Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (15 page)

Talk to me when you’ve had to stuff formaldehyde-soaked cotton up your father’s ass so he doesn’t leak’ (‘Pilot’, 1:1). By organising viewers’

introduction to the series’ main characters around the traumatic loss and burial of the father’s body, the creator of
Six Feet Under
, Alan Ball, situates the pilot within a long-standing American tradition of

‘parricidal textuality’, to borrow Russ Castronovo’s term (1995: 31), and at the same time sets into motion a critical re-examination of that tradition. The result is a trenchant commentary on the repressed yet ‘leaky’ dimensions of American society and selfhood.

Such observations will come as little surprise to anyone familiar with Ball’s previous work, most notably his Oscar-winning screenplay for the film
American Beauty
(Sam Mendes, 1999). This film rehearses many of the themes that resurface in
Six Feet Under
, including voices from beyond the grave (the film is narrated by a dead man), the hypocrisy of a middle-class marriage and the ineluctable forces of sexual yearning, paranoia and violence that lurk beneath the rose-tinted surface of affluent suburbia. Pronounced elements of Gothic cultural production (including a young heroine who lies about having lost her virginity, and a psychotic villain) give shape to a narrative which, although not a horror film per se, has been described as ‘scarier than
The Blair Witch Project
’ (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez 1999) (Baughman: www.popmatters.com). Many critics 72

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have interpreted the climactic murder of the disillusioned, middle-aged hero, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), by a homophobic neighbour as a critique of white heterosexual masculinity. But, more than this,
American Beauty
provides a sustained meditation on all that the national narrative conceals beneath its well-trimmed uniformity: a denial of the messy truth of American history.

This chapter argues that
Six Feet Under
, although not a Gothic text in the strict sense, employs distinctly Gothic conventions in its study of psychic and cultural dislocation, or the ‘turns and tendencies in the dismantling of the national subject’ (Martin and Savoy 1998: vii). Of course, given the protean and diffusive nature of the genre in American cultural production, the question of what ‘Gothic’ in the strict sense might mean has remained open to debate. In
Love
and Death in the American Novel
, Leslie Fiedler argues that American literature is fundamentally Gothic in character, ‘a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation’ (1982: 10). In contrast to the British Gothic’s preoccupation with class conflict, Fiedler reads the American Gothic impulse principally as an expression of Freudian neurotic states, a tradition defined by a pathological obsession with death and a fear of adult sexuality.

More recent critics have treated the Gothic as an ambivalent mode of ‘narrating the nation’ (Bhabha 1990), or as a means of interrogating the past and of reasserting those histories and figures that have been repressed in American culture. Gothic narrative confronts the contradictions that challenge national ideals of innocence, purity and equality, thus summoning up in Teresa Goddu’s estimation, ‘the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it’ (1997: 10). ‘Like the abject,’ writes Goddu, ‘the gothic serves as the ghost that both helps to run the machine of national identity and disrupt it’ (10). Indeed, for a new generation of critics the national machinery is haunted above all by the historical brutalities of racism. Gothic form thus becomes instrumental insofar as it refuses to allow that element of

‘darkness’ long associated with American romance to function in a purely symbolic register (Morrison 1993). On the contrary, American Gothic reclaims that darkness as the racial ‘other’, and in doing so reminds us that its meanings are inescapably historical, the mark of a collective social contradiction that is not easily reducible to individual psychological conflict. Rather, the Gothic demands to be 73

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

understood as a record of the ghostly, repressed and silenced body of the nation.

Moreover, the national narrative represses death itself, or the ever-present ‘ticking clock’. The mass culture of the United States is a culture that trembles in the face of the inevitable decay of the body, marketing all manner of youth and pleasure-extending commodities and shunning all contact with cigarettes, fat, disease or other reminders of the body’s inevitable demise. American capitalism mobilises vast resources in an effort to defer, deny and disguise death.

But death, the ultimate abject, is a central character in
Six Feet Under
.

