Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (18 page)

‘a different place’. Part of the uniqueness of her character is her talent at playing a variety of roles in rapid succession – bright and perky on the phone, then dismissive and businesslike as soon as she hangs up, for instance. The efforts of
Six Feet Under
to answer big questions about mortality work best within the framework of a campy appropriation of melodrama.

In her famous 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag describes the phenomenon as lovingly ambivalent and essentially apolitical, which does describe the stance of
Six Feet Under
to melodrama. The camp humour of gay artists such as Rosa von Praunheim or John Grayson, however, tends to be more overtly political.
Six
Feet Under
also has clear moments of social critique. In the first season at least, the bogus commercials for death care products are alienating in a Brechtian sense (‘Pilot’, 1:1). As Ball states in his DVD commentary on the first season, the ads emphasise both the commercialisation of death as well as the use of advertisements to 89

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

fund television and art in general. The critical assessment of the commercialisation of death runs throughout the show; Nate, for instance, periodically gives voice to twinges of conscience about the obscene mark-ups in the industry, and he actually acts on the principles behind his qualms when he buries Lisa in the wilderness without embalming her or putting her in a casket (‘Falling Into Place’, 4:1). Of course, the real enemy in the show is not the small funeral home but Kroehner, a large chain company that uses rationalisation and all the tools of modern capitalism to drive small businessmen out of business. Kroehner, whose representative is repeatedly called a ‘Nazi fuck’ and whose company bears a Germanic-sounding name, seems to unite fascism and capitalism in a way that conforms to analysis by the Frankfurt School.

The series also takes a clear stand on homosexuality.

Homophobia, in the family and in organised religion, receives significant attention as David tortuously and wrenchingly comes out of the closet. When a young gay graduate student named Marcus Foster (Brian Poth) is brutally beaten, the series reveals how deep homophobia runs in American society (‘A Private Life’, 1:12).

Marcus’s own father (Arthur Taxier) seems to blame the death on his son’s sexuality. When his mother, Patsy (Joan McMurtrey), says that she had worried so much about AIDS that she never thought about the danger her son faced by simply being on the street, she implies that homophobia is an even more entrenched problem than AIDS itself – that AIDS is, in fact, a symptom of homophobia At times, however,
Six Feet Under
straddles the boundary between exposing social ills and acquiescing to the tragedy of their existence. Its portrayal of social stratification in the United States is unrelentingly grim and offers little hope for change. The wealthy Chenowiths live a life seemingly unencumbered by bills or the need for regular employment. The Fisher sons pursue the family business as if they were members of an undertaker caste. In the first season, Claire’s boyfriend Gabe Dimas (Eric Balfour) represents an underclass that seems to have no hope of social mobility. Even Rico’s ability to become a partner in the firm Fisher and Sons is the result of an inheritance, not of pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. Because
Six Feet Under
makes no calls for any change in these structures, it is hard to know whether the depiction of this socially frozen society is a political critique or merely a melancholy observation.

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POLI T ICS, TRAGEDY AND
SIX FEET UNDER

Nor does the series make specific political calls for change on other social issues either. While much art and literature concerned with AIDS made direct attacks on political figures important in their own era, such as President Ronald Reagan or Senator Jesse Helms, the characters in
Six Feet Under
rarely address contemporary politics.

Unlike much cultural work on AIDS,
Six Feet Under
has few concrete proposals for policy change on any issues that could affect death in the United States, let alone AIDS. There is no discussion of the country’s inadequate health insurance system, the poorly staffed drug rehabilitation programmes, or other health care crises afflicting the poor, the young, the old or the immigrant population. This absence of calls for specific political action raises the possibility that the show is not primarily about political action but more a working through of the tragedies of human mortality.

To a certain extent, the political mission of
Six Feet Under
is different from many other works of art devoted to AIDS, because the show is also about the rehabilitation of masculinity in a post-patriarchal society. This rehabilitation is particularly tricky because of the campy melodramatic form of the series. In her analysis of the possibilities and dangers of relying on melodrama to represent AIDS, Cherniavsky argues that melodramatic representations of AIDS

position the gay male in a role typically filled by women (1998: 377). Ball must therefore be particularly overt in his focus on masculinity in order to overcome the feminine implications of melodrama. The absence of lesbian characters is symptomatic of the show’s concentration on masculinity. The biggest overt anxiety surrounding David’s sexual development is not the threat of AIDS but, rather, his endangered masculinity. When he and Keith watch
Oz
, another HBO series devoted to masculinity, the scene that they see involves two characters talking about whether life in the prison has made one of them into a ‘bitch’ (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). When the gang member known as Paco – born Manuel Bolin (Jacob Vargas) – dies, his apparition admonishes David not to be a ‘bitch’ (‘Familia’, 1:4).

When David comes out to Rico, he ends the discussion with the exclamation ‘I am a man’. The series’ concern about masculinity becomes especially apparent in the episode about Gulf War syndrome (‘Brotherhood’, 1:7). While the episode brings out parallels between GWS and AIDS, it also seemingly endorses the masculinist and nationalist discourse of the military. The title of the episode, 91

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

‘Brotherhood’, refers both to the male bonding that takes place among the men in the first Iraq war as well as to the bonding that takes place between Nate and David to the exclusion of their sister Claire.

In mourning patriarchy and attempting to remake masculinity, the show has a political agenda that is at times quite different from that of most work on AIDS.

In considering the role of mourning in gay cultural responses to AIDS, Michael Moon has argued that because of homophobia gays and lesbians are unable ever to achieve the normalcy that the Freudian
Trauerarbeit
(work of mourning) promises (1995: 235).

