Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (16 page)

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SIX FEET UNDER

style costumes (‘The New Person’, 1:10). The Fishers at such moments appear less on the run from life than eager to embrace it, creatively and passionately. As the biblical dimensions of their name suggests, they are searching for an authentic way to live among others, according to their own inner rhythms, in defiance of a social imaginary in which no female body and no homosexual body is ever appropriate.

And, along these lines, it is worth noting that the dead who populate the basement mortuary of the Fishers’ home more often than not die from unnatural causes. After three seasons, or 39 episodes, of
Six Feet Under
, eight of the deaths depicted were the result of murder, two were the result of suicide and six occurred from vehicular accidents. Three of the victims suffocated (two while eating and one while practicing autoerotic asphyxiation), two were electrocuted, six died from trauma to the head, eight were shot, two unintentionally killed themselves and one died from lethal injection. Only 14 have died of illness or some other natural cause, such as old age (Television Without Pity, 2003). The world generated by the opening deaths of
Six Feet Under
is a world of random violence and chaotic mishap, a world in which gruesome tragedy waits, potentially, around every corner. Frequently these tragic overtures are overlaid with black humour and irony. A sleazy con artist dives into his luxurious backyard swimming pool while persuading a mark to invest in a pyramid scheme, and cracks his head open (‘The Will’, 1:2). A department store Santa riding to work on his motorcycle turns to wave to a group of children on the roadside and is crushed by a truck, as the kids look on in blank astonishment (‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’, 2:8). In
Six Feet Under
, death is the ultimate contrivance that lies in wait to reveal the uselessness and fraudulence of middle-class aspirations, morals and cultural practices.

In death, we are all fated to become the punch line to a sick joke that was on us all along.

In the midst of so much counterfeit moralising and mayhem, as they strive to embrace their own fleeting and contradictory embodiment, the Fishers often turn to ethnic and racial others who appear to embody (or to have formerly embodied in life) modes of being and desire that are genuine and courageous. Thus Ruth’s ambivalence about her new-age hairdresser boyfriend, Hiram (Ed Begley, Jr), leads her into the arms of a Russian immigrant and florist, Nikolai (Ed O’Ross), whose uncomplicated sensuality and 78

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unrestrained appetites recall her to carnal pleasures that she otherwise methodically denies, meagrely and neatly portioning out her existence as she meagrely and neatly portions out her food: one pork chop, three Brussels sprouts, two potatoes (‘Back to the Garden’, 2:7). Nate’s repressed misgivings about his marriage to Lisa are brought to the surface by the corpse of William Aaron Jaffe (Josh Radnor), a young Jewish husband and father who in 1975 told his wife that he was going out for a newspaper and drove his VW Beetle off a forest road, where hikers discover his remains 25 years later.

‘You are so fucking trapped,’ he sneers at Nate, appearing beside him during his funeral. ‘You look me in the eye and tell me that sometimes you don’t want to get in your car and just start driving and never look back. Come on, I dare you’ (‘The Trap’, 3:5).

Keith is enlisted in the service of providing David’s moral/historical conscience, as David battles against his internalised homophobia and his closeted existence. With Keith’s admonishments to live honestly and defend himself, viewers begin to see David move towards greater self-acceptance. For example in one episode Keith convinces David to go away with him for a weekend to ‘Los Lomos’, a romantic resort (‘The Eye Inside’, 3:3). When they arrive, David is intimidated on seeing that all the other guests are heterosexual. In a hilarious fantasy sequence, a man vomits and a mother

© the authors

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clutches her son in alarm, shouting ‘you can’t have him’, as David and Keith enter the pool area. In reality however, nobody seems to care that they are a gay couple. Keith affirms this when he wraps his arms affectionately around David and asks a poolside waiter to take their photograph. Still David cannot stop worrying that he makes others around him uncomfortable. ‘Sometime I just get exhausted by the running commentary in my head all day long about how to be,’ he admits to Keith. ‘Is this shirt too tight? Is that gesture too flamboyant?’ Here David expresses a queer cultural awareness not unlike W.E.B. Dubois’s (1994) famous ‘double consciousness’ of the African-American, or the ‘sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of the other, and measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (2). In this way, the series assumes commensurability between the dread effects of racism and homophobia in fracturing and alienating those identities that are positioned outside the national narrative. As an African-American gay man, and, moreover, as a man whose work as a police officer/

security guard carries associations with masculine authority, Keith carries the cultural and social capital necessary to lift David out of his self-entombment. Fittingly, then, in the afterglow of drunken, raucous sex, David bangs on the wall of their hotel room and shouts,

‘We’re gay in here,’ thus signalling not only his evolving critical stance in relation to compulsory ‘heteronormativity’, to use Michael Warner’s term (1993: xxi), but his refusal to be boxed in, confined and silenced within a coffin-like space of his own consignment.

Appropriately, then, Fisher and Sons Funeral Home (or ‘Fisher and Diaz’, as it is renamed when Rico buys in as a third partner and surrogate ‘brother’) is an open, public site of intimate cross-racial, cross-ethnic, multicultural encounter and negotiation, an archive of different bodies and rituals that do not easily coalesce within any singular image of the national family. We see this as the Fishers reluctantly comfort an elderly black man (Bill Cobbs) who indignantly refuses to leave the side of his dead wife until he too dies from grief (‘The Room’, 1:6), and when a Thai family interrogates a puzzled Nate as to his familiarity with the guidelines for organising a traditional Buddhist funeral (‘The Secret’, 2:10), and again when the Fishers receive the corpse of a Mexican-American gang-banger, Manuel Pedro ‘Paco’ Antonio Bolin (Jacob Vargas), and are forced to confront their own racist presumptions as they are faced with the 80

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task of arranging a traditional Mexican funeral for the young man’s family and gang associates (‘Familia’, 1:4). Nate senses the mutual distrust that threatens to undermine their business with the Bolins.

