Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (14 page)

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

5 November 1994–18 April 2001. The usual fade to white inaugurates the story proper, which interweaves the sorrowful preparations for Anthony’s funeral with David’s attraction to Kurt (Steven Pasquale), a handsome young dance instructor. Meanwhile, Ruth’s lover Hiram (Ed Begley, Jr.) attempts to revive their relationship with an invitation to an overnight camping trip, for which she must seek time off from her job at the flower shop. When the weary Nate, who has just discovered his failure in the funeral director’s exam, tells Billy and Brenda about his sense of inadequacy in dealing with Anthony’s distraught mother, Vickie Dimas (Wendy Schaal), Brenda points out that there is no word for a parent who loses a child. With the four main storylines of the episode (Anthony’s death, David’s affair, Ruth’s camping trip with Hiram and Nate’s anxiety about his competence as a funeral director) established, the pace picks up in a series of short scenes intercut between each strand.

— At a gay club Kurt introduces David to Ecstasy, and an evening of frenetic dancing and sex.

— The next morning David attempts to arrange a funeral with a tremendous hangover.

— Andy tells Gabe’s high school friends about Anthony’s death.

— David contemplates taking more ‘E’ to fight his hangover. But when his mother interrupts him, he hastily drops the tablets in an aspirin bottle.

— Parker McKenna (Marina Black) warns Claire against renewing her disastrous relationship with the grieving Gabe.

— To bolster Nate’s confidence, Brenda invites him to compare the professional procedures of other funeral firms.

— Claire looks for Gabe at his home and speaks briefly to his wretchedly withdrawn mother.

— In the preparation room, the still hung-over David scrubs the blood from Anthony’s fingers.

— Pretending to be the grief-crazed daughter of parents killed in a helicopter crash, Brenda tests the counselling abilities of an amazed funeral director (David Wells), who can only recommend matching caskets.

— As Ruth packs extensively for her one-night camping trip, Claire enters the kitchen with a headache and takes a tablet from the aspirin bottle.

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AMERICAN GOTH IC

— A second funeral director (Matt McCoy) attempts to take advantage of Brenda’s apparent grief by recommending a series of overpriced products.

— When Claire encounters Gabe bringing his little brother’s soccer clothes for his burial, he confesses that the fatal accident was his fault.

— Ruth unpacks extensively at the campsite.

— At a third funeral home, a coughing Brenda impersonates a terminal cancer patient arranging her own funeral with the pseudo-therapeutic encouragement of its director, Rosemary (Dale Raoul), while an appalled Nate looks on.

— David fits a soccer boot on Anthony’s foot and then telephones Kurt.

— Claire discovers David, clad in a tight black T-shirt, looking for the aspirin bottle prior to his date with Kurt.

— After drinking champagne with Hiram around the campfire, Ruth takes a tablet from the aspirin bottle for her headache.

— David and Kurt meet Keith, David’s ex, and his current boyfriend, Eddie (Terrell Clayton) at the club.

— As Hiram snores, a thirsty Ruth gulps water.

— Keith disapprovingly watches David snort drugs on the dance floor.

— Dressed in her nightgown, a dreaming Ruth wanders through a Disney woodland, kissing the trees.

— David discovers Kurt kissing another man at the club and declines a threesome.

— In bed with Brenda, Nate confesses that her impersonation of a dying woman frightened him. ‘I will die someday,’ she replies;

‘we all die.’

These short scenes are followed by two summary sequences. In a continuation of Ruth’s dream she and her dead husband tenderly reunite to discuss the joys and failings of their marriage. She then wakes to Hiram’s congratulations on her spectacular lovemaking the night before. At Anthony’s funeral the boy’s estranged father (Gabe’s stepfather, Sam Finelli, played by Ted Marcoux) arrives late and physically attacks the youth for his neglect of his son. After Nate evicts him from the chapel, the father confesses that the gun was his, left behind for his wife’s protection while he was away. Nate sternly informs him that his chances of being with his son have 67

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SIX FEET UNDER

expired and that his own life is a ticking clock. In a brief coda Ruth returns home happily, to be greeted by Claire and David. She then returns the aspirin bottle to its place. In her bedroom, Claire comforts the weeping Gabe.

