a more postmodern one.

From the ‘Traditional’ to the Postmodern

As well as exploring ways that dead bodies are transformed and disposed of and how death pollution is managed,
Six Feet Under
explores changes in attitudes and practices towards death, dying and bereavement. Reasons for this relate to two other sociological and anthropological functions of the funerary ritual. As well as the disposal of the dead body, funerals mark a rite of passage for the bereaved, to mark the changing symbolic social status of the bereaved (from wife to widow, for example). Secondly, funerals celebrate the survival of the group. An individual may have died and their death precipitated an existential crisis for those left behind, but the funerary rites, predicated on tradition and anteriority, indicate that society (and its codes and conventions) can transcend the death of any individual.

In traditional societies ritual marks the rites of passage; it allows for the community to pause and commemorate/celebrate the different stages of a person’s life – from birth and marriage to death. Ritual instils social and cultural values in its participants and gives life and experience, including bereavement, social meaning. In a secular world, however, the dwindling of traditional religious customs means that the life stages through which one passes are not given the same social significance. Without a cultural infrastructure to socialise mortality, the passage from life to death increasingly becomes an isolating and meaningless ‘non-event’ (Bauman 1992). This is reflected in death rituals becoming more austere and sterile. Even where people still believe in traditional forms of religion, such as Christianity, the commercialised and industrialised nature of the death ritual leaves funerary rites devoid of psychological or social value. These ceremonies instead reveal the ways in which death has increasingly become a taboo subject and separated from the everyday. Such 45

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

distancing and turning the funeral away from ‘an essentially existential experience into an essentially retail one’ (Lynch 2000: 162) mean that bereavement and grief are increasingly shut away from the public gaze. As Phillippe Ariès has asserted in his classic book,
Western Attitudes Toward Death, from the Middle Ages to the
Present
, ‘[s]orrow does not inspire pity but repugnance’ (1976: 90).

As
Six Feet Under
suggests, contemporary funerals adhere to strict conventions concerning dignity and propriety, with public displays of extreme emotion strictly policed. The sociologist Jenny Hockey (1997) has observed that during funerals in Britain, for example, clergymen pay particular attention to bereaved women and move in quickly when necessary to prevent them from uncontrollably breaking down. Keeping watch over the grieving subject and monitoring the behavioural codes by the bereaved can be witnessed in the funerary rituals at the beginning of season one of
Six Feet Under
. In ‘Pilot’

(1:1), Ruth starts sobbing during the viewing of her dead husband’s body, and is quickly ushered away by her younger son, the experienced funeral director. Nate is surprised and turns to his younger sister: ‘She’s so sad she has to be taken out of sight?’ Claire replies: ‘They always do that. The second someone starts to lose it they take them off into that room. Makes all the other people feel uncomfortable, I guess.’

David’s sense of professional propriety – his dour reserve, controlled demeanour, respectful silence – can be read as speaking about commercialised and secular attitudes towards death. By contrast, Nate’s description of a Sicilian funeral in the same episode, where village women openly weep and wail over the corpse, indicates for him the importance of catharsis to heal the community and help the bereaved to grieve the dead. Such public demonstrations of unrestrained grief and out-of-control hysteria appear to him as ‘probably much more healthy’ than the restrained American way. Later, at his father’s graveside, Nate berates the ‘clean’ and ‘antiseptic’ funeral ceremony arranged by his brother. His outburst gives Ruth licence to express how she really feels, whereupon she collapses in grief onto the soil which will soon cover her dead husband’s body. The programme’s sympathy here is with Nate and Ruth, as the satirical faux television commercials for funerary products such as the ‘New Millennium Edition Crown Royal Funeral Coach’ and the ‘Franklin Leak-proof Earth Dispenser’ provide an explicit critique of the commercialisation of funerary culture. By depicting a transgression 46

DEATH, LIMINALI T Y AND TRANSFORMAT ION IN
SIX FEET UNDER