SALON

Six Feet Under

Wednesday, Jul 27, 2005 5:18 PM UTC

“This wasn’t planned, you know”

When Nate hit the floor, "Six Feet Under" skidded off the road into total darkness, and took our psyches with it.

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Narm!

You heard that right: Narm!

You know, Narm! as in, “My arm is numb!” as in, “I might just be dying right before your eyes!” as in, “I made you hate me all season just so you could take a little sadistic joy in my untimely death!”

Yes, fans of “Six Feet Under” gasped in horror and delight last week when Nate, aka the Man We Love to Hate, fell to the floor and hit his head with a bang. These were his last words, before he fell:

“My arm is numb. Numb arm! Numarm! Narm! NARM!”

It was the last scene of the episode, shocking to the point of feeling slightly abusive. There was no warning. One minute Nate is putting on his clothes after cheating on Brenda with Maggie, that faux-pure Bad News Jane. The next minute, he’s on the floor, eyes wide open, and there’s a horror soundtrack playing just to let you know it’s serious. Suddenly, all of our collective sadistic fantasies are realized. It’s as if our worst, most vengeful urges willed the scene into existence.

See how those who watch way too much TV develop boundary issues? But more important, should we feel guilty now that Nate is either dead (no, I don’t have any privileged information beyond what we all saw in the last scene of last Sunday’s episode) or he’s a vegetable or he’s about to die?

OK, I’m just guessing. But when someone’s arm feels numb, and then their eyes roll back in their head and they hit the floor, and then lie there with their eyes open? That’s not a very good sign. And really, as many of us who’ve known people to die of heart attacks and strokes know all too well, there’s nothing more shocking or sudden or terrible than a sudden, irreversible trauma to the circulatory system.

Which is probably why it made me laugh. But also, this is Nate we’re talking about. If it were Claire, or Ruth, or, God forbid, David or Keith, that would be a whole different story. I really want them to be happy. I want Claire to marry a lawyer, oddly enough. I want David and Keith to raise those sweet little delinquents. I want Ruth to find love with Ed Begley Jr. And if the price I have to pay for their happiness is seeing Nate ripped from life at the least convenient moment possible, so be it.

First of all, that’s the whole point of the show, to demonstrate the arbitrary and unavoidable nature of death, to drum home the fact that death has terrible timing, to shove death in our faces when every other part of our culture is so adamantly opposed to acknowledging its existence. Every new season of sports and television, every latest media circus, every sizzlin’ summer sale flashes in our faces, taking our minds off the fact that we’re just a faulty valve or a weak blood vessel away from muttering “Narm!” and dropping off the face of the planet.

Second, Nate has always been an ingrate. What’s brilliant about him, as a character, is that he embodies the very worst of the so-called sensitive, liberal, enlightened, privileged white world. He has a cushy job, a smart, beautiful wife, a reasonably sane family, and an adorable daughter who never babbles on tediously like most toddlers. So what does Nate do? He goes crawling off to screw a relative stranger and tricks himself into believing that his infidelity is a piece of some greater search for meaning.

In other words, Nate embodies all of our selfish urges and all of our pathetic rationalizations for indulging those urges. He’s a big, sad child who finds it impossible to connect with those who actually matter to him, who are in his life, who care, and instead goes running after wholesome-seeming strangers whose complicated needs aren’t apparent to him yet.

But here’s the sick thing: Nate has, from the very beginning, served as the perfect blank protagonist onto which the viewer is meant to project him- or herself. The degree to which we despise Nate is directly proportional to the degree to which we hate our own selfish, lazy, endlessly rationalizing selves.

In other words, Narm! Narm represents the self-destruction that lies ahead for the self-hating! It’s the tender, chewy moral of “Six Feet Under,” a show that’s painstakingly avoided morals until now: Those who endlessly look inward, who gnaw relentlessly on their own worldview, who sneak around instead of being honest, who blame themselves for everything instead of trusting their instincts, who torture themselves instead of trying to experience life more fully or trying to give a little more of themselves to others, those modern negative nellies are destined to waste their time here, then die in some lonely, debased manner at the worst possible moment.

The only unfortunate thing is that Nate will likely appear and speak to members of his family after he dies, when, in real life, all they’d be left with is his last incoherent garbled Narm! Oh yeah, and his last words before he noticed his arm, which were: “This wasn’t planned, you know.”

Ha ha! Narm, damn it! Feel like being grouchy to your mom? Feel like snapping at your kids? Feel like fucking your secretary? Feel like beating yourself up for every single neurotic thought in your head? Narm! The end is near. Narm! Better have another slice of pizza. Narm! Better be nice to the people who put up with you. Narm! Better walk the dog. Better have another glass of wine. Better turn off the TV set.

Narm! Because you never really know, do you? Narm! A cry of anguish or a cry of celebration? A cry of pain and regret, or a life-affirming squeal of joy? It’s anyone’s guess! Narm narm narm!

Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky.

Wednesday, Jun 1, 2011 12:32 PM UTC

10 year time capsule: “Sex and the City” on aging gracefully

In a season that began with a life crisis, Darren Star's show proved it could hold its own with HBO big boys

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10 year time capsule: Carrie Bradshaw: one of 20th century television's most iconic figures.