Here the combination of the Gothic narrative (the untimely death and violent funeral of a small boy) with its satire (Brenda’s increasingly histrionic performances of grief and the funeral directors’ variously unthinking, exploitative and smoothly consoling responses) and the life-affirming family saga works to undermine the uncanny. In the domestic setting of Anthony’s death, the Oedipal conflict of Gabe and his stepfather, and the uncanny revelation at the episode’s conclusion that the ‘fateful and inescapable’ (Freud 1985: 360) pistol had been left in the house – beneath the mother’s bed! – by the violent father, the Finelli tragedy is
unheimlich
. But Anthony’s family is carefully distinguished from the
heimlich
Fishers in class terms (Gabe’s inarticulate, chain-smoking mother, the deadbeat dad who’s been out of touch for years), as well as in their very different relation to drugs (disaster for Gabe throughout the series, sexual release for David and Ruth). Where Anthony’s estranged father is expelled from his son’s funeral, Nathaniel Fisher, Sr, is reconciled with Ruth in her Ecstatic dream. And his ghostly visitation is not in the least uncanny. As Freud warns, ‘Even a “real” ghost…loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about it and allows liberties to be taken with it. Thus we see how independent emotional effects can be of the actual subject-matter in the world of fiction’ (1985: 376).

Although ‘dramedy’ might intensify the horror of death by combining genres to achieve a genuinely disturbing humour, the tragic impact of Anthony’s accident is increasingly mitigated by Brenda’s comic narrations of the same experience. Similarly, her demonstration that the funeral business – with its smooth condolences and overpriced caskets and plots – is, as Nate concludes, a ‘racket’ is contrasted with the Fishers’ genuine response to Anthony’s death.

Here the series retains its satirical portrait of the commercialised

‘death industry’ while directing it away from its family firm, whose reluctance to cash in on Gabe and his mother’s grief is underlined by David’s insistence that they should not recommend an expensive open casket reconstruction. Yet, in doing so,
Six Feet Under
exculpates 68

AMERICAN GOTH IC

not only the Fishers but also their trade, in precisely the way Jessica Mitford warned against in her Foreword to
The American Way of
Death
(1963:9):

This would normally be the place to say (as critics of the American funeral trade invariably do), ‘I am not, of course, speaking of the vast majority of ethical undertakers.’ But the vast majority of ethical undertakers is precisely the subject of this book. To be

‘ethical’ merely means to adhere to a prevailing code of morality, in this case one devised over the years by the undertakers themselves for their own purposes.

From beyond the grave, so to speak, Mitford’s 1963 indictment of ‘ethical’ undertaking implicates
Six Feet Under
’s family business in the exploitation it purports to oppose, its profits dependant upon ‘that intangible quality, sincerity’ (17).
The American Way of Death
also anticipates the series’ resistance to the uncanny in its discussion of the then new practice of ‘grief therapy’, whereby the funeral industry begins to claim a psychiatric imperative for its ‘floral tributes’ and

‘memory pictures’. If
Blue Velvet
pre-exempts psychoanalytic interpretation by narrativising a casebook of psychopathologies,
Six
Feet Under
goes one better by narrativising their treatment. Not only are its scripts salted with Freudian references, like those to ‘The Uncanny’, but it teems with characters who actually are psychiatrists, couple therapists or counsellors, or psychologically minded clerics like Rabbi Ari (Molly Parker), as well as psychiatric patients (Billy) or subjects of psychological study (Brenda). Self-improvement courses like ‘The Plan’ and Brenda’s sex addicts support group (both in season two) swell the psychobabble, which commences in the series’

very first episode with her question about Nate’s anger with David:

‘Are you mad at him, or the fact that we’re all going to die?’

