Everything. Everyone. Everywhere.
Ends: Six Feet Under
HUM 3085: Television and Popular Culture
Spring 2013
Dr. Perdigao
April 3, 2013
The Sense of an Ending
• “Corpse of the Week” opening sequence for each episode, except the series
finale
• Series finale “Everyone’s Waiting”
• Aired Sunday, August 21, 2005
• Nate’s death
• Nate’s appearance to Claire, sending her off
• “Come on. Everybody’s waiting.” (59:27)
• http://www.hbo.com/six-feet-under/episodes/5/63-everyoneswaiting/article/obituary.html
Snapshots
• “The sequence offers us the macabre (a corpse), the enigmatic (that crow
might have flown right out of a Wallace Stevens poem), the mystical (the
white light into which the gurney and its passenger move resembles the
classic near-death experience), the self-referential (Ball’s name on a
tombstone carries on a cinematic tradition of auteur signature, like
Hitchcock’s cameos) and the naturally mysterious (that single tree, that
verdant hillside). If HBO’s brand is ‘not TV’, what is the trademark, the
brand, ‘the mission statement’, if you will, of this, its ‘not The Sopranos’
series?” (Lavery 23)
• The grotesque, fantastic, and magic realism (27)
• Reality of death in the corpse and the haunting presence of the death, the
presence of dreams, line between dreams and reality
• Alan Ball: “They’re not really ghosts . . . They’re a literary device to
articulate what’s going on in the living characters’ minds, so I didn’t want
them to seem supernatural. I didn’t want to do any spooky lighting or
otherworldly stuff. When our characters are talking to the dead, it’s not
much different than staring at the wall. When death has touched your life
in such a frighteningly intimate way, your entire world becomes surreal.”
(qtd. in Heller 82)
Faces of Death
• “After three seasons, or 39 episodes, of Six Feet Under, eight of the deaths
depicted were the result of murder, two were the result of suicide and six
occurred from vehicular accidents. Three of the victims suffocated (two
while eating and one while practicing autoerotic asphyxiation), two were
electrocuted, six died from trauma to the head, eight were shot, two
unintentionally killed themselves and one died from lethal injection. Only
14 have died of illness or some other natural cause, such as old age
(Television Without Pity, 2003). The world generated by the opening
deaths of Six Feet Under is a world of random violence an chaotic mishap, a
world in which gruesome tragedy waits, potentially, around every corner.”
(Heller 78)
Six Feet Under (2001-2005)
• Taboo of death on television (Lawson xvii)
• Darkening of tone in series produced around 2000: The Sopranos (1999-2007),
The West Wing (1999-2006), Sex and the City (1998-2004), 24 (2001-2010), and
Nip/Tuck (2003-2010) (xviii)
• “toughening of American television” credited to HBO (Home Box Office);
continuation with True Blood (2008- ) and Game of Thrones (2011- )
• Innovative series—dialogue, profanity, political complexity, sexual
explicitness; 24 with play with shape and timing of television (xviii)
• Other series have roots in cinema: The West Wing (The American President);
The Sopranos (The Godfather); Sex and the City (New York dating films
Looking For Mr Goodbar and Kissing Jessica Stein) (xix)
• Twin Peaks as precedent for experimentation in television, considered by
Lawson to be the “most daring” series until SFU, and based on David
Lynch’s cinematic style
• SFU as television series; only “debt to cinema” is Alan Ball, the creator,
who wrote the script for Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (xix)
Framing Six Feet Under (2001-2005)
• Literary precedents—Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Wrong Box—but no representations of this nature on
television or film
• Experiment in form: “Corpse of the Week”
• Comparison to Buffy’s “Monster of the Week”
• Begins with death; ends in burial
• Example from Season 5, episode 2, “Dance for Me”
• Taboo of death, gay sex, interracial relationship as well (Lawson xx)
• Spoof ads—consumer culture, medium of television as well
• “funeral business”: “the death care industry” (xx)
• “embalming”: “preparation for visitation” (xx)
• Topical series about politics, more so than The West Wing (xx)
“It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.”
• HBO’s first broadcast in 1972: a Vancouver-New York hockey game to 365
homes in Wilkes-Barre, PA (Akass and McCabe 5)
• Live concerts, then in 1981, 24-hour broadcasting
• Live sporting events and television premieres of uncensored and
uninterrupted feature films (5)
• Advent of VCRs led to new models of programming—original features
• Channel branding in the 1990s, “upp[ing] the ante on violence, sexuality,
and the macabre” (qtd. in Akass and McCabe 6)
• SFU premiered Sunday, June 3, 2001, at 10 pm—months before 9/11; dealing
with grief, melancholy
• HBO and Game of Thrones—DVD release; viewer interest
• Repetition of episodes on the network during the week
Origins
• Alan Ball—as auteur
• Graduated from University of Georgia and Florida State University;
helped set up the General Nonsense Theatre Company in Sarasota, FL
before heading to NY and Broadway (8)
• Wrote for Grace Under Fire, with support of television producers Tom
Werner and Marcy Carsey (8)
• Series Oh, Grow Up on ABC, cancelled—dissatisfaction with television
• 2000 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (American Beauty,
which also won Best Picture)
• Wrote pilot; HBO bought concept and gave him 13 episode commitment
(9)
• “I get notes from HBO saying, ‘You don’t have to spell this out, it’s clear
what’s happening’ . . . They actually say, ‘Give it more edge.’ That doesn’t
happen on network television. On network television, everything is
explained. Nothing is ambiguous. Any kind of edge is removed” (10)
Lineage
• Death of the patriarch to begin the series
• Effects of patriarchy on three women: Ruth Fisher, Claire Fisher, and
Brenda Chenowith (13)
• Nate: Nate
• “Everyone’s Waiting” begins with birth
• Extratextual: HBO website obituaries