This is worth mentioning because
Six Feet Under
relies explicitly on Freudian vocabulary, particularly through the Chenowiths. Margaret and Bernard Chenowith are both psychiatrists, while Billy and Brenda have both been extensively analysed. To take one example of the significance of psychoanalysis for
Six Feet Under
, dream sequences function in a Freudian manner in numerous episodes.

Although an analysis of the use of Freudian thought in
Six Feet Under
would go beyond the scope of this chapter, it is suggestive that the institution of psychiatry incorporated in Dr Gareth Feinberg (author of
Charlotte Light and Dark
) and the Chenowiths is held up for considerable sceptical scrutiny. The series indicates by its distance from institutional psychiatry that its allegiance is not to normalisation and medicalisation but, rather, to a Freudian discourse that offers the potential for a more radical critique. Ultimately, then, though
Six Feet Under
does not always share the same agenda as other AIDS

works, it does promote a political project as it simultaneously attempts to offer a work of mourning.

The importance of at least a theoretical possibility for the coexistence of mourning and political action became increasingly clear for many AIDS activists throughout the nineties. Kushner’s 1992
Angels in America
pointed the way for the possibility of bringing together a camp sensibility, Brechtian alienation, bitingly corrosive political satire, a highly specific and self-conscious political agenda and tenderly elegiac representations of private sorrows and personal loss that allow for the work of mourning to go on. Significantly, it was HBO that produced a critically acclaimed and widely publicised television adaptation of
Angels in America
in 2003, suggesting that the company was particularly open to efforts of artists such as Kushner and Ball. Like
Angels In America
,
Six Feet Under
unifies 92

POLI T ICS, TRAGEDY AND
SIX FEET UNDER

mourning and politics by relying on a tradition of thought developed in the gay community in response to AIDS. Eschewing conventional linkages of homosexuality with illness and heterosexuality with health, gay artists utilise a camp sensibility both to rejuvenate humanist messages and to call for pointed political action. While comedic alienating effects might have pre-empted any efforts to help readers or audiences mourn their losses, authors such as Kushner are able to reintroduce a sense of mourning and the tragic into their works without losing their political edge. Alan Ball’s
Six
Feet Under
applies the lessons that the gay community has drawn from its battle with AIDS to universal questions of mortality.

Robert Deam Tobin would like to acknowledge his current sabbatical as a
Rockefeller Fellow in Columbia University’s Program for the Study of
Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights.

93

eight

Americanitis: self-help

ASHLEY

and the American dream

SAYEAU

in
Six Feet Under

I realized that I knew nothing … In the

next instant – after I realized that I knew

nothing – I realized that I knew

everything … It was so stupidly, blindly

simple that I could not believe it. I saw

that there were no hidden meanings, that

everything was just the way it is, and that

I was already all right. All that knowledge

that I had amassed just obscured the

simplicity, the truth, the suchness, the

thusness of it all.

Werner Erhard, who founded the self-

actualisation group, est, after having

this ‘epiphany’ on a California freeway

(quoted in Kaminer 1993: 63)

‘Jesus, just pull your dicks out and measure them – let’s get this over with,’ begs Claire Fisher of her brothers Nate and David in the pilot episode of
Six Feet Under
(1:1). The problem, she suggests, could not be more obvious. David is bitter that Nate abandoned his family for a life in Seattle, leaving him to run the family business; while Nate

– rightly so – says his brother is just jealous. He’s also repressing his 94

AMERICANI T IS

own guilty feelings, of course. Claire is hardly the only one so psychologically proficient. Nate and Brenda compare their families’

neuroses shortly after meeting. Hers is certifiably demented, making his – with his ‘control freak’ mother and ‘wild like me’ sister –

relatively normal (1:1). Thematically, the show’s writers mirror the Fishers by simply laying it out there: a father dies, leaving his sons both resentful and slightly relieved. It is hardly the most original of themes, for either the characters or the viewers. This is, after all, a culture infused with recycled psycho-babble, where widows really do cry out ‘we didn’t die’ (1:1), and everyone – from disaffected teenagers to National Book Award recipients – idolise, even identify with, the heroine of
Charlotte Light and Dark
, the charming story of a barking eight-year-old girl and her therapist.

Way past Oedipus’s crossroads, when wanting to kill your father and sleep with your mother did the trick, the characters on
Six Feet
Under
battle with a hotchpotch of pseudo-psychological and pseudo-spiritual jargon that is more akin to self-help than straight psychology – and far more uniquely American for it. One can only imagine what Freud might have thought of Ruth’s imaginary tome,

‘How to Insist Your Daughter Has an Eating Disorder’, or the series’

mass-market television show
Dr Dave
, the talk show host whose viewers believe ‘only makes love when you want to’ (‘Making Love Work’, 3:6). As on Main Street, USA, self-help – of this ‘clichéd’,

‘mass-market’ sort – is omnipresent in
Six Feet Under
. Not even minor characters evade its grasp. Kroehner’s Mitzi Dalton Huntley (Julie White) has made lambasting ‘victim mentalities’ a career strategy, and Ben Cooper (Adam Scott), David’s short-lived boyfriend, takes beta blockers to relax. And, just when you think you’ve seen it all (Ruth’s ‘blueprint’, for instance), you meet

‘crunchy-granola backpacky’ Lisa, who worships garlic as a ‘miracle herb’ and shuns movies because ‘film is processed with gelatine.