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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The lost souls of HBO's "Six Feet Under" are back for a fifth and final season, as stubborn and repressed and sadly human as ever.
Jun 4, 2005 | "Life is really fucking lonely," Nate blurts out at his 40th birthday gathering, but his pity party is interrupted when guests yell for him from the kitchen. A bird flew in a window and is eating off the kitchen table. It's the same bird that made a few surprise appearances earlier in the night. The first time, everyone agreed to leave it alone, hoping that it would fly out on its own. Each time the bird left, though, it would fly back in through another window in the house.
This time, Nate has had enough. Drunken and angry, he chases the bird around the kitchen with a broom as his shocked guests look on in horror.
If some scenes from the fifth and final season of "Six Feet Under" feel like a lesson in the use of symbolic imagery in short fiction, that makes sense, since the show has always had more in common with literature than it has with most other TV dramas. Just like Raymond Carver or John Updike, creator Alan Ball returns to the missed connections and melancholy of domestic life, dragging sad, unforgettable images into the frame so that the focus rests on what's missing: what the characters aren't saying, what they don't have, what they long for no matter how their circumstances change.
Like many of Carver's or Updike's lead characters, it's impossible to know what Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) wants or even needs. He's finally free from the ghost of Lisa (Lili Taylor), his awful passive-aggressive wife, who we learned at the end of the last season was murdered by her sister's husband after a long-term affair. He's marrying Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), who has straightened out her life and has proved to be a good parent to Maya, Nate's daughter with Lisa. Over a beer with a creepy classmate from high school, Nate claims to feel happy and grateful for all of the good things in his life -- which is, of course, our cue to start worrying about him. Typically, when Nate starts sounding smug, that's when everything begins to fall apart.
So what's he repressing this time? What's eating him alive, underneath that disimpassioned grimace? Before we can find out more, his dead father shows up to grumble about how Nate's entire life is just an ongoing pattern of pretending to feel things. Suddenly Nate snaps into reactive mode, dredging up scathing words for Brenda, open hostility for innocent bystanders, and a continued fascination with anyone tragic or just out of reach or both. Nate's most intimate moments, as usual, are with the dead, the half-dead, and the doomed. By the end of his lovely dance of anger with the bird, we're about ready to chase Nate out of our kitchens once and for all.
Nate's little sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose), who was always a wide-eyed if slightly misguided breath of fresh air in the family, seems to lose wisdom instead of gain it as she gets older. After her successful gallery show, she dropped out of school to focus on her photography full time, claiming that she's learning more now than when she was at school, "that pretentious art barn." Sounds like a wise enough move, right? Did I mention she's also living with Billy (Jeremy Sisto), Brenda's cr-cr-crazy little brother -- you know, he of violent outbursts, incestuous obsessions and generally odd behavior? Sure, Billy seems as placid and satisfied as a college professor, but it's even harder to trust his uneasy peace than it is Nate's.
David (Michael C. Hall) and Keith (Mathew St. Patrick) are more stable and happy than ever, which is why it's time to take on more onerous challenges, most notably the procurement of a child to call their own. Keith favors the notion of a surrogate mother (you really can't help but cringe at the thought of such a plot in the hands of the "Six Feet Under" writers), while David favors adoption, and both are trying to go along with each other's plans while sabotaging them in private. Aside from such sneakiness, though, David and Keith have always been the best couple on the show; unlike the others, they've matured and developed guiding principles of how to treat each other and themselves. Regardless of what hideous turn the surrogate-mother story will take, at least we know these two will stand by each other to the end.
