Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (26 page)

(‘Out, Out, Brief Candle’, 2:2). Her constant testing, altering and transforming is her way of dealing with the aftermath of therapy and its diagnosing of an identity for her. Dawn, a writer and feminist, sees this as ‘just a misogynistic attempt to pathologise women who refuse to toe the patriarchal line’ (Out, Out, Brief Candle,’ 2:2), but Brenda knows different. The higher the level of ‘scrutiny’ (i.e. the more people learn about and get to know her), the more she needs to reinvent herself to avoid labelling and defy easy understanding. As Dawn observes, this activity also denies any possibility of pinpointing who she is as a woman; she fervently resists being stereotyped.

Nathaniel and Isabel:
‘You mark my back, I’ll mark yours’

Locating a narrative to counter the coherent version of her ‘Charlotte’

self is not a recent phenomenon. As a child, she and her brother Billy lost themselves in the fictional world of
Nathaniel and Isabel
.

Described by their mother as ‘quite dark’, these storybooks are about

‘two orphans who had adventures. They ran away from an orphanage. There was a malevolent nurse who was always hunting them down. But they always managed to outsmart her’ (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). Given that Brenda feels as though she was ‘handed 140

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over’ to ‘strangers, experts … [and] academic fucks’ as a child, and given her constant attempts to ‘outsmart’ their plans to assign an identity for ‘Charlotte’, it is no surprise that she is drawn to these stories. Brenda’s penchant for changing identities can be read as a symbolic attempt to escape the evil nurse – or, more accurately, her mother. The books not only provide an escape narrative, but also supply her with an ally. Unlike her experience with the doctors, here she is not left struggling alone: Nathaniel and Isabel – Billy and Brenda – are united against the world. Brenda read the books to her brother, three years her junior, for hours; the siblings thus became allies against the ‘malevolent’ forces engulfing them.

Brenda and Billy continue their identification with the characters of Nathaniel and Isabel into adulthood. So obsessed are they with the story that they have the characters’ names tattooed onto their bodies. Significantly though Brenda has ‘Nathaniel’ branded onto her lower back and Billy has ‘Isabel’ marked on his – the identity of Isabel exists only in concert with Nathaniel – one without the other is meaningless. Their codependence is evident: ‘He’s my brother,’

says Brenda. ‘And he needs me. This is who I am. This is what you get’ (‘Brotherhood’, 1:7). Meaning: she knows who she is only in relation to Billy (and her later crisis, precipitated by the supposed completeness she admires in Trevor and Dawn, occurs after she has Billy committed and the siblings separate). Brenda is not saying ‘this is who I am for now’ but that her relationship with Billy gives her a sense of identity, a feeling of completeness – the light to her dark.

In addition, Billy’s bipolar disorder means that he needs Brenda as a protector as much as she needs to care for him. Even as Billy’s mental illness worsens and Brenda begins to distance herself from him and shift her alliance from brother to boyfriend (‘The Trip’, 1:11), in the final analysis she insists on taking sole responsibility for his well-being. Her parents propose that Billy should be institutionalised, and Nate, having been terrorised by Billy’s antics, insists she follow her parents’ suggestion. Brenda however finds it almost impossible to extricate herself from her brother. ‘This is so not how I need you to be right now,’ she says to Nate (‘A Private Life’, 1:12), pushing him away for suggesting that Billy might be dangerous.

Eventually, as predicted, Billy becomes violent and destructive, breaking into Dr Feinberg’s office, stealing the files relating to

‘Charlotte’ and scrawling ‘Nathaniel and Isabel’ on the wall. This is 141

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a bizarre, futile and misguided attempt to protect his sister from the
Charlotte Light and Dark
narrative, as well as an effort to supplant the
Charlotte
story with that of
Nathaniel and Isabel
. Given the pointlessness of his actions, Billy suffers a complete breakdown and physically cuts out the mark that connects him to his sister. The final solution, to his unstable mind at least, is to remove her brand as well. Brenda arrives home to find Billy, dripping with blood, claiming he knows ‘how to fix it’. ‘We can bury them and be new people,’ he says to a terrified Brenda. She replies: ‘I don’t want us to be new people. I like us the way we are.’ Her attempt to reason with Billy reveals ambivalence over the separation while, at the same time, the realisation that he could harm her. Refusing to see how potentially dangerous her brother really is hides a more terrifying truth – that she is somehow implicated, somehow responsible for his unstable mental state, somehow like him. She saw herself and Billy as lost, misunderstood, persecuted and orphaned; however, this new reality reluctantly forces her to move beyond
Nathaniel and Isabel
, beyond the dysfunctional sibling relationship – as Billy tells her, ‘our relationship is really toxic’ (‘Someone Else’s Eyes’, 2:9). Billy’s actions not only compel her to resign as caregiver and have him committed, but the elimination of the tattoo severs her tie to
Nathaniel and Isabel
and the narrative they constructed together. Seen for what it is –

fucked-up, unhealthy and codependent – the
Nathaniel and Isabel
narrative will never function in the same way for her again.

Brenda: In her Own Words

Freed from past narratives with the destruction of the
Charlotte
research and the hospitalisation of Billy, Brenda falls into depression.

She is cut adrift without a narrative. Soon she stumbles on the idea of writing her own story (‘The Invisible Woman’, 2:5). Nate is enthusiastic: ‘I think this is great. Charlotte finally speaks! The story of your fucked-up childhood, but from your point of view! People’ll want to read that!’ But Brenda has other ideas.

