Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (6 page)

The last three sections prelude with poems written by Peter Wilson. Each directly responds to both the series and individual deaths: one (‘S&D @ HBO (TR for
SFU
)’) conveys an impression of the moods and themes that pervade the show, while the others (‘Emily Previn, 1954–2001’, and ‘Nathaniel Samuel Fisher, 1943–

2000’) adopt the personae of those in the thralls of death. Adapting stanzaic patterns such as terza rima and triolet gives order to the poetic form. With these elegiac attempts to give voice to the melancholic we come full circle. We end where we began – with a death. How Ball describes his own experience of familial loss tells us much about the series. When he was 13 years old his sister Mary Ann was killed when a car ploughed into them as she was driving him to a piano lesson. He says of the tragedy (Ross 2003:11): That separated my life into a life before and a life after. It was really my first experience of losing someone close to me in the worst possible way – out of the blue and in front of my eyes …

nothing else in my life has affected me quite as profoundly as that.

That nothing is ever quite the same again after you put that dead body in the room is realised in the series and explored in this collection. Each article carves out a new direction, some by revising old debates and others by seeing culture and theory anew. It is hoped that this collection will go some way in addressing the absence in language and pauses in discourse identified by Lynch (2000: 227).

14

INTRODUCT ION

A good funeral, like a good poem, is driven by voices, images, intellections and the permanent. It moves us up and back the cognitive and imaginative and emotive register. The transport seems effortless, inspired, natural as breathing or the loss of it. In the space between what is said and unsaid, in the pause between utterances, whole histories are told; whole galaxies glimpsed in the margins, if only momentarily…Good poems and good funerals are stories well told.

15

spectacle, the

specular and

observing the

dead

one

‘It’s not television,

DAVID

it’s magic realism’:

LAVERY

the mundane, the

grotesque and the

fantastic in
Six Feet

Under

Prologue: Getting Six Feet Under

The sequence to which I call attention at the outset of this examination of
Six Feet Under
’s generic allegiances is as baffling as it is unclassifiable. In ‘Parallel Play’ (4:3) Federico (Rico) Diaz, the Fisher family’s Puerto Rican restorative artist, has a strange dream (confirmed at the sequence end), clearly the product of his dalliance with the stripper Sophia (Idalis DeLeon), who has just manipulated him into agreeing to pay for new breast implants. Working as usual in the basement of the Fisher and Diaz Funeral Home (at dream’s end he will wake up at his desk), he is distracted by music and light, by a strange unfolding scene in which he sees himself sitting on a sofa in a forest tableau, a Christ-like Sophia crucified behind him, wrapped in a loincloth but naked from the waist up, blood streaming from below her soon-to-be-surgically-enhanced breasts.

A series of shots: Sophia stripping; her bleeding breasts (again); a priest, to whom Rico confesses his sins; his wife Vanessa, dressed like the Virgin Mary; Sophia’s young daughter; the birth of Rico and Vanessa’s son, Augusto (at the end of season one); Vanessa mopping Sophia’s brow – an ever-present bottle of Tylenol (Sophia’s daughter’s only toy, a makeshift castanet, in an earlier scene) passing back and forth between the various dream personae. Together, Vanessa and 19

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

Sophia (come down from on high) join to service Rico’s needs: the Tylenol bottle now contains oil, poured onto his feet, which Sophia begins to wash, but the act of cleansing turns into oral sex, and he awakens. One of the great dream sequences in a series known for its reveries (its only oneiric TV rivals are
Twin Peaks
,
The Sopranos
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
), Rico’s vision draws on the Hispanic imagination, tapping the tradition of magical realist art exemplified in paintings by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954): imagery from paintings like ‘A Few Small Nips’ (1935), ‘The Two Fridas’

(1939) and ‘Tree of Hope’ (1948), each dealing with surgery and hospitalisation, informs the dream.

Take note that in order to describe what amounts to less than five minutes of TV I resorted to a vocabulary not common in televisual parlance: ‘the grotesque’, ‘fantastic’, ‘magic realism’. Discourse about
Six Feet Under
does not always require such exotic language; these are not the only registers in which the series functions. Its detractors, after all, find it anything but generically extraordinary, calling it ‘a sitcom with elephantiasis’ (Carson 2002), or a soap opera (Nussbaum 2002; Buckman 2004). Even its staunchest defenders single out its greatest virtue as not the bizarre but ‘the mundane catastrophes of day-to-day life’ (Havrilesky 2002). Beginning with its opening credits, however,
Six Feet Under
invites – indeed, insists –

that we understand it as something quite different.

Opening Credits

A bird crosses blue sky. The camera tilts down to reveal a single tree on the horizon, where a verdant hill meets the sky. Two hands break apart in slow motion. A man washes his hands. The camera tilts to reveal two feet on a gurney – the big left toe bears an ID tag. Open sky again. A gurney moves down an institutional hallway – light at the end of the tunnel. From what might be the point of view of the body it bears, the gurney enters the light. Seen through a bottle of fluid, a man in a white coat moves about. A beaker of liquid (embalming fluid?) slowly empties. The corpse head is turned away from the camera. In close-up, a ball of cotton held in a pair of tweezers mops the brow. A tilt moves up the cadaver from its feet, stopping before showing the head. A jump cut reveals a vase of flowers dying 20

‘ I T ’S NOT TELEVISION, I T ’S MAGIC REALISM ’

(wilting) in time-lapse. A hearse door opens, a coffin within. In close-up the mortician’s hand grabs its handle. (In earlier versions a clearly visible skull ring can be seen on the mortician’s finger, but the memento mori was digitally removed in the final cut.) The hearse seen from behind, its load door wide open. A still life of two framed photos. In close-up, a bird’s claw feet move slowly off. A tombstone bears the words ‘Executive Producer Alan Ball’. A crow perches on a tombstone. The sky again, crossed by the black bird. The hill and tree from earlier. The tree puts down roots, forming a box, in which the words ‘
Six Feet Under
’ appear.