Most importantly, as Mitford warned of the US death care industry,
Six Feet Under
represents undertaking itself as a psycho-therapeutic vocation. Thus, in ‘Life’s Too Short’ (1:9), Nate’s crisis of confidence is provoked by the catatonic withdrawal of Anthony’s mother and his anger by the emotional illiteracy of his competitors.

Throughout the series, good grieving, like good living, requires the release of repressed feeling. So the high camp funeral of ‘Nobody Sleeps’ (3:4) concludes with the bereaved lover, Kevin Lamb (Dennis Christopher), operatically declaring to the other mourners, ‘I never 69

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thought I would be in a relationship at all … no one could possibly love me enough to stick around. But Bob stuck around’ – sentiments that send David sobbing to Keith about their own relationship. Such revelations are not the hidden secrets of the uncanny, the very disclosure of which arouses horror. Instead, these longings (for love, loyalty, a future that’s ‘worth it’) can, and – in the ethos of the series

– must be brought to light.

Far from acknowledging death, this grief therapy accords with what Jacques Lacan has called ‘American psychoanalysis’, the post-war ego psychology ‘offered to Americans to guide them towards happiness’ (1977: 231). This is achieved by cheerfully denying the insatiability of desire, desire that he describes – citing Freud – as

‘borne by death’ (1977: 277). Quirky, disturbing, but ultimately life-affirming,
Six Feet Under
both satirises and performs this function.

Indeed, the series assumes the very ‘dramaturgic role’ that Mitford observed in the funeral business, ‘in which the undertaker becomes a stage manager to create an appropriate atmosphere and to move the funeral party through a drama in which social relationships are stressed and an emotional catharsis or release is provided through ceremony’

(1963: 18). The irony of so exact and unintended a repetition would not have been lost on the author of ‘The Uncanny’.

I am indebted to Stephan Trockle for research support on this article.

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six

Buried lives: gothic

DANA

democracy in
Six Feet

HELLER

Under

I wanted to show that these characters are

kind of buried … They’re sort of living Six

Feet Under …

Alan Ball (creator of
Six Feet Under
)

(Magid 2002)

In the pilot for the HBO series
Six Feet Under
, Nathaniel Fisher –

husband, father and director of Fisher and Sons Funeral Home –

is killed in his own hearse, in a violent collision with a Los Angeles city bus, while driving to the airport on Christmas Eve to meet his son (‘Pilot’, 1:1). By becoming a corpse and by entering the realm of myth, Nathaniel is reduced to a shadow presence that capriciously haunts the
mise en scène
of the series. His abrupt removal from the domestic scene kills off the figurative authority of patriarchal law and order, thus abandoning the surviving Fisher family, and all questions of memory and identity, to incoherence and disruption. But one of the central ideas of
Six Feet Under
is that such ruptures in genealogies – familial and national – are critical moments in the process of realising and remembering the plenitude and progressive aspirations of the American social body.

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SIX FEET UNDER

Such processes are not easy to set into motion, especially in a nation largely founded on the idea that it is not only possible to elide the ghosts of the past, both distant and recent, but beneficial to do so. It is therefore not surprising that nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cultural production demonstrates a high degree of ambivalence with respect to paternal figures and figurations, their legacies and the stability of the national body in the face of the many disruptive historical contradictions – slavery, Native American genocide and xenophobia, to name a few – that persistently threaten social and political agitation. As heir to this tense and conflicted history,
Six Feet Under
engages a Gothic critique of American family romance. This critique reveals Oedipal stability, and by metaphorical association a seamless and inviolable version of the national narrative, to have always been a myth. For example, at Nathaniel’s funeral, his son, Nate, criticises his younger brother, David (who, like their father, is a mortician) for overly sanitising the burial process. David responds angrily: ‘You sanctimonious prick.