June 3, 2001: Carrie Bradshaw and her three best friends hit HBO’s run … er … airways once again, beginning the fourth season right as Sarah Jessica Parker’s character was turning the big 3-5. “[It's] a landmark age for women,” Parker said during an interview about the episode, (titled “The Agony and the Ex-Tacy,” woof), “It makes her think about choices she makes and what she doesn’t want to repeat.”

But it wasn’t just aging wombs that were being counted down on “Sex and the City.” As they embarked on their fourth season, the show had definitely found itself a niche in women who both related and longed to live the lives of the lawyer, the writer, the sexpot, and the Connecticut princess in New York. But it was also an HBO show, straddled in a time slot right after “The Sopranos” and before a quirky new dramedy called “Six Feet Under” premiering that spring.  Over the years, these women would struggle to stay relevant; not only in the dog-eat-dog NYC where young waifs ruled supreme, but as television characters whose lives were just a tad more frivolous than the Soprano’s or the Fishers’. 

And you know what? They pulled it off. Say what you will about “He’s Just Not That Into You“  or Liza singing “All the Single Ladies” in that terrible movie sequel; “Sex and the City” had — has!–  one of the largest influences on popular culture, specifically because it didn’t market itself as an HBO show. (You know what I mean, everyone who canceled their subscription after “The Wire” ended.) The issues touched on by Carrie and co. weren’t all schmaltzy girl stuff either: not only did it earn a place in Time’s top 100 list of best television shows alongside its heavyweight network brethren, but I know just as many straight guys who enjoy the show as much as I do. I’m not an obsessive fan and I never think which character I would be (Samantha…no, Charlotte! No…who is that one that fell out of a window at a cocktail party?) but I can appreciate the clever writing, if not the constant yapping about shoes and dinner reservations. Sometimes I thought those women would have been happiest if they were all engaged to Patrick Bateman. But then I realize I’m just bitter, because collectively I don’t think I’ve had four close female friends over the course of my life. Let alone in New York City. Bitches be scheming.

So love them for what they were or hate what’d become of them, it’s impossible not to see the “SATC” franchise as a force to be reckoned with — and by extension, the women themselves. Look how far these ladies have come: from New York to Abu Dhabi and back again. And hey, if the price is right, maybe one day you’ll see Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda toasting their 80th birthdays in space with a bunch of zero-gravity pink martinis and hunky, underage guys.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Friday, Apr 8, 2011 12:40 PM UTC

Saved by Pop Culture: How “Six Feet Under” killed my depression

Sometimes salvation comes from strange places. For me, it was HBO's saddest family

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Saved by Pop Culture: How Gallows humor from the Fisher family.

After a painful breakup, there’s always “that song” or “that band” that you can’t listen to anymore, because they are painful reminders of your former relationship. But I’ve always wondered about the good pieces of pop culture that survives past a relationship or other tragedy. You know, like the show you never would have watched unless your boyfriend made you, and which ultimately lasted longer than your dating history? Or that bluegrass band you only started to appreciate after your dad passed?

While we associate grief with a sense of loss — with throwing things away or storing them someplace and never looking at them again — we never talk about how these same artifacts can actually help us get through tough times. That’s what the new regular feature “Saved by Pop Culture” is about: those songs, movies, and shows that might be watched by millions but are important to you in a way that’s totally your own.

I never saw “Six Feet Under” when it was on TV. I’m terrible like that with TV, because while I am a total movie snob, I have never scraped up enough cash post-college to buy a set and pay for cable. Especially for things like HBO and Showtime, which, let’s face it, is where the good shit is at.

So no “Sopranos” for me, no “The Wire,” and no “True Blood,” a show that everyone told me  I would love because it was about vampires and sex. I thought it sounded hokey in a total Anne Rice way, until I started dating a boy from New Orleans who swore by Sookie Stackhouse. I fell hard for the boy, and he had fallen hard for Bon Temps, so eventually he wore me down enough to watch the opening sequence of Alan Ball’s overwrought Southern gothic. Of course, I was hooked instantly. It was funny, it didn’t take itself too seriously, and — at least for the first season — it was scary as hell.

Then around Friday the 13th (I know), I lost my job and that boy on the same day. I was broke, and the guy who had introduced me to the vampire porn show had gone back to New Orleans himself (maybe to meet his own version of Sookie?). It was one of those breakups that hit you incredibly hard, almost more so for the relationship having been so short. I was still infatuated when he left, and I was devastated about his departure with an intensity that freaked me out. Didn’t I have other stuff to think about?

Apparently not. After watching the second season of “True Blood” for the third time, I realized it was time to move on. Of course, “moving on” in my case didn’t mean that I stopped obsessively making late-night calls to this guy, it meant taking a lot of pain medication that I had stockpiled from a previous surgery and tooth removal, lying in bed all day, and starting up another show. I decided on “Six Feet Under,” because I figured that since it was also written by Ball and was about death and dying, it would be like watching a longer, more boring version of “True Blood” while I slowly faded away.

