Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (23 page)

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

of grieving strangers. All this changes when a city bus ploughs into her father’s new hearse, instantly killing him. Suddenly everyone is taking a keen interest in her. Bitterly she objects to the attention paid to what she does with the rest of her life, when she was basically invisible beforehand. But how does this surveillance police the teenager as she struggles to become her own woman? Complicating the process further is her interaction with the other female characters, from whom she learns about female identities and social roles. But it is precisely through this interaction that we find out just how complicated, conflicted and confusing the process of acquiring female identity proves to be.

Underlying my argument here is the thought that contradictions producing female subjectivities – between endorsing traditional notions of femaleness and introducing insurgent ones – are embedded right into the dramatic structure of
Six Feet Under
. The series appropriates other television confessional formats – daytime talk shows, serial melodramas and soap operas – as well as the American rewriting of Freud’s ‘talking cure’ (Starker 1989) – self-help, self-actualisation, ego psychology, 12-step revisions and counselling –

which privileges individual self-knowledge over patriarchal dependence. Just as the series confronts us ‘with the departure of the father who seems to bear the phallus’ (Tobin 2002: 87),
Six Feet
Under
draws on the individual-oriented therapies made popular during the anti-authoritarian period after World War II (Shattuc 1997: 114) – therapies that transferred agency from expert to patient (Adler 1959; Horney 1939, 1964; Fromm 1956; Miller 1969). Such discourses continued to increase because post-war American society busied itself challenging patriarchal power – the Vietnam War, the possibilities provided by emanicipatory movements like second-wave feminism, gay and civil rights, and a counter-culture defined by popular music, new age philosophies and experimentation in the arts. But, moreover,
Six Feet Under
is saturated in these anti-authoritarian social rules and cultural values. Put simply, Claire remains enclosed in the power relationships produced by this contested social world.

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Troubling the Oedipal Text

Just as Sigmund Freud seemed ‘unable to solve the riddle of femininity’ (1986: 415), the Fishers find Claire’s female growing pains hard to handle. Nothing is known of her movements; and nobody really knows what she thinks or what to say to her. Noticeable in the first few episodes is how the family talk about rather than to her. Suspicious that she might be responsible for setting fire to the house across the road, her family assume the worst (‘Familia’, 1:4).

While Ruth refuses to believe Claire would do such a terrible thing, her brothers are not too sure: ‘She hates us,’ opines David. Later, while watching a rerun of that other TV show about a fatherless brood,
The Partridge Family
(‘the family who sings together stays together’ rings out from the television), Nate tries to reach out to his younger sister to find out if anything is wrong. Claire plays along: no, things aren’t okay – her pimp is threatening to beat her up for not turning enough tricks and take away her smack. Responding to Nate’s maddened reaction, she retorts: ‘Why do you naturally have to assume I’m in trouble?’ Such a moment, coming in the fourth episode, puts into operation an entire range of formal, thematic and narrative conventions used over the series to position her as a conundrum and compel her to speak about why she is a problem.

Her family, educators, school guidance counsellor – and, of course, the
Six Feet Under
serial structure – demand that she endlessly talk about her sexuality, justify her behaviour and communicate her most intimate feelings.

Seasons one and two find Claire seeing the school guidance counsellor, Gary Deitman (David Norona). She is initially sent to him to explain why she put a corpse’s foot in a classmate’s locker (‘The Foot’, 1:3). Her justification of ‘protesting Footlocker’s inability to sell a decent-priced sneaker’ placates no one. But Claire’s presence in this therapeutic space reveals how female behaviour bears the taint of abnormality and is labelled as dysfunctional precisely because the clinical (male) space of the counsellor’s office defines it as such. Julia Sherman detailed back in 1975 the ways in which psychoanalysis proved detrimental to female patients: from promoting ‘dependency and mystification [and] locating the problem and the blame within women’ to ‘providing a negative view of women [and] handy rationales for the oppression of women’

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(Sturdivant 1980: 52). Is it any wonder that the series’ other female patient, ‘Charlotte’, resorted to barking at her therapist and why Claire is often reduced to sulky silence?

Just as the televisual dramatic form provides a space for inciting a discourse of female subjectivity – presenting it for an audience, staging dilemmas, allowing the viewer to observe and read a performance –

the clinical space also functions as an incitement to discourse. Yet, as Foucault describes, such presentations of self unfold within a power relationship, in which ‘the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile’ (1998: 61–62). If Foucault is to be believed, then Gary is there to infer meaning, solve dilemmas and heal familial rifts. Under his watchful gaze, and removed from her close kin, Claire’s revelations become defined as an emotional display, as about a disclosure of a dysfunctional family, of a female self laid bare. Immediately Gary asserts his dominance by inviting Ruth to join them (‘An Open Book’, 1:5), making known that interpretative power resides not with the one who speaks but with ‘the one who listens and says nothing’ (Foucault 1998: 62).

Claire has no say in the matter: ‘I told her it wasn’t my idea.’ Gary deciphers Claire’s unhappiness – that she missed out – for Ruth.

Claire stops him: ‘No, you said that. I told you I don’t think there was a time when this family was ever happy.’ Ruth and Claire start bickering, while Gary sits back to listen (a virtual position shared by us). Letting the women exhaustively rehearse their complaints produces humour while revealing certain truths about this mother-daughter alliance. But Ruth and Claire emerge as exhibiting ‘signs of distress and mild clinical depression’ (Ball and Poul 2003: 144) precisely because what they say is read as troubling by the secular interlocutor who desires to bring about an emotional adjustment and modify female behaviour. That Gary offers only platitudes (‘I think you should have more of a dialogue. Make time for it. Schedule it.

