Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (17 page)

‘Within the teratological paradigm, ageing and death signify “an embodied difference that has historically been coined negatively –

by the metaphysical cannibalism” of a consumer capitalism that feeds upon the desires of its citizenry’ (Braidotti: 388). The commercials for funereal products that are woven into the series pilot in this way constitute a satirical commentary on capitalism’s marketing of the dead for its own ahistorical reproduction. The ‘New Millennium Edition Crown Royal Funeral Coach’, is described as ‘sleek, sophisticated, seductive’, and pitched with the slogan ‘Because your loved one deserves the very best in style and comfort’ (‘Pilot’, 1:1).

In contrast, the dead of
Six Feet Under
have no use for the comforting pieties of capitalism, pieties that suggest a culture locked in a 83

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

perpetual present, in denial of history and mortality. As funeral home directors and as sons newly ‘un-fathered’, the Fisher brothers find themselves dislocated from the very pieties that they are daily compelled to peddle.

Gothic forms tend to come to the cultural forefront at times of social and economic upheaval.
Six Feet Under
premiered just three months before 11 September 2001, a day that thrust the nation violently into a history that it had too long remained blind to, causing the voices of the dead to resound with a force that continues to traumatise the national imaginary.
Six Feet Under
’s exploration of the everyday consequences of Gothic democracy demonstrates the contradictory powers of the dead to decentre our master narratives and at the same time grant us the kind of singularity that enables the coalescence of diverse national stories, a manner of affirmative dislocation that constitutes a passionately political force of belonging.

Alan Ball is rightly ambivalent about our great white fathers’

legitimacy as sources of coherent identity, an ambivalence made evident in the opening sequence of
Six Feet Under
, which depicts a cemetery tombstone with Ball’s own name inscribed on it. Authorship may be a fiction that grounds us in an illusion of immortality and narrative coherence, but
Six Feet Under
invites us to question the artifices and institutions that sustain an illusory sense of being safe and anchored in the shadowy (his)tory of our progenitors.

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seven

Politics, tragedy and
Six

ROBERT

Feet Under
: camp

DEAM

aesthetics and strategies

TOBIN

of gay mourning in post-

AIDS America

Responding to AIDS, gay artists in the eighties were torn between political art that demanded changes and a more personal style of art imbued with a sense of tragedy that allowed a space for mourning.

Douglas Crimp gives a sense of the conflict in his aptly titled essay

‘Mourning and Militancy’, first published in 1989. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1992 drama,
Angels in America
, helped resolve this dialectic between the actively political and the tragically personal. Like two other Pulitzer-Prize-winning works of literature emerging from the subcultures affected by AIDS, Jonathan Larsen’s musical play
Rent
(1996) and Michael Cunningham’s novel
The Hours
(1998),
Six Feet Under
, which was conceived by the openly gay Alan Ball and first appeared on HBO in 2001, follows in the tradition of
Angels in America
. In contrast to works such as Jonathan Demme’s 1993 blockbuster
Philadelphia
, which tried to explain AIDS from a straight perspective,
Six Feet Under
attempts, in the wake of AIDS, to apply the lessons of gay mourning to the human condition by uniting the tragic and the political.

Few of the deaths featured in the series are actually caused by AIDS. Nonetheless, the representation of death in
Six Feet Under
frequently echoes the tropes of the rhetoric of AIDS. Answering the charge, for instance, that meaningless promiscuity caused her death, Jean Louise McArthur (Veronica Hart), the deceased porn star who 85

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

worked under the name Viveca St John, declares that she loved every man with whom she ever had sex (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). Alluding to the humiliating loss of bodily control that sometimes accompanies AIDS, Alfred Jones (Bill Cobbs) defines love as the ability to clean up after one’s partner has soiled his/her pants in a movie theatre (‘The Room’, 1:6). This is comparable to the turning point in Kushner’s
Angels in America:
Part I
, Millennium Approaches
, when Louis breaks down because his HIV-positive partner, Pryor, has had bloody diarrhoea in the hall (1992: 48). When baby Dillion Cooper dies of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), his mother (Veronica Lauren) asks an extreme form of the question often asked at the funeral of young gay men who died of AIDS: ‘How can the beginning and the end be so close together?’ (‘The Trip’, 1:11). When Victor Wayne Kovitch (Brian Kimmet) dies of Gulf War syndrome (GWS), his obituary merely notes that he died ‘after a long illness’, like many an AIDS obituary. At the viewing, his brother Paul (Wade Andrew Williams) asks one of Victor’s former comrades, ‘You sick?’

