Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (24 page)

Claire might think she knows who Parker McKenna really is, courtesy of culturally produced clichés to help her unlock meaning, but the joke is ultimately on her. Less virtuous and hard-working movie heroine than scheming nymphomaniac stalking men and power and populating television soaps (Modleski 1997: 41), Parker belongs firmly to a televisual narrative world (once Parker becomes identified as a TV villainess she becomes friends with Claire). But, more importantly, Claire is not immune from such a narrativisation process. Driving around in her lime-green hearse, living over a funeral home and moping around school appearing tortured leads Parker to conclude that Claire is ‘like this Goth, arty freak girl, who is – like – tragic and suicidal’. Claire may dismiss such labelling –

‘That is so not who I am’ – but she belongs nonetheless to the newer televisual phenomenon of the hypersensitive young woman out to debunk clichés defining normative feminine roles while changing the script in the process (like
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joan of Arcadia
and
Charmed
). No easy task. Revealed in the ways in which Claire makes sense of herself and self-obsessively talks about her social world is an indication of how trapped she is by cultural definitions and social norms not of her making. Nowhere are the contradictory processes involved in producing female identities made more apparent than when Claire interacts with the women around her. Such contested encounters – hearing different voices, playing with a media lexicon of cultural identities, exposing clichés, challenging gendered 128

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expectations – reveal how Claire learns to be dysfunctional while acquiring subjectivity.

Claire is awed at meeting ‘Charlotte’ from
Charlotte Light and
Dark
– the child protégé with the 185 IQ who is ‘like way smarter than the people who [were] analysing her, and so [was] constantly fucking with them’ (‘In Place of Anger’, 2:6). ‘It’s like meeting Gandhi. Or Jesus,’ gushes Claire (‘The Room’, 1:6). Brenda is having none of it. ‘Don’t tell me. The book spoke to you. Like it was written specifically for you …’ But Brenda misses the point. That her story reaches out to ‘lonely’ teen girls like Claire, and that ‘Charlotte’ is the poster-girl for disaffected adolescent females, says much about how the female becomes labelled dysfunctional for dissent and annexed to mental illness (Foucault 1998). This book is not read by the likes of Claire as a psychological study of a child with borderline personality disorder, but is to her about exposing techniques that identify the female as a problem and offering strategies for resistance.

Uncovering the nature of Brenda’s precocious behaviour and putting it into discourse (
Charlotte Light and Dark
) makes her knowable and subject to constant surveillance. Only Brenda knows the price paid for her defiance. But her performing psychological disorders and disrupting her treatment – for building up narratives and tearing them down – reveals to Claire, able to read against the patriarchal grain, the pleasures involved in refuting labels, interrupting those with the power to define and resisting cliché definitions.

Such a relationship may offer a unique opportunity to explore ways of critiquing schemas of knowledge that subjugate the female subject. But heck no. Instead, Brenda and Claire bond, normally accompanied by alcohol and a spliff, over complicated and high-maintenance boyfriends – and one man in particular (‘The Room’, 1:6). Brenda’s younger brother, Billy, immediately captivates Claire.

Her intense connection with the mentally unstable but artistically gifted Billy lasts for two seasons (and resumes in season four), in which Claire comes to replace Brenda as Billy’s confidante after the brother-sister relationship disintegrates (‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’, 2:8; ‘Someone Else’s Eyes’, 2:9). Exhilarating but inappropriate relationships with sexually dangerous and emotionally tortured young men prove a pattern for Claire. Soon after meeting her heroine, Claire starts replicating the codependent relationship Brenda has with Billy with Gabe (‘The New Person’, 1:10; ‘The 129

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SIX FEET UNDER

Trip’, 1:11). She becomes his emotional nursemaid as he deals with the death of his stepbrother, Anthony Finelli (Jake Gridley), who accidentally blew his head off with a gun while in his older brother’s care (‘Life’s Too Short’, 1:9). Bonding over intense loss and a pointless tragedy translates, in Claire’s mind at least, into a fiction about misunderstood young lovers against the world. She easily slips into the selfless role of a Mills and Boon heroine seeking to bring back the brooding hero, damaged by tragedies not of his making, from the brink, armed with nothing more than an egg Mac-Muffin and a true heart.