Remember, any relationship is work.’) is not the point. Instead, it is his hermeneutic function to incite a discourse about an indifferent mother and depressed daughter over which he keeps watch that is key here.

Nowhere are attempts to police female behaviour more sharply brought into focus than when Claire is required to talk about sex and desire. Of course, the reason she is seeing Gary in the first place is 124

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because of her sexual relationship with Gabriel Dimas (Eric Balfour). Foucault draws our attention to how medical and psychiatric institutions ‘analysed’ the female body as ‘saturated with sexuality’

(1998: 104) and inherently pathological. Claire is often required to talk about her feelings for Gabe despite her wish to discuss something else (‘A Private Life’, 1:12; ‘The Plan’, 2:3; ‘Driving Mr Mossback’, 2:4). The more she tries to comprehend how
she
feels, the more Gary interrupts and pathologises her narrative in ways she often cannot anticipate. It is a repeated pattern whereby he gives her permission to speak frankly but when she does he imposes meaning on what she says. In the aptly titled episode ‘The Invisible Woman’

(2:5), Gary mentions the ‘sexual tension between them’. It is a strangely inappropriate moment, coming after Claire’s violent outburst towards Parker McKenna (Maria Black) for cheating on the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs). Despite Gary telling her that she is displacing, he introduces a new topic. ‘And now is probably a good as time as any to talk about the sexual tension between us.’ Claire lets out an incredulous ‘What?’ He continues: ‘It exists. It is a normal part of transference and counter-transference.’ Claire is stunned –

and silenced. Seen from her uneasy position, the process of probing for any traces of sexuality and desire, of wrenching out the most stubborn confessions, and of opening the female subject to unremitting scrutiny is made uncomfortably visible here. Never let us forget how the
mise en scène
of that office, with its closed venetian blinds and counsellor peering out from behind the desk, hems her in and often leaves her prowling like a trapped animal around the room.

Although Gary aims to build up her self-esteem and sense of self (he is, after all, responsible for getting her onto the Sierra Crossroads programme and passing on details of LAC-Arts), is not the therapeutic process circumscribed? Only certain things can be uttered – despite Gary telling Claire she can say anything. Articulating disappointment and annoyance over what she sees around her, while interpretable within the male confessional space, often fails to give adequate voice to her frustrations. She is often lost for words, silenced by thwarted rage or says things she does not quite mean. Rigor mortis is not only the preserve of the cadaver here. It also speaks of stultifying discourses available to the female subject when attempting to utter ‘I’. Claire’s irritation seems to me less about her rejection of normative female social roles – daughter, sister (of which I will come to later) – than 125

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about the limits of discourse to adequately express and describe her experiences, her desires, her identity. But try she must. Just as a death structures each episode to offer a liminal space for suspending rules and challenging taboo, Claire represents within the narrative logic of
Six Feet Under
another kind of liminal space: a gendered

© the authors

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liminality in which the possibilities for representing female identity differently are, for better or worse, negotiated.

Desiring (Female) Identity

There is something suspect about the way Claire spits out her indignant rage. Despite railing against the world and its hypocrisies, one wonders if she does not protest a little too much. Fantasising about the future lives of her classmates – one a rich lawyer blissfully wed with two kids (‘you must be unbelievably happy’), another with a Masters in French who gives up living in Paris and becomes a successful television development executive with an obsession for the body perfect and a slight substance abuse problem (‘but you look great’) and another who runs a successful interior lighting design firm until succumbing to ovarian cancer before reaching 30 (‘that totally sucks’) – reveals a paradoxical Claire (‘Brotherhood’, 1:7).

Hovering on the edge of this ‘in’ group finds her caught between desperately wanting to fit in yet not belonging, between resisting but not immune to long-held normative messages about the svelte body and female achievement. Playing with these narratives in her head reveals how she has imbibed dominant cultural models of female accomplishment, whereby marriage and children equal happiness while singledom results in nothing but loneliness or death – despite what feminism tells her. Her subsequent friendship with Parker is riddled with similar contradictions; for, while Claire hates how Parker masquerades as the bright, perky straight-A student to play the system, she enjoys her company. Possibly it is because she takes pleasure in the ways in which Parker ‘acts out her own hidden wishes’ (Modleski 1997: 42). Ensnared in an endless struggle for self-definition, Claire is obsessed with understanding identities, definitions of self and lifestyle labels. Yet looking on at other women to help her make sense of who she is and what she wants proves to be a profoundly contradictory and ambivalent process.

Raging against glib stereotypes does not prevent Claire from using them to make sense of others. Taking part in the Sierra Crossroads programme – an outward bound course recommended by Gary that encourages participants to test their physical endurance and find spiritual enlightenment by traipsing in the mountains (or, 127

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seen another way, a course which polices behaviours and turns out responsible and emotionally balanced citizens) – proves a miserable experience for Claire, made worse by the discovery that Parker is also participating (‘Crossroads’, 1:8). Confiding in another seeming misfit, Topher (Jordan Brower), she hides her discomfort by posing the question of who would play Parker in the movie of her ‘perfect life’: Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock? Topher does not think she rates that high, at best ‘one of those
Buffy
,
Dawson’s Creek
chicks’. Such a self-reflexive interchange, pitching a cause and effect Hollywood movie subjectivity where a protagonist achieves self-knowledge in 90-minutes against an open-ended televisual one that focuses on the endlessly solipsistic struggle of becoming (one need only think of Buffy Summers, Willow Rosenberg and Joan Girardi for other examples), reveals how different narrative forms and mass media images come to know the female subject.