Here’s a piece of advice: When you’re teetering on the brink of a major depression, watching five seasons of an intensely personal study in grief and death is not going to make you feel better. The fact that every episode began with an illustration of  how death can take you at any time, any place (while diving in a pool, getting cut in half in an elevator door, or getting hit by frozen human waste falling from airplanes) didn’t make me appreciate the value of life, it scared the hell out of me. It also reinforced my belief that never getting out of bed was probably the safest way to exist, for the time being.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected a show about a funeral parlor to be really uplifting. But I cried during that first episode (Oh god, the phrase “buddy boy” still gets me to this day) and didn’t stop bawling until Claire drove away in the car that wasn’t a green hearse, heading toward New York and imagining, in the best montage in the history of television, how everyone she knows will die.

(Warning: Spoilers? Kind of? Although at this point you can’t blame me for ruining a show that’s been over for six years.)

I went through the entire show in about a month and a half, which is actually a pretty solid feat, considering that the show had 63 episodes, each an hour long. I told my concerned friends calling to check up that I was fine, I was hanging out with my friend Brenda, or Claire. (Ha.) I ordered in Chinese at night, slept all day, told my parents I was sick, and continued to buy meds I wasn’t prescribed from shady guys on Craigslist. I don’t think I knew it at the time, but I was watching “Six Feet Under” in the hopes that I’d get depressed enough to kill myself.

Fortunately, that’s not the effect the Fisher family had on me. This dark little family who dealt with mortality every day, whose business was literally trading in death (including their own) slowly, over the course of those painful six weeks, taught me more about appreciating life than the past four years of my own had.

I know, that sounds terrible. That I can’t cry in real life over the death of a pet or family member, but a show about imaginary people leading imaginary lives with their imaginary brain tumors can make me sob until I reach catharsis. And at first, I was really just crying for myself, for my own selfish reasons about everything just sucking and look, we all die in the end so what does it matter anyway? I was Claire in season four, where she’s a real asshole. I was Billy when he was off his meds. I was Brenda’s entire narcissistic personality disorder. Then two things happened.

The first was this one really, really odd night when in addition of my usual cocktail of antidepressants and Percocets I found an old pill of Ecstasy that I had been saving to do with the guy from New Orleans. In a moment of sheer, stupid rage I took it. (“That will show him!” I said to my completely empty apartment.) I knew I was courting a hospital trip, and I didn’t care. I turned on “Six Feet Under,” and it was the episode where Nate takes two aspirin before a family dinner. At first Nate (and the audience) can’t figure out why he’s acting so punch-drunk: spilling over the wine, touching his girlfriend Brenda’s arm in tactile wonder, laughing too loudly. Meanwhile, it slowly dawns on his brother David that Nate may have accidentally taken the Ecstasy tabs he had hidden in the aspirin. Odd coincidence, but all I remember at the time was wishing I could feel as happy as Nate did while inadvertently rolling. All I felt was more of that self-indulgent sadness welling up. Also, my sheets were really, really smooth.

When Nate tries to sleep off his trip, he dreams about his dad, Nathaniel Sr., which isn’t that odd considering that despite dying in the first act, the actor Richard Jenkins made an appearance in almost every “Six Feet Under.” It was all very “Twin Peaks,” with Nate meeting both Death and Life playing poker with his father:

Say what you will about that speech at the end — “All that lives will live forever, only the shell passes away” — but what really got me was Nate’s head on the chair, his dad stroking his head.

“Dad, I’m high. I know I’m high.”

Then Nate wakes up. I didn’t. (Not because I died or anything, just because I had never fallen asleep.) But I was really freaked out. How did the show know I was on drugs??? And then, like, speak to me through the screen?

I can accurately pinpoint that moment as the turning point when I stopped caring about my own stupid problems so I could focus more intently on the Fishers’. But that’s good escapism, right? People immerse themselves in the lives of characters crafted by brilliant writers, so their lives both reflect and outshine our own.

So skip ahead a couple seasons (blah blah Lisa disappears, who cares, Claire finally hooks up with Jeremy Sisto’s Billy, which I had been waiting for since forever, Ruth keeps sleeping her way around town while acting like an anorexic Piper Laurie in “Carrie,” David and Keith have a completely realistic and three-dimensional relationship which is the first of its kind for a gay couple on TV and I kind of don’t notice, Brenda continues to be the worst, etc., etc.,) and Nate has that seizure at his sister-in-law’s place. Or heart attack. Or brain aneurysm. Whatever. And everyone thinks, “Okay, we’ve seen this before, the ‘Nate is going to die’ thing,” because it was the cliffhanger in season two. And then he wakes up at the hospital, and he and David talk, and he has one of his dreams again. Except it’s a little weirder than the other dream sequences we’ve seen on “Six Feet.” Like instead of Nate walking around and talking to his dad, it’s him and David smoking weed in a van, going to the beach. And David is trying to tell Nate not to go in the water, but he does, and then David is left alone.

And then David wakes up because it’s been his dream all along, and he’s really alone. Nate has died.

Now, on “Six Feet Under,” people died for no reason all the time. Wasn’t that the point? Death is random, life is random, and even if you know all of this you’ll still take everyone in your world for granted because that’s how human beings work?

