Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (13 page)

The connection between the funeral and the familial is also long established in America, originating in the Protestant traditions that dominated the country’s early culture. Prior to the Civil War (1861–1865), death would ideally occur at home in the company of family, friends, a local physician and – sometimes – a member of the clergy. The deceased’s body was then prepared for burial by female relatives, ‘laid out’ after being washed, shaved if necessary, dressed in a shroud and placed in a wooden coffin. For between one and three days it would remain in the home, often in a front room or parlour, watched over by family members, friends, volunteers and sometimes hired minders. The primary purpose of this vigil was to ensure that the deceased really was dead, as well as to permit the neighbourly visits and social eating and drinking which ‘helped to counteract the fissure created by the death of a community member’

(Laderman 1996: 31).

Often a service involving prayers or speeches took place in the home prior to the procession to a church or directly to the burial site.

There the deceased was interred in a grave frequently depicted as a home, a place of repose with family and friends. This was in fact increasingly the case, as family plots were a frequent feature of the new ‘garden’ cemeteries of the mid-nineteenth century. And with the liberalisation of American Protestantism across the period, the popular image of the afterlife was transformed from the Puritan spectre of hell and damnation to one of spiritual homecoming. ‘Death,’

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declared the Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher, ‘is only God’s call, “Come home”’ (1866: 232–233).

The transfer of death’s ritual observance from the home of the deceased to commercial undertakers like
Six Feet Under
’s Fisher and Sons was largely a consequence of the American Civil War. Its terrible fatalities (more than 600,000 dead of wounds and disease –

one-third more than the US dead in World War Two) necessitated new methods to transport bodies long distances for burial. Demand for the metallic ‘caskets’ developed before the conflict could not be met near rural battlefields. Where embalming had previously been reserved for cadavers used for dissection in medical schools, the wealthier families of the war’s victims turned the practice into a profession. By 1863 four embalming/undertaking firms were advertising their services in Washington, DC, and many others operated near army hospitals and camps, or followed troops into the field. And, when President Lincoln was assassinated at the war’s end, the techniques of his body’s chemical treatment were reported at length in the press and made visible in the public display of his open coffin.

In the years following the Civil War, this commodified management of death developed into the modern funeral industry, supported by a renovated Protestantism that stressed the continuity of the spirit rather than the corruptibility of the flesh. The preference for embalming over cremation also reflected a Victorian fascination with
preservation
– of flowers, earlier building styles and bodies fortified against decay. In the 1880s undertakers renamed themselves ‘funeral directors’, with a newfound professional ethos (‘the keeping of the body to [the] completeness and certainty of an exact science’ (Farrell 1980: 151)) and trade journals hawking a range of expensive and ultimately futile products for staving off the inevitable. By the 1920s the funeral ‘homes’ or ‘parlours’ of these professional undertakers –

complete with preparation laboratories and funeral chapels – had replaced the actual home as the main site for the American care of the corpse.

Only 20 years later, according to Alan Ball and Alan Poul’s companion volume to the HBO series, the fictional Fisher and Sons Funeral Home is opened in a large house on 2302 West Twenty-fifth Street in Los Angeles (2003: 10–11). The multi-gabled building, with its mullioned windows, pointed arches and stained glass around the doorway, is patently Victorian Gothic. (In real life, it houses the 61

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Philippine Historical Society.) Its ground-floor interior, as designed by Art Director Marcia Hinds, maintains the late Victorian style, with dark panelling, floral wallpaper, sconce lighting, pelmeted curtains, mahogany furniture and potted ferns. In homage to another Gothic setting, the Bates Motel in
Psycho
(1960), porcelain birds provide a major decorative motif (Trockle 2004: 58). Throughout the first season of the series, the precise layout of this building is deliberately obscured. In Ball’s description, the house’s family quarters feature

‘layers … windows looking in on windows … because the family is so insulated from each other and so sort of repressed, I wanted there to be almost like there’s a room and there’s a room surrounding the room’ (season one DVD commentary).

What is clear from the outset is another patently Gothic motif: the location of death underground, where corpses are embalmed, reconstructed and cosmetically enhanced. In the floor above are the sombre public rooms, in which mourners are received and services conducted. And above this live the Fisher family, in a house that is truly a funeral
home
. Thus the historicised topography traditional to the Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the horror films of the twentieth – the quotidian present over the buried or ‘encrypted’ past – is revived for a twenty-first-century family firm in its third generation. And that which is repressed is discovered at the deepest level of this structure, in the subterranean morgue where the sons must go about their father’s business.

Read like this,
Six Feet Under
becomes ‘dollar-book Freud’, in Orson Welles’s famous description of the manifest psychodrama of
Citizen Kane
. But the film this TV series most recalls is not the 1941

Kane
but the 1986
Blue Velvet
, and its hugely conspicuous citations of Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1985). Not only is David Lynch’s drama of evil in small-town America rife with Freudian symbols, but the primal scene, the threat of castration, sadomasochism, infantile sexuality and male homosexuality are also written directly into its narrative. In one scene a cross-dressed male character lip-syncs to Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’, with its line referring to ‘the candy-coloured clown they call the Sandman’ – the title character of the E.T.A Hoffman story of Oedipal conflict, castration anxiety and gender ambivalence whose interpretation is the centrepiece of ‘The Uncanny’. Not surprisingly,
Blue Velvet
’s knowing anticipation of its psychoanalytic readings gave pause to critics inclined to produce 62

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them. One complained of its threat ‘to make interpretation redundant’

(Creed 1988: 97); another diagnosed the film’s ‘eliciting of, and desire to gag, interpretation’ as a particularly postmodern perversion (Stern 1992: 81); and a third described the film’s eminently ‘readable’

reflexivity as a representation of the uncannily cinematic President of the eighties, Ronald Reagan: ‘made-up, artificial and amnesiac’

(Mulvey 1996: 56).

