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Authors: Kim Akass, Janet McCabe
Tags: Non-Fiction
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off Life; and, as Nate looks on in amazement, she mounts him.
Here García captures with gusto a scene simultaneously grotesque and comic.
And García – again working with a Ball script – helmed ‘Perfect Circles’ (3:1), the mind-blowing opening sequence of which begins where season two left off: with Nate under the knife, brain surgeons operating on his arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Things are not going well (the surgeon asks for aneurysm clamps), and on the screen appears:
NATHANIEL SAMUEL FISHER, JR.
1965–2002.
In rapid succession, with seamless editing reminiscent of the final sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , we see the following: Rico sitting at the foot of Nate’s corpse; Claire lying morosely on her bed; Ruth, dressed in a slip, ironing; David at his desk, weeping; Nate, worried he will be ‘late for his own funeral’, impatiently watching his father eat – he is wolfing down fenugreek (an ancient 30
‘ I T ’S NOT TELEVISION, I T ’S MAGIC REALISM ’
medicinal herb, used as an embalming agent, to enhance nursing mother’s milk supply, and as an insect repellent), which he claims to be delicious with maple syrup (he counsels his son not to be in such a hurry, for he now has all the time in the world; ‘Time doesn’t exist anyway,’ he adds). Nate stalks off and finds himself at his funeral, where he sees his family (including Lisa and their baby, Maya) and stares at his own bald corpse on display (‘Damn it, David. I said I wanted to be cremated!’). Moving into a nearby room he watches David trying to teach a near-catatonic Nate to pronounce words like ‘cat’ and ‘duck’. Moving on, he watches himself with Lisa as they play with Maya on the floor. Hearing another baby crying, he discovers – smiling broadly – himself entering the Fisher home with Brenda and their child. Following voices, he looks on as the Fisher family eats dinner and engages in lively conversation about how George W. Bush stole the election and Nate voted for Ralph Nader.
At another, smaller, table, another Nate, his father, an almost unrecognisable mother (blonde and completely bitchy) and sister (not Claire) eat Christmas dinner until interrupted by a customer in need (a very competent, very involved, very conventional-looking Nate handles the call). Again following voices in another room, he finds a redneck version of himself wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and slumped on the couch watching a strange television programme; though it has the look and feel of a soap opera, we hear a laugh track and find the characters talking about ‘Dr Schrödinger’ and Copenhagen /
Copenhagen (the Michael Frayn play about quantum physics? The Danish capital?) and uttering lines like ‘We always end up in a universe in which we exist’ and ‘Everything that can happen does’.
When this last line is uttered, Redneck Nate proclaims, ‘I’ve seen this one before.’ Nate follows his clipboard-carrying father (passing a man obliterating a wall clock with a sledgehammer) into a room with a coffin, full of mourners (all Nate-on-the-operating-table lookalikes, all bald), where he begins to question his son (who wants desperately to know if he is alive or dead):
Do you believe that your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles?
Do you believe that particles move backward and forward in time and appear in all possible places at once?
Do you believe that the universe is constantly splitting into billions of different parallel universes?
31
READING SIX FEET UNDER
Nathaniel avoids giving his son a straight answer, explaining instead that in another universe Nate never existed. His insistence that Nate ‘open the box’ (the coffin) causes the assembled audience to simultaneously don identical sunglasses. (The coffin becomes, in effect, the famous box of Erwin Schrödinger’s reductio ad absurdum gedanken experiment, in which a cat, hidden in a box, may be either alive or
Here García captures with gusto a scene simultaneously grotesque and comic.
And García – again working with a Ball script – helmed ‘Perfect Circles’ (3:1), the mind-blowing opening sequence of which begins where season two left off: with Nate under the knife, brain surgeons operating on his arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Things are not going well (the surgeon asks for aneurysm clamps), and on the screen appears:
NATHANIEL SAMUEL FISHER, JR.
1965–2002.
In rapid succession, with seamless editing reminiscent of the final sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , we see the following: Rico sitting at the foot of Nate’s corpse; Claire lying morosely on her bed; Ruth, dressed in a slip, ironing; David at his desk, weeping; Nate, worried he will be ‘late for his own funeral’, impatiently watching his father eat – he is wolfing down fenugreek (an ancient 30
‘ I T ’S NOT TELEVISION, I T ’S MAGIC REALISM ’
medicinal herb, used as an embalming agent, to enhance nursing mother’s milk supply, and as an insect repellent), which he claims to be delicious with maple syrup (he counsels his son not to be in such a hurry, for he now has all the time in the world; ‘Time doesn’t exist anyway,’ he adds). Nate stalks off and finds himself at his funeral, where he sees his family (including Lisa and their baby, Maya) and stares at his own bald corpse on display (‘Damn it, David. I said I wanted to be cremated!’). Moving into a nearby room he watches David trying to teach a near-catatonic Nate to pronounce words like ‘cat’ and ‘duck’. Moving on, he watches himself with Lisa as they play with Maya on the floor. Hearing another baby crying, he discovers – smiling broadly – himself entering the Fisher home with Brenda and their child. Following voices, he looks on as the Fisher family eats dinner and engages in lively conversation about how George W. Bush stole the election and Nate voted for Ralph Nader.
At another, smaller, table, another Nate, his father, an almost unrecognisable mother (blonde and completely bitchy) and sister (not Claire) eat Christmas dinner until interrupted by a customer in need (a very competent, very involved, very conventional-looking Nate handles the call). Again following voices in another room, he finds a redneck version of himself wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and slumped on the couch watching a strange television programme; though it has the look and feel of a soap opera, we hear a laugh track and find the characters talking about ‘Dr Schrödinger’ and Copenhagen /
Copenhagen (the Michael Frayn play about quantum physics? The Danish capital?) and uttering lines like ‘We always end up in a universe in which we exist’ and ‘Everything that can happen does’.
When this last line is uttered, Redneck Nate proclaims, ‘I’ve seen this one before.’ Nate follows his clipboard-carrying father (passing a man obliterating a wall clock with a sledgehammer) into a room with a coffin, full of mourners (all Nate-on-the-operating-table lookalikes, all bald), where he begins to question his son (who wants desperately to know if he is alive or dead):
Do you believe that your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles?
Do you believe that particles move backward and forward in time and appear in all possible places at once?
Do you believe that the universe is constantly splitting into billions of different parallel universes?
31
READING SIX FEET UNDER
Nathaniel avoids giving his son a straight answer, explaining instead that in another universe Nate never existed. His insistence that Nate ‘open the box’ (the coffin) causes the assembled audience to simultaneously don identical sunglasses. (The coffin becomes, in effect, the famous box of Erwin Schrödinger’s reductio ad absurdum gedanken experiment, in which a cat, hidden in a box, may be either alive or
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