Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (9 page)

And the ether mists of death’s metaphoricities, which I used to harvest and adorn with the sleekest ‘Gothic’ romanticism, now enforce an abject trembling (as when one stares too long at a painting by Francis Bacon) that terrifies me to the point of dank and chronic insomnia. Rainer Maria Rilke (2002):

There stands death, a bluish distillate

in a cup without a saucer. Such a strange

place to find a cup: standing on

the back of a hand. One recognises clearly

the line along the glazed curve, where the handle snapped. Covered with dust. And
HOPE
is written across the side, in faded gothic letters.

The man who was to drink out of that cup

read it aloud at breakfast, long ago.

What kind of beings are they then

who finally must be scared away by poison?

Otherwise would they stay here? Would they keep chewing so foolishly on their own frustration?

The hard present moment must be pulled

Out of them, like a set of false teeth. Then

They mumble. They go on mumbling, mumbling …

O shooting star that fell into my eyes and through my body—:

Not to forget you. To endure

For now, I shall endure: in pain. Huge chunks of memory lost to seizures. But enduring.

35

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

What is it, then, that might position an innovative television show such as
Six Feet Under
as a directive, driving idiom of the ‘New American Gothic’? Certainly, director and creator Alan Ball and the stunning crew and cast all continually spin seductive, dazzling blue-black threads of loss, rage, loneliness and the immediate hurt of splintering hearts – lives sinking, blue pulse slowing, in a small hole at the centre of a dark, frozen lake. Hearts swollen with bottomless longing yet sheathed (desperate, frantic, scratching at the seams of protection) in thick, colourless metallics.

And we, as viewers, loom and huddle over the rough-hewn, murky hole in the ice to watch – perhaps to empathise or to rescue.

Maybe we swoon over the turbulence of the show’s dynamics because there are traces of a palpable set of disarticulate erotics belonging only to each of our own narratives of winter and of the broken heart

– the stark silence and the pure white sheen and timelessness of a

‘Gothic’ scene; evocatively,
Six Feet Under
unveils an atlas of both familiar and bewildering territories. To become engaged with the show as a regular viewer is to flirt vicariously with our own inevitable end, and also to alchemically process and translate the mysterious spirit that infuses the show – a fascinating force that Edward Hirsch explores: ‘Duende’ (2002:11).

Duende rises through the body. It burns through the soles of a dancer’s feet, or expands in the torso of a singer. It courses through the blood and breaks through a poet’s back like a pair of wings.

It smokes through the lungs; it scorches the voice; it magnetizes the words. It is risky and deathward leaning. ‘The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible,’ Lorca says (
Deep
Song
). Duende, then, means something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death. It has an element of mortal panic and fear.

It has the power of wild abandonment. It speaks to an art that touches and transfigures death, that both woos and evades it.

Duende
. It is an immense obsidian angel that can pierce a needle’s eye. And it brings not only darkness but also pleasure and an ambivalent, damaged spirit. It is a pleasure of utter otherness – this
duende

– that saturates
Six Feet Under
.

Roland Barthes suggests that ‘what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the
dissolve
which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss. Culture thus recurs as an edge: in no matter what form’ (1990: 7).

36

EXQ UISI TE CORPSE

20 July 200_, 4:26 a.m. I am busily preparing I.V. bags for both the
dying and the newborn when the intercom goes off: ‘CODE BLUE …

CODE BLUE.’ I rush to the scene to meet the rest of the team that is
working on the dying person. The room is crowded and hectic, and
everyone is focused, intent, coldly sweating. The patient is long gone,
however. After 30 minutes of resuscitation efforts the physician calls
the time of death, and we all go back to our given workstations as if
nothing major had just happened.

I have seen the dead, poised like an unspeakable word on the edge of a blunt, rusted knife; poised like a perfect still life of a gleaming cut-glass bowl full of overripe black cherries. Poised like an odalisque: one moment of unblemished stillness captured in a bath of brief but radiant warm light.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret: there is nothing mysterious going on behind the high walls of the pharmacist’s box. I cannot speak for mortuary experts, but perhaps part of the allure of
Six Feet
Under
is that viewers have countless opportunities to both thrill and cringe as voyeurs of one of the most privatised, taboo and mysterious professions – the atmosphere, tools and challenges of the embalming room – without actually having to experience the actual panic, abjection and disorientation of standing two feet away from a body that has just expired. In her poem ‘The Stroller’, Jane Kenyon strikes a certain chord that could easily describe the experience of becoming a fan of
Six Feet Under
: watching it ‘is like looking into a mirror/

by kind permission of T. Cribb and Sons

37

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

And seeing your own eyes and someone else’s/ Eyes as well, strange to you/ But benign, curious, come/ To interrogate your wounds, the progress/ Of your beating heart’ (1993).

Six Feet Under
skilfully plies the many visual and emotive conceits of death, dying and mourning while urging its audience to turn themselves inside out to have a look, if only for a short while. Mark Doty:

‘Interiority makes itself visible’ (2001: 49).

