UNIVERSITE MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE - BORDEAUX III U.F.

R D'ANGLAIS

"LIFE GOES ON, BUT WE DON'T" The Social and Psychological Relevance of Six Feet Under

TRAVAIL D'ETUDES ET DE RECHERCHES PRESENTE PAR FLORIAN LENIAUD

DIRECTEUR DE RECHERCHE Mme Benjamin-Labarthe

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Sesssion de soutenance Juin 2005

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction - p. 4

CHAPTER 1 : BREAKING NORMS AND TABOOS - p. 8 A. A CHOICE SETTING FOR A TARGETED AUDIENCE 1- THE BASES OF A NEW SERIAL a. LA : the archetypal city of death denial b. The main director : Alan Ball c. A histrionic cast for a darkly comic touch 2-TOWARDS A MORE DEMANDING AUDIENCE B. REJUVENATING HACKNEYED AMERICAN ISSUES 1- A DISCONCERTING HOMOSEXUALITY a. Trivializing the gay couple b. Religion and homosexuality in SFU : an image of puritanical America 2- LICENTIOUS MATERNAL REPRESENTATIONS 3- CAN WE FIND TYPIC HOLLYWOOD LANDMARKS? a. Death and the American cinema b. The hero in SFU CHAPTER 2 : SFU AS A SOUL-SEARCHING DRAMA - p. 28 A. PSYCHOANALITICAL DIMENSIONS 1- DYING AND GRIEVING IN THE US a. Death denial : causes of the phenomenon b. Current manifestations of denying death in America c. Grieving in the US : the ever-present taboo 2- THE PHILOSOPHY OF SFU a. SFU as cathartic show b. A secular humanistic series B. DELVING INTO A GRIEVING AMERICAN FAMILY : THE INTIMACY OF THE FISHERS 1- THE LOST FATHER FIGURE a. Therapeutic visions of the dead b. A missing paternal guide 2- THE CULTURE OF SILENCE WITHIN THE FAMILY a. Death-like silence b. The family life as a catalyst of frustrations

CHAPTER 3 : THE AMERICAN SPIRIT AND THE UNDERTAKING BUSINESS - p. 48 A. THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE UNDERTAKER IN THE US 1- THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR'S THREE MAIN FUNCTIONS a. A merchant b. An embalmer c. A lay psychiatrist 2- THE SOCIAL VALIDITY OF THE SO-CALLED DISMAL TRADE B. THE AMERICAN CULTURE OF EMBALMING 1- PRETENDING LIFE : THE MEANING OF EMBALMMENT a. Origins and principles b. An attractive American way of death 2- MASKING DEATH a. Current American justifications of embalmment b. Embalmment : a symbol of the American death denial Conclusion - p. 66 APPENDIX - p. 71 BIBLIOGRAPHY - p. 83

