Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (11 page)

of normalised codes of behaviour during funerary rites, and by poking fun at mainstream funerary culture, it offers up transformative possibilities for the viewer. In this reading, Nate is the one who acts progressively to try and transform the emotional and social bankruptcy of the modern, secular funeral. This straightforward dichotomy between David (modern) and Nate (traditional) is, however, misleading.

Instead, they both reflect an engagement with changes in attitudes towards funerary culture. Partly this is because David knows the burial rituals of numerous religions, and that he himself is a Christian. He is familiar with the various contents in the ‘ritual objects’

room; and he is able to offer advice and make arrangements for a range of funerals throughout the series, including the Jewish funeral in ‘Back to the Garden’ (2:7) and the Thai Buddhist one in ‘The Secret’ (2:10). Yet while these different funerals represent a more multicultural society, made up of a rich blend of traditions and values, the representation of these funerals also suggests a diverse, reflexive, accommodating and responsive attitude towards the conduct of these rituals. The Jewish funeral is modified, for example, to reflect the family’s distress that the deceased had apparently committed suicide, although the Fishers soon realise that the victim died accidentally from autoerotic asphyxiation. In ‘Familia’ (1:4) the wake is conducted along traditional lines, but later Paco’s gang leader holds an im-promptu prayer gathering, which includes the Fisher family.

This is complemented later in the series with other depictions of humanist approaches to death and dying. Increasingly today, funerals often include readings from favourite books or poems, as well as much-loved pieces of music or songs from popular culture. Examples of such personalised rituals include the biker funeral in ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ (2:8) and the constructed opera stage in ‘Nobody Sleeps’ (3:4). In the biker episode a middle-aged Hell’s Angel, Jesse Ray Johnson (Frank Ross), is killed when his Harley-Davidson collides with a truck while on his way to work as a department store Father Christmas. His widow, Marilyn (Rusty Schwimmer), and friends want a customised, spray-painted coffin (the same as his Harley, in fact) and have specific requests for the Christmas Day funeral for which they are willing to pay. The subsequent wake, accompanied by kegs of ‘Bud’ and cases of Jack Daniels, is more an all-day party than a funerary rite. As Nate looks 47

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

on, the assembled bikers hold up their cigarette lighters and salute Jesse with their drinks, accompanied by the Blue Oyster Cult’s nihilistic anthem ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’. Similarly, in ‘Nobody Sleeps’, a mourner performs ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s opera
Turandot
during the service for a gay theatre lighting designer amidst a specially constructed set in the slumber room. Combining the transformative potential of liminal space where difficult truths can be uttered, and a ritualised moment of community, the deceased man’s partner celebrates the number of sexual partners they both shared.

Both the biker funeral and the ‘gay opera’ serve to bring their respective social groups together, to celebrate the survival of these communities, to emotionally come to terms with the loss of a loved one and friend, and to signal the end of the period of liminality. In these ritually infused moments, where cultural meaning is instilled, the Fishers are transformed themselves; while Nate takes his newly acquired Harley-Davidson for a high-speed drive along the coastal road, inspired by Marilyn’s advice to live life to the full (2:8), David attempts to come to terms with the difficulties involved in his relationship with Keith (3:4).

Six Feet Under
articulates an ongoing shift in funerary culture.

It shows that the evolution from ‘traditional’ forms of ritual to modern, secular ones has not been an entirely happy one. Instead, it offers a blend of the traditional
and
the modern, to reflect a more postmodern attitude – one that seeks a return to older values in conjunction with the new. These more postmodern values offer the possibility of better coming to terms with death and bereavement in the contemporary (Western) world.

Of Transformation and Endings …

In sociological studies of death in modernity there is a consensus that death has been sequestrated from everyday life. It has become institutionalised, with the dying secreted away in hospitals, old people’s homes and hospices. Funerary practices have also become increasingly commercialised and managed by big business. This is handled in
Six
Feet Under
with the Fishers’ ongoing resistance to the Kroehner takeover, and by the explicit critique of commercialised funerary culture with the spoof television advertisements in the first episode.

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

Within modern society this secularised, institutionalised and eco-nomically rationalised approach to death and dying turns death into a taboo subject. Such silencing results in grief becoming repugnant, and bereavement a private act to be carried out away from the public gaze. If grief is not publicly acceptable, and with funerary rituals becoming increasingly sterilised and industrialised, what we find is that bereaved individuals no longer know how to deal with grief.

If grief is hidden from public view, then media representations of bereavement take on a new importance. As the sociologist Tony Walter (1999) suggests, it is through media representations of public mourning following major disasters (such as 9/11) and high-profile deaths (like Diana, Princess of Wales) that people learn about responding to death and strategies for mourning.
Six Feet Under
emerges as progressive precisely because it breaks the taboo of death and the silence surrounding bereavement, as it places dying, the dead body and intense sorrow at the heart of its drama. The series also provides a space of liminality which allows not only for the themes of death to be openly acknowledged and discussed, but also for the deceased, the bereaved and the central characters to speak what cannot be said elsewhere. As a progressive media representation of the business of death, it further makes known the transformative properties of what happens to the body after death as well as the changes taking place to those processes. But, as Tony Walter argues, the ongoing transition in attitudes towards death and bereavement is a slow and uneven process. The televisual representation of death, liminality and transformation in
Six Feet Under
thus extends these new, postmodern discourses into the private sphere of the domestic audience. In a sphere where the privatised and isolated experience of death might still be acutely felt,
Six Feet Under
can make a radical intervention and propose profound social change.