But is this protective behaviour just learnt from Brenda? It seems to me that Claire may not be so different from her mother after all.

Despite rebuffing her mother’s attempts at intimacy, and endlessly harping on about how Ruth sacrifices her own needs for the sake of her family, Claire proves to be just as smothering as Ruth in her dealings with men. Gabe soon feels trapped by Claire constantly questioning his every move and suffocating him with kindness. While she protests that she has good reason to be concerned, her performance of ideal soap-opera mother – ‘who has no demands or claims of her own’ (Modleski 1987: 39) – makes visible how she is learning to sublimate herself and assume a nurturing role. Talking about her doomed relationship in therapy with Gary (paralleled by Brenda attempting to write her own narrative following Billy’s rejection) leads to Claire bringing forth a discourse about a female identity predicated on losing selfhood and eclipsed by the all-consuming needs of her man. Superficially at least, it confirms a Lacanian schema whereby the female exists nowhere in the (male) symbolic. But incessantly talking about it, grappling to understand what is happening, does make strange.

Heeding no warning from television archetypes like Parker or her mother, Claire learns instead about the pitfalls of doomed love and the dangers of misreading tormented young men from a movie script. The realisation that Gabe has let her down (again) – lying to her, pilfering embalming fluid from her brothers’ prep room to make ‘fry’ (dope soaked in the liquid), revealing that he was involved in an armed robbery – finds Claire slumped in front of the telly watching
Badlands
(1974). The story about Kit (Martin Sheen) lashing out against a society that writes him off and his misguided teen companion (Sissy Spacek) hits a nerve. The desolation of this 130

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intense yet ill-fated romance, and story of murders committed by a frustrated anti-hero because he knows he will never belong, gives a narrative order to what happens later to Claire (‘The Plan’, 2:3).

Playing out the story of doomed lovers in the badlands of an LA suburb at night rewrites the movie ending, with Claire coming to her senses and Gabe taking flight after shooting at another driver for poking fun at Claire’s hearse. Making the script turn out right defines Claire’s future attempts to find love. But, time and again, fairy-tale movie endings give way to messy television break ups – from would-be indie rock musician Phil (J.P. Pitoc), who does not want to be exclusive (‘The Eye Inside’, 3:3), to fellow art student Russell Corwin, with whom she enjoys an intense affair before she gets knocked up (‘Death Works Overtime’, 3:11) and he confesses to fooling around with their teacher, Olivier Castro-Staal (‘Everyone Leaves’, 3:10).

Can Claire escape these fairy tales, which convince women their only happiness can be found in romantic love and caring for a man? The unexpected arrival of Aunt Sarah (Patricia Clarkson), Ruth’s younger sister, presents Claire with a possible alternative (‘In Place of Anger’, 2:6). Immediately entranced, she takes her aunt to see her artwork. Sarah’s critique turns into an analysis of her niece: her work, like Claire, is marked by ‘anger, urgency, passion. Resentment of the status quo. And some jealously of it as well …’ Mistaking an arrangement that Claire rescued from the rubbish as being about ‘the death of romance in a regimented, artificial world’ risks exposing Sarah as a fraud. She may stray into pretension, but she is the first to recognise Claire’s creative talents: ‘You see through the veil.’ No one has spoken to Claire like this before; in fact, no one has talked about her like this before.

Aunt Sarah may only be around for two episodes but she leaves her mark on Claire. Steeped in the counter-culture of alternative lifestyles and pop art (a muse for sixties Factory artists like Andy Warhol) and politicised by conscious-raising movements like women’s rights, she presents Claire with a different way of being from her dutiful mother (although the visit does bring mother and daughter closer). The excesses of Sarah’s bohemian lifestyle – with half-naked middle-aged hippies cavorting around a bonfire howling (‘Back to the Garden’, 2:7) – hold little interest for Claire. She is, nonetheless, introduced to new opportunities and a new language with which to speak. Hidden from Claire, however, is the price 131

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Sarah paid for her choices. Using televisual conventions of self-disclosure, Sarah and Ruth air grievances (‘In Place of Anger’, 2:6).