When
Six Feet Under
creator and executive producer Ball first saw Digital Kitchen’s storyboard for this enigmatic, metaphysical opening credit sequence, he recalls finding it ‘so elegant …
so
cinematic … so unlike TV
’ (season one DVD commentary; emphasis added). Ball, of course, had become prime mover on
Six Feet Under
on the strength of his Academy-Award-winning screenplay for
American Beauty
(1999), and though he was not new to TV (he had written for
Grace Under Fire
,
Cybill
and
Oh Grow Up
prior to attaining auteur status in screenwriting), it should surprise no one, least of all his bosses at HBO, that from the outset he was anxious to distinguish, in the premium channel’s tradition, his series from ordinary television. Even the best makers of television –
Buffy the
Vampire Slayer
’s Joss Whedon, or
The Sopranos
’ David Chase –

commonly assert their disdain for TV and dream of escaping to greener movie pastures (see Lavery 2002; Lavery and Thompson 2002).

And yet, as Ball readily acknowledges, the opening title sequence

‘transports you into the world of the show …’ (season one DVD

commentary), which is precisely what the credit sequence of any television series, network or cable, is supposed to do. The ‘Welcome to Twin Peaks’ road sign, the falls, the lake beside which Laura Palmer’s body is found, ‘wrapped in plastic’, transported us to the extraordinary diegesis of
Twin Peaks
. An eagle’s cry and an inquisitive moose prepared the viewer every week for a visit to
Northern Exposure
’s Cicely, Alaska. Tony Soprano’s cigar-chomping drive from New York, past Satriale’s Pork Store, past urban New Jersey, to the front door of his palatial suburban home, ritualistically relocates us for a visit with The Family. These and other memorable televisual opening credits, aided by signature music (Thomas Newman, ‘
Six Feet Under
’, David Schwartz, ‘
Northern Exposure
’, Angelo Badalamenti, ‘
Twin
21

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

Peaks
’, A3, ‘
The Sopranos
’), have long summoned viewers to step out of their household flow and into one-of-a-kind television worlds (Altman 1986: 43–44).
Six Feet Under
’s opening credits may be superb, may be enthralling, may be cinematic, may be HBO, but they are still, at least functionally, TV.

Executive producer Alan Poul’s understanding of the opening credits, however, takes the matter further. ‘The theme music and title,’ Poul notes, thinking like a producer – like an employee of HBO

and not just a creator – ‘encapsulate the show so well in
a kind of
branding way
that all you need is the opening chords or the image of the tree and it’s so evocative that
people know what you are talking
about
’ (emphasis added). Poul’s choice of words is revealing. As Mark Rogers, Michael Epstein and Jimmie Reeves describe in an essay on
Six Feet Under
’s big brother
The Sopranos
, HBO is all about branding.

(The eras can be distinguished by their dominant forms of marketing: TV I – 1948–1975 – was ‘the age of mass marketing’; TV II – 1975–

1995 – was ‘the age of niche marketing’; and TV III – 1995 to the present – is ‘the age of brand marketing’ (2002: 48).)
Six Feet Under
, extremely edgy, very profane, highly sexual, very adult (very much the beneficiary of expanded creative freedom), is designed to help HBO ‘build its brand and attract new subscribers’

(Rogers et al. 2002: 47). If
The Sopranos
lends itself more easily to brand marketing, bringing imaginitive life and economic power to its about-to-become-a-cliché slogan (‘It’s Not TV. It’s HBO’), it does so as a representative of a readily identifiable genre: the gangster film; what can be made of the harder to classify
Six Feet Under
, a series which, like its opening credits, is a strange concoction?

It’s very abstract, and there’s something kind of spooky about it but something kinda beautiful about it at the same time, and that sorta fits within the tone of the show in which there are things that are sad and upsetting and ugly and depressing about life but there’s beauty in them as well (Ball, director commentary for

‘Pilot’, season one DVD).

What on earth (or beneath it) is
Six Feet Under
? Are we certain Poul knows what he is talking about when he insists that
Six Feet Under
viewers ‘know what you are talking about’, beginning with the opening credits? The sequence offers us the macabre (a corpse), the enigmatic (that crow might have flown right out of a Wallace Stevens poem), 22

‘ I T ’S NOT TELEVISION, I T ’S MAGIC REALISM ’

the mystical (the white light into which the gurney and its passenger move resembles the classic near-death experience), the self-referential (Ball’s name on a tombstone carries on a cinematic tradition of auteur signature, like Hitchcock’s cameos) and the naturally mysterious (that single tree, that verdant hillside). If HBO’s brand is ‘not TV’, what
is
the trademark, the brand, ‘the mission statement’, if you will, of this, its ‘not
The Sopranos
’ series?

It’s Not TV, It’s the Grotesque …

One ready-to-hand designation for
Six Feet Under
might be ‘grotesque’.