Read Online Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For by Kim Akass, Janet McCabe - Free Book Online
Authors: Kim Akass, Janet McCabe
Tags: Non-Fiction
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TELEVISION, I T ’S MAGIC REALISM ’
believe in and have “real” experiences of ghosts. Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It’s not a thought experiment. It’s not speculation. Magic realism endeavours to show us the world through other eyes’ (Rogers:2004).
The fantastic offers us a world, as we have just seen, where ‘we are uncertain whether we are witness to the natural or the supernatural’
(ibid.). Magic realism is not agnostic. The supernatural exists; it is real, at least for a given subject. In a revealing scene in ‘The Plan’
(2:3), David and Nate talk of their father:
Nate: Sometimes I kinda feel like dad’s around. Do you ever?
David: Nope.
But the viewer knows that neither Nate nor David is being quite honest: both Fisher boys communicate with their dead father. Plenty of ghosts are seen by others: Nathaniel, killed in the pilot, is a regular, appearing to the principal characters; many a loquacious corpse refuses to go gentle into that good night. With the exception of Dorothy Sheedy’s delusional, fatal misreading of floating sex dolls (‘In Case of Rapture’, 4:2), Six Feet Under seldom debunks the alternate realities to which its characters are privy. ‘ Six Feet Under ,’ Laura Miller observes, ‘is remarkable precisely because it refuses to instruct us on how to feel about its characters, something no other TV show does’
(2002).
If Six Feet Under ’s narrative DNA, including the magic realism
‘chromosome’, is contained in its opening credits, its ‘genetics’ may be more than merely metaphorical. Can it be merely coincidental that the son of Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate (1982) and magic realism’s patriarch, is one of Six Feet Under ’s directors? Rodrigo García has directed four episodes to date, including the second and third season premieres. It will come as no surprise that some of the series’ most memorable, and most magical, moments are his. García directed ‘The Room’ (1:6), scripted by Christian Taylor, in which investigating a receipt he finds among his father’s records leads Nate to a mysterious back room at a restaurant the owner provided Nathaniel as payment for funeral services rendered. Sitting in his father’s sparsely furnished, tawdry hideaway, Nate discerns that it had evidently served as a refuge, a hang-out, a place for his dad to get away from it all, and he imagines what he might have done there. In mind-screen we share his reverie: Nathaniel 29
READING SIX FEET UNDER
smokes pot, dances and plays air guitar, hangs out with bikers, receives a blow job from a prostitute, fires repeatedly – Lee-Harvey-Oswald-style – a high-powered rifle with a sight out of the room’s lone window. The unfolding montage is orchestrated to the words (sung by Ted Nugent) of the Amboy Dukes’ 1968 acid rock classic
‘Journey to the Center of the Mind’: ‘Leave your cares behind /
Come with us and find / The pleasures of a journey to the center of the mind / Come along if you care / Come along if you dare / Take a ride to the land inside of your mind / Beyond the seas of thought
/ Beyond the realm of what / Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not.’ García succeeds in the difficult feat of taking us inside two minds, father and son, one imagining the other, each real in the eye of the beholder.
García directed from a script by Ball, ‘In the Game’ (2:1), in which Nate unwittingly takes Ecstasy before a dinner party at the Fisher house. Abandoned by Brenda and his family, who find his drugged high spirits hard to take, he finds himself late at night alone with his father, who introduces him to two friends: the Grim Reaper (Stanley Kamel), an urbane white man smoking a cigar, and Mama Life (Cleo King), a large, jovial African-American woman. Clearly old pals, the two play Chinese chequers. But Death cannot keep his hands
believe in and have “real” experiences of ghosts. Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It’s not a thought experiment. It’s not speculation. Magic realism endeavours to show us the world through other eyes’ (Rogers:2004).
The fantastic offers us a world, as we have just seen, where ‘we are uncertain whether we are witness to the natural or the supernatural’
(ibid.). Magic realism is not agnostic. The supernatural exists; it is real, at least for a given subject. In a revealing scene in ‘The Plan’
(2:3), David and Nate talk of their father:
Nate: Sometimes I kinda feel like dad’s around. Do you ever?
David: Nope.
But the viewer knows that neither Nate nor David is being quite honest: both Fisher boys communicate with their dead father. Plenty of ghosts are seen by others: Nathaniel, killed in the pilot, is a regular, appearing to the principal characters; many a loquacious corpse refuses to go gentle into that good night. With the exception of Dorothy Sheedy’s delusional, fatal misreading of floating sex dolls (‘In Case of Rapture’, 4:2), Six Feet Under seldom debunks the alternate realities to which its characters are privy. ‘ Six Feet Under ,’ Laura Miller observes, ‘is remarkable precisely because it refuses to instruct us on how to feel about its characters, something no other TV show does’
(2002).
If Six Feet Under ’s narrative DNA, including the magic realism
‘chromosome’, is contained in its opening credits, its ‘genetics’ may be more than merely metaphorical. Can it be merely coincidental that the son of Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate (1982) and magic realism’s patriarch, is one of Six Feet Under ’s directors? Rodrigo García has directed four episodes to date, including the second and third season premieres. It will come as no surprise that some of the series’ most memorable, and most magical, moments are his. García directed ‘The Room’ (1:6), scripted by Christian Taylor, in which investigating a receipt he finds among his father’s records leads Nate to a mysterious back room at a restaurant the owner provided Nathaniel as payment for funeral services rendered. Sitting in his father’s sparsely furnished, tawdry hideaway, Nate discerns that it had evidently served as a refuge, a hang-out, a place for his dad to get away from it all, and he imagines what he might have done there. In mind-screen we share his reverie: Nathaniel 29
READING SIX FEET UNDER
smokes pot, dances and plays air guitar, hangs out with bikers, receives a blow job from a prostitute, fires repeatedly – Lee-Harvey-Oswald-style – a high-powered rifle with a sight out of the room’s lone window. The unfolding montage is orchestrated to the words (sung by Ted Nugent) of the Amboy Dukes’ 1968 acid rock classic
‘Journey to the Center of the Mind’: ‘Leave your cares behind /
Come with us and find / The pleasures of a journey to the center of the mind / Come along if you care / Come along if you dare / Take a ride to the land inside of your mind / Beyond the seas of thought
/ Beyond the realm of what / Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not.’ García succeeds in the difficult feat of taking us inside two minds, father and son, one imagining the other, each real in the eye of the beholder.
García directed from a script by Ball, ‘In the Game’ (2:1), in which Nate unwittingly takes Ecstasy before a dinner party at the Fisher house. Abandoned by Brenda and his family, who find his drugged high spirits hard to take, he finds himself late at night alone with his father, who introduces him to two friends: the Grim Reaper (Stanley Kamel), an urbane white man smoking a cigar, and Mama Life (Cleo King), a large, jovial African-American woman. Clearly old pals, the two play Chinese chequers. But Death cannot keep his hands
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