The New American Gothic, then, is not only the elemental Barthesian recursive edge of a particular type of text or culture – one that yields resounding grief, a choking stasis and a fathomless obsession with the exquisite corpse – but also one that recasts and collapses a representation of a contemporary American family into that of one wherein lives are suspended in a heightened contemplative state: paradoxical longings, salvaged lives; thin veins of memory and many artefacts of dead or dying relationships.

And deliberate veils of silence, fiercely shimmering.
Six Feet
Under
clearly defies any singular means of taxonomy; however, I maintain that it represents the ‘New American Gothic’ because it sustains the portraiture of a contemporary culture where the living and the dead are both separate and together at the same time –

asserting the given properties of the iconographic power of each of them at the appropriate moments in the show (which, often, are the most pleasurable and unexpected moments for viewers). Its complexities are indeed blissful for an ill Ph.D. candidate who has seen the real thing far too many times. Georges Perec, in
Species of Spaces
, takes fragmented words and phrases and creates this heartbreaking whole – this mirror of my life, of every life – of which only the ending I include (1997: 36)

going into raptures touching up botching scraping dusting mano-euvring pulverizing balancing checking moistening stopping up emptying crushing roughing out explaining shrugging fitting the handle on dividing up walking up and down tightening timing juxtaposing bringing together matching assessing pinning up arranging distempering hanging up starting again inserting spreading out washing looking for entering breathing hard settling in

living in

living

For John, always.

38

three

Death, liminality and

ROB

transformation in
Six

TURNOCK

Feet Under

Pervaded by an overwhelming aura of death, the opening credits of
Six Feet Under
draw on both romantic and Gothic images with shots of hands parting, a time-lapse sequence of wilting lilies, and images of gravestones intercut and framed by those of a black crow. These shots are counterpoised against more clinical and modernist representations of death. Hands are washed in prelude to a quasi-surgical procedure, shots foreground beakers of embalming fluid and a trolley carrying a cadaver is pushed towards a bright light. Not only does the sequence indicate that this is a series about death and dying, it signals that each episode’s narrative concerns the journey of the body from death to its disposal. In these opening sequences the parting hands mark the moment of death, the embalming process signifies the clinical transformation of the dead body, and the hearse and gravestone images signify the laying of the corpse to rest. Put simply, it makes known that each programme is about the initial, transitory stages of death.

These images, and the articulation of this transitional period of death, herald the fact that the
Six Feet Under
narrative operates as a liminal space and about a liminal time. In anthropological terms liminality derives from the Latin word
limen,
meaning ‘threshold’; it is a transitory place which is neither here nor there (Turner 1969).

Following the death of an individual, liminality threatens to erode 39

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

the separation between mortal, quotidian existence and a frightening

‘other world’, transcendental plane or immaterial existence. And it is in this transitional sphere in which
Six Feet Under
operates. This dimension is not just ritually framed by the structure of each episode, but is also visually articulated throughout the series in hallucinatory sequences where the dead come back to life, or in dream sequences where alternative realities are explored.

At the same time, liminality can become a dangerous place because the usual rules and codes governing our day-to-day existence suddenly become meaningless in the face of death. With everyday rules and beliefs temporarily suspended, people can speak or act in ways which might otherwise be socially inappropriate. As a result, each
Six Feet Under
episode offers a liminal space for exploring socially and culturally problematic themes and taboo subjects: it is a space for transformation where meaning collapses, and this is dramatically explored through the changes each character undergoes across the series. Yet it also articulates two specific forms of transformation concerning funerary ritual in contemporary Western society: the first about how the social and cultural transformations of the dead body are dealt with in the funerary process; and the second about the broader transition currently taking place in social and cultural attitudes towards death, dying and bereavement. It marks an ongoing shift from modern, secular and clinical attitudes towards a more postmodern one. This shift draws on a variety of traditional and humanistic sources to personalise funerary rites, and to help make death and grief more socially meaningful for the bereaved.
Six Feet Under
, for me, marks a radical intervention in these changes by both airing the subject of death in a television drama and by offering a range of potential contemporary cultural and personal responses to death and bereavement.

Death Pollution

In
Six Feet Under
the purpose of the Fisher business is the disposal of the dead body. In sociological terms the removal of the cadaver, which is both physically and metaphorically polluting, is a key function of funerary rites. Not only does the physical breakdown and decay of the corporeal body present aesthetic, aromatic and 40

DEATH, LIMINALI T Y AND TRANSFORMAT ION IN
SIX FEET UNDER

hygienic problems, but also the corpse is a symbolic reminder of the disruptive potency of death – both personal and social. Death happens to us all, and this is potentially terrifying in and of itself for the living. It also threatens the moral and social order by bringing into question daily codes and conventions. In such circumstances the recently bereaved can experience an existential crisis that leads them to break the rules of everyday propriety, say things that should not be said and violate systems of daily life. Furthermore, within the patterns of the socio-economic division of labour in contemporary capitalist societies, such an existential dilemma can prove threatening, for it brings into question the fundamental premise of selling one’s labour for wages. If we are all going to die, and if we should live every day as though it might be our last, why bother going to work at all?