Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (31 page)

Keith’s un-Christ-like behaviour in season two, in David’s eyes, is one cause of his apparent loss of faith. As the Church storyline peters out in season two, David’s self-acceptance and his formation of a new social identity begin to materialise. David slowly begins to learn that having a relationship with an icon is actually a relationship with an idealised self. David’s new Christ is achingly human and troublingly 172

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masculinist. David may have queered Christ into Keith (‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’, 2:8), but Keith (and all his post-gay neo-conservatism) needs to be queered as well. In his progression to self-acceptance David’s neo-orthodoxies of sexuality and spirituality suffuse at the moment when the storyline erases them. The queer Church disappears (after Foucault 1998: 36) at the moment of its visibility.

173

fourteen

Revisiting the closet:

SAMUEL A.

reading sexuality in

CHAMBERS

Six Feet Under

The character of Will Truman (Eric McCormack) from NBC’s
Will
and Grace
offers a pithy summary of most people’s understanding of the closet: ‘Coming out of the closet is something you only do once.

It’s like being born’ (‘William, Tell’, 1:6). This claim turns sexuality into a rigid, binary framework of ‘sexual orientation’, and it suggests that people who find themselves in the closet must be figuratively reborn as gay through the act of coming out. This singular birth will thereby produce a gay sexual identity for them, which will then persist throughout their lives. Of course, it goes without Will saying it here, but his claim presupposes that only gay people come out.

Straight people never need to declare their sexuality at all; all they must do, quite literally, is be born.

The character of Russell Corwin (Ben Foster) from HBO’s
Six
Feet Under
seriously troubles this view of both the closet and of sexuality, when he unexpectedly says to his close friend and confidante, Claire, ‘I’m not gay, you know’ (‘Nobody Sleeps’, 3:4). How do we interpret this claim? What does it reveal about the structures of power and knowledge produced by the closet? What does it tell us about
Six Feet Under
’s representation of sexuality? And above all, in light of a claim such as this, how are we to
read
sexuality?

These are the questions to which this chapter seeks to provoke responses. It builds from an earlier essay in which I defend the claim 174

REVISI T ING THE CLOSET

that
Six Feet Under
is the first show on television to explore the internal workings and political dimensions of the closet. In that essay (2003) I discuss briefly
Will and Grace
and
Queer as Folk
as examples of shows that offer their viewers gay (often
very
gay) characters, but simultaneously erase the politics of the closet. (Writing now, almost four years later, I would certainly add
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
to such a list.) In these shows, the viewer always
knows
who is gay and who is not, but the problems with presuming (hetero)sexuality or the difficulties of interpreting sexuality are rarely, if ever, raised (and, even then, only for comic effect: see Battles and Hilton-Morrow 2002).

Six Feet Under
has been the only show on television to investigate the issue of closeting. Starting with the first few episodes of the series, viewers experience the closet through the life of David: a character who is outed to the viewers in the very first episode, but who remains closeted to family, colleagues and friends for much of the first season. The show thereby explores fundamental epistemological questions (questions concerning the production and limits of knowledge) and crucial political problems (problems of power, identity and representation). This means, finally, that
Six Feet Under
serves to expose the operation of heterosexual norms (what I will call

‘heteronormativity’) by offering a different perspective on the presumption of heterosexuality.

This chapter will argue that in its third season
Six Feet Under
revisits the closet from a radically different yet still politically salient angle, through the character of Russell. From the pilot episode on, David always remained certain about his sexuality (even if he questioned the morality of it), and he never wavered in his knowledge that he was ‘gay’. Thus, while the viewer experiences others’

questioning of David’s homosexuality (or incorrect presumptions of his heterosexuality), the viewers themselves, like David, still ‘knew’

he was gay. The viewer is thereby given a certain epistemological privilege in the case of David, and the question of sexuality is always already decided, at least from the viewer’s perspective.

With Russell, it does not work that way; he never claims to be gay or straight. And the viewer sees Russell’s sexuality through the eyes of Claire, who never attains the certainty about his sexuality that she so desperately (and perhaps phobically) longs for. We can understand or discuss Russell’s sexuality only through our (and 175

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

Claire’s) interpretation of a series of phenomena: his outward signs, his actions and his own denials about his putative homosexuality.

Russell’s sexuality is
never
fixed because it is never clearly
legible
.

I will argue here that it is precisely this illegibility of Russell’s character – understood through the storyline that covers the triangular relationship between him, Claire, and Olivier (Peter Macdissi) – that shakes our confidence in the solidity of sexuality, and it troubles the assumptions that a heteronormative society insists on making.

Therefore, despite his refusal to declare a gay sexuality (or, better,
because
of that refusal), Russell proves to be a much more queer character than David. Through Russell’s character, the third season of
Six Feet Under
continues the show’s unprecedented and still un-paralleled tradition of exposing and thereby challenging heteronormativity. I aim to demonstrate that Russell produces for both the characters around him and for the viewers of the show a significant disruption of the terms of modern sexuality; he rejects the offer to claim the modern category of ‘the homosexual’, while he refuses to play the normative role of ‘the heterosexual’. This chapter offers an elucidation of that disruption in the form of a reading of sexuality in the third season of the show; its goal is to reveal the very alterity of those present categories of sexuality and to contest the heteronormativity that preserves, fixes and reifies them.

