Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (12 page)

SEX, SHO CKS AND ST IFFS

admits to having wedged ‘a can of cat food under each boob’ – is irrelevant; what matters, in the words of Viveca’s former lover, Larry Wadd (Terence Knox), is that ‘she should look spectacular … that’s the most important thing’. Rather than expand the scope of what is visible, therefore, the viewing serves conversely to reiterate the parameters of what should, culturally speaking, appear on display.

Examining the money shot and the slumber room viewing side by side, moreover, points towards key questions about the nature of spectatorship, and specifically about the capacity for these two categories of image to exert any kind of compelling, transformative impact on the viewing subject. Like ‘the industry’ in the Fisher’s native Los Angeles – the entertainment business – the death care trade trucks in the production and sale of the spectacle, positioning the viewing as a catalyst for spiritual healing. The series riffs repeatedly on the parallels between LA’s image-centric commercial focus and the funeral industry’s imperative that the cadaver look not just ‘real’, but optimally attractive; as the voice-over for a mock mortuary product commercial intones, ‘she looked her best every day of her life … don’t let one disfiguring accident change that’ (‘Pilot’, 1:1). The figure cut by the corpse, then, meticulously revamped, docile and at rest in an ex-orbitantly marked-up coffin – David pitches one such box as ‘more than just a casket. It’s a tribute, really’ (‘The Will’, 1:2) – represents a startling accretion of capital, the extravagant finale on which the successful functioning of the entire funereal apparatus rests. Mes-merising in its claims to verisimilitude, the image of the corpse can prove unsettling in its relationship to ‘truth’, the pinnacle of the cultural emphasis on the body as semiotic surface. Yet, for the bereaved, the consumption of this spectacle remains primarily a passive enterprise; the Fishers hover at a respectful distance, poised to enforce standard behavioural protocols – to prevent ‘casket climbing’, for example, or usher those who succumb to excessive outbursts of misery to a heavily curtained private mourning area. In the end, the ritual of the viewing seems clearly in the service of perpetuating a docile citizenry, providing a publicly acceptable forum for controlled affective expression and diligently schooling subjects as to the norms for containing grief.

The money shot, by contrast (homing in on the moment of unfettered bodily expression), epitomises what is sometimes deemed transgressive in porn; as Kipnis contends, ‘the out-of-control, un-53

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SIX FEET UNDER

mannerly body is precisely what threatens the orderly operation of the status quo’ (Kipnis 1996: 134). In the context of
Six Feet Under
as a series, Viveca’s demise is only one of a proliferation of ‘money shots’, revealing an ongoing preoccupation with the trope of the body out of control. The opening act of each new episode, for example, depicts a death – ironically, the archetypal instantiation of closure. While usually less patently eroticised than Viveca’s passing, these sequences provide a similarly voyeuristic glimpse of climactic physical ex-penditure, moments of departure that are at times peaceful but more frequently convulsive and grotesque. Although predictable in their adherence to a standard format (they invariably start off the narrative, providing a certain structural under-girding for the ongoing and more complex Fisher family storyline), these prefatory money shots actively subvert expectations, playfully misleading us to evoke surprise; we’re never quite sure who’s going to die or how. By angling for a collective gasp – trying to provoke moments of shock or horror – the images jar the audience into a state of active viewership, temporarily rupturing the seamless suturing process characteristic of the classic spectatorship paradigm. For a fleeting few seconds, therefore, these initial images

‘pester and thwart the dominant’ (Kipnis 1996: 165) by putting the coherence of the self in jeopardy; as film scholar Barbara Creed writes of the effects of horror on sci-fi spectators, ‘the viewing subject is put into crisis…the “self” is threatened with disintegration’ (Creed 1990: 137).

This ‘crisis’ of unexpurgated, surprise visibility, moreover, as juxtaposed with the carefully choreographed ritual of the viewing, establishes a fundamental tension that structures and informs the broader narrative arc of the Fishers’ process of healing. The first episode of
Six Feet Under,
in which Nathaniel, the Fisher patriarch, is instantaneously crushed by a bus while leaning behind the dash of his brand new hearse to light a cigarette, immediately establishes the

‘shock value’ of the money shot: the potential for a climactic end to launch a new journey – in this case the family’s – towards self-realisation and genuine mutual understanding. Over and over throughout the course of the series, the Fishers find themselves viewing or acting in money shots of their own; repeatedly occupying positions of voyeuristic spectatorship or unexpected exposure, they enact unwitting visual confessions that force the family members in question to perceive one another – and themselves – in new and potentially jarring ways. (Think of Ruth walking in on Nate giving 54

SEX, SHO CKS AND ST IFFS

Brenda head, for example, or Nate nonchalantly popping in on his brother’s VCR to discover – much to David’s chagrin – gay porn.) These startling moments of unregulated bodily expression derive particularly potency when juxtaposed with the family’s typically controlled conduct, throwing the ‘truth’ of their routine interactions into doubt. In effect, these interstitial money shots – much like their analogues at the opening of each show – foreground the spectacular quality of self-presentation, the proverbial cat food tins belying up-standing tits.