Introduction

Death is the hidden face of life, a face willingly put aside by man in the hope that this deliberate oblivion could somehow reassure him, a face still hard to consider and believe. It has often been unreasonably assumed that the slightest thought about death progressively takes us closer to our finitude or even to hell. Routinely equated with depressing reflections, the fear of the unknown makes death an uncommon topic whose essence is seldom discussed. Yet, though it remains a taboo within modern societies, nothing is more universal than dying. It is because death is erroneously deemed uninteresting, repelling and dreary that the decision to write about such an awkward topic also emerged. Besides, while death is today more than ever a topicality of great importance in American society, not many research works have seemingly sought to delve into this existential mystery and highlight the way it is commonly perceived. After viewing the critically acclaimed new serial Six Feet Under, drawing a parallel between the complex broadcast and the American perception of death naturally came to mind. Overwhelmed by mass-produced talk-shows and innumerable movies, today's American screens constantly seek novelty in a society where each individual basically tries to find mere entertainment. Regarding the amount of private channels and the harsh competition in the cinema industry, the challenge to reach the expected viewing audience seldom turns out to be a success. As far as TV serials are concerned, they do not seem to be an exception either. Many are launched onto the small screen only to disappear a few months after the pilot episode, and this is not just a coincidence if for the past few years a great deal of American serials have gradually dealt with some more specific themes. The successful American cable channel HBO, a Time Warner subdivision, has intensively contributed to the production and the introduction of such new series as Band of Brothers, The Sopranos or Six Feet Under into the very private sphere of the family. Not far from watching a film at home, the remarkable aspect about serials is that they somehow combine movie and television characteristics. Serials are mostly produced by TV channels and they tend to bring out the best of movies in a more simplistic way. Compared to movies, the more modest overall production coming out of series forces the
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audience not to have acute expectations, leaving open doors to possible pleasant surprises. Rather than going to professional places like cinemas and see high-quality films, the viewer at home is likely to be less demanding whilst in front of his TV set. In a family, TV stands for a mirror of the social reality, or an open door on dreams and wishes - it is an influential individual mediator for the masses, for the collective. Among this recent wave of specific TV broadcasts Six Feet Under will be retained. Only the title itself, conjuring up straight morbid images, could most likely and immediately split people into two categories : the most sensitive souls, sneaking away from the supposedly gloomy idea of watching burials, and the other group to which "Six Feet Under" would sound boldly enough to be described as a witty and intriguing show. The serial therefore caters to the two opposed extremes of TV public, covering a wide range and predictably assuring itself of a substantial commercial success. Rather than leading to indifference, this show, whose mere title compels the potential viewer to take sides, is seemingly prone to trigger controversies. It calls for a reaction in total contrast with the innocuous and rosy-colored American series had accustomed to. Focusing on the consequences of the father's sudden death in a mortician family, the theme of the recent exclusive and provocative series tackles the paraphernalia, the technicalities of death and its immediate surroundings or consequences. Created by Allan Ball, mainly known today for his essential contribution in American Beauty, the serial would apparently supply the audience with the darkest nightmares : caskets, hearses, mourners and grief, everything surrounding the "dismal trade" is part of the plot. Yet, after a deeper viewing, the show quickly turns out to be far from any far-fetched issues, casting an obviously optimistic outlook on our existence. Indeed, American critics from The Guardian argue : "As true as life and real than any realism, Six Feet Under is what Henry James said the novel should be, an aesthetically fine, psychologically complex work of art."1 The literature hint seems somewhat relevant in that, with its peculiar places as well as love and death issues it applies to its complex characters, SFU enters the grief-stricken characters' psyche. Still, undoubtedly truer, the most striking feature sticking out of the broadcast must be its realism and genuine lucidity on life and death, the living and the dying. The series, which has pedagogical and psychoanalytical
1

See official SFU critics : www.hbo.com

virtues, conveys throughout the four different seasons its own humanistic philosophy which urges the viewer to stare at his own fate and have a keen awareness of death. The idea of reminding us of our own fragility, of our major flaw, cannot be more adequate at a time when, after the aftermath of September the 11th, American society seems desperately in need of identification. From then on, it has been said that Americans have started becoming conscious of an actual vulnerability. In American culture, the will of self-preservation, perfection and longevity has clearly been established and all those breakthroughs in terms of cosmetic surgery, cryogenisation, or embalmment are blatant attempts to curb laws of nature, necessities to feel more alive than ever. Even though all of this may sensibly sound like an endless battle, the will to persuade oneself that aging could eventually be tackled seems to be part of a natural optimistic American ideal. Besides being synonymous with bleak prospects, how does the word "death" sound like then? Perhaps it already sounds scary enough not to be faced. Or most likely, the ultimate options to face death appear to be oblivion and denying when life's main purpose is to forge ahead in a demanding capitalistic society - in other words trying to put aside any negative thoughts sounds like the best collective behavior to have. But, how far can the US go into the death denial process? Derived from the American poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch, the heading "Life goes on, but we don't" directly introduces the main idea of the show which encourages its viewers to face the inevitable and rediscovers the trick of affirming life and living in the midst of sorrow and death. As well as sex, unfaithfulness, homosexuality and drugs, death is markedly no longer a taboo in the show. Terry Desmond, an American funeral director working in Ohio, says : "Clients want to talk to me like I'm a therapist. Our society limits the time for grieving, but life doesn't work that way."2 There is a possible discrepancy between what life is in actual facts and what social life should be. In disregarding the reality of death, the American culture veils what SFU tends to highlight : life is ephemeral, not eternal, and it seems that such a society, supposedly both modern and evolved, does not leave families enough time to ponder over much more basic and sensitive issues such as life and death. Why is death such an awkward and tabooed topic? Is yearning for eternal life not a delusion? What are the American
2

Fisk Alan, Morticians dig `Six Feet Under', www.detnews.com 12 June 2004

alternatives to thwart death? Three different chapters structure and outline this analysis of the main themes conveyed by SFU. The first feeling one may have watching the show is its groundbreaking aspect and its capacity to reverse any former dogmatic and moralistic aspect of the common American serial. The beginning of this whole work thus focuses on the disconcertedness and the reality of the series fitting current expectations. At the crux of the framework, lies the SFU psychoanalytical dimensions mainly centered on the effects of a relative's death : denying, grieving and mourning. The causes and consequences of the American death denial phenomenon are also developed as well as Allan Ball's avant-gardist endeavor to introduce in American families the reality of such an intimate affliction as grief. The third and final pillar eventually deals with the far-reaching weight of the death business in the American economy, an ostentatious world far from its more modest European roots, where the undertaker and the embalming procedure play pivotal roles in the specificities required for such an atypical funeral. For now, the first following chapter exclusively focuses on the assets of the series itself.

CHAPTER 1 : BREAKING NORMS AND TABOOS

A. A CHOICE SETTING FOR A TARGETED AUDIENCE 1- THE BASES OF A NEW SERIAL a. LA : the archetypal city of death denial

Where could be the most appropriate place in the United-States to shoot a TV serial dealing with the business of death? Los Angeles, mostly associated with the cinema industry, profit and success, could indeed provide a great deal of comical and unexpected situations due to the obvious gap dividing the two businesses. On the one hand, there is a city epitomizing entertainment and happiness in which fulfilling dreams only appears to be a question of individual desire, and, on the other, stands the Funeral Home Fisher Family, which puts a clear stop to the Californian ideal. Out and away from the seedy Los Angeles areas, the very wide and beautiful Funeral Home1 is located in Pasadena, known for its world-class environment with vast neighborhoods reflecting stability and care. Everything is made from the very beginning of the show to establish a natural and stark contrast between the thrilling impression of Los Angeles and the austere atmosphere of the Family Home, all the more since the serial clearly starts at Christmas time. The purpose is to surround the main locus, the Funeral Home, in a profoundly opposed society to enhance the specificities and the atypical aspect of this frowned-upon mortuary business. In actual circumstances, who would think about death at Christmas time in Los Angeles? Apart from American morticians who occasionally report that "death takes no holidays", it seems pretty obvious that none of the Los Angeles citizens would think about dying at Christmas Eve. As Allan Ball puts it : "One of the reasons I wanted to start this show in LA is because LA is the world capital of the denial of death."2 The director clearly wants to set his serial in a welcoming environment that conjures up the apparent idea of safety and sanity, where everything is made to insist on the father's unexpected death. The
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This Funeral Home does exist and is inhabited by a non-mortician family, see picture p. 71 See Ball's commentary upon the pilot episode of the Season 1 DVD box

sudden death occurs at the least expected moment of the year, in one of the most unperturbed and zestful area of LA. Near the ocean, among palm-trees, Los Angeles may be the perfect place to give a portrayal of heaven on earth. Everything until its very famous Forest Lawn cemetery is built to render a feeling of everlasting hope and eternity. The fact that even the main Los Angeles graveyard is part of the tour guide is an evidence of this peculiar conception of death. The bracing tackiness of this place formed the macabre inspiration for The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's toxic comedy of deathly manners and mores, Los Angeles-style. The cemetery is actually scattered into six wide memorial-parks sprawling magnificently around the city of Los Angeles : Hollywood Hills, Glendale, Lond Beach, Cypress, Covina Hills and Cathedral City. A reporter from The Guardian argues : "Within its wrought-iron fences one passes the bleak crematorium and flower shop and enters into a suburban sylvan glade of fanatically well-kept gardens, polished marble mausoleums (my favourite plaque reads : George Burns and Gracie Allen - Together Again!") and monuments to the dead so sentimental that one is moved closer to belly-laughter than to tears. The gently sloping, meadow-like lawns aren't defaced by actual gravestones; