Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (37 page)

Late in the last century there was some trending towards the more home-grown doxologies. Everyone was into the available

‘choices’. We started doing more cremations – it made good sense.

People seemed less ‘grounded’ than their grandparents, more ‘portable’,

‘divisible’, more ‘scattered’ somehow. We got into balloon releases 210

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and homing pigeons done up as doves to signify the flight of the dead fellow’s soul towards heaven. ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’

replaced ‘How Great Thou Art’. And if Paul’s Letter to the Romans or the Book of Job was replaced by Omar Khyyam or Emily Dickinson, what harm? After great pain, a formal feeling comes, rings as true as any sacred text. A death in the family is, as Miss Emily describes it, First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go
.

Amidst all the high fashions and fashion blunders, the ritual wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead still got us where we needed to go. It made room for the good laugh, the good cry and the power of faith brought to bear on the mystery of mortality.

The dead were ‘processed’ to their final dispositions with a pause sufficient to say that their lives and their deaths truly mattered to us.

The broken circle within the community of people who shared blood or geography or belief with the dead was closed again through this

‘acting out our parts’, as Reverend Long calls it. Someone brought the casseroles, someone brought the prayers, someone brought a shovel or lit the fire, everyone was consoled by everyone else. The wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead ran smooth.

Lately I’ve been thinking the wheel is broken or gone a long way off the track or must be reinvented every day. The paradigm is shifting. Bereft of communities of faith or family, the script has changed from the essentially sacred to the essentially silly. We mistake the ridiculous for the sublime.

Take Batesville Casket Company, for example. They make caskets and urns and wholesale to funeral homes all over the globe.

Their latest catalogue is called ‘Accessories’ and includes suggested

‘visitation vignettes’ – the stage arranged around neither Cross nor Crescent nor Star of David, but around one of Batesville’s ‘life-symbols’

caskets featuring interchangeable corner hardware. One ‘life-symbol’

looks like a rainbow trout jumping from the corners of the hardwood casket, and for dearly departed gardeners there is one with little plastic potted mums. There is the ‘sports dad’ vignette, done up like a garage with beer logos, team pennants, hoops and hockey skates – and, of course, a casket that looks a little like a jock locker gone horizontal.

There’s one for motorcyclists and the much-publicised ‘Big Mama’s Kitchen’, with its faux stove, kitchen table and apple pie for the mourners to share with those who call. Instead of Methodists or Muslims we are golfers now; gardeners, bikers and dead bowlers. The 211

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bereaved are not so much family and friends or co-religionists as fellow hobbyists and enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled within a theatre that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd – a triumph of accessories over essentials, of stuff over substance, gimmicks over the genuine. The dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knick-knacks in a kind of funereal karaoke.

Consider the case of Peter Payne. Dead at 44 of brain cancer, his wife arranged for his body to be cremated without witness or rubric, his ashes placed in the golf bag urn, the urn to be placed on a table in one of our parlours with his ‘real life’, which is to say ‘life-sized’

golf bag, standing beside it for their son and daughter and circle of friends to come by for a look. And, if nobody said ‘doesn’t he look by kind permission of T. Cribb and Sons

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natural?’ several commented on how much he looked like, well, his golf bag. The following day the ensemble was taken to the church, where the minister, apparently willing to play along, had some things to say about ‘life being like a par-three hole with plenty of sand traps and water hazards’ – to wit, all too short and full of trouble. And heaven was something like a ‘19th hole’, where, after ‘finishing the course’, those who ‘played by the rules’ and ‘kept an honest score’

were given their ‘trophies’. Then those in attendance were invited to join the family at the clubhouse of Mystic Creek Golf Course for lunch and a little commemorative boozing. There is already talk of a Peter Payne Memorial Tournament next year. A scholarship fund has been established to send young golfers to a PGA training camp. Some of his ashes will be scattered in the sand trap of the par five on the back nine with the kidney-shaped green and the dog-leg right. The rest will remain, for ever and ever, perpetual filler for the golf bag urn.

Whether this is indeed a paradigm shift, the end of an era, or, as Robert Pogue Harrison (2003) suggests, an ‘all too human failure to meet the challenges of modernity’ is anyone’s guess. But we are nonetheless required, as he insists, to choose ‘an allegiance – either to the post-human, the virtual, and the synthetic, or to the earth, the real and the dead in their humic densities’.

In the albeit virtual world of
Six Feet Under
, the allegiance is clearly pledged to the ‘the earth, the real and the dead in their humic densities’. Ours is a species, as Ball portrays it, that deals with death by dealing with the dead – actually, physically, hands-on – the palpable, loveable, corruptible corporeality of the dead in the flesh. Paraphrasing Wallace Stevens (1990), the show insists that we deal with not only

‘the idea of the thing’, but with ‘the thing itself’. This is why the dead are everywhere in Ball’s version – because for generations, now, they’ve seemed to be nowhere. Much of the attraction to
Six
Feet Under
is that it puts the bodies back in funerals. In Britain and America, for half a century now, they’ve been hidden under coffin lids in the name of ‘good taste’ or dispatched to the retort or the grave unceremoniously in the name of convenience and cost efficiency.

