Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (8 page)

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

believe in and have “real” experiences of ghosts. Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It’s not a thought experiment. It’s not speculation. Magic realism endeavours to show us the world through other eyes’ (Rogers:2004).

The fantastic offers us a world, as we have just seen, where ‘we are uncertain whether we are witness to the natural or the supernatural’

(ibid.). Magic realism is not agnostic. The supernatural exists; it is real, at least for a given subject. In a revealing scene in ‘The Plan’

(2:3), David and Nate talk of their father:

Nate: Sometimes I kinda feel like dad’s around. Do you ever?

David: Nope.

But the viewer knows that neither Nate nor David is being quite honest: both Fisher boys communicate with their dead father. Plenty of ghosts are seen by others: Nathaniel, killed in the pilot, is a regular, appearing to the principal characters; many a loquacious corpse refuses to go gentle into that good night. With the exception of Dorothy Sheedy’s delusional, fatal misreading of floating sex dolls (‘In Case of Rapture’, 4:2),
Six Feet Under
seldom debunks the alternate realities to which its characters are privy. ‘
Six Feet Under
,’ Laura Miller observes, ‘is remarkable precisely because it refuses to instruct us on how to feel about its characters, something no other TV show does’

(2002).

If
Six Feet Under
’s narrative DNA, including the magic realism

‘chromosome’, is contained in its opening credits, its ‘genetics’ may be more than merely metaphorical. Can it be merely coincidental that the son of Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate (1982) and magic realism’s patriarch, is one of
Six Feet
Under
’s directors? Rodrigo García has directed four episodes to date, including the second and third season premieres. It will come as no surprise that some of the series’ most memorable, and most magical, moments are his. García directed ‘The Room’ (1:6), scripted by Christian Taylor, in which investigating a receipt he finds among his father’s records leads Nate to a mysterious back room at a restaurant the owner provided Nathaniel as payment for funeral services rendered. Sitting in his father’s sparsely furnished, tawdry hideaway, Nate discerns that it had evidently served as a refuge, a hang-out, a place for his dad to get away from it all, and he imagines what he might have done there. In mind-screen we share his reverie: Nathaniel 29

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

smokes pot, dances and plays air guitar, hangs out with bikers, receives a blow job from a prostitute, fires repeatedly – Lee-Harvey-Oswald-style – a high-powered rifle with a sight out of the room’s lone window. The unfolding montage is orchestrated to the words (sung by Ted Nugent) of the Amboy Dukes’ 1968 acid rock classic

‘Journey to the Center of the Mind’: ‘Leave your cares behind /

Come with us and find / The pleasures of a journey to the center of the mind / Come along if you care / Come along if you dare / Take a ride to the land inside of your mind / Beyond the seas of thought

/ Beyond the realm of what / Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not.’ García succeeds in the difficult feat of taking us inside two minds, father and son, one imagining the other, each real in the eye of the beholder.

García directed from a script by Ball, ‘In the Game’ (2:1), in which Nate unwittingly takes Ecstasy before a dinner party at the Fisher house. Abandoned by Brenda and his family, who find his drugged high spirits hard to take, he finds himself late at night alone with his father, who introduces him to two friends: the Grim Reaper (Stanley Kamel), an urbane white man smoking a cigar, and Mama Life (Cleo King), a large, jovial African-American woman. Clearly old pals, the two play Chinese chequers. But Death cannot keep his hands off Life; and, as Nate looks on in amazement, she mounts him.

Here García captures with gusto a scene simultaneously grotesque and comic.

And García – again working with a Ball script – helmed ‘Perfect Circles’ (3:1), the mind-blowing opening sequence of which begins where season two left off: with Nate under the knife, brain surgeons operating on his arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Things are not going well (the surgeon asks for aneurysm clamps), and on the screen appears:

NATHANIEL SAMUEL FISHER, JR.

1965–2002.

In rapid succession, with seamless editing reminiscent of the final sequence in Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
, we see the following: Rico sitting at the foot of Nate’s corpse; Claire lying morosely on her bed; Ruth, dressed in a slip, ironing; David at his desk, weeping; Nate, worried he will be ‘late for his own funeral’, impatiently watching his father eat – he is wolfing down fenugreek (an ancient 30

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

medicinal herb, used as an embalming agent, to enhance nursing mother’s milk supply, and as an insect repellent), which he claims to be delicious with maple syrup (he counsels his son not to be in such a hurry, for he now has all the time in the world; ‘Time doesn’t exist anyway,’ he adds). Nate stalks off and finds himself at his funeral, where he sees his family (including Lisa and their baby, Maya) and stares at his own bald corpse on display (‘Damn it, David. I said I wanted to be cremated!’). Moving into a nearby room he watches David trying to teach a near-catatonic Nate to pronounce words like ‘cat’ and ‘duck’. Moving on, he watches himself with Lisa as they play with Maya on the floor. Hearing another baby crying, he discovers – smiling broadly – himself entering the Fisher home with Brenda and
their
child. Following voices, he looks on as the Fisher family eats dinner and engages in lively conversation about how George W. Bush stole the election and Nate voted for Ralph Nader.

At another, smaller, table, another Nate, his father, an almost unrecognisable mother (blonde and completely bitchy) and sister (not Claire) eat Christmas dinner until interrupted by a customer in need (a very competent, very involved, very conventional-looking Nate handles the call). Again following voices in another room, he finds a redneck version of himself wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and slumped on the couch watching a strange television programme; though it has the look and feel of a soap opera, we hear a laugh track and find the characters talking about ‘Dr Schrödinger’ and
Copenhagen
/

Copenhagen (the Michael Frayn play about quantum physics? The Danish capital?) and uttering lines like ‘We always end up in a universe in which we exist’ and ‘Everything that can happen does’.

