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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
HBO's "Six Feet Under" ends its second season with a series of soap-opera devices -- but refuses to preach, lie or moralize about its most painful subject: Family life.
Jun 5, 2002 | Coming to terms with our mortality might just be impossible, and perhaps that's why the characters in Alan Ball's HBO series "Six Feet Under" haven't been spending much time talking to the dead lately. In the show's just-concluded second season, the members of the Fisher family have had fewer and fewer fantasy moments in which the people they're embalming in their funeral home appear before them, fully animated and perched on the edge of the gurney to deliver a few choice observations about Life. The Fishers' late paterfamilias, Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins), had been the most frequent manifestor, sometimes dispensing sardonic wisdom to his children -- Nate (Peter Krause), David (Michael C. Hall) and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) -- sometimes merely taunting his two sons with how little they knew about him.
Lately, though, Nate has been making his own whirlwind tour through the valley of the shadow of death, courtesy of a cluster of wayward blood vessels on his brain. Nathaniel's appearances on the show have been limited to other characters' memories, and the bodies processed by Fisher & Sons Funeral Home have stayed on the table, their lips discreetly sealed. It's as if Nate's own closer contact with the prospect of death gives the lie to such visions, which are really just a way of fudging the fact that the dead are irretrievable.
Nate is ending this year's season on the brink of cranial surgery after shepherding a disagreeable cancer patient through the man's last moments, and he seems finally to be grasping that the dead are absolutely alien, the exact opposite of ourselves, without desire but also without fear. When we conjure them in our minds, hoping for a bit of advice or comfort, we can only do it by dragging them back into the mess of living, where no one knows much of anything and muddling through is largely a matter of ignoring where it all ends. Wherever the dead have gone, it's someplace unimaginable, at least to us. The dying (which is really all of us) are another matter.
Wandering through the Fisher home and workplace, Nate picks up a photo of himself and David as children with Nathaniel. Cue the music; he looks around, over his shoulder, but no Nathaniel. Nate's finally left with no one but his mother Ruth to turn to for comfort. It may be the only time she's gotten what she wanted from one of her kids all year.
Perilous brain surgery is, of course, a soap-opera staple, and underneath its veneer of black humor, profanity and sexual bravado, "Six Feet Under" is a soap opera -- but then, what TV drama series worth watching faithfully isn't? ("The Sopranos" simply proved that if you add enough violence men will watch a soap, and marvel over the fact that "it's really about family" as if there were some other thing it could be about.) In the ongoing Fisher saga this year we've had such other classic soap devices as the sudden appearance of a baby (Nate's, by a former roommate with whom he had a one-night stand), a surprise inheritance (for Freddy Rodriguez's Rico; it will allow the Latino embalmer to purchase a 25 percent share in Fisher & Sons and save the company from closure) and the startling return of the dangerous Billy (Jeremy Sisto), the crazy but now medicated brother of Nate's girlfriend Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), from the institution where he'd been socked away.
It's Brenda's own personal meltdown, however, that's provided the most arresting spectacle this year. Griffiths earned her supporting-actress Golden Globe from last season all over again in portraying Brenda's drift into sexual compulsion: First a voyeuristic friendship with a call girl, then some hypnotically sleazy fantasies, then a hand job for one of her massage clients, some frottage with a stranger in a tony boutique and then finally a few zombified trysts, including one with two creepily blank surfers.