Fearing that they may turn to another funeral home, Nate and David ask Rico, who is Puerto Rican, to work with the family – a request that suddenly racialises relations among the three men and spurs Rico’s resentment. ‘Why? Because I’m Latino, I know about gangs?’

he snaps. Only after David explains that they may lose the funeral otherwise does Rico agree to help. Nate cautions David to keep out of the way. ‘We are so white,’ he says. ‘If we step in we will fuck everything up.’

However, the cultural barriers and racial tensions that prohibit communication among the living are bridged in death, when David receives coaching in self-respect and dignity from Paco’s corpse (‘Familia’, 1:4). During his embalming process, Paco opens his eyes and begins berating David for doing nothing to defend himself after earlier being called ‘faggot’ in a grocery store parking lot. Paco’s encouragements lead to David’s confrontation with Matthew Gilardi (Garrison Hershberger), a bullying corporate representative from a funeral home franchise that is seeking to buy out Fisher and Sons.

When Gilardi threatens to ‘bury’ Fisher and Sons within a month, David leans forward and looks him straight in the eye: ‘Someday, when your mind isn’t on Fisher & Sons, I will find you or someone you love. I’m not saying anyone is going to die. There are tragedies far worse than death. Things you couldn’t even dream of, you spineless, candy-ass corporate fuck.’ Stunned, Gilardi backs off, as once again the disenfranchised spirits that haunt the can-do platitudes of American corporate capitalism disrupt its historical narratives of self-determination. In the episode’s final scene, the Bolins invite the Fishers to gather with them in a prayer circle in the main room, where Paco’s funeral is being held. Grief, loss and the refusal to fall prey to humiliation are the forces that apparently unite the Fishers and the Bolins, despite differences of race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.

Paco, who is also part of the prayer circle, holds hands with David.

His final advice to David, as his coffin is carried away, is ‘don’t be a bitch’.

This parting piece of advice is important, as it shifts the focus of the closing scene away from the sentimental politics of shared feeling back to the nagging and unresolved question of power.

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Indeed, the dead of
Six Feet Under
do not ask for our sympathy; they are presented as objects of ethical enquiry, not as objects of feeling.

And, despite its strategic use of the Gothic convention of necromancy, or communication with the dead, viewers of
Six Feet Under
can be certain that the corpses who commune with the Fishers do not truly walk the earth. The rules of the game are made clear: the dead appear only to the living, as manifestations of their inner questions and darker truths. ‘They’re not really ghosts,’ Ball explains. ‘They’re a literary device to articulate what’s going on in the living characters’ minds, so I didn’t want them to seem supernatural. I didn’t want to do any spooky lighting or otherworldly stuff. When our characters are talking to the dead, it’s not much different than staring at the wall.

When death has touched your life in such a frighteningly intimate way, your entire world becomes surreal’ (Magid 2002).

However, as these identifications with the dead who occupy the Fishers’ heads begin to mirror the lived identifications that cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, it becomes possible to argue that
Six Feet Under
constitutes a surreal requiem for a Utopian fantasy of the nation. The logic of this argument stems in part from the assumption that a particular image of white, middle-class patriarchal family life has long served as an extension of a particular political fantasy of the nation, with its unshakeable economic growth and ideological coherence. Anxieties and insecurities about proper gendering and sexual behaviour – particularly in relation to other markers of identity, such as race, ethnicity and class – have remained central to twentieth-century debates over the health of American society and the nation. The truth of one’s sex and the symbolic manifestations of one’s relationship to that truth are measures of a mythical, much-longed-for coherence that helps hold the nation (and its others) in place. This coherence has been manufactured through what Lauren Berlant (1997) calls a

‘nationalist politics of intimacy’, a conservative ideological agenda that has personalised the space of citizenship and national culture by making the private heterosexual family the foundation of national survival (7).

Gothic democracy critiques this agenda by rejecting social fictions of naturalness and affirmative normalcy that are rooted in myths of gender. For example, concerned that she and Claire lack intimacy in their relationship, Ruth determines to foster closeness 82

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by visiting a recently divorced cousin who has a teenage daughter Claire’s age (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). When they arrive, however, Claire and Ruth find they have nothing whatsoever in common with this insipid, incessantly cheerful mother-daughter pair, who advocate spinning classes and dieting, and whose intellectual acumen is revealed over a game of Scrabble to be negligible. In the end, Ruth and Claire do experience the moment of mother-daughter bonding that Ruth had hoped for, occurring as they secretly escape from their cousin’s house at dawn before they can be forced to attend an early morning spinning class.

At the same time, Gothic democracy critiques the ideology of national symbiosis by championing what Rosi Braidotti (2001) has termed the ‘teratological imaginary’, an imaginary that revels in difference – zombies, mutants and monstrous bodies positioned on the outskirts of normalcy and convention (383). Within this imaginative framework, bodies undergoing transformation by processes of ageing and disease take on a special importance as ontological rebels that express the traumatic yet dynamic instability of the Western subject unmoored from consumerist ideals of perpetual youth, health and glamour. ‘It’s frightening how much we change,’ says Ruth when confronted with an old photo of herself, nude, that was taken in a hotel room the night before Nathaniel, Sr, left for Vietnam (‘The Room’, 1:6). Yet Ruth’s erotic longings are not diminished by the culture’s taboo against acknowledging the sexuality of post-menopausal women – a taboo that writers explore in the third season episodes tracing Ruth’s unrequited crush on Arthur, the creepy, twenty-something mortician who interns with the Fishers.