Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
After five seasons of alienation, lost loves and fragile connections, "Six Feet Under" goes out kicking.
Aug 22, 2005 | Plenty of things in life are mediocre, or they're good or bad in the most mundane ways. Almost everything, in fact, falls into a detached thumbs-up or noncommittal thumbs-down category. Dogs that bite, telemarketers: bad; friendly people, free stuff: good. This is not the story you are taught when you're young. Everyone -- your parents and teachers and society in general -- tells you that there are incredible, impressive works of art and literature and music around every turn, that people who are brave and courageous fight evil and bring justice to the world, that it will be easy to make the right decisions, that God is looking out for you, that the world is vast and brilliant and full of possibility.
Boy, are you in for a rude surprise. No one tells you how impoverished and empty most human interactions are, how flat and unoriginal most books and TV shows and movies are, how tedious most careers turn out to be. We all want to experience the world as a big, beautiful, romantic place, but the truth is that it can be achingly dull, and confusing, and difficult.
And then, something comes along and shakes you awake: You fall in love, hear some heart-wrenching song, experience some tragic event, or read an incredible book, and what was once a mundane world changes into an incredible, glowing, rich, exquisitely sad, humbling, beautiful place. Art is designed to have this effect: to inspire us and wake us from the stupor of day-to-day life. The very best art feels incredibly personal, highlighting our most treasured memories and dredging up our deepest sorrows and pointing us toward a more passionate future. Each of us has a different collection of cherished items that we hold close to our hearts. My own messy tangle of favorite things includes REM's "Reckoning," the Rabbit series by John Updike, Charlie Kaufman's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen, almost any Sufjan Stevens song, the last chapter of Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose," and Alan Ball's "Six Feet Under."
On Sunday, one of my favorite things, a show that shook me awake every single week and made me feel more inspired and alive than any other TV show ever has, went off the air. It felt very personal. Saying goodbye to "Six Feet Under" was, unexpectedly, an emotional wrenching experience, more memorable and invigorating and heartbreaking than I could ever have imagined it would be. It's just a TV show, after all. But the characters of "Six Feet Under" felt as familiar and as inscrutable as siblings: They pressed into my dreams, invaded my psyche, made me angry and sad and hopeful. Their actions confounded my expectations but always felt natural and stubbornly true. Sometimes they inspired me, sometimes I scolded them, sometimes I was happy for them, sometimes I was disgusted by the way they made the same mistakes over and over again. In other words, they felt like family.
But instead of feeling sad over the loss of these characters, the last episode of the show somehow pointed forward, allowing me not only to let go of them, but also to abandon years of conditioning to expect or even require a concrete happy ending, and to simply hope for the best for them -- and for myself, somehow.
Sounds pretty personal, doesn't it? Well, something about "Six Feet Under" always felt far too personal to express. More than the fully imagined characters or the daunting circumstances of their lives, the show tackled the ambiguity and confusion that's an unavoidable element of our lives. On other TV shows, and in movies and in pretty much every facet of American culture, fictional characters are clearly defined as good or bad: We know who they love and what they want, we know which decision is the right one for them, and we even know that they'll make the right choice eventually and everything will turn out OK. Justice will prevail, the villain will pay, the good guy will get the girl and the big house and yard full of kids and live happily ever after.
"Six Feet Under" is far less safe and sound than that. Here, there is no clear right and wrong; the characters aren't good or bad. They struggle with their choices and sometimes make big mistakes that they live to regret. Still, the beauty of Nate's death toward the end of this season is that it provided a catalyst for the characters to take some risks and open up to each other. If the show has a moral at all, it's that death -- either a realization of your own mortality, or the death of someone close to you, or both -- knocks you on your ass, shakes you awake, and makes you realign your priorities.
Like most characters on the show, Ruth (Frances Conroy) embodies a heady mix of lovable and detestable traits. She's rigid and generous and stubborn and sweet and judgmental. She's a creature of habit who's aching to be spontaneous and free from 30 years of the same old clothes, the same hairstyle, the same old routine of giving herself to others while her life passes her by. She rescues George (James Cromwell) from a life of loneliness and mental health crises, then never lets him forget what she sacrifices for him, day in and day out. She's lonely and awkward and has trouble connecting with her children, and sometimes she seems completely helpless to her old habits, while other times she can break out of them and breathe freely, if only for a second or two. Ruth combines an almost archetypal mother role -- the passive-aggressive martyr, with her manipulative woe-is-me outbursts, her distance in the face of real attempts by her kids to connect with her, and her controlling, irrational power grabs -- with a vulnerability and spontaneity and deep concern for others that make her irresistible.
In the show's final episodes, it makes sense, as a maternal archetype, that Ruth should struggle with the ultimate fear of any parent, the death of her child. To see her climb out of the mire and refuse to define her life as a tragedy, to see her relocate her will to connect with her children and grandchildren and her daughter-in-law, feels somehow redemptive.
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