For the Fishers, further, the question of containment assumes a heightened degree of urgency; the fact that they live at work – and are in a literal sense at home with death – means that they inhabit a space where boundaries are contested as a matter of course. The notions of ‘family’ and ‘business’ are tangled into an impossibly complex knot, lashing the Fishers forcefully to cultural codes of bodily control and decorum. Their experiences of inadvertent sexual display and spectatorship incur an added charge in violating not simply the constraints on sex in the workplace – philosopher Georges Bataille writes that the taboo on sexual freedom exists ‘to make work possible … work is productive’ (Bataille 1986: 68) – but the interdiction against inappropriate (i.e. non-conjugal) sexual expression in the family as well. As Foucault observes, the family occupies an instrumental role in governmentality, serving to contain sexuality –

Foucault calls the family ‘a hotbed of constant sexual incitement’

(Foucault 1998: 109) – while assiduously denying its intra-household existence to the culture at large. The sudden surfacing of sexuality in the Fishers’ money shots, then, stands out sharply against the family’s embattled efforts to erect and police proper boundaries; consider Ruth admonishing her soon-to-be employer-cum-lover, Nikolai (Ed O’Ross), ‘this is a place of business – there are grieving people here.

I can’t have you skulking around with that look in your eye – that sex look’ (‘The Room’, 1:6), or Claire testily reminding her mother

‘there’s a thing called
knocking
’ after Ruth bursts into her daughter’s bedroom to find Claire cursing a video game nemesis: ‘Suck on this, you little fuck’ (‘Familia’, 1:4).

Among the most material examples of the Fishers’ beleaguered attempts to regulate boundaries and behaviour, of course, are those involving their handling of the cadavers, which – even in death –

fail to assume a reliably orderly posture. Throughout the series, the 55

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Fishers struggle to contain the renegade oozing, stinking, farting and shitting that occurs prior to the embalming process; as David snaps to Nate, ‘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). Like the hard-core money shot, in which the image of fluid spilling over the bodily borders is the sine qua non and explicit focal point, these references to uncontrollable corporeal eruptions suggest a kind of transgressive unruliness; only when the corpse has been laid out as spectacle is the promise of fail-safe coherence fulfilled. The permeability of bodily margins – staunched only as an effect of capital, in the conflation of ‘self’ and ‘sign’ at the slumber room viewing – materialises the notion of the body in excess of itself, pointing positively towards the potential for growth and change, towards an ongoing state of ‘becoming’.

In the end, this sense of expansive possibility – this struggle to realise a ‘true’ identity, an alternative, as Claire articulates, to the citizenship mandate that ‘you go to college, get a job so you can be a good consumer’ (‘Brotherhood’, 1:7) – cannot be fully visualised; in itself, the money shot is an effect of the capitalist emphasis on image and spectacle. The depiction of the out-of-control body, a response to culturally dictated norms of self-presentation, is also contingent on these norms, serving as a temporary, fetishistic stand-in for the cul-tivation of self-knowledge and genuine affective intensity. Even in porn, as Williams notes, training the spotlight on ejaculation requires the male performer to temporarily disengage from the communion at hand, ‘perfectly embod[ying] the profound alienation of contemporary consumer society’ (Williams 1999: 107). What is key to the Fishers’

progress towards ‘healing’, however, is their active response to these visual confessions: their attempts to incorporate the newly gleaned information to fortify their emotional bonds. Edging away from relationships mediated by the spectacular or constrained by convention, they begin more successfully to explore and exteriorise deep-seated, nebulous feelings; as Claire describes, ‘I just feel like there’s something inside me. I’d just like to find out what it is’ (‘The Will’, 1:2). Paradoxically, then, in laying bare the ‘truth’ of the out-of-control body,
Six Feet Under
’s money shots impel the Fishers forward on their journey towards deeper and more gratifying mutual connection and understanding, simultaneously exposing the gap between what can be rendered visible and what can be known.

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melancholia:

American

cultural crisis

and recovery

five

American Gothic:

MANDY

undermining the

MERCK

uncanny

‘America, land of the happy ending, famously has an aversion to matters of mortality…When it comes to death and dying, the average American recoils. Hollywood aids and abets, as well as reflects this: death in films or on TV is mostly dealt with in one of two ways – either with spectacular, impersonal violence, or with intense, simple-minded sentimentality.’ Thus a British critic hailed the ‘surprising’

success of an ‘off-kilter “dramedy” … set in and around [a] family business, an independent funeral home in Los Angeles – ironically the world’s capital of death denial’ (Whittle 2002). Such observations are commonplace in discussions of
Six Feet Under
, including those by the series’ head writer, Alan Ball, who has declared that ‘one reason our culture is so shallow is that we ignore death – we pretend it doesn’t exist. The death care industry in America has become all about hiring professionals to take care of it all and sanitize it’ (Clinton 2001).

But, if
Six Feet Under
’s success surprised the reviewers, its critical premise should not have. The claim that mortality has replaced sex as America’s most censored subject is itself geriatric, dating back to Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel
The Loved One
, Geoffrey Gorer’s 1955

Encounter
essay on ‘The Pornography of Death’ and Jessica Mitford’s best-selling 1963 exposé of the US funeral industry,
The American
Way of Death
. In 1968 the historian Arnold Toynbee summarised 59

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these views in the proclamation that ‘death is un-American, an affront to every citizen’s inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ (131). Meanwhile, far from denying the ‘death care industry’, Hollywood exploited its comic potential. Waugh’s satire of Whispering Glades Memorial Park (LA’s real-life Forest Lawn) was filmed by MGM in 1965, in a comedy featuring a mad cosmetologist, two fraudulent morticians, a suicidal injection of embalming fluid and a plot to redevelop a cemetery into a luxury spa by firing its corpses into space. Less spectacularly, the funeral home figured as the location for the coming-of-age comedy
My Girl
(1991) and its sequel
My Girl 2
(1994). So, neither
Six Feet Under
’s setting nor its apparent social critique are new. Indeed, this historical provenance informs the multigeneric character of its ‘dramedy’: a family saga wrapped round an already established satire of a Gothic theme – the disposal of dead bodies.