Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (20 page)

BOOK: Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For

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‘
Knot’s Landing
in a funeral home’ (quoted in Gamson 2001). And the insular, incestuous world of the series more closely resembles a soap opera than any other show on HBO, such as
The Sopranos
,
Sex
and the City
and
The Wire
, which emphasise how work and friends can either supplement or replace traditional families. This is not so on
Six Feet Under
, where brothers plant wet kisses on sisters and sons picture their mothers in their beds. This unremitting focus on the family is in line with the ethic of self-help, which, Wendy Kaminer claims in her scathing critique of it,
I’m Dysfunctional, You’re
Dysfunctional
(1993), supports the idea that ‘unhappiness begins at home … No soap-opera is more compelling than our own’ (12).

Soap operas and self-help also seem philosophically linked in the series, given that the fragments of soap operas that the
characters
themselves
watch in the show contain moments that mimic self-help mantras. Accurately differentiating sentences like ‘we always end up in a universe in which we exist’ (‘Perfect Circles’, 3:1) from ones like ‘you must open the door. Put out the flames … invite your father to come visit you’ (‘The Plan’, 2:3) is an impossible task.

But nothing resembles the soap opera more than the outlandish and unlikely plots in
Six Feet Under
. Laura Miller of
Salon
names a few: in addition to ‘perilous brain surgery … we’ve had such other classic soap devices as the sudden appearance of a baby … a surprise inheritance … and the startling return of the dangerous Billy, the crazy but now medicated brother of Nate’s girlfriend Brenda, from the institution where he’d been socked away’ (Miller 2002). To this we could add missing persons, dental records and run-ins with the Russian mob. These plot devices are more complicated than they may initially seem, particularly as they relate to our discussions of self-help. While much of the show suggests the need to disarm or at 101

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

least debunk clichés, these storylines do the opposite. They make the series into a sort of performance piece. Instead of countering the anxieties and fears the self-help market feeds off, this aspect of
Six
Feet Under
materialises them. Here anger does cause cancer, or at least costs you your job. Here you can really get a headache and have a life-threatening disease. Here smoking does lead to death, if only indirectly – remember that Nathaniel misses the fatal red light while bending down to light a cigarette. The series enacts self-help themes in other ways as well. If mind really trumps matter, as many psycho-gurus have suggested, did Nate actually will Lisa’s death? And, while Ruth sounds like Oprah in the pilot when she snaps: ‘We didn’t die,’ when she says the same thing to justify her quick marriage to George in the third season it makes sense (‘I’m Sorry, I’m Lost’, 3:13).

This affinity for formulaic plots is made even stranger when we consider the political and cultural context the series came of age in.

While the first season ended approximately three weeks before 9/11, the last two seasons aired when language about American ex-ceptionalism and vulnerability were rampant. We lived in a ‘new normal’ but would prevail. All others were either ‘for us or against us’, because ‘we would not let the terrorists win’. As awful as the attacks were, the rhetoric that followed from politicians and the larger culture was deeply invested in the self-help tropes about success and anxiety that I have explored. Americans, it was said, had never been more anxious, but also never more determined to succeed. According to Starker, self-help literature is particularly adept at speaking to Americans in times of need or social struggle. He quotes a book entitled
Success
! from the turbulent seventies (1989: 142): Cities are crumbling and going into bankruptcy, the world’s survival seems to hang on the whims of the Arabs, taxes are higher than ever, and poverty seemingly ineradicable – all this is true. But you can still succeed.

This and other works from this period, Starker suggests, emphasised the need for self-sufficiency, to protect oneself against a vague, growing threat. ‘Store enough food for one year. Survival starts here!’ (143).

This sort of ‘self-ism’ was prevalent after the 9/11 attacks as well –

in high sales for duct tape, and hyped-up stories about child abductions (i.e. strangers invading our houses, taking our innocence). National 102

AMERICANI T IS

security was of the utmost importance. No matter how simplified the clichés, they were ultimately taken to be true and had to be defended. As David tells Keith in the second season, ‘[security’s] the national obsession. It’s the new freedom’ (‘The Last Time’, 2:13).