After staring at her computer and absent-mindedly typing, we see Brenda’s thoughts on-screen. ‘Go ahead, write. What exactly do you have to say that hasn’t been said before? All you do is observe yourself. You are incapable of anything real.’ Once again, Brenda 142

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realises that she has no authentic voice. Her journey from one version of her ‘self’ to another continues despite the fact that her quest is obviously futile. She will never be able to create a satisfactory counter-narrative to
Charlotte Light and Dark
or locate the ‘real’ Brenda. She does, however, keep on trying.

Absolutely fascinated with the discovery that one of her clients, Melissa (Kellie Waymire), is a call-girl, Brenda begins to act out sexual fantasies – fantasies that provide her with just the right amount of information to begin writing her novel. When asked by Melissa whether her book is fiction or non-fiction, Brenda replies that ‘it’s still trying to work itself out’ (‘Back to the Garden’, 2:7) – her reality is only tolerable when she is pretending to be someone else.

This allows her to sexually experiment and operate outside the traditional relationship she so admired in Trevor and Dawn. But once she finishes describing her most recent sexual escapade, she must find a new experience – a new onanistic encounter to write about.

Each act seems to be more extreme than the last – from the voyeuristic excitement of watching Melissa give a client a blow job, to giving a

‘happy ending’ to a Shiatsu client and attending swingers’ parties, to engaging in anonymous sex with numerous strangers (surfer boys, married men, a self-help guru). Brenda’s frustrating journey continues unfettered. Though she might get ‘12 pages’ of writing out of an encounter, she is never content. She just needs to keep writing.

Brenda attends a reading of the self-help book
The Lie of Romance
, by Louis Winchell (Tim Murphy), highlighting her continued search for a complete identity. Perusing the shelves finds Brenda imagining books with titles that identify dilemmas in her life –
Living with Life-Threatening Illness, I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me, Charlotte Light and
Dark
and
Damaged Beyond Repair: Your Brother’s A Wacko And Your
Fiancé is Going to Die
– each book offering a complete narrative for her problems.

She listens intensely to Winchell’s tirade against romance: ‘Of all the lies we’re fed on none is more insidious than the lie of romance, the seductive but infantile notion that somewhere there exists someone to complement us in every way – someone who will make us complete … this illusion keeps us from ever being complete in and of ourselves’ (‘Someone Else’s Eyes’, 2:9). In Winchell’s words, Brenda recognises the false journey that she has embarked upon in terms of becoming ‘one’ with Nate through love and marriage.

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Winchell acknowledges the futility of looking to others for fulfilment and suggests that individual completeness is possible – but he then ends up having sex with Brenda in the bookstore washroom.

Casual sex is most certainly not romantic and it does not allow Brenda to become ‘complete in and of [herself]’. Maybe she gets only a momentary buzz and a few more pages for her book, but it reveals a complete lack of control over her narrative after separation from her brother and the destruction of the
Charlotte
files.

Brenda’s obsessive/compulsive sexual adventures make her increasingly uneasy; she has had enough therapy to know that she is out of control here. In an imagined conversation with Ruth, she blurts out her confession (‘The Secret’, 2:10): ‘I thought, now, this would be crossing a line. Which I seem to be doing more and more these days. Because, you know what? The lines are only in our heads. In actuality, there are no lines at all, which is really fucking terrifying, if you think about it.’ Indeed, the lines, the boundaries, the narratives are, as Lyotard says, actualised and given authority when they are ‘[put] into “play’’’ (1997: 23) by people. Resisting socio-cultural positioning as well as patriarchal definitions results in Brenda consistently crossing lines. But, once you cross those lines and dismiss patriarchal language, what rules can you then apply?

Brenda is convinced that she will be able to find a stable, un-contaminated identity somewhere that she alone constructs without patriarchal interpretation. Instead, her search for new meaning and her experimentation with various female identities and sexual relationships ends up leading her to face up to what she already knows – the ‘fucking terrifying’ reality that no narrative is authoritative. Narratives are ‘legitimated’ for no other reason than the fact that ‘they do what they do’ (Lyotard 1997: 23).

Brenda’s quest to locate, understand and record a satisfactory

‘real’ self, is therefore endless. She recognises this, and though the third season presents her as pursuing a new identity – she is part of a 12-step programme for sex addicts, and attempts to remake herself by moving to a new apartment and approaching relationships in a new way. Therefore, through Brenda, the viewer of
Six Feet Under
is drawn into an awareness of the innumerable possibilities of female representation. It is not, however, just placing one’s finger on a single story that the show reveals to be a problem. It is the entire process of self-construction and the necessity of narrativisation.

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Brenda exists in reality, the show tells us, but she will always be involved in the search for the ‘real’ Brenda. In a show dominated by death and decay, Brenda’s exploration of the process of self-construction provides insight into the ever-adapting nature of both self and life. It presents us with various narratives for woman in order to challenge these very narratives.

Through Brenda, we experience how attractive a static, reliable identity is, but we also recognise, as she does, the fallacy of this desire, especially in a post-feminist, post-patriarchal age. Her struggle with both the comfort as well as the restrictiveness of narrative definitions demonstrates that a coherent self is nothing but a fiction.

However, the process of working through issues of identity opens up possibilities and allows for new opportunities for viewing the self. By observing Brenda, as a woman or simply as a storyteller, we are encouraged to acknowledge the ever-changing nature of what it means to be a woman, and to challenge the comforting belief that

‘it’s all in the book’.

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dilemmas (II):

masculinities

reconsidered