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four

Sex, shocks and stiffs:
Six

LUCIA

Feet Under
and the

RAHILLY

pornography of the

morbid

Season one, episode five, ‘An Open Book’: ageing porn star Jean Louise McArthur, screen name Viveca St John (Veronica Hart), is killed by her own pussy. The segment is brief but rife with innuendo: panning the cosmetic paraphernalia scattered across Viveca’s bathroom, the camera settles on Viveca, wooing her pet cat tub-side like a lover, preparing for an impending rendezvous by reclining into a bath. ‘He’s got a big fat dick. And he fucks like a jackhammer,’ she confides of her date, swooning in a swirl of bubbles and sighing,

‘Those never last.’ Within seconds Viveca’s pedicured toes are tensing convulsively in a visual allusion to orgasmic ecstasy. Her cat has nudged her hot rollers into the bathwater, electrocuting her.

In the parlance of porn, this image – Viveca’s final, climactic shudder – constitutes a kind of ‘money shot’, a depiction of an irrepressible bodily spasm that, in this instance, ironically blurs
le petit
mort
with the moment of death. Within the framework of hard-core porn, the money shot fulfils an essential function: testifying to the authenticity of the experience being filmed – and the limit of acting, or ‘faking it’ – by zeroing in on a moment of reflexive, involuntary physical expression, the paroxysm of male ejaculation. By highlighting a body that is quite literally unable to contain itself, the money shot provides a fleeting glimpse of ‘genuine’ affect, of the private self un-inflected by the norms of public performance; porn scholar Linda 50

SEX, SHO CKS AND ST IFFS

Williams calls it ‘the ultimate and uncontrollable – ultimate
because
uncontrollable – confession of sexual pleasure in the climax of orgasm’

(Williams 1999: 101). Resonating with the quality of unadulterated

‘truth’, therefore, the money shot represents the logical culmination of what philosopher Michel Foucault describes as the ‘will to knowledge’

regarding sex – the irremediable cultural compulsion to exact sexual confessions as a means of understanding one another and ourselves.

As Foucault writes (1998:78):

We must make no mistake here…the West has managed…to bring us almost entirely – our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history – under the sway of the logic of concupiscence and desire.

Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key … Sex, the explanation for everything.

In the case of Viveca St John, the connection between sex and self is unusually overt; as a porn star, Viveca’s persona – and, what’s more, her livelihood – are inextricably bound up with her legibility as a sex symbol. For Viveca and her partners in porn, sex is not a secret but rather a source of pride and profits; at her funeral, her former colleagues shamelessly bring sexuality to the fore, tearfully eulogising her career break as a fledgling fluffer, her peerless flair for fellatio and her near-sacrosanct successes in the sack (as one mourner laments,

‘fucking Viv is at the top of my list of things to thank God for’).

Indeed, by the time a sobbing former co-star (Sandra Oh) bursts in on one of David’s client meetings to exclaim, ‘Her tits have never looked better!’ the funeral proceedings have come to seem less a testament to truth than a burlesque of grieving; the sheer surfeit of sexuality imbues the proceedings with the spirit of ribald farce. The cardinal question of identity, in this sequence, hinges on performance – and specifically on whose self-presentation is less ‘genuine’: Viveca, the actor whose hypersexual affect is nakedly in evidence (David calls her surgically enhanced bosom ‘beautiful, in a completely
artificial
way’), or David, the closeted gay man who’s trying desperately to keep up appearances (Viveca’s posthumous response to his remark: ‘Men loved them! Well, real men.’).

Beyond first blush, however, this very tenor of parody –

the aesthetic of campy theatricality that prevails throughout the solemnities – can be seen to illuminate the key ‘truths’ at stake in the 51

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SIX FEET UNDER

construction of social identities, and specifically in the presentation of a culturally viable self. As Foucault and others have argued, conventional codes of propriety serve a particular socio-economic purpose: to produce and perpetuate an industrious, efficient and essentially law-abiding workforce. In the culture at large, the control and care of the self are considered vital markers of citizenship, fundamental to the broad matrix of manners and mores that render the body ‘more obedient as it becomes more useful and conversely’

(Foucault 1977: 138). This explains, at least in part, why David chastens Nate for revelling in Viveca’s sexual exploits; he perceives Nate’s antic banter with Federico over Viveca’s cadaver – the conversation kicks off with ‘this chick fucked a snake!’ – as at odds with commonly agreed-upon business ethos, reminding him, ‘Nate.

What we do here is serious.’ The incursion of stark sexuality into the ceremony of the funeral therefore gives rise to what cultural critic Laura Kipnis, describing pornography, calls a ‘festival of social infractions … confronting its audiences with exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, from mainstream culture and political discourse’ (Kipnis 1996: 164). In effect, the funeral goings-on become an instance of camp – by queer scholar Jose Munoz’s definition, ‘a mode of enacting the self against the dominant culture’s identity-denying protocols’ (Munoz 1999: 120) – bringing to light not simply the productive labour that self-control facilitates but the work that the act of controlling the self demands.

Returning to the notion of the money shot, then, a striking point of contrast emerges between the body that is incontrovertibly out of control – and that, by virtue of its disorderliness, smacks of authenticity and ‘truth’ – and the figure lying serenely in the slumber room, the quintessence of self-contained composure. In Viveca’s instance, ironically, the boorish elegies for the base and bodily function as a foil for the impenetrably passive corpse; her former entourage may lampoon the norms of etiquette, but Viveca’s mien is finally – if not by virtue of her décolletage seemly – at least sedate. Viveca’s body – the intended focal point of the ‘viewing’ – is, paradoxically, lacking in the potential for ‘real’ fleshly inappropriateness; whereas the money shot derives its appeal from the revelation of ‘truth’, the funereal viewing hinges on the manufacture of a facsimile, a final, artfully assembled image of the coherent self. That Viveca’s posthumously cockeyed bust has been propped up with canned goods – Federico gleefully 52