The raw truth of it confronts the Fishers at every turn, both publicly and privately. A new employee, who is fired for being too forthcoming about her private life, complains of the Fisher family ‘everyone is so fragile. And can’t bear to hear anything. I’ve never worked in a funeral home that was this depressing’ (‘The New Person’, 1:10).

The Fishers tend to deny their more intimate relation with sorrow.

And yet, as members of the family are visited by the ghost of Nathaniel, and by other ‘dead’ characters that appear from time to time to converse with, observe and advise them, they are prompted to question the truth of what they know about themselves and about the past. Viewers are thus invited to view the Fisher family as a site of relentless interpretive struggle. In episode after episode, these struggles play out across the boundaries of public and private, juxtaposing the public performance of obligation to the commercial ‘death care’

industry with the private performance of obligations to love, intimacy, sexuality and domesticity.

In this way, the ‘home’ of ‘Fisher and Sons Funeral Home’ suggests multiple, contradictory meanings. It refers, on the one hand, to a collapse of the illusory social boundaries that ostensibly defend the private family against the brute forces of history and social change.

‘This is what you’ve been running away from your whole life, buddy boy,’ Nathaniel tells his son, Nate, when he arrives at the morgue to identify his father’s corpse. ‘And you thought you’d escape. Well, guess what? Nobody escapes’ (‘Pilot’, 1:1). History inevitably reclaims us all, forcing us to confront not only our own mortality but also the irreparable death of an innocent fantasy of nationhood. Our liberation from this fantasy suggests the transformative possibilities of ‘Gothic democracy’, a progressive social vision in which abject

‘others’ direct future narratives of national identity and belonging.

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We see this vision unfold as the random strangers whose deaths trumpet the beginning of each new episode collectively suggest a portrait of the nation that is at first aberrant and anonymous: a tedious, talkative husband is bludgeoned to death by his wife (‘The New Person’, 1:10); a young gay man is murdered in a hate crime (‘A Private Life’, 1:12); a bakery janitor is chopped to pieces while cleaning an industrial dough-kneading device (‘The Foot’, 1:3); a Korean woman is shot during a hold-up in a convenience store (‘Death Works Overtime’, 3:11). As David and Nate come into intimate contact with them through their vocational engagements with restorative cosmetology, their professional interactions with surviving friends, lovers and relatives, and their commercial investments in the ‘grief industry’, the dead of
Six Feet Under
provide a gloss on the moral shortcomings and mortal frailties of the living. In a flashback, viewers discover that Federico ‘Rico’ Diaz is drawn to the study of mortuary science following his father’s death from a fall, the impact of which crushes his face. Nathaniel Fisher miraculously restores his father’s appearance to the way that young Rico wishes to remember him. The power of the mortician’s art is that it rehabilitates the surface of social relations. The power of the dead is distinguished, however, by the fact that they – unlike the living – are unburdened of their surfaces, utterly free to speak their minds and acknowledge the deeper truth.

In contrast, the Fishers contain dark secrets that they have difficulty fully acknowledging. David, the responsible ‘good son’ of the family, struggles to accept his homosexuality and rise above his fears of rejection by family and Church. This conflict is often the contentious focus of his off-and-on-again relationship with Keith Charles, an openly gay African-American policeman for whom being ‘out’ is a mark of honour. The family matriarch, Ruth Fisher, has been having an adulterous affair with a hairstylist whom she met at church. Nate is obsessed with his health and on the run from adulthood, commitment and family. Claire, the youngest Fisher, is an outcast at high school, ambivalent about attending college and routinely appalled by the artificiality and hypocrisy of the world around her.

As the series opens with the shock of Nathaniel’s death, the Fishers’

secrets begin coming to light and their characters gradually emerge as oddly out of sync with the social values and norms that they would, on the surface, appear to represent.