At the bottom of Ruth’s burning resentment is her sense that Sarah had more fun than she did. Sarah divulges her buried narrative of disappointment and loss with the only man she ever loved dying when she was 21 and the longed-for children an impossibility because her ovaries are as ‘dried as stone’. Sarah may speak the empowering language of feminism – of building women’s self-esteem, self-image and identity – but the melodramatic tone reveals a concealed narrative of enduring infertility and the silence surrounding the sterile female body.

Yet the narrative of a young woman striving to find a unique voice structuring Claire’s narrative arc represents a crisis of discourse.

Encouraged by Aunt Sarah, and inadvertently helped by Billy, who asks her to take photographs of his naked and scarred body (‘Someone Else’s Eyes’, 2:9), Claire is persuaded of her vocation as an artist.

Applying to LAC-Arts coincides with the termination of her therapy. Her epiphany comes not in her final session with Gary but at her college entrance interview, where she re-imagines the audition from
Flashdance
(1983) with her legs coming off as she contorts her body to impress (‘The Last Time’, 2:13). It is the moment when she realises that creating art helped her cope with the un-sayability of bereavement and the pulsating ache of lost love. Crying inappropriately may have got her in, but season three finds her struggling to give actual representational form to her silent despair; she confesses she is an artist because she has ‘a lot of pain’ (‘Nobody Sleeps’, 3:4).

Olivier, her form and space tutor, immediately identifies her as a promising student – but, of course, not as good as Russell. He reads her work depicting graveyards and death as good because it ‘instantly makes me want to throw up’ (‘The Eye Inside’, 3:3). Experiencing Claire’s artwork as nausea is similar to how the body functions for the French feminists (Kristeva 1980, 1981) in ‘shattering the logical coherence of symbolic thought and language’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 111). (It is ironic that Ruth confesses to her daughter that she wanted to read the French feminists at college [‘I’ll Take You’, 2:12].) But, pretensions aside, Claire’s proximity to death and the corpse, living over the liminal space where the corporeal body lies between death and burial, places her in a unique position when developing representational forms that understand subjectivity as 132

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about process rather than identity. Producing new revelatory truths in her work reveals her uneasy attempt to intervene and put into discourse another kind of subjectivity.

Desiring to move beyond the social roles that confine other female characters, and aspiring to think differently, ends abruptly for Claire. No sooner has she started to find her voice then she falls pregnant (‘Death Works Overtime’, 3:11). She is the exact same age as her mother when she had Nate. Is history repeating itself? It does, in fact, seem that the melodramatic conventions of the
Six Feet
Under
discourse have reclaimed Claire for dutiful motherhood. But, whereas Ruth married Nathaniel Fisher and moved into the family home, her daughter makes a very different choice. Deciding to have an abortion, she turns not to the discourse of motherhood (Ruth) but the one of female resistance (Brenda) for help. Knowing what is best for her, she remains haunted by her decision. Despite her visit to the afterlife with her father, and meeting those she has lost, including her aborted child and Lisa (where those learnt skills of mourning the departed and moving on come in very handy), Claire is still left holding the baby at her mother’s wedding to George (‘I’m Sorry, I’m Lost’, 3:13). Tears start to flow. Is she crying because her mother is getting remarried, or at the thought of her own unborn child as she holds Maya? Or is she just learning to speak the melodramatic language of the adult female?

Being subject to intense scrutinisation means that Claire Fisher is required to talk endlessly about herself. But what she has to say is often unsettling. Speaking frankly about the hypocrisies she sees around her, challenging assumptions made about her, revealing inconsistencies between actual behaviour and what people say, or making known strategies of (female) resistance, Claire anticipates what Foucault has said about the task of truth being ‘linked to the challenging of taboos’ (1998: 130). But her thwarted attempts at making known these revelations and frustrated silences reveal how challenging discourse producing identities for women is a precarious process. When the dead patriarch heckles from beyond the grave that ‘nobody escapes’, it reminds us that there is an inevitability about returning to the Symbolic as the site of paternal signification that Freud and Jacques Lacan first imagined when gendered identities are assigned. But, more importantly,
Six Feet Under
’s compliance with and departure from television conventions reveals to me how 133