Still. Even knowing that. Even with every episode about death, and seeing people react to a loved one’s passing, I was not ready for the death of Nate Fisher. I actually just stopped watching the show, despite the continuation of episodes (apparently TV, like life, doesn’t just stop when someone dies). I was furious, because you can’t just kill off a show’s main character for no reason! No reason! There was no reason Nate should have died, it was so pointless and stupid.

I hated that show for killing off Nate, because Nate was us, he was our window into the world of “Six Feet Under.” The fact that the story could continue without him would be to admit that life could go on without us. Without me. And then, after I begrudgingly watched the last couple of episodes, some of the saddest ever on TV (besides maybe the last episode of “MASH”), it was devastating in a way that the passing of Nathaniel Sr. on the show’s premiere wasn’t. Watching a family suffer that much wasn’t even television (it was HBO?). I had never had anyone close to me die, but suddenly I felt like I was intruding on my best friend’s house as his family just completely lost it.

“This can’t happen,” I thought to myself, “My parents can’t ever go through this. What the fuck was I thinking?”

Wanting to die is inherently selfish, though there are always degrees of personal pain involved that might make the decision understandable. But what the hell had I been doing to myself? And more importantly, why? Because some guy who liked “True Blood” moved out of town? Because after three weeks, I thought I was “in love” and now life wasn’t worth it? I’ll cut myself some slack, because I had never seen death up close and personal, and hey, I’m not saying that a fictional person’s pretend death counts (Peter Krause is currently on “Parenthood,” alive and well), but it’s the closest I had ever come to seeing the profound and personal way a death affects a family, especially a death so random and senseless as Nate’s.

After that episode, I stopped buying painkillers from shady drug dealers. I got out of bed and got another job. (Well, I worked from home, so technically I still stayed in bed, but at least I was earning a paycheck.) I also took trips home to my mom’s house for weeks at a time, just happy that she wasn’t the frigid and uptight Ruth but also wanting so badly to never, ever put her through what Ruth had to go through.

I won’t say that “Six Feet Under” saved my life, because who knows, maybe an intervention would have just as easily done the trick, or I would have just gotten bored and would have eventually left my bed anyway. Oddly enough, it turned out I was more Claire than Brenda after all: A couple years later, and I’m back in New York, doing my form of art for a living. I’m even dating a goofy lawyer who wears a suit to work every day, like Ted, the Republican Claire ends up with. Luckily, mine isn’t a Republican.

Have you ever been moved to change by a movie, TV show, or album? Let us know. Leave your stories in the comments section or blog about it on Open Salon and tag your post “saved by pop culture.”

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Thursday, Jul 23, 2009 10:23 AM UTC

Kevin Spacey needs a “Shrink”

The two-time Oscar winner talks about his move away from Hollywood and his new role as a pothead Dr. Phil type

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Kevin Spacey needs a Kevin Spacey in "Shrink."

Roadside Attractions/Jihan Abdalla

Kevin Spacey in “Shrink.”

One way of looking at Kevin Spacey’s film-acting career is that most of it happened in another century and he has moved on. A two-time Oscar winner in the ’90s — for best supporting actor in “The Usual Suspects” and best actor in “American Beauty” — Spacey has literally and figuratively left Hollywood behind, devoting most of his energies to directing the Old Vic Theatre in London, where he has lived since 2003.

As Spacey has told various interviewers, he didn’t see how his movie career could possibly top what he had already accomplished, and he was tired of living in hotel rooms and making three or four films a year. From his days at Chatsworth High School in Los Angeles (where he played Captain von Trapp opposite Mare Winningham’s Maria in “The Sound of Music”), theater was his first love. In the same year when he won his Academy Award for “American Beauty,” he also won a Laurence Olivier Award for his role in the London-Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh.” (Truthfully, it might be the most memorable stage performance I’ve ever seen.) In retrospect, it looks as if two roads lay before him at that moment and he chose the one less traveled. So it is that the man once viewed as the greatest American film actor of his generation was recently ranked at No. 10 on the Daily Telegraph’s list of “the 100 most powerful people in British culture.”

It’s also possible that Spacey returned to the boards because he could see his Hollywood future stretching out before him: a middle-aged character actor, Oscars and all, who was too ambiguous for leading-man roles and was always likeliest to be asked to play a con man, a salesman, a stalker or some other double-edged dude with a secret. In some ways that was a result of Spacey’s powerful acting technique — he leads you astray with suggestion and misdirection, hinting at an inner life that is never fully revealed — and he also contributed to it with his famous refusal to discuss his personal life. I knew better than to ask Spacey personal questions when I met him for coffee in a resort-hotel atrium during the Sundance Film Festival last January (and I wouldn’t have been that interested in the answers anyway).