In comments like this one the series seems aware of the dangerous role of such banalities in post-9/11 America. Nevertheless, in the second and third seasons, the show also seems to re-enact the central ‘truisms’ of the period – particularly in its actualisation of fears that I discuss above. In the first episode of the second season, which premiered in March 2002, David is treated for gonorrhoea with Cipro, a drug that is also used against certain anthrax exposures and which many Americans were said to have stockpiled after the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11. There are also references in these seasons to the need to prepare for the worst. When Brenda tells Nate that she does not believe in a life after death, ‘just survival’, he wonders how she can live like that. ‘I’ve been prepared to die tomorrow since I was six years old … [since I] read a report on the effect of nuclear war. I wake up every day pretty much surprised that, uh, everything is still here’ (‘The Plan’, 2:3). Facing a life-threatening force of his own, arterial venous malformation, Nate vacillates from a position of anxiety to determination – riding his motorcycle, running against doctors’ orders. His insistence on persevering, on living life in this ‘new normal’, is highly reminiscent of that post-9/11 trope that begged Americans to go out, shop, fly, do anything so that the terrorists would not win. And, AVM-free in the third season, Nate seems to have beaten his enemy through the grace of God, blind luck – or just through sheer American determination to succeed.

The need for security, or, more specifically, to protect yourself from others, is also a theme
Six Feet Under
explores in the second and third seasons. Countless characters – Brenda and Billy; Claire and Gabe, then Russell; Rico and Vanessa; Lisa and Carol; and, especially, Nate and Lisa – must choose between caring for themselves and caring for others. As Claire says to Russell, ‘I’m not some nurse who’s here to take care of the misfits … You’re going to have to figure it out on your own’ (‘Everyone Leaves’, 3:10). These are self-help clichés one can relate to. We even agree with Brenda’s mother (a scary thing normally) when she tells her daughter ‘you’ve spent 32 years being your little brother’s nursemaid to avoid having any emotional life of your own’ (‘Driving Mr Mossback’, 2:4). Further, 103

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for all the fun the series has at Ruth’s expense, The Plan’s ‘You are the architect of your life’ motto is never completely dismantled. These characters who so often dream of different lives actually attain them quite frequently. Ruth had a long-term affair with Hiram (Ed Begley, Jr) outside her marriage. Her husband also had a secret life – with a secret room, secret records and a secret pot stash (‘The Room’, 1:6).

Even Lisa drinks Dr Pepper (and, we learn in season four, does a whole lot more) when Nate is not looking. It seems that, if you could only suspend your responsibility to others, you might realise your full potential, your power. In both post-9/11 America and in the series, this has a gendered aspect to it as well. To justify the use of military might after the attacks, politicians often evoked masculine images to explain the need to cast off others in order to protect oneself.

Borrowing from the highly successful self-help book, one commentator quipped before the Iraq War, ‘Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.’ At times the men in
Six Feet Under
seem equally –

and sympathetically so – tied to the apron strings of the women around them. Lisa harps on at Nate for everything, from smoking to even (very energetically) killing a snake that came too close to their daughter. Even David confesses that he liked to sleep with women, but couldn’t handle their emotional side – the ‘Honey’ and the

‘children’s names’ (‘Making Love Work’, 3:6).

Of course, to enact situations or feelings is not necessarily to endorse them. There are numerous counter-examples that would suggest that intimacy and attention to others are a vital part of life.

The few moments when Claire and Ruth actually connect are some of the most moving of the entire series. And it is Brenda that Nate turns to at the conclusion of season three, because, despite all the twisted stuff, they need each other. That self-help clichés are at once contradictory, simplified but also often true – as the show ultimately seems to suggest – is cogent. Embracing life today because we could die tomorrow, while not exactly original, is good advice. And, at its best, the series makes viewers realise how much they have invested in self-help jargon, particularly about success. While we sympathise with Nate’s frustration at being born into the funeral business, we wonder if being a manager at a Seattle food co-op was really all one could hope for either. Likewise with Brenda, who was accepted by Yale but is nevertheless ‘just’ a massage therapist – and often an unemployed one at that.

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But sometimes perpetual contradiction and incessant irony can defuse the hope of ever saying anything meaningful. As Claire tells Olivier: ‘You constantly contradict yourself. So nothing you say ever means anything’ (‘Death Works Overtime’, 3:11). While the show thematises this problem, it occasionally seems resigned to it. At one moment repression is a killer and we are happy to see David defeat it by coming out. In the next moment, however, repression seems the better option, as when Keith tries to confront his violent father, who is only abusive in return. The potential problem with the series is not that it refuses to provide clear-cut answers. There is no art without contradiction. And pointing out the slippery and seductive nature of self-help jargon is a vital gesture, particularly given the politics of the day. Its ability to do just this – and with such elusive themes as success, anxiety and fear – is what makes
Six Feet Under
a great show. But accepting clichés without any possibility of judging them, simply because they may contain a morsel of truth or because they provoke emotional reactions, is a different – and, as we have seen, a politically suspect – matter. ‘I think an artist has a responsibility to do more than just give in to every emotional impulse,’ Claire tells Olivier (‘Death Works Overtime’, 3:11). It remains to be seen whether the series will succeed in this truly daunting task, and become not just a great show – but the best.

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