Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (5 page)

Central to HBO’s definition of original programming is its promotion of the TV auteur and top-notch writing. Any survey of the original publicity for
Six Feet Under
reveals an emphasis placed by HBO on the creative genius behind the show: Alan Ball, creator/

executive producer. Graduating from the University of Georgia and Florida State, Ball started out in theatre. He helped set up the General Nonsense Theatre Company in Sarasota, Florida, before moving to New York. Here he formed the Alarm Dog Repertory Company (1986–1994) with friends. Writing and producing Off Off Broadway black comedies, he eventually came to the attention of Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, prominent television producers, who offered him a job. Writing for
Grace Under Fire,
starring Brett Butler, for one year and
Cybill
with Cybill Shepherd for three years, where he rose to executive producer, saw Ball move into network 8

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television. In 1999 he signed a three-year television development deal with the production company Greenblatt Janollari Studio – the company that now produces
Six Feet Under
. The first project back in 1999 was a sitcom written by Ball for ABC called
Oh Grow Up
, a quasi-autobiographical series about three men, two straight and one gay, living together in Brooklyn. The show received mixed reviews before the network cancelled it.

The experience proved discouraging for Ball. Like other HBO

series creators Darren Star (
Sex and the City
) and David Chase (
The
Sopranos
), he found working in network television a dispiriting and frustrating experience: ‘When my last show,
Oh Grow Up
, was cancelled by ABC [after only 11 episodes], I thought if I have to do another four-camera laugh track sitcom I’ll shoot myself’ (Brown 2001). A detour into film would change his profile when, in 2000, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with
American Beauty
; the film won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and grossed nearly $350 million around the globe. The success of
American Beauty
meant Ball was much in demand and could leave behind network television. ‘I was offered everything, but I didn’t want to become a hired gun,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to be hired to write other people’s ideas. I had done one year of
Grace Under Fire
and three years of
Cybill
. That was enough. It’s no mistake that
American Beauty
was about a man who was beaten down and lost interest in his life rediscovering his passion for living’ (Weinraub 2001: 21).

Ball admits that had
American Beauty
not been such a commercial and critical success ‘HBO would not have come along and offered him almost total freedom on
Six Feet Under
’ (25). But had he not been so taken with
The Sopranos
, he would not have got

‘so excited about the possibilities of television’ (Hendrickson 2002: 114). Soon after the film’s release, Ball met with Carolyn Strauss, senior vice-president for original programming at HBO, who told him that her favourite films were
Harold and Maude
(1971) and
The Loved One
(1965) – ‘black comedies that take decidedly irreverent attitudes toward death’ (Weinraub 2001: 21). Inspired by her interest in producing a show about running a funeral home, he wrote the pilot. HBO bought the concept and gave him a 13-episode commitment – and
Six Feet Under
was born (or so the story goes).

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READING
SIX FEET UNDER

What proves intriguing about this story is that Ball turned his back on film and theatre
as well as
network television. Like other TV auteurs Star and Chase before him, and despite being an Oscar winner, Ball confirms that HBO is the place to work. ‘I get notes from HBO saying, “You don’t have to spell this out, it’s clear what’s happening,”’ Ball has said. ‘They actually say, “Give it more edge.”

That doesn’t happen on network television. On network television, everything is explained. Nothing is ambiguous. Any kind of edge is removed’ (Weinraub 2001: 21). But this is more than just differentiating itself from network television, despite what Ball is saying.

HBO prides itself on producing television with a new and groundbreaking sensibility; it may be drawing on talent and conventions from elsewhere (independent film, Off Broadway theatre and even network television), but it remains first and always television.

Liminality,
Six Feet Under
and TV To Die For
Creating an awareness of what HBO is doing is vital to an understanding of how the institutional context produces
Six Feet Under
.

Operating as it does in a wider industrial context of changing televisual narratives, transforming generic conventions and how television is watched and consumed means its tag-line – ‘It’s Not TV. It’s HBO’ – is more than a distinction for its original programming from regular TV fare; it is describing a transitional moment in television culture. Just as
Six Feet Under
explores and is about liminal states, might it not be argued that HBO gives additional meaning to this idea?

Victor Turner, who writes about socio-cultural moments of transformation, describes liminality as being about a culture contemplating its rules and conventions, often using performative or dramatic forms with which to do so (1977).
Six Feet Under,
on the surface at least, confirms what Turner describes as liminal: as related to thresholds, transitions and margins. If, as he argues, every society carves out spaces existing on the cultural periphery that are shaped by ambiguity and paradox, then what does
Six Feet Under
say about ours? It is a question that this collection seeks to address. There is a liminality to this anthology as it considers how the series challenges representation, lifts cultural taboos, says what normally cannot be said on 10

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regular TV – as Thomas Lynch points out later, placing a corpse in a room means you can pretty much say anything.

Each episode begins with a demise: a man suffers a heart attack while taking out the rubbish, a conman cracks his head on the bottom of his swimming pool while Dean Martin croons ‘Ain’t that a kick in the head’, a young woman commits suicide, and a 14-year-old falls off the bed laughing and breaks her neck. Each death will bring the Fishers some business, and often it sets the tone for the episode. The first section of this anthology, ‘Memento mori: spectacle, the specular and observing the dead’, starts from this premise – the idea of death and what it means. David Lavery starts by placing the genre of magic realism within a cultural and televisual context. Arguing that death allows for a moment where normal rules are suspended and everything becomes topsy-turvy, Lavery investigates how this operates at a generic and formal level in the show. Next is Mark W. Bundy’s lyrical piece. It offers a visceral engagement with the show through his own experiences of death and illness. Rob Turnock’s chapter returns us to a more critical study of liminality and how it functions within
Six Feet Under
. He suggests that the structure of each episode, which begins with a death and concludes with a burial, makes visible a liminal space that allows for possibilities of change and transformation. Concluding this first section, Lucia Rahilly offers a close textual reading of the death of porn actress Viveca St John (Veronica Hart) in ‘An Open Book’

(1:5). Rahilly makes a case for suggesting a blurring between the

‘money shot’ (the physical shuddering of male ejaculation in pornographic films) and the moment of death.

Six Feet Under
premiered only months before the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, and thus was well positioned to respond to the haunting elegiac-ness of a nation in mourning. Peter Krause (who plays Nate Fisher) mused that ‘after Sept. 11, a lot of people who do TV went back to work and thought, “Oh, jeez. This is meaningless”

but our show is now as meaningful as ever’ (Zaslow 2002). He went on, ‘the basic theme of our show is, you’ve got one singular life and that’s it. It makes people think about themselves and their place in the world’ (ibid.). Part two, entitled ‘Mourning and melancholia: American cultural crisis and recovery’, is grounded in this uneasy cultural zeitgeist obsessed with death and tragedy. Arguably American culture has long been obsessed with death – with guns, violence and 11

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

killing. We may be able to bear the cause and effect logic of a mobster whacking a miscreant in
The Sopranos,
but are far more uncomfortable with what Christopher Moore called ‘the cool quiet of actual death’ (2002). The section thus considers strategies of coping and healing, which in turn enable authors to ponder what lies beneath this American preoccupation.

The first two pieces explore the American Gothic as an historical strategy and how it is used to understand the present in
Six Feet
Under
. Mandy Merck surveys how it works at a thematic and formal level, reading the series through Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’

and the tradition of nineteenth century Gothic literature. For Dana Heller the American Gothic speaks about America’s repressed traumas such as slavery. She goes further to suggest how
Six Feet Under
in turn uses these same strategies to re-evaluate contemporary struggles involving race, ethnicity and class. The final two chapters of this second section look to more modern methods of coping with tragedy and healing. Robert Deam Tobin identifies strategies of gay mourning in post-AIDS America, suggesting how camp aesthetics have now entered the cultural mainstream as a means of uniting the tragic with the political. He contends that
Six Feet Under
explodes the rhetoric of gay responses to AIDS while, at the same time, re-using the fragments of that discourse in a general discussion of death.