Spacey has kept one oar, or maybe half an oar, in film acting, and his latest role is a dilly, playing the depressed pothead celebrity psychiatrist Henry Carter in “Shrink,” the debut feature from young director Jonas Pate. A likable Los Angeles-made indie with overtones of “Six Feet Under,” “Half Nelson” and “Crash,” “Shrink” offers a roster of wonderfully eccentric characterizations, shoehorned into a dramatic structure that’s just a little too formulaic. Playing a character who could easily become caricature — the high-level shrink whose life comes apart in the wake of personal calamity — Spacey puts on a veritable clinic on how to deliver profound emotion without histrionics. The tremendous scene he has with an uncredited Robin Williams (as a sex-addict patient) should be required viewing for every acting student in the world. (You can check out the “Shrink” trailer at the bottom of this page.)

Carter’s only tethers to reality, in his deepening sinsemilla haze, are a mistrustful African-American girl named Jemma (terrific newcomer Keke Palmer), whom he’s taken as a do-gooder pro bono case, and a slackerish former patient named Jeremy (Mark Webber, an actor I always enjoy). Screenwriter Thomas Moffett crafts crisp, funny dialogue, but to my taste he’s way too eager to bounce these characters off each other in a series of increasingly melodramatic “Crash”-style coincidences, rather than allowing their stories to play out in more laid-back fashion. Still, “Shrink” is a debut well worth catching, loaded with an oddball supporting cast — Saffron Burrows, Jack Huston, Robert Loggia, Griffin Dunne and, so help me, Gore Vidal — and depicting a cross section of L.A. society not often seen on screen.

In addition to voicing the robot who is Sam Rockwell’s only companion (sort of) in Duncan Jones’ sci-fi cult success “Moon,” Spacey has several new films in the pipeline. He will costar with George Clooney and Ewan McGregor in “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” supposedly an Iraq-war film with a paranormal twist — don’t ask me! — and will play ill-fated Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a dark-edged Spacey character if ever there was one, in George Hickenlooper’s upcoming “Casino Jack.”

In person beside the incongruous indoor pool in Park City, Spacey was not dark or mysterious in the least, but crisp, polite, soft-spoken and utterly professional.

Kevin, you play a psychiatrist in the film, and I guess he’s a distinctive, 21st-century breed of psychiatrist. Talk about this guy a bit.

I suppose you can put him in the same category as the Dr. Phils and these kinds of characters of the world. Thank God, he doesn’t have a television show. He’s become quite well known, quite quoted, popular, sells lots and lots of books. We meet him at a point of his own personal crisis and tragedy, and the film is about can he a) help himself and b) help any of his patients. But he’s certainly far more screwed up than most of his patients, as it turns out.

The movie is about how the lives of eight or so people intersect because of what he does. In particular, one young girl who is given to him as a pro-bono client by his father, who is also a therapist, played by Robert Loggia. He resists, and this young girl doesn’t want to go to therapy. Yet when they’re brought together somehow they manage to break through, both to each other and to themselves. So the film is about how ultimately this girl Jemma, played by Keke Palmer, ends up being the best thing for him to get to the next step of his life.

She’s really wonderful in the film, I thought. Was it fun to work with a young actor who has that much talent?

She was great. She’s just a firecracker and she’s fun to be with, we laughed a lot. We had a sort of ongoing contest on who could crack each other up more at the end of a scene. We’d have these really serious scenes and then one of us would try to do something to crack the other up, to sort of keep the tension light. I think she’s remarkably talented. Her instincts are really admirable and she trusts what she can do. I think Jonas [Pate] did a really great job in shaping her.

It’s always such a challenge in an ensemble film to give equal weight to developing each characterization. Dallas Roberts, Mark Webber, Jack Huston and Robin Williams also play important roles in the film. They’re all archetypal figures that we have come to know and either love or loathe in the world of Hollywood.

I assume that one of the things that attracted you to this project was that idea, getting to do this ensemble work with so many different actors and characters.

Yes. That, and it also is not about the side of Los Angeles that we see so often, which is so completely shallow and uninteresting, at least to me. The glamour and all that stuff that is, in a way, an appendage to the work that people in that town try to dedicate themselves to. People get caught up in that world and I think that this is a deeper look at the turmoil and the problems that every human being goes through no matter what their position or fame or wealth, and tries to get underneath that into some really genuine emotional landscape.

I suppose that’s similar to the journey that your character takes. He’s gotten caught up in being not just a psychiatrist for celebrities in some cases, but also in his own right a celebrity psychiatrist. In addition to suffering a personal tragedy, has he also lost sight of  …

I think he gets to a point where he thinks he can’t do any good for anybody, including himself. And then he begins what one only could call a rather unhealthy regime of self-medication.

There’s an awful lot of pot smoke in this film.

Indeed there is.

With all this marijuana intake and all the sleeping in places that aren’t his actual bed, I was thinking that this guy probably isn’t smelling that great.

Oh, no, he showers. He’s not a bum. He definitely cleans himself up, but he does get messy. No doubt he gets messy.

One of the things they talk about in acting class is the “obstacle” that a character faces. A psychiatrist who is himself going through a profound depression, that’s a pretty big obstacle to deal with. On one hand, that’s a great challenge, and on the other, how do you make that into something fresh instead of a cliché?

Look, clichés are clichés because they’re true. It’s just how you approach them and how you ultimately explore them. Clichés that are badly done become, “Oh, that’s a cliché,” because it’s obvious. But it isn’t obvious if it’s trying to explore different territory or come at something from a slight different angle. Last night I saw the movie for the first time with an audience. I was very excited by the reaction that the audience had to the humor of the film, to its tone.