Two decades later, with Reagan finally dead and
Blue Velvet
consigned to critical history,
Six Feet Under
’s narratives of ‘death and dead bodies…the return of the dead, and…spirits and ghosts’ invokes the thematics of the uncanny in what Freud described as ‘the highest degree’ (1985: 364). In particular, the father’s subterranean occupation recalls the experiments conducted by the father in ‘The Sandman’.

In Hoffman’s 1816 story, a curious young boy steals into his father’s room one night to find him clad in a long smock using ‘strange implements’ to fashion human bodies: ‘I seemed to see human faces appearing all around, but without eyes – instead of eyes there were hideous black cavities’ (Hoffman 1982: 91). In the series’ pilot episode, a flashback reveals a frightened boy discovering his gloved and aproned father embalming a corpse. Like the patriarch in ‘The

© the authors

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Sandman’, the father in
Six Feet Under
will himself die, and he too will be ‘laid in his coffin…his features…again mild and gentle’ (94).

Both sons become disturbed young men and both fall in love with beautiful, but rather strange, women. Both are named Nathaniel.

Freud uses the family relationships in Hoffman’s story to illustrate his theory that horror begins at home. Tracing the etymology of the German word for ‘comfortable’ or ‘cosy’ (
heimlich
), he discovers a strange convergence with its opposite.
Heimlich
can mean ‘intimate’

or ‘familiar’, but it may also mean ‘hidden’, ‘concealed’ or even

‘secretive’. Thus
unheimlich
– ‘weird’, ‘gruesome’, the equivalent of the English ‘uncanny’ – reveals the literally ‘homely’ root of horror: the secrets of domestic life. The strange familiarity of the uncanny is produced by the revelation of that which is both known and concealed, the repressed emotions of intimate existence. In the case of Hoffman’s Nathaniel, Freud identifies a repressed fear of an Oedipal father who threatens his son with a feminising wound – the blinding equivalent in unconscious fantasy to castration.

If death is America’s best-kept secret, the funeral
heim
would seem the ideal setting for such repressions and revelations. For Nate Fisher, the repressed fear is that of death – his father’s, his wife Lisa’s and that threatened by a potentially lethal malformation in his own brain. The fate of an undertaker unable to face mortality seems dark enough for any Gothic tale. Yet, as more than one critic has observed, ‘
Six Feet
Under
offsets the morbidity of its themes with a certain sentimentality’

(Lawson 2004: 10; Trockle 2004: 57). In apparent acknowledgement, the HBO Website entry for the series’ third season announces it as

‘the quirky, sometimes disturbing – but ultimately life-affirming –

story of a resilient American family’. Drama or comedy,
Six Feet
Under
’s ruling genre is the family saga, affirming the centrality and continuity of kinship itself. Episode by episode, the Fishers’ resilience as family and firm endorses the very optimism that its setting threatens.

By the end of season one, the family has not only survived the death of its patriarch but also reconciled huge divisions in age, sexuality, ethnicity and lifestyle. In an age of global economic power and a city torn by racial conflict, Fisher and Sons has fought off Kroehner International’s takeover and rehired Federico Diaz, the talented Latino mortician Kroehner had lured away. By season three the funeral home has expanded to include Rico as business partner and three generations of Fishers under its roof.

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Although the generally upbeat tenor of this narrative is complicated by episodes of a more melancholy tone, these also advance the series’ family values. Thus one of the bleakest deaths in the series’

second season, that of a solitary middle-aged woman who chokes while dining alone and is not discovered until the smell of her decomposing body alerts neighbours a week later, is softened by the unusual care taken by Ruth and Nate to carry out her funeral wishes (‘The Invisible Woman’, 2:5). In doing so they not only dignify the death of Emily Previn (Christine Estabrook) but also re-establish the kinship that seems to have failed her. Fearfully contemplating Emily’s fate as a warning against her own future isolation, Ruth assembles her reluctant family to become the mourners at the lonely woman’s funeral. There, Father Jack (Tim Maculan), the Fishers’ own vicar, preaches to Nate, David, Claire, Ruth and Rico that ‘every life is a contribution. We just may not see how.’

This oscillation between isolation and community parallels that between repression and revelation in the series’ psychodramas. If the individual Fishers’ characteristic secrecy seems over-determined by personal circumstances (sexual guilt, adolescent distrust, fear of homophobia) it is also mandated by the narrative deferral required by serial melodrama. The misunderstandings (Neale 1986) that drive its plots and evince its pathos (if only Ruth and Claire /

David and Keith / Nate and Brenda knew how much each loved the other!) depend upon an exaggerated reticence that periodically gives way to an equally exaggerated disclosure (often under the influence of drink or drugs). The former frequently supplies the (melo)drama and the latter the comedy in HBO’s ‘dramedy’, with the two often alternating at dizzying speed within single episodes.

An outstanding example of this rapid succession of moods and genres is in ‘Life’s Too Short’ (1:9). The opening death is a particularly poignant scene, in which a small boy’s fatal discovery of the gun beneath his mother’s bed is intercut with the chat of his neglectful teenage brother Gabe (Eric Balfour) and a classmate smoking marijuana in a room down the hall. When the gun, predictably, goes off, Gabe and his friend Andy (Timm Sharp) can only exclaim stoned curses at the consequences and get the dope out of the house. As always, the ensuing inter-title identifies the victim in the graphic style of a headstone inscription – Anthony Christopher Finelli, 65