When this last line is uttered, Redneck Nate proclaims, ‘I’ve seen this one before.’ Nate follows his clipboard-carrying father (passing a man obliterating a wall clock with a sledgehammer) into a room with a coffin, full of mourners (all Nate-on-the-operating-table lookalikes, all bald), where he begins to question his son (who wants desperately to know if he is alive or dead):

Do you believe that your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles?

Do you believe that particles move backward and forward in time and appear in all possible places at once?

Do you believe that the universe is constantly splitting into billions of different parallel universes?

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READING
SIX FEET UNDER

Nathaniel avoids giving his son a straight answer, explaining instead that in another universe Nate never existed. His insistence that Nate ‘open the box’ (the coffin) causes the assembled audience to simultaneously don identical sunglasses. (The coffin becomes, in effect, the famous box of Erwin Schrödinger’s
reductio ad absurdum gedanken
experiment, in which a cat, hidden in a box, may be either alive or dead, depending on whether or not light is a wave or a particle, but visually the ‘box’ recalls the case [perhaps containing a nuclear weapon] opened at the end of the classic
noir Kiss Me Deadly.
) When Nate lifts the coffin lid, radiant light engulfs the room. Once again the NATHANIEL SAMUEL FISHER, JR. / 1965–2002 title appears, but the ‘2002’ fades and we see Nate, holding Maya, talking about his surgery to a male friend at a family barbecue. If there has been a more extraordinary sequence in the history of television, I have not seen it. García and Ball’s collaboration here makes Cooper’s dream from
Twin Peaks
seem tame by comparison.

Earlier, in my brief examination of the grotesque in
Six Feet
Under
, I catalogued Claire’s despicable/fascinating art professor Olivier’s insistence that good art makes him want to vomit. But there is more to his postmodern aesthetic, as he goes on to explain (‘The Eye Inside’, 3:3)

This drawing instantly makes me feel nauseous. You can tell if something is truthful, even if you don’t understand it, if it affects your body. Your liver and your bowels are more important as an artist than your eyes, because they are so far away from your brain.

Six Feet Under
’s art, whether in the hands of García or Ball, would probably not quite meet Olivier’s exacting standards. But in magic realist mode it rouses both body and mind, and we can tell it is true, even if it is beyond our comprehension.

Epilogue: The Magic Bus

At the end of the pilot, Nate, out jogging, finds himself at the same intersection where the city bus struck his father’s hearse. At a bus stop across the street, Nate sees his father sitting, waiting. When the bus arrives, he boards, and waves – as the bus pulls away – to his son, who stands and stares, making eye contact with passing strangers before the closing credits roll.

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

At the end of the next episode, ‘The Will’ (1:2), Nate and David return to the same spot, arranged by Brenda to allow the brothers to confront and move on. This time they board the bus, and while Nate looks at David, hoping to read his reaction, David stares out of the window, captivated by what he (and he alone) can see: his young father carrying him as a child. As Nate reaches out to hold his brother’s hand, David collapses sobbing on his brother’s shoulder before the closing credits roll.

The end of season two finds Nate preparing to go under the knife to repair his AVM. As the anaesthetic takes effect, he imagines himself jogging on a country road, the city – ‘the world capital of the denial of death’ – far behind. A bus passes him and stops; its doors open. Nate looks inside; it is empty. With the sounds of the operating room clearly audible, especially Nate’s breathing, a cut takes us to a long view of the bus, Nate still standing at its side.

‘The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds,’ Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris observe, ‘means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory between or among those worlds

– in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, meta-morphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism, or pragmatism’ (1995: 6).
Six Feet Under
’s magic bus moves between these worlds, crosses thresholds. Where it is bound, this early in such a ‘long haul’ (Vowell 2000) series, we cannot tell. For, in a sense,
Six Feet Under
is this bus; but it is still TV – and therein lies the magic.

33

two

Exquisite corpse: death

MARK

as an odalisque and the

W.

new American gothic in

BUNDY

Six Feet Under

I hope the exit is joyful

And I hope never to return.

Frida Kahlo

Let’s face a third certainty in our lives besides death and taxes: most, if not all, US graduate students juggle the exhaustion of scholarly work with equally draining ‘side jobs’ of some sort – store clerks, restaurant workers, retail employees. Along with my diehard effort and determination to climb the fragile ladder of a Ph.D. in English, I have been working in the field of pharmacy for over 11 years. How many confused eyes have glazed over in sticky puzzlement whenever I’ve mentioned that I am years into an English Ph.D. programme while also performing the dark, arcane witchery that occurs behind those tall and aloof pharmacy walls? Literature and pills? It’s not that big a stretch, folks.

About two years ago I got my first job in an inpatient hospital pharmacy – a completely different set of modalities and configurations of practising pharmacy from those in an outpatient retail setting. And, yes – I worked the graveyard shift. It was difficult, tiring work, and the very old hospital was quite literally haunted (on at least three floors, including the basement pharmacy). Part of what 34

EXQ UISI TE CORPSE

got me through the weeks and months of crazy schedules and near-meltdown status was my becoming a devout fan and critic of the HBO phenomenon
Six Feet Under
. I have a magnetic connection to the show on many levels.

Another personal note: a few months before I began working at the hospital, I developed epilepsy, in one completely out-of-the-blue moment. I had a massive grand mal seizure that lasted for quite a few minutes, and my life and body have never been the same since that October afternoon. More recently, I was diagnosed with fibro-myalgia – an incredibly painful syndrome with symptoms similar to those of lupus. This is a significant aside, because both illnesses forced me to see my physiological vulnerabilities and to face my own sense of mortality. My limits.