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'Six Feet Under'! |
HBO's funeral home funfest
becomes a favorite show
By KINNEY LITTLEFIELD
of TheColumnists.com
JUST SO YOU KNOW, I’m rethinking my plans for cremation. Seductive as it is, HBO’s daring funeral drama “Six Feet Under” has made me see caskets in a brand new light.
Not that “Six Feet Under” is solely about beautifying and burying those who pass before us. As its first season unfolded this spring, the seminal series about the fear-fraught, funeral home-owning Fisher family grew to be more about savoring life than death. The show took cogent pot shots at self-involved modern angst--at our plague of emotional isolation and wounded, psychobabbly egocentrism. It made the contentious, uncommunicative Fishers feel hopeful and whole and viable. It de-psychologized them, shredding the hypocrisy of trying to codify what is sane or healthy and what is not.
And the more that happened, the more the Fishers let their foibles hang out, the more I rooted for them and bonded with them. After all, we’re all in this sticky mortal state together.
Increasingly, I want to cozy near “Six Feet’s” sleek coffins on Sunday nights.
Now I’ve just finished previewing the show’s majorly superb season-ender--two fast-flying, back-to-back episodes that brew issues of love, sex, loss, loyalty, family, kids, responsibility and prejudice into an irresistible stew that leaves me sighing for “Six Feet” to return next year. Which it definitely will, in March.
Meanwhile “Six Feet’s” season finale airs 9 p.m. August 19. (Encores are 11:30 p.m. Aug. 21, 9 p.m. Aug. 22 and midnight Aug. 23, Eastern and Pacific time. Check your local cable listings).
And I know I’ll stay amped about this delicately subversive series until its 2002 debut.
I mean right now I’m
ready to pry up the nearest coffin lid, curl up inside its shiny
satin interior and let soulful mortician Federico (Freddy Rodriguez)
primp, preen and coiff me as no one else can do. I promise to
hold still. A Federico fix is almost better than sex.
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cast usually gathers for a funeral at least once, yet the show still isn't morbid. |
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No wonder it is, considering the kind of sex the other characters sample on a regular basis.
In the show’s premiere Nate (Peter Krause of “Sports Night”) had no sooner returned to Los Angeles for his father’s funeral--a funeral director’s funeral, ha!--when troubled Brenda (Aussie Rachel Griffiths) got her weirdo hooks into him. Since then they’ve had lots of rewarding sex and indulged in flaming fights that Brenda relentlessly sparks--when the two aren’t stalked by Brenda’s overly possessive brother Billy (Jeremy Sisto), that is.
Brenda is intrusive and insensitive and bitchy and grating. She pushes Nate’s buttons in bad ways. Mostly I wish she’d shut up.
Which means Griffiths is a pretty fine actor, if a shade too flat and pat for my taste.
Billy is a paranoid schizophrenic whose relationship to Brenda looks darned incestuous--at least emotionally so. But hey, their parents are both shrinks, so of course the kids are cuckoo. No wonder Billy tried to kill manipulative Mom and Dad. No wonder he takes covert photos of Nate and Brenda in the clutches and is jealously lusting after Nate’s blood in the season finale.
Then there’s Nate’s brother David (Michael C. Hall) who stayed in the family funeral biz while Nate worked at a food co-op before Daddy’s demise. David is gay and until recently was in the closet. For a while he had a most excellent and hunky cop-boyfriend named Keith (Mathew St. Patrick). David also has a life-threatening penchant for unprotected sex with strangers.
Fisher mom Ruth (Frances Conroy) is a prissily repressed redhead who wears dowdy ’50s clothes, cooks big-meat meals in a ’50s-styled kitchen and is vaguely excited by her mild-mannered hairdresser-lover Hiram (Ed Begley, Jr.). Vaguely, that is, until she accidentally downs David’s stash of Ecstasy on a camping trip with her coiffeur. Ya-hoo!