(‘Brotherhood’, 1:7). Private Bailey (David Henry) responds, ‘No.

Never got sick. I don’t know why.’ This too is a typical discussion from the world of AIDS, as survivors try to understand why they were spared. In ‘The Last Time’ (2:13), Nate spends time visiting Aaron Buchbinder (Glenn Fitzgerald), another character whose obituary merely states that he ‘died of an unbearably long illness’; although he, in fact, does not have AIDS but pancreatic cancer, his death mirrors the long painful death caused by HIV. In the opening episode of the fourth season, Claire looks at Nan Golden’s photographs of people with AIDS as she attempts to develop her own authentic artistic vision, suggesting the importance of the AIDS crisis for modern art (‘Falling Into Place’, 4:1). Again and again,
Six Feet Under
explodes the rhetoric of gay responses to AIDS and re-uses the fragments of that discourse in a general discussion of death.

The response of
Six Feet Under
to AIDS mirrors the efforts by many artists and writers to break the links between death and same-sex desire that have existed at least since the late nineteenth century emergence of the modern concept of homosexuality. Jeff Nunokawa finds in Oscar Wilde’s
Portrait of Dorian Gray
evidence for ‘a deep cultural idea about the lethal character of male homosexuality’ (1991: 311). Mortality looms in the very title of Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
(1912), a canonical early representation of 86

POLI T ICS, TRAGEDY AND
SIX FEET UNDER

male-male desire. The rhetoric surrounding the AIDS epidemic reinforced all these linkages with frightening intensity. In 2004 the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative religious lobbying group in Washington, DC, still bluntly published on its Website that

‘homosexuality = Death’. Crimp has provided a thorough analysis of a number of authors from within the gay community, including Randy Shilts, Michelangelo Signorelli, Andrew Sullivan and Larry Kramer, who have implied that something about the modern homosexual lifestyle is itself responsible for the spread of AIDS and thus linked to a culture of death (2002: 1–26). Given the omnipresence of this connection between homosexuality and death, many artists working with AIDS struggled first and foremost to tear apart the equation of

‘homosexuality = sickness = death’ (Poirier 1993: 2).

In film, the artistic medium most directly related to
Six Feet
Under
, thoughtful directors have also attempted to disentangle the web that connected desire and death. Establishing a pattern that
Six
Feet Under
also follows, Bill Sherwood’s 1986 film
Parting Glances
, for instance, critically rejects one character’s idea to understand AIDS

as a modern
Liebestod
or love-death. Politically, gay responses to AIDS could not afford any romanticisation of sexuality and death, thanatos and eros. A 1987 video piece by John Grayson, called the

‘ADS-Epidemic’ (for ‘acquired dread of sex’), directly takes on the literary historical tradition with the line ‘this is not a
Death in
Venice
’ (Crimp 2002: 79). If artists were to avoid suggesting that homosexuality caused AIDS, they would have to disavow the strong linkage between death and same-sex desire that was part of the West’s cultural heritage.