The tastefully upmarket, emotionally neutered, socially ambiguous ‘memorial service’ that Mitford peddled, to which everyone but the dead guy gets invited, where the chit-chat and finger-food are determinedly light-hearted and, needless to mention, ‘life-affirming’, and after which ‘closure’ is predictably proclaimed (often just before 213

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the Merlot runs out), is no more authentic than the junk-mailed, telemarketed, prepaid, pre-planned commemorative ‘events’, heavy on warm-fuzzies and merchandise that the multi-national ‘death care’ conglomerates have been peddling, by quota and commission, for the past two decades now. Both miss the mark. Both confuse merchandise with meaning, fashions with fundamentals, accessories with essential elements. The mortuary moguls insist that a good funeral is about what you buy. The new century Mitfordians insist it is about what you don’t. Ball seems to be arguing that it is neither what we spend nor what we save. Good funerals are about what we
do
.

Can they be done without coffins and gladioli? Without limou-sines and morning suits? Without flags and anthems and processionals?

Of course. But can we do them without the dead?

When the Fisher family gathers at the graveside to bury their dead man, in the opening episode of
Six Feet Under
, the cleric says the prayers then passes a canister of sand for the family to sprinkle on the casket. The dutiful David observes the protocol; his wide-eyed sister Claire follows suit. But Nate, the blow-in elder brother from Seattle, refuses, protesting loudly that it is like ‘salting the popcorn’. He won’t have the experience ‘sanitised’. He searches for a clump of ‘real’ dirt because it better represents his ‘real’ grief – the untidy business of anger, love, guilt, pain and loss. His prim but apparently passionate mother follows suit, unwilling to go gently into the good night of widowhood. David gets his reality in the embalming room, conversing with his dead father gone horizontal, and argues for tradition, ceremony, decorum and calm. Claire sees her father’s ghost, propped on the hearse parked at the kerb, smiling widely. Nate shows his mother how to dirty her hands in her husband’s burial, while her wrenching, whole-body sobs remove any pretence of ease. They all leave with their separate longings for the dead – the sons still fighting for their father’s approval, the daughter still hungering for attention, the wife wanting him back long enough to forgive her for her clumsy infidelities.

By the opening of the fourth season, the widow Fisher is remarried, David remains in furtive, fitful love with Keith, Claire has been investigating her broadening sexual options and sad internal life, and Nate is, as his mother was, the guilt-tinged widower. When his dead wife Lisa’s badly done and putrefying corpse is found in the ocean, Nate and David go to collect the body. Once again,
what to do
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becomes a dense embrangle of love, grief, duty and desire. Lisa’s parents want her cremated and her ashes installed in the family niche ‘back home’. Nate wants her buried,
sans
box,
sans
embalming, in keeping with her stated preferences. A quiet conspiracy of the Fisher brothers allows both sides to get a bit of what they want when Lisa’s parents are given an urn full of ashes and Nate drives out into the desert to do the needful thing for his dead wife and for himself.

He deals with the notion of her mortality by dealing with the gruesome, decomposing ‘remains’ of her. Nate’s is a large-muscle, ‘shovel and shoulder work’, ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of keening that leaves him, at daybreak, covered with the dust and dirt from which we humans come, quite literally a voice crying in the desert.

It is Ball and Company at their very best, avoiding the temptation for happy endings, easy maths or tidy metaphors. We are given, instead, humanity – aching, uncertain, ragged and struggling, weeping and giggling at the awkward facts of life and facts of death. If Nate’s whole-body immersion in his wife’s disposition is too much for most mourners, the no-body obsequies of the Mitford set seem like too little to do, lacking any witness and rubric any ‘humic densities’ or human duties.

Ball and his team ‘get’ what funeral directors have always understood: that, once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything. Next to a corpse, everything, anything is possible and possibly remedial. It ups the existential, emotional, and spiritual ante in a way that virtual or symbolic memorials fail to do. On the evidence, it will be a wide-ranging conversation on sex, death, drugs and religion, love and money, heartbreak and desire, funerals and family.

Like the Levertons and Lynches and A. France and Sons, the brothers who inherit Fisher and Sons find themselves playing in the deep end of the pool, among the verities and uncertainties that are the human condition.

Sometimes Nate and David hear their dead father speak to them. The air is full of ghosts, who both instruct and disturb us. It was ever thus. I hear my father still, these long years since he died. ‘We serve the living’, he was fond of saying, ‘by caring for the dead.’

Like the living, the dead are everywhere.

Unlike Mitford or the mortuary moguls, unlike anything else on TV now,
Six Feet Under
plays – sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes casting the cold eye – for the most part in the deep end of the pool.

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EPISODE GUIDE

Season One (2001): US premiere on 3 June.

1. 1:1

Six Feet Under
(Pilot).

w. Alan Ball.

d. Alan Ball.

Deceased: Nathaniel Samuel Fisher (1943–2000).

Final moments: killed when a city bus ploughs into his hearse.

2.

1:2 The Will.

w. Christian Williams.

d. Miguel Arteta.

Deceased: Chandler James Swanson (1967–2001).

Final moments: dives into his swimming pool and sustains a fatal head injury.

3.

1:3 The Foot.

w. Bruce Eric Kaplan.

d. John Patterson.

Deceased: Thomas Alfredo Romano (1944–2001).

Final moments: chopped into pieces by an industrial dough mixer while cleaning it.

4.

1:4 Familia.

w. Laurence Andries.

d. Lisa Cholodenko.

Deceased: Manuel Pedro Antonio (aka Paco) Bolin (1980–2001).

Final moments: shot by rival gang members.

5.

1:5 An Open Book.

w. Alan Ball.

d. Kathy Bates.

Deceased: Jean Louise McArthur (aka Viveca St John) (1957–2001).

Final moments: electrocuted when cat knocks heated rollers into her bath.

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6.

1:6 The Room.

w. Christian Taylor.

d. Rodrigo Garcia.

Deceased: Mildred ‘Hattie’ Effinger Jones (1922–2001).