Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (36 page)

PK: Who are the people commenting and coming up with the ideas – the directors? As I think I’ve noticed a musical difference between episodes directed by Alan Ball and others.

RM: The directors, in general, do not have much to say about the music. The writers have more impact on the music; because Alan Ball, being a writer, makes sure they have a lot of say in what goes on. Especially in the first season, there would be references to specific songs in the scripts. There still are.

PK: Some of these can be expensive, but you say it is a low-budget show?

RM: It’s not any more.

PK: The licensed songs are listed on the Website. But I often hear source music that isn’t listed. I have assumed that this is you?

RM: There is some I do. I do a lot of the classical, pseudo-classical music – for the slumber room. I often have to do source that needs to change.

PK: Yes, I have noticed that Ruth seems to listen to classical music.

But is not really a cognoscente?

RM: I think Alan, in particular, wants to promote that she is in a little box, trying to be sophisticated and intellectual. I would say his point on most music is that it is projecting something about the character. Everyone has their kind of music to which they listen.

PK: The emotions you play are very carefully specific. Is this your spotting or does Alan point these out in spotting?

RM: He is very specific. I would think, in the first couple of years, it was pretty clear what he was going for. He would say, ‘This is surreal,’ or ‘This is incredibly sad’ or ‘This is just a heightened awareness with just a taste of sadness’, and I would have to say there is a tad of sadness in everything in the show. I have been accused, by other directors, of having a tad of sadness in anything I do, which I think has helped me a lot in this show, a sort of melancholia, so I can relate to it.

PK: But a lot of the time the music feels emotionally non-committal.

It allows the audience to be more emotional, while you pick your spots – avoiding thirds, or using them at very specific moments?

RM: There are more thirds in the last couple of seasons than the first two. That’s interesting … We are very careful we are not commenting on the emotions. We are trying to provide an environment where the emotion becomes slightly more moving or enhanced.

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PK: So, when he says ‘this is incredibly sad’, that doesn’t mean he wants you to weep all over?

RM: No, whenever I try something, like in the fourth season, when Nate buries his wife. To me, it was so emotional, so operatic that I wrote this, like, Puccini-esque string thing. I thought it was great. I played it for them and they just sat there and said, ‘It’s killing the scene. It’s just too emotional.’ So I went back to what I know works for them, which is the suspended stuff, non-committal piano, a lot of false cues building up to something and not going there, and they’re weeping on the couch, saying: ‘Now you’re letting the characters do it, you’re not commenting on how sad this is.’

PK: It seems towards the end of shows there is almost always a reunion, a sense of resolution between two members of the family that have been at odds, and there you bring a quality of hope in the music.

RM: I always try to make it … as bleak as some of these situations are. Intrinsically, I think this is just life. And there is courage that people have. To me this show has tons of love in it. These characters all love each other, and that’s when you go to that major chord in a low register, that is what you are saying: that this is life.

PK: Does Alan talk about trying to delineate the characters, musically, through your underscore, as opposed to the source?

RM: Well, we have had some character themes. Ruth has a theme.

It started out, in the pilot, when she is opening the kitchen cabinets and asking Nate if he had to leave. That has recurred at times: Ruth feels lost and the family is leaving her. There is also

‘Nate remembering his dad’ theme, from the pilot, where he is going down the stairs to the prep room. And in the pilot, when Nate is on the bus remembering his dad squirting him with the hose. This nostalgia Nate feels for his dad happens a few times through the first two seasons. There is no David theme, or Claire.

PK: And there are times where the music seems to be about time flow, sense of time moving.

RM: I always think of it as trying to suspend time.

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sixteen

Playing in the deep

THOMAS

end of the pool

LYNCH

Like David Fisher in the new HBO series,
Six Feet Under
, when my father died I embalmed him. My brother Pat assisted. We dressed him, put him in a box and soon thereafter buried him. Tim did the obits and drove the hearse. Eddie called the priest and did the printing.

Mary handled the florals and disbursements. Julie organised the luncheon that would follow. Brigid got the pipers and the soloist.

Christopher called the sexton and stonecutter. Colonel Dan, the eldest of us, flew in from his army post in Seattle and assumed command. We all were pall-bearers.

It’s what we do – family and funerals. It is what our father had taught us to do.

Like David Fisher, I have siblings – alas, four times as many –

and a funeral home. In fact, we have four of them. Lynch and Sons is what we call them. And, unlike David and his brother Nate, we’re not just ‘on’ one night a week for an hour. Like the venerable London firms of Leverton and Sons (now eight generations old) or A. France and Sons (who buried Lord Nelson), we are always ‘on’. Whenever someone calls, we answer. Round the clock and round the calendar we’re at the ready. Dinners and Christmases, holidays and family outings, days off and the night’s sleep – every imaginable intimacy has been interrupted by a death in the family, someone else’s family, be they royalty or regulars. Of course, the Levertons are in Camden 207

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Town and the Frances are in Holborn, and the Lynches are, in fact, in Milford, Michigan – real places where the cameras aren’t running and the characters aren’t acting and the corpses aren’t manufactured by the prop makers. The Fisher brothers are in, well, Hollywood.

And it shows.

Six Feet Under
is a caricature – deftly sketched; a cartoon, in the best artistic sense, of life and death and the undertaking trade. As such it traffics in hyperbole and lampoon – a purposeful distortion that helps us see the truth. Still, it is more than just another smart, hip, sure-fire hit show. Beyond the weekly belly laughs and heartbreaks, between which viewers are run up and back the emotional register and are thereby ‘entertained’, there seems a deliberate effort to probe a deeper question:
what should we do when someone dies
?

Before Alan Ball, the prevailing version of matters mortuary, four decades old, was Mitfordian: death as non-event; the undertaker as obsequious ghoul, an extremely unctuous predator with an inordinate interest in dead human bodies and an overpriced box for every occasion. Jessica Mitford’s
American Way of Death,
published in 1963 and again in 1998, made much of the sales pitch and oddments of the funeral biz, most of which she pulled from the pages of
Mortuary
Management
– a trade magazine still being read in
Six Feet Under
.

Of course, Mitford’s own experiences of death in Britain and America – her first daughter’s death in infancy of a fever, her first husband’s death in World War II, and the death of her first son, Nicholas, killed at age 10 in a horrible accident in Oakland, California – were never mentioned in either the original or revisited text. Indeed, Nicholas, who was delivering newspapers on a bike when the bus ran him down, is never even mentioned in the two volumes of Mitford’s autobiography. His death was simply ‘disappeared’ from the story of her life. Decca, as she was known to friends, preferred the stiff upper lip, a good laugh to the good cry and the talk of money to the talk of mourning when it came to deaths in the family. On the maths of caskets she was a good read and reliable source. On the deeper meanings of life and death she seemed, sadly, to have no clue.

Nathaniel Fisher, Sr, is also killed by a bus in California. He’s driving his new hearse to the airport to pick up his first son, Nate, who is coming home for the holidays from Seattle and who, at the moment of his father’s death, is having vigorous and blissfully anonymous sex with a fellow pilgrim in an airport broom closet.

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Like Shakespeare and the book of Genesis, Alan Ball has a knack for getting sex and death, the good laugh and the God-awful, the ridiculous and sublime, in the same scenes.

On the matter of bodies, Ball offers a version that is more fleshy and recognisable. While Mitford preferred the dead kept out of sight and out of mind, Ball brings them front and centre, with all their wounds and foibles and post-mortem scars, to be dealt with before they are disposed of, and afterwards. Every episode begins with an end –

a death from usual to not so usual causes – and a stone with names and dates cut in. And this damaged but not entirely dysfunctional family of funeral directors – Fisher and Sons – is not so ghoulish as they are ordinary neurotics, made extraordinary by living under the one roof with the constant procession of the dead and bereaved.

When Alan Ball was 13, his sister died in a car accident, and his mother’s abject grief was hushed and over-buffered by the fashions in funerals then – to treat grief as a structural weakness, by which people were forever ‘breaking down’ or ‘falling apart’ or ‘going to pieces’. Ball recognises that both the undertakerly tendency to prettify death, with cosmetics and euphemism and warm-fuzzies, and Mitford’s instructions to dispose of them by hasty cremation in the name of convenience and cost efficiency are equally misguided efforts to get around rather than through the difficult business of mortality. Disguise and disappearance are both denials. So is diversion.

What Alan Ball so clearly ‘gets’ is that the funerals are about the living
and
the dead – the talk and the traffic between them. In his show, they constantly confront one another. He lets them occupy the same space, often the unlikely ‘space’ of the Fisher and Sons mortuary, where the living look the dead in the face. Not because we need answers but because, in the face of mortality, we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember. Alan Ball presses us to examine the difference between the fashions and the fundamentals in the business of death.

And it is time we did.

With the erosion of religious, ethnic and social connections and the rituals and metaphors they provide to confront mortality and bereavement, more and more of us must reinvent, from the leftovers and borrowings of our various traditions, the wheel that works the space between the deaths that happen and the deaths that matter.

This is what we do funerals for; not only to dispose of our dead, but to 209

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bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith and hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

I came up burying Presbyterians and Catholics, devout and lapsed, born again and backslidden Baptists, Orthodox Christians, an occasional Zen Buddhist and variously observant Jews. For each of these sets, there were infinite subsets. We had right old Calvinists who drank only single malts and were all good Masons and were mad for the bagpipes, just as we had former Methodists who worked their way up the Reformation ladder after they married into money or made a little killing in the market. We had Polish Catholics and Italian ones, Irish and Hispanic and Byzantine, and Jews who were Jews in the way some Lutherans are Lutheran – for births and deaths and first marriages.

My late father, himself a funeral director, schooled me in the local orthodoxies and their protocols, as I have schooled my sons and daughter, who work with me. There was a kind of comfort, I suppose, in knowing exactly what would be done with you, one’s ethnic and religious identities having established long ago the fashions and the fundamentals for one’s leave-taking. And, while the fashions might change, the fundamental ingredients for a funeral were the same: someone who has quit breathing for ever, some others to whom it apparently matters, and someone else who stands between the quick and dead – priest or shaman, rabbi or imam – and says something like ‘behold, I show you a mystery’.

‘An act of sacred community theatre’, Dr Thomas Long, writer, thinker and theologian, calls this ‘transporting’ of the dead from this life to the next. ‘We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.’ The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb while the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without them. The transport is ritual, ceremonial, metaphor and reality, process and procession, witness and participation.