Six Feet Under
scrupulously avoids the pitfalls of linking same-sex desire and death. In no way is the gay community seen as excessively sexual or particularly kinky. If anything, the gay David is the most uptight sexually. In contrast, Nate Fisher has had lots of girls in his life, including Brenda Chenowith, with whom he has sex in a closet before he even knows her name. Brenda, in fact, becomes a full-fledged sex addict. Claire Fisher is the one experimenting with crystal meth because her boyfriend, Gabe Dimas (Eric Balfour), says it makes sex more exciting. Even Ruth Fisher overcomes her inhibitions to have an active sex life. There is not a sense in
Six Feet Under
that sexuality per se is a danger needing suppression, or that homosexuals in particular are introducing some kind of virus into an otherwise 87

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SIX FEET UNDER

healthy community. Indeed, that community – white, bourgeois America – is shown as deeply unhealthy and in need of reform. In general, the series rejects sentimental portrayals of the traditional family. Flashbacks to home movies merely underline the wounds of childhood – the way, for instance, that both David and Claire feel, for different reasons, that their father neglected them. Although the first season ends with a redemptive family festivity (‘Knock, Knock’, 1:13), it is Federico Diaz’s family, and thus distinct in terms of culture and class from the Fishers.

Rejecting the imposed linkage between homosexuality and death, many in the gay community relied on the camp tradition to confront the horrors of AIDS. Rosa von Praunheim’s 1985 film
A Virus Knows
No Morals,
for instance, brings a dark sense of humour to something deadly serious. In this early German response to AIDS, biting laughter accompanies the critique of almost every major societal institution: medical scientists, represented by ‘Dr Blood’, who works at the

‘Institute for Pestilence, Plague and Death’, candidly admit that as many people will live off AIDS (through government research grants, for example) as die of the disease; nurses bet on which patients will die first; and religious characters masturbate to images of Boris Becker in their closets. Through it all, a drag queen chorus encourages safe sex as they sing songs such as ‘You’ve Got Your Future in Your Hands’ (sung to the tune of ‘You’ve Got the Whole World in Your Hands’). Similarly, John Grayson’s 1993 musical
Zero Patience
confronts the censorious myth of ‘Patient Zero’ (whom Randy Shilts and others blamed for spreading AIDS) with humorous over-the-top musical numbers.

Six Feet Under
carries on this campy tradition with its fake ads, its interpolated musical numbers and its outrageous fantasy scenes.

When Claire sings ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ after a successful erotic adventure (‘The Foot’, 1:3), her musical fantasy underlines the limits of realism as much as any drag queen. In an article by Virginia Heffernan in
The New York Times
, Lauren Ambrose, the actress who plays Claire, remarks on the particular ability of what she calls the ‘Alan Ball world’ to balance ‘incredible over-the-top moments and then these very truthful moments’ (2004: 1). The same article discusses the willingness of the show to tackle

‘grand and even garish emotion’ without ‘ever lapsing into pathos’.

Heffernan attributes this aspect of the show to the performances 88

POLI T ICS, TRAGEDY AND
SIX FEET UNDER

of the actresses. It would, perhaps, be more precise to say that the actresses’ performance of gender and femininity allow the series to make major statements without seeming melodramatic – and a camp aesthetic heavily colours their performance of gender (2004: 18).

The camp style has been particularly fond of melodrama, both loving and sending up the outsized emotions and ‘sappy happy’ endings of melodramatic fiction. Eva Cherniavsky argues that AIDS dramas in particular have made use of the genre of melodrama (1998).
Six
Feet Under
takes advantage of this tradition of campy melodrama as it tries to put forth a vision of the meaning of life. Tracy Montrose Blair (Dina Waters), who is almost a caricature of femininity, introduces one of the most moving scenes in the first season. In

‘Knock, Knock’ (1:13), lamenting the death of her aunt, Lilian Grace Montrose, Tracy cries, ‘I’ve never felt this alone in the world.

And I’m used to being alone. I know what it’s like. Now I find out that there’s this whole new level. Why do people have to die?’ When Nate answers her that people die in order to make life important, and urges her to make the most of each day the way her aunt had, he is able to articulate what Ball himself calls the message of the show without seeming excessively didactic because that message is embedded in lightness and humour. In Ball’s commentary about the scene on the DVD edition of the first season, he refers specifically to the ability of Tracy’s comedic character to move the audience to