I. Mappings: Sex, Art and Heteronormativity

Before taking the first steps to build out the logic and provide the evidence to substantiate the above claims, I need to map out a number of terrains. This means sketching a summary of the plot, clarifying my core critical concept and offering a brief overview of the argument to come. For readers who have not recently viewed the third season, I will confine my argument to the relationship between Claire (the Fishers’ only daughter, younger by far than her two brothers), Russell (Claire’s fellow first-year classmate in art school) and Olivier (their teacher), with occasional references to David (Claire’s gay brother, who runs the family funeral home with their brother, Nate). As a triangular relationship, the story of Claire, Russell and Olivier is, almost by definition, complex. Here I will offer only 176

REVISI T ING THE CLOSET

the barest skeleton of the plot, filling in important substance as my argument develops.

Based on their shared status as outcasts in high school and sceptics of the artist ethos now that they are in art school, Claire and Russell bond quickly after meeting. Their friendship appears at least partially founded on Claire’s almost immediate assumption that Russell is gay. Claire turns to Russell as a source of emotional support during her brief relationship with Phil (J.P. Pitoc). When things with Phil do not work out, Russell and Claire spend even more time together, with Claire opening herself up to Russell more than she has with any of her boyfriends. It is at this point that Russell, seemingly aware that Claire has taken him for gay up to this point, tells Claire,

‘I’m not gay, you know’ (‘Making Love Work’, 3:6). This anti-coming out proves to be the hinge that turns their relationship from friendship to romance, and eventually leads to them having sex (which Russell describes as his first time).

Olivier intervenes in the ostensible happiness of Claire and Russell’s relationship; he brings with him manipulation, power games (always filled with sexual undercurrents) and sometimes psychological warfare. Olivier’s teaching of art consistently remains thoroughly imbued with sex and power; he insists on conflating all three, both for himself and for his students (at least, his best students). He takes Claire on as his research assistant, but then seduces Russell while Claire is off on an errand (‘Tears, Bones and Desire’, 3:8). The viewer does not witness this seduction, never seeing Russell and Olivier together in a sexual way, but Russell later confesses to Claire that he and Olivier ‘fooled around’ (‘Everyone Leaves’, 3:10). Claire is both shattered and inexpressibly angry at the news; she breaks up with Russell on the spot, and then refuses his repeated efforts to reconcile (and ignores his repeated claims to love her).

This summary lays the framework in which I will forward my argument, but central to that background context is the concept I referred to in the introduction: heteronormativity. The term was coined by Michael Warner (who does much important work
with
the term but very little conceptual or theoretical work
on
the term), but its roots extend back at least to Adrienne Rich’s famous argument concerning ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Warner 1993; Rich 1980).

Some define heteronormativity as a ‘
practice
of organising patterns of thought, basic awareness and raw beliefs around the presumption of 177

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SIX FEET UNDER

universal heterosexual desire, behaviour and identity’ (Dennis 2003), while other definitions emphasise either ‘the
rules
that force us to conform to hegemonic heterosexual standards’ (‘Guide to Literary and Critical Theory’ 2004) or ‘the
system
of binary gender’ (‘Wikipedia’

2004). Heteronormativity certainly involves rules, systems and practices, but to my mind none of these definitions does enough to emphasise the importance of
norms,
which proves so central to the concept. I have therefore tried to distinguish heteronormativity from both heterosexism and homophobia, as the latter terms emphasise individual acts or practices of discrimination in such a way as to neglect the importance of normalising forces. Accordingly, I have argued for the following theoretical articulation of the term (Chambers 2003: 26).

Heteronormativity means, quite simply, that heterosexuality is the norm, in culture, in society, in politics. Heteronormativity points out the expectation of heterosexuality as it is written into our world. It does not, of course, mean that everyone is straight.

More significantly, heteronormativity is not part of a conspiracy theory that would suggest that everyone must become straight or be made so. The importance of the concept is that it centres on the operation of the norm. Heteronormativity emphasises the extent to which everyone, straight or queer, will be judged, measured, probed and evaluated from the perspective of the heterosexual norm. It means that
everyone and everything is judged from the
perspective of straight
.

Heteronormativity carries a certain disciplinary power with it. This means that it structures the social, political and cultural worlds not just through its impact on ideas and beliefs but also materially, in the way that it operates through institutions, laws and daily practices.

For such practices, we can think of marriage, of course. But we can also think of adoption, immigration and taxes. We can think of gym memberships and car insurance. We can ponder blind dates, bathrooms and Valentine’s Day. And none of this is to mention weddings. Any list of laws, customs and practices like this points to the fact that heteronormativity accrues privilege to those behaviours, practices and relationships that more closely approximate the norm, while stigmatising, marginalising or perhaps rendering invisible those behaviours, relationships and practices that deviate from the norm.

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With these two background contexts in mind, I develop my argument as follows. In the second section I explore the problem (both theoretical and practical) that Claire and Russell face so concretely: how does one know one’s own, or someone else’s, sexuality?

‘The problem of knowing’ lies at the heart of the operation of heteronormativity, and the Russell/Olivier/Claire relationship reveals new and significant dimensions of that problem. I then pose the question of how to ‘read’ someone’s sexuality, leading me to argue, as a contribution to this debate, that Russell forces both the characters around him and the viewers to experience modern categories of sexuality as somehow alienating or inadequate. This latter claim will be demonstrated through an interpretation (a failed ‘reading’, as it were) of the illegibility of Russell’s sexuality, an illegibility that makes his character so very queer. Finally, I conclude with some brief remarks about the political significance of revisiting the closet through a reading of sexuality in
Six Feet Under
, suggesting along the way that the show makes a crucial contribution to emerging cultural politics.