Bringing this section to a close is Ashley Sayeau and her contribution on how
Six Feet Under
is saturated in America’s cultural preoccupation with self-help. Interrogating this very middle-class obsession allows her to argue that beneath the self-help agenda lies

‘an almost irrepressible by-product of middle-class American anxieties surrounding success, fear and narcissism’.

Just as the
Six Feet Under
characters are drawn from the post-Vietnam, post-feminist, post-civil-rights, post-Watergate eras of social upheaval, which rendered patriarchal authority suspect, the aftermath of 9/11 has led to another period of introspection and a questioning of American patriarchy – its foreign policy, the Bush administration and the Republican agenda. As if to confirm this, the series opens with the death of the patriarch when Nathaniel Fisher perishes in a tragic accident. The series thus, argues Tobin in an earlier article,

‘attempts to provide a positive answer to the question of how society should develop without patriarchal guidance’ (2002: 87). Sections three and four provide answers of sorts to this post-patriarchal dilemma.

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The first, ‘Making visible the female subject’, explores how the questioning of patriarchal authority has affected three women: Ruth Fisher (now Sibley), Claire Fisher and Brenda Chenowith. The authors in section three explore how representation is now up for grabs and how the
Six Feet Under
women are trying to carve their own identity, for better or worse, without patriarchal interference.

Kim Akass argues that
Six Feet Under
offers a rare opportunity for an exploration of the middle-aged, post-menopausal mother with adult children, to suggest that there is more to this positioning than meets the eye. Invisible to most, Ruth’s narrative finds her embracing her liminal status and overturning expectations along the way. Janet McCabe charts the complex narrative territory negotiated by Claire as she searches for identity. Required endlessly to talk about who she is and justify her actions reveals the precarious processes Claire must negotiate in order to attain female subjectivity. The final chapter, by Erin MacLeod, deals with the complicated narrative world of Brenda. MacLeod’s chapter maps out the shift from
Charlotte Light
and Dark
to Brenda’s own attempts at writing, to expose the difficulties confronting Brenda when speaking about experience beyond the established forms of patriarchal discourse.

Section four investigates masculinity, male sexuality and the men in
Six Feet Under
. Joanna di Mattia leads with her study of the Fisher brothers, Nate and David. She argues that
Six Feet Under
offers a groundbreaking portrait of male intimacy rarely before seen on our television screens. If the portrayal of this sibling relationship is innovative then the representation of the Church, argues Brian Singleton, is nothing short of revolutionary. Read through queer theological theory, he argues that there is something more than a little queer about the Church and religion in this show. If the Church contributes to David’s unease about his sexuality, then what do we make of Claire’s (ex) boyfriend Russell and his sexual orientation?

Samuel A. Chambers concludes this section with a study of heteronormativity and heterosexual assumptions of sexuality in
Six Feet
Under
. Focusing on Russell allows Chambers to interrogate and question the whole notion of heterosexuality as the norm, and he posits the question: do we now need to out ourselves as heterosexuals?

Section five investigates the use of music as well as giving poetic insight into death and mourning. Peter Kaye begins his chapter by contextualising the musical influences in
Six Feet Under
– Thomas 13

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

Newman’s musical pedigree and the Hollywood connection. Offering two close textual readings allows him to reveal not only how the original score functions as a brand but also how licensed music works alongside the narrative to give additional meanings. An interview with Richard Marvin, musical supervisor and composer for the series, concludes his contribution. A personal response from the man who provided the main inspiration for the series, Thomas Lynch (an American poet, author and professional undertaker in Milford, Michigan), ends the anthology. Alan Ball asked the cast and his writing staff to read Lynch’s award-winning books
Bodies in Motion
and At Rest
(2000) and
The Undertaking
(1997), along with Jessica Mitford’s
The American Way of Death
(1963), before starting work on the show (Ross 2003: 12). Lynch’s contribution here weaves his personal experience of undertaking with a poetic reflection on
Six
Feet Under
.