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SIX FEET UNDER

However, surfaces – and surface narratives – can be deceptive, and this is a point that
Six Feet Under
reiterates not only through its characters but also through its location. The series is set in California, a primary locus of American myth and one of the more prominent sites for the discovery and interrogation of national identity in American literature. While Gothic writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King, have tended to set their narratives in New England, and while an equally strong Gothic tradition, represented by writers such as Flannery O’Connor, has roots in the American South, the mythical landscape of the American West –

and California in particular as a receptacle for all that gravitates toward the farthest western boundaries of the nation and the national imaginary – features prominently in American Gothic texts. This is especially true in cinema and television texts. Los Angeles, which –

not insignificantly – means ‘the angels’, provides a fitting location for Fisher and Sons Funeral Home, itself a border station between the world of the living and the dead. As the origin of Hollywood legend and lore, and as an infamous gateway to hope, youth, success and prosperity, Los Angeles would seem to contradict Gothic decay and terror. However, Los Angeles’s culture of the hyper-real and its glorification of celebrity narcissism provide a sinister and mysterious setting for interrogations of the American Dream. The chartreuse hearse that Claire drives to and from school undercuts the very idea of style and enacts a morbid inversion of the automobile as an American symbol of youthful energy, mobility and glamour. When Claire and Gabe (Eric Balfour) have sex in the roomy tail end,
Six Feet Under
challenges the American idealisation of young love by depicting it literally as a frolic in the back seat of a hearse (‘The Will’, 1:2). And when Claire steals the severed foot of a corpse and hides it in Gabe’s locker to avenge a betrayal, the narrative admits to the splintering of romantic illusions by referencing the Gothic trope of body snatching (‘The Foot’, 1:3).

Alan Ball describes
Six Feet Under
as ‘
Knots Landing
set in a funeral home’ (Peyser 2002: 54). This allusion to the series (1979–1993) that focused on the intersecting lives of five California families locates
Six Feet Under
within the popular genre of family melodrama. However, the constant presence of death eschews the superficiality and relentless camera motion, the soap opera formalism and tight close-ups, that drive most commercial network 76

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hour-long dramas. In sharp contrast, the mystery of human mortality casts a constant sidelong glance over the lives of the Fishers. The action is played in wide shots, a visual element that emphasises the human insignificance and existential isolation of characters. In this way,
Six Feet Under
rigorously defies classification according to the standard rules of television aesthetics, playfully remixing elements of popular literary and visual formats in addition to Gothic, including soap opera, family melodrama, satire, comedy and romance. These elements are combined with a realist dedication to the details of mortuary science so exacting that it has won praise from real-life funeral directors (Peyser 2002: 58). Much of the pleasure of watching the series derives, in fact, from this confusion and collusion of the disturbingly real and unremarkably surreal, as when Nate encounters a corpse with an erection (‘angel lust’, Rico informs him) (‘The Will’, 1:2) or when David casually exchanges sarcastic quips with a dead porn star while at the same time embalming her discoloured remains (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). But, once again, to overlook the importance of such dislocating moments would be to miss the point of
Six Feet Under
, as the opening epigraph to this chapter highlights.

Indeed, the very title of the show, while referencing the Gothic trope of living entombment, admits to the absence of boundaries between the living and the dead, the desiring body and the decaying body, while also suggesting ambivalence as to the question of whose desires remain hidden beneath the surface of national narrative.

Like the heartland couple in Grant Wood’s classic painting,

‘American Gothic’ (1930), the Fishers appear to be a buttoned-up, dour lot. ‘Oh, Jesus! No accident you guys are undertakers,’ says Brenda Chenowith, Nate’s girlfriend. ‘You take every fucking feeling you have and put it in a box and bury it’ (‘Familia’, 1:4). However, viewers quickly learn that wild yearnings lurk beneath this staid image.

These yearnings find expression through fantasy sequences. The morning after Claire’s first sexual encounter with Gabe, she giddily enters the kitchen and removes her robe to reveal a sequence gown before breaking into song. ‘Oooh, what a little moonlight can do-oo-oo,’ she croons, with her mother and David providing spontaneous back-up vocals (‘The Foot’, 1:3). While vacuuming the funeral parlour carpets, David’s determination to fully embrace his sexuality inspires a fantasy musical rendition of ‘Got a Lot of Livin’ to Do’, with him at the centre surrounded by male dancers in Bob-Fosse-77