When they’re laughing at things that aren’t jokes, but are character revelations, then I’m very excited. That to me means they really are following the story, they really are following these characters. They’re laughing out of recognition and not just out of, “Oh that was a funny joke.” You just never know. Until you get something in front of an audience, that’s the moment that something really does get birthed.

As you said, Robin Williams is a small part in this movie. He plays one of your clients, a Hollywood director who’s having some issues with sex addiction or maybe with alcoholism. To me, watching you and Robin work together was one of the real joys of this movie. You could put that scene on the wall in an acting class, as an example of how to do this job.

What was important to me about that scene — and Robin was really willing to go there — was that his character is ironic, his character says funny things, makes jokes. So there’s a certain side of his character that’s the Robin Williams you expect and the Robin Williams that you enjoy. I also felt it was hugely important that Carter slap him down and say, “Cut it out.” Throughout that scene you see Carter, through his reactions to this fun and games, to the inability of Robin’s character to talk honestly about what he’s going through. I think that was an interesting way to go, that I actually do stop him from doing that sort of stuff. In a way, Robin gets to go somewhere new. That was a great scene, which sort of evolved in the day that we shot it.

After two Academy Awards and so many leading and supporting performances in so many films, you must get shown a ton of scripts. How would you describe your approach to finding the right role in the right film?

I first would have to disagree with you. I don’t get shown a ton of stuff and that’s a myth, that anyone who wins an award can get any movie going. That just isn’t true. Partly what you’re offered is what you’re available to do and partly what you’re offered is what they don’t offer to somebody else first. The myth that one can do whatever they want or that you can pick and choose your projects is actually exaggerated. You pick and choose your projects that you’re offered and that you’re available to do.

Over the last six years my full-time job has been running the Old Vic Theatre in London. I have not been available to do anything I might have wanted to do because my first responsibility is there. But with respect to what I do, for me, does it offer me an opportunity to work with people I admire? To go somewhere maybe I haven’t gone, to experience something that will be new for me? And in some cases it’s just, hey, this is a really, really good money gig and I’m gonna go do this for a couple of weeks, but, you know, it’s not where my passion is. I can exist in both worlds and still look at myself in the morning.

Does it help you psychically, to have that theater job in London? Is that something that roots you in your life, especially if you take film roles for the money?

I can only tell you that it’s the best decision I’ve made in my life, and it changed my life in all the ways I wanted it to change my life. After 12 years primarily focusing on the film world — and it going better than I ever could have imagined — I didn’t want to spend 10 years doing the same thing, so I just decided to, in a way, flip it. I was sneaking plays in before. Now I’m sneaking in movies.

“Shrink” opens July 24 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release beginning July 31.

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Sunday, Nov 2, 2008 11:20 AM UTC

I Like to Watch

The sexy vampires of HBO's "True Blood" charm our mortal pants off, while the churlish motorcycle thugs of "Sons of Anarchy" stoop to a new low. Is the new fall TV season just a filthy tease?

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I Like to Watch

 I’m over this fall TV season. Like a dull girl who hides her below-average intelligence by cultivating a mysterious vibe — mostly by keeping her mouth shut and refusing to put out — the fall TV season somehow teased us into submission. She flashed a little thigh in mid-June, made one half-assed joke at the television critics’ tour in late July, claimed not to believe in sex before marriage throughout September (while sleeping around like a filthy whore behind our backs), then she threw herself on us in October, sticking a rough, sluggy tongue down our throats and pledging her undying love forever and ever while we reeled in agony.

We’re supposed to believe that the pseudo-scientific ass-hattery of “Fringe” is a cult hit? No amount of Kool-Aid can make me watch a show about a tangle of idiotic conspiracies, a kooky mad scientist, and an eeeevil corporate entity run by a one-handed Cruella de Vil. We’re supposed to be excited to watch two guys fiddling with bamboo pea-shooters on NBC’s “Crusoe”? NBC’s “Knight Rider” is a big hit? Who do they think they’re kidding?

And that’s not to mention HBO’s “Life and Times of Tim” and CBS’s “Worst Week,” two positively awful, irredeemable messes that it’s hard to believe made it onto the air in the first place

Narmed to the teeth

But then that sleazy halfwit girlfriend of ours sidles up with a few glasses of Cabernet and an elaborate seafood lasagna and reminds us about HBO’s “Summer Heights High” and ABC’s “Life on Mars.” She recalls how CBS’s “Gary Unmarried” made us laugh last week, and reminds us that we watched another episode of “The Mentalist” and sort of enjoyed it.

No matter what that slut says, the only new show I never miss is “True Blood” (9 p.m. Sundays on HBO). Admittedly, Alan Ball’s kooky vampire mystery baffled me at first. I guess I half-expected those small-town vampires to seduce the mortals in their midst with vitriolic psychoanalysis and ultra-witty complaints about the pretensions of art school, then adopt scrappy, adorable foster children, indulge in illicit affairs with relative strangers, and finally, fall down dead from scary brain infections out of the blue. (Narm!)

