Grave affairs: HBO's 'Six Feet Under'

Christian Century, Nov 2, 2004 by Thomas Lynch

LIKE DAVID FISHER in the award-winning HBO series Six Feet Under, when may lather died, I embalmed him. My brother Pat assisted. We dressed him, put trim 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 finances. Julie organized 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 pallbearers. Everyone played what part he or she could. Our circle of friends played their parts too.

It's what we do, we brothers and sisters--funerals. It is what our father taught us to do.

Like David Fisher I have siblings--alas, four times as many--and a funeral home. In fact, we have half a dozen of them. Lynch & Sons is what we call them. And unlike David and his brother Nate, we're not just on one night a week--Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO. We're 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 our night's sleep--every imaginable intimacy has been interrupted by a death in the family, someone else's family. Our funeral homes are in Michigan--in real places where the cameras aren't running and the characters aren't acting and the corpses aren't manufactured by the prop-makers. Fisher & Sons and Six Feet Under hail from Hollywood. And it shows.

Six Feet Under is a caricature--deftly sketched--a cartoon, in the best artistic sense, of sex and death and matters mortuary. 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 down the emotional register and are thereby "entertained," there seems a deliberate effort to probe much deeper questions--What should me do when someone dies? What are the boundaries of love and grief? What are the dynamics of memory and desire, flesh and faith, bodies and souls?

Before Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty and the creator of Six Feet Under, the prevailing cartoon of funeral directors, four decades old, was Mitfordian. Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death, which sold 5 million copies in 1963, made much of the sales pitch and oddments of the funeral biz, most of which she pulled from the pages of Mortuary Management--a California-based trade magazine still being read in Six Feet Under.

But where Mittford focused mostly on the math of caskets and the money issues, Ball pursues the meaning of things. Where Mitford saw flowers, monuments and other funereal accessories as needless expenses, Ball considers each as metaphor, symbol, symptom and substance. Where Mitford kept asking, "How much?" Alan Ball keeps wondering, "How come?" Where Mitford seemed bothered by all the "stuff," Ball is intrigued by the subtext. Where Mitford kept count of costs and profits, Ball keeps tally of what counts, what lasts, what loss is and what really matters. And where Mitford preferred to keep dead bodies out of sight and out of mind, the better to maintain her stiff upper lip and jaunty British humor (the bodies of her first husband, her first daughter, her first son and herself were all "disappeared," according to her family), in Six Feet Under the dead are everywhere.

So are the souls.

Every episode begins with an end. In the very first, Nathaniel Fisher the Elder, founder and father of Fisher & Sons, is killed when the new hearse he's driving is broad-sided by a bus. He's en route to the airport to pick up his son and namesake, Nate, who is coming home for the holidays from Seattle and who, while his father is colliding with the bus, is having vigorous and blissfully anonymous sex with a fellow pilgrim in an airport broom closet. Like Shakespeare and the Book of Genesis, Alan Ball has a master's gift for getting sex and death, the good laugh and the good cry, the godsend and god-awful, the ridiculous and sublime, all in the same scene. And like Dickens, he loves his ghosts. The raucous soul of Nathaniel Fisher has roamed at will through the four seasons of the series since his demise, delivering up doses of wisdom and wry humor, happily haunting the places and the people he loved.

When Man Ball was 13, his sister died in a ear 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 folks were for "breaking down" or "falling apart" or "going to pieces." Ball recognizes that both the undertakerly tendency to prettify' death, with cosmetics and euphemisms and warm fuzzies, and Mifford's suggestion 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.