Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (7 page)

Needless to say, much of the often scatological, frequently-immersed-in-bodily-fluids, always about bodies, both dead and alive, often ghoulish
Six Feet Under
clearly invites such a seemingly non-commercial branding. (HBO, after all, demonstrates a certain affinity for the grotesque, as
Carnivale
in its entirety and
The Sopranos
,
Deadwood, Real Sex, Taxicab Confessions
upon occasion confirm.) David Fisher rebukes his brother: ‘You want to get your hands dirty? You sanctimonious prick. 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). A corpse displays an erection (a phenomenon known as

‘angel lust’) and later defecates (‘The Will’, 1:2). A man is accidentally sliced to pieces in a huge bread dough mixer (‘The Foot’, 1:3). A lawyer dies from autoerotic asphyxiation while masturbating (‘Back to the Garden’, 2:7). Blood erupts (twice) from the Fisher and Sons Funeral Home plumbing system – ‘It’s like
The Shining
in here!’

Claire Fisher proclaims (‘Parallel Play’, 4:3). Claire steals a corpse’s foot in order to get back at her boyfriend for labelling her a ‘toe slut’

at school (‘The Foot’, 1:3). A grossly fat corpse falls to the floor when the gurney collapses (‘Making Love Work’, 3:6). Rico restores the flattened face of a woman smashed in by a traffic light (‘Crossroads’, 1:8). Funeral services for a porn star (‘An Open Book’, 1:5) and a biker (‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’, 2:8) turn into bizarre, over-the-top wakes. Claire does a portfolio of photographs of corpses (‘The Secret’, 2:10). In ‘The Plan’ (2:3), Rico excitedly begins to describe the effects of cancer on the body to a widow who has just lost her husband to the disease, until silenced by David. Claire’s art teacher Olivier praises her work with the strange compliment that it 23

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

‘instantly makes me want to throw up’ (‘The Eye Inside’, 3:3). A visiting artist, Scott Philip Smith (Evan Handler) at LAC-Arts, describes one of his favourite works: a Reagan-era protest in which he ‘spent two nights roaming the streets of New York City in the dead of winter asking [the homeless, mentally ill] to wipe their asses with

[the American flag]’ (‘Nobody Sleeps’, 3:4). Mysterious boxes of shit (or ‘doo’, as Arthur Martin refers to it) begin arriving at the Fisher house, addressed to Ruth Fisher’s new husband George Sibley in season four. All these matters might be called grotesque. But is
Six
Feet Under
itself grotesque?

The grotesque, as William J. Free (1978) reminds us, is multifaceted. Its ‘fanciful and sinister’ nature is two-faced, exemplified for Free in the paintings by Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymous Bosch.

Brueghel’s grotesque is an essentially comic ‘irreverent attitude toward his subject’, conveying ‘the artist’s joy at contemplating the hurly-burly confusion of life which swallows up any attempt of history to impose meaning on it’ (1978: 191). Bosch’s grotesque, on the other hand, is ‘terrifying’, the manifestation of an ‘insanely demonic world peeping from beneath the order of life and threatening to destroy it in disgusting violence’ (ibid.). Philip Thomson agrees: ‘Writers on the grotesque have always tended to associate the grotesque with either the comic or the terrifying. Those who see it as a sub-form of the comic class the grotesque, broadly, with the burlesque and the vulgarly funny. Those who emphasize the terrifying quality of the grotesque often shift it towards the realm of the uncanny, the mysterious, even the supernatural’ (1972: 20). Our reaction to the grotesque is thus inherently complex, even contradictory. Not surprisingly, Thomson makes the grotesque’s ‘
unresolved clash of incom-patibles in work and response
’ part of its very definition, and offers as a secondary, simplified definition ‘
the ambivalently abnormal
’ (27).