Instead, Ball offered up a kitschy town full of oddballs and misfits with seriously fake Southern accents. For someone who grew up in the South, these exaggerated drawls couldn’t be more chafing. Imagine a British guy attending a production of “Hamlet” put on by a bunch of 8th graders in Texas, and you get the idea. Tara (Rutina Wesley) is particularly awful at the Southern drawl, and seriously needs to tone it down. That’s the trick, see? You take your idea of a Southern accent (hopefully not derived from watching “Gone With the Wind” because, uh, those accents were fake, too) and then you cut it in half. Otherwise, you sound like a space alien.

But there’s something so tasty and irresistible about “True Blood.” Even when the dialogue is a little predictable, even when there are lots of ignorant rednecks milling about, gossiping to each other (How many times have we seen the same stereotypical Southern nosy neighbors and sugarcoated snakes before?), even when the vampires other than Bill (Stephen Moyer) really do seem like the scary perverts most of the townsfolk take them to be, I’m always anxious for the next chapter in this story.

Why? Somehow I want to know how Sookie (Anna Paquin) and Bill fare as a couple. He’s brooding and intense, she’s picky and untouchable: It’s the ultimate high-maintenance girl’s fantasy of a passionate affair with a libidinous artistic type. He’s a little bit depressed and slightly creepy, she’s a little bit prudish and stubborn, plus she’s a tease. They’re made for each other.

And I need to know what’s going on with the creepy bartender, Sam (Sam Trammel). He was easy to dislike even before he started sniffing dead women’s dirty sheets and dashing through the swamp naked as the day he was born. (Didn’t a character on the show actually use those words? See how this Southern crap writes itself?) But wouldn’t it be too obvious if Sam were the killer?

Obviously it couldn’t be Sookie’s hapless whore of a brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), either. But I did love the addition of the totally understanding, drug-wieldin’ new-age-hippie girlfriend, Amy. That character is pure Alan Ball. She’s the open-minded, affectionate, idealistic, gorgeous, utterly perfect lover — until she’s not getting exactly what she wants, and then she manipulates and twists the knife until she does. Amy proves once again that Ball has a serious knack for modern archetypes. Think Lisa, Lilli Taylor’s character on “Six Feet Under,” one of the most loathsome, irritating humans ever to be depicted on the small screen. Ball drags Lisa into Nate’s life, turns him into a sniveling, soft-pedaling wuss in front of our eyes, and then — surprise! — she’s secretly rotten to the core. For all of his very enlightened perspectives on life and death, Ball is clearly a man who finds many, many people wildly distasteful — and that makes him a great writer.

OK, so “True Blood” isn’t exactly a brilliant, layered narrative, heavy with insights and thoughtful moments and weighty images. I almost wish Ball would fly free of Charlaine Harris’ “Sookie Stackhouse” series of novels more often, and follow his own, seemingly less stereotypical instincts.

But I’m still hooked on this TV version of a page turner, with its quick fix of goofy interactions, sexy vampire lovemaking and backwoods nastiness. It may not be groundbreaking television, but I really do look forward to it each week — which is much more than I can say for most of the new shows to air this fall.

 Love is murder

Speaking of sex and death, did anyone else catch the episode of “Sons of Anarchy” from the week before last, where Tara (Maggie Schiff), the cute doctor lady, and Jax (Charlie Hunnam), the hot Brad Pitt-ian motorcycle thug, finally do the deed after weeks of growing sexual tension?

Whether or not you watch this show or care, hunker down and listen up, because this was an episode for the TV history books. Here’s what happened: Tara was being stalked by her obsessive exboyfriend, ATF agent Scott Kohn, who was, disconcertingly enough, played by Jay Karnes, the same actor who plays Dutch on “The Shield.” While I applaud the move not to cast some smoldering tough guy in this role, it’s about as hard to imagine Dutch stalking someone as it is to picture Don Draper running a prostitution ring or Nate Fisher beating his mom senseless. And really, would Tara date someone who looked like Dutch, when her high school boyfriend looked like this? Mmmm, I don’t think so.

So anyway, having decided that Jax is his main rival, Dutch (aka the ATF boyfriend) breaks into his house and pees on his floor. As a result, Dutch is brutally beaten by Jax, charged with assault, and driven out of town forever and ever. Even after all of that, Dutch still shows up in Tara’s house a few nights later and gets all lovelorn and violent and weird. Tara is clearly freaking out — Maggie Siff does a great job showing us a mix of panic and desperate scheming to get out of this situation alive — and she finally resolves to make out with Dutch to calm him down. She strips, crawls on top of him, then grabs his gun from the night table. It accidentally goes off! Dutch is hit! He yells at her to call an ambulance! Instead, she calls Jax, who comes to her house, blows Dutch’s head off, and then makes sweet love to her, a few feet away from her ex-boyfriend’s still-warm dead body!

