Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For by Kim Akass, Janet McCabe Read Free Book Online

DeLeon), who has just manipulated him into agreeing to pay for new breast implants. Working as usual in the basement of the Fisher and Diaz Funeral Home (at dream’s end he will wake up at his desk), he is distracted by music and light, by a strange unfolding scene in which he sees himself sitting on a sofa in a forest tableau, a Christ-like Sophia crucified behind him, wrapped in a loincloth but naked from the waist up, blood streaming from below her soon-to-be-surgically-enhanced breasts.
    A series of shots: Sophia stripping; her bleeding breasts (again); a priest, to whom Rico confesses his sins; his wife Vanessa, dressed like the Virgin Mary; Sophia’s young daughter; the birth of Rico and Vanessa’s son, Augusto (at the end of season one); Vanessa mopping Sophia’s brow – an ever-present bottle of Tylenol (Sophia’s daughter’s only toy, a makeshift castanet, in an earlier scene) passing back and forth between the various dream personae. Together, Vanessa and 19
    READING SIX FEET UNDER
    Sophia (come down from on high) join to service Rico’s needs: the Tylenol bottle now contains oil, poured onto his feet, which Sophia begins to wash, but the act of cleansing turns into oral sex, and he awakens. One of the great dream sequences in a series known for its reveries (its only oneiric TV rivals are Twin Peaks , The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer ), Rico’s vision draws on the Hispanic imagination, tapping the tradition of magical realist art exemplified in paintings by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954): imagery from paintings like ‘A Few Small Nips’ (1935), ‘The Two Fridas’
    (1939) and ‘Tree of Hope’ (1948), each dealing with surgery and hospitalisation, informs the dream.
    Take note that in order to describe what amounts to less than five minutes of TV I resorted to a vocabulary not common in televisual parlance: ‘the grotesque’, ‘fantastic’, ‘magic realism’. Discourse about Six Feet Under does not always require such exotic language; these are not the only registers in which the series functions. Its detractors, after all, find it anything but generically extraordinary, calling it ‘a sitcom with elephantiasis’ (Carson 2002), or a soap opera (Nussbaum 2002; Buckman 2004). Even its staunchest defenders single out its greatest virtue as not the bizarre but ‘the mundane catastrophes of day-to-day life’ (Havrilesky 2002). Beginning with its opening credits, however, Six Feet Under invites – indeed, insists –
    that we understand it as something quite different.
    Opening Credits
    A bird crosses blue sky. The camera tilts down to reveal a single tree on the horizon, where a verdant hill meets the sky. Two hands break apart in slow motion. A man washes his hands. The camera tilts to reveal two feet on a gurney – the big left toe bears an ID tag. Open sky again. A gurney moves down an institutional hallway – light at the end of the tunnel. From what might be the point of view of the body it bears, the gurney enters the light. Seen through a bottle of fluid, a man in a white coat moves about. A beaker of liquid (embalming fluid?) slowly empties. The corpse head is turned away from the camera. In close-up, a ball of cotton held in a pair of tweezers mops the brow. A tilt moves up the cadaver from its feet, stopping before showing the head. A jump cut reveals a vase of flowers dying 20
    ‘ I T ’S NOT TELEVISION, I T ’S MAGIC REALISM ’
    (wilting) in time-lapse. A hearse door opens, a coffin within. In close-up the mortician’s hand grabs its handle. (In earlier versions a clearly visible skull ring can be seen on the mortician’s finger, but the memento mori was digitally removed in the final cut.) The hearse seen from behind, its load door wide open. A still life of two framed photos. In close-up, a bird’s claw feet move slowly off. A tombstone bears the words ‘Executive Producer Alan Ball’. A crow perches on a tombstone. The sky again, crossed by the black