Our cultural understanding of the grotesque has, however, been significantly altered by Mikhail Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and His World
(1968) and its championing of the carnivalesque he finds operative in
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, the ‘earthy’, pre-‘bodily canon’ celebration of the ‘grotesque body’ of pre-Renaissance art in general and Rabelais in particular. The grotesque body, Bakhtin writes, unashamedly

‘fecundates and is fecundated … gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying’ (1968: 319). (The

‘bodily canon’, as Bakhtin defines it, censors the grotesque body, 24

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

‘assert[ing] instead that human beings exist outside the hierarchy of the cosmos. It stresses that we are finished products, defined characters, and in its reductionism attempts to seal off the bodily processes of organic life from any interchange with the external world’

(320–21).) Thanks to Bakhtin we now see the artistic embrace of the grotesque not only as a pact with the devil but an expression of

‘true … fearlessness’ (335) in the face of the human condition, an anti-anal (in the Freudian sense) world-view that accepts embodiment as ‘a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception’ (318).

Six Feet Under
is hardly carnivalesque in Bakhtin’s sense (for that matter, neither is HBO’s
Carnivale
); its grotesqueness is too gross.

But its infatuation with the grotesque is certainly shaded towards the comic pole of the axis. The grotesque body may not be exuberant or joyous in the series’ ongoing narrative, but it is not exactly repressed either. Consider the following exchange between Nate and Rabbi Ari (Molly Parker), to whom he confesses his possibly fatal brain abnormality (‘Back to the Garden’, 2:7):

Rabbi Ari: You must be really scared.

Nate: Yeah. I’m going to die.

Rabbi Ari: Yeah, me too.

Nate: Really? What do you have?

Rabbi Ari: A body.

Coming from a woman who earlier quoted in a funeral service the Talmudic proverbial wisdom ‘Better one day in this life than all eternity in the world to come’, the Rabbi’s jest nevertheless blesses, on behalf of the series itself, the return of the repressed, and may well crystallise what Heather Havrilesky intuits (but does not identify) as the ‘
wisdom guiding this show that we may have never encountered on
television before—and might not encounter again
’ (2003; emphasis added).

It’s Not TV, It’s the Fantastic …

A series in which the dead are seldom really dead and routinely talk to the living, in which imagination and reality are difficult to distinguish,
Six Feet Under
is not only routinely grotesque but also fantastic. ‘So long as we are uncertain whether we are witness to the natural or 25

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SIX FEET UNDER

the supernatural,’ Diane Stevenson writes in an essay on
Twin Peaks
,

‘we are in the fantastic’ (1994: 70). As the Russian writer Solovyev insists, the fantastic in its purest form as a genre ‘must never compel belief in a mystic interpretation of a vital event; it must rather point, or
hint
at it’ (quoted in Hawthorn 1998: 74). Drawing on Todorov’s thesis that, historically, the fantastic as a genre functioned as a kind of pre-scientific form of imagination enables Stevenson to suggest that
Twin Peaks
’ disturbing representation of child sexual abuse resorted to the fantastic – making Laura Palmer’s molester and killer not really her father but a supremely evil, supernatural parasite named BOB – because of its unthinkable-ness.

If
Twin Peaks
resorts to the fantastic in order to come to grips with the incomprehensible, might it not be argued that
Six Feet
Under
’s use of it is inspired by a similar motive: in order to explore not the aberrant, unnatural inexplicable-ness of a father’s abuse and murder of his daughter but the ordinary, natural unfathomable-ness of death? If death, as someone once observed, is to us as sex was to the Victorians; if, as radical sociologist Ivan Illich once observed, we live in a time in which obituaries should properly be written in passive voice (‘David Lavery has been died today’) – death being now routinely thought of not as an existential given but as a failure of medicine; then how could a television series about a family of funeral directors not resort to the fantastic?

In the pilot, at a dreary, subdued viewing of their father’s body, Nate tells Claire of a memory from a long-ago backpacking tour of Europe, and in his mind-screen we see the story unfold. He had been on a boat in the Mediterranean that delivered a coffin to a beach in Sicily:

And there were all these old Sicilians, dressed up all in black, waiting, just lined up on the beach. And when they got that coffin to the beach, they just went ape-shit: screaming, throwing themselves on it, beating their chests, tearing at their hair, making animals noises. It was just so … so real. I mean, I had been around funerals all my life, but I had never seen such grief, and at the time it gave me the creeps, but now I think it’s probably so much healthier than this.

Here, and on a weekly basis,
Six Feet Under
, frequently going ape-shit (narratively speaking), puts death in active voice, makes death real. ‘What’s remarkable about
Six Feet Under
,’ writes Carina Chocano, 26

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

‘is that it takes something everybody knows (we’re all going to die) and calmly repeats it, with a surprising lack of morbidity and next to no moralizing, until everybody understands (we’re all going to die!)’ (2002). The fantastic and the grotesque are as essential to this transaction as they are to
Six Feet Under
’s brand, but as genetic features they are simply not comprehensive enough to capture the series in its entire complexity.

It’s Not TV, It’s Magic Realism …

A case could be made for suggesting that
Six Feet Under
’s dominant tendencies may be found, in germ, in a scene from
American Beauty
.

Mid-film, the darkly morose but clearly brilliant Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) shows his new love Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) unusual film footage he captured with his always-at-hand camcorder of a plastic bag and leaves blowing back and forth before a garage door.

(We know from Ball’s ‘Afterword’ to the film’s screenplay that ‘an encounter with a plastic bag outside the World Trade Center’ was one of
American Beauty
’s seed crystals (1999: 113), and, on the DVD

commentary, director Sam Mendes acknowledges that the plastic bag scene was the hook that convinced him to direct the project.) As a work of art Ricky’s film appears at first glance to be simple realism of the minimalist variety, but he sees in the image (as do we) much more, as he explains: ‘That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.’

After a moment’s pause, during which Jane turns away from the screen to look at him, he confesses poignantly, ‘Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it … and my heart is going to cave in.’ When critics identified
American Beauty
as

‘magic realism’, the plastic bag scene being key to the designation, and when
Six Feet Under
is similarly identified, is it not because of its comparable recognition – sometimes grotesque, sometimes fantastic

– of ‘this entire life behind things’?

Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortazar, Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges made ‘magic realism’ a literary household phrase. The term has not only created, in Borgesian fashion, ‘its own precursors’ (Borges 1999: 365) but also become 27

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an international phenomenon and bled into other media forms.

According to Luis Leal, magic realism ‘can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures’ (1995: 119). But can television, ever infatuated with various notions of the ‘real’, from
You Are There
to
Survivor
, be
magically
real? From its opening credit sequence, to those omnipresent ghosts, to its dream and NDE (near-death-experience) visions, to its first-season-only hyper-real mortuary ads, all coexisting with life in the Fisher household, with school, with work (of morticians, florists, a Shiatsu masseuse, a policeman) – with what is mundane –
Six Feet
Under
encourages us to label its exploration of life and death ‘magic realism’.

The pursuit of the ‘marvellous’ in art, writes Alejo Carpentier,

‘had, of course, been attempted before – by the fantastic, by surrealism … – but magic realism’s heuristic followed a different method, looked in a radically new direction: if [earlier art forms]

pursued the marvellous, one would have to say that [they] very rarely looked for it in reality’ (1995: 102–104). Magic realism’s anything but sanguine world-view is by no means sweetness and light. As David Danow is careful to note, it is in fact grounded in ‘a view of life that exudes a sense of energy and vitality in a world that promises not only joy, but a fair share of misery as well’ (1995: 65ff.). In what Robert Scholes terms a form of ‘metafiction’, magic realist storytelling, according to J.A. Cuddon, is likely to recognise ‘the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, bizarre and skilful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the elements of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable’ (Cuddon 1998: 488). In three plus seasons crowded with dreams, fantasies, time dislocations, esoteric knowledge (what the hell is fenugreek, anyway?), mysteries and secrets, and a great deal of misery,
Six Feet
Under
lays claim to these traits, keeping it simultaneously real, especially on the emotional level.

In worlds that magic realists create, ‘the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence’ (Zamora and Faris 1995: 3). In magic realism, Bruce Holland Rogers insists, ‘[if] there is a ghost … the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who 28