Now look, I want to like this show, I really do. The cast is great, the writing isn’t half bad, the whole premise is interesting and fairly original — you know, all of the basics are in place. But this absurd scene sums up exactly what’s wrong with the show: It has no self-restraint. A few stupidly sensationalistic choices damn it to mediocrity week after week. Everyone is absurdly corrupt and skeezy on this show, and as I’ve written before, it’s far worse than it ever was on show creator Kurt Sutter’s inspiration, “The Sopranos.” Even the reasonably ethical characters do terrible, unbelievable things. Gemma and Clay scheme to keep Jax doing their bidding, while trying to hide all of the bad stuff they’ve done in the past (which obviously involves Jax’s dead father in some way). Clay sleeps with a young prospective club member’s crush just to demonstrate that he’s the top dog, then Gemma breaks the poor girl’s nose with a skateboard in a jealous rage. Rival gang members and innocent bystanders are killed left and right without remorse. It gets to the point where you feel sorry for anyone who’s forced to associate with these bastards.

And how about the episode where a rival gang and the Sons of Anarchy open fire on each other from a few yards away, and half of them don’t even attempt to take cover the entire time? Who knew that motorcycle gangs favored the trench warfare of World War I — except without the trenches? I know these guys are supposed to be violent thugs, but could they really be that stupid?

Of course, the second that I write this show off, they go and air a really good episode: Tara and Jax struggle with their crime, Gemma struggles with the sight of Tara, and Clay (Ron Perlman) strikes an unexpected deal with the Mayans. It’s remarkable how strong the dialogue is on this show, given how annoying and unrealistic the story lines can be. I guess I’ll have to climb on board this crazy train and ride it for another week. It’s not like there’s anything else on.

Next week: “Friday Night Lights” flounders in obscurity (again!) on DirecTV, while CW’s loan shark drama “Easy Money” straddles an uneasy line between dark and zany.

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Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky.

Thursday, Sep 11, 2008 10:47 AM UTC

Arab-American beauty

En route from "Six Feet Under" to "True Blood," TV genius Alan Ball snuck in "Towelhead," an earnest drama about race and sexual awakening in '90s suburbia.

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Arab-American beauty

Warner Independent Pictures

Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil in “Towelhead.”

I first wrote about “Towelhead,” the film-directing debut of “Six Feet Under” impresario Alan Ball, last January at Sundance, before it became clear that Ball’s energies were focused on a new prime-time HBO series featuring hot young vampires. Now that “True Blood” has reached Ball’s core upper-middle HD-cable audience, “Towelhead” looks even more like a noble but ultimately minor detour — the agreeable but overly formulaic young-adult novel tossed off by an author of epic-scale melodramas.

“Towelhead” is of course adapted from a novel, a quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative by Alicia Erian, who, like her heroine Jasira Maroun (played in the film by the appealing Summer Bishil), was once a biracial Arab-American teen in suburban Texas, circa 1991. It’s a fascinating social setting, no question, and one in which I think Ball sees our current polycultural society — the Palin vs. Obama society, you could say — in embryo. With President George H.W. Bush about to launch the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, Jasira and her father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi, in the film’s standout performance), face an atmosphere of intense anti-Arab bigotry. But Rifat hardly fits the stereotype; he’s an aristocratic Lebanese Christian who never seems to go anywhere without a suit, and is certainly more politically conservative and morally puritanical than Travis (Aaron Eckhart), the xenophobic Army reservist next door.

Jasira dates an African-American kid from her high school, much to her father’s displeasure, and is gradually drawn into a creepy, manipulative relationship with Travis, who both turns her on and makes her immensely uncomfortable. Ball certainly tries to handle all this with subtlety and dignity; the sex scenes are shocking without being explicit, and the characters’ motivations are complicated. There’s no question that Travis takes advantage of Jasira’s innocent desires, but she feels them nonetheless. Like molesters in the real world, Travis is internally conflicted: He feels genuine affection for Jasira, and does not pretend that having sex with her is healthy or acceptable. He simply can’t stop himself, or at any rate he doesn’t.

Throw in the nosy hippie-mom neighbor (Toni Collette) who becomes Jasira’s self-appointed defender against both her father and Travis, and it sure sounds like an Alan Ball soap-opera plot. But much as I applaud Ball’s desire to escape from the angst-ridden, middle-class world of “Six Feet Under,” there’s something drab, dogmatic and earnest about the world of “Towelhead.” By focusing on a straightforward, linear narrative with a young and unsophisticated central character, Ball is almost deliberately avoiding his strengths. He’s a creator of ensemble drama and a spelunker into the soul of the privileged classes, who never feels remotely at ease with this story of female sexual awakening in the insta-sprawl of the ’90s.

When Collette’s character finally manages to cram most of the film’s characters into her Rice Dream-and-herbal tea household for a series of collisions that will determine Jasira’s future, Ball is finally in his element. He’s a dramatic supercollider: Give him a gay leather boy and a right-wing Christian (or, better still, a Christian leather boy and a right-wing homo) and he’ll have them sharing a doobie, a round of folk songs and a platter of fresh-baked tollhouse cookies inside 15 minutes. This third-act redemption raises “Towelhead” several notches, but it still ends up feeling like a well-acted and well-intentioned after-school special, a long way from the vividness and texture of Ball’s television work.

“Towelhead” opens Sept. 12 in most major cities, with wider release to follow.

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