Teen-age daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) completes the Fisher clan. As Claire, Ambrose is marvelous--pouty and stubborn and sullen and slouchy just like the real teen thing. Claire’s car is a vintage hearse and she has a rebellious boyfriend named Gabe (Eric Balfour) who likes to have his toes sucked--in the hearse. Could be good, I guess.
Leave it to executive producer Alan Ball--screenwriter of that supreme satire of middle-class life “American Beauty”--to so sharply dissect the strange, roiling connections between sex and death.
In the constricted world of “Six Feet Under” sex is part escape, part refuge, part temporary suicide. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s the characters’ clench-jawed secrets that have done the greatest damage--David’s fear of his own sexual orientation; Ruth’s long-stuffed fear of taking her place in the world; her dead husband’s secret life in a secret room in another part of the city; Billy’s murderous machinations and his yen for Brenda and his uptight family’s denial of same.
By refusing to embrace reality and celebrate life all these folks have killed themselves a little.
(OK, I can’t resist
the urge to psychologize).
It’s an apt message for weary, worn and wrinkled baby boomers
who dote on HBO. After all, Ball is in his forties--when the
reality of limited time on earth really strikes.
No wonder a funeral home is such a perfect setting. Emotional rigor mortis rules. The Fisher family tiptoes around each other carefully, in hushed tones, as if in the presence of the deceased.
That “Six Feet” is set in sunny L.A. is a great surreal twist. The show resonates with the pall-of-death irony of Nathanael West’s apocalyptic La La Land novel “Day of the Locust” and Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One,” a savage take on Tinseltown’s funeral biz.
Occasionally Ball’s series taps into tougher stuff--the primal terror that tore Joanne Woodward’s psyche apart in the classic 1957 film of schizophrenia “The Three Faces of Eve.” As a child Woodward’s character looked into a relative’s dead face in an open casket and came unglued.
Death be not pretty at all. Yet death is us. Time for Federico’s gentle, magic hands.
“Six Feet” also goes other places where many prime-time dramas refuse to tread--the realms of spirituality and life after death.
I’m not talking the feel-good platitudes of “Touched By An Angel.” “Six Feet’s” season-ender offers a sensitive scene in which David kneels and prays wholeheartedly. It plays ever so true.
And the way Papa Fisher (Richard Jenkins) wanders around the family digs in his deceased state, waxing philosophical with various family members, has grown on me tremendously. Sometimes he’s simply a brief, silent, watchful presence. He makes me feel safe.
Of course Ball and cohorts can’t resist a bit of gallows humor, like guest star Illeana Douglas (“Action”) playing a temp mortician who puts way too much sexual fervor into her work. Yet “Six Feet” never indulges in the ghoulish relish of the various weirdo medical examiners on “Homicide: Life on the Street.” It has more reverence.
I also dig the way each episode, at least this season, starts with the demise--sad, untimely, brutal, whatever--of an individual who ends up in the Fishers’ front parlor, changing the family for the better as a result.
And what a cast. All have made their conflicted characters endearing. Hall plays slightly pompous but with a forthright, yearning heart. Krause is the charmer, the tease. Conroy for many episodes seemed more spacey than Griffiths. As she has started to let her tangerine hair down however--both figuratively and literally--her brittle, bridled delivery has became a neat counterpoint to her passionate core.
Yeah, when you get down to it, there’s something quite honest and alive about dealing with our inevitable end and its trappings--with caskets and viewings and wakes.
Last year I was saying. "Oh, just burn me and throw me in the ocean when my time comes."
Now I’m definitely craving a little TLC “Six Feet Under”-style. Make mine a glossy mahogany. I’ll be ticking the minutes till the second season of “Six Feet Under” next year.
© 2001 by Kinney Littlefield. The photos are © 2001 by HBO.
You can comment
on this column or contact Kinney Littlefield with an email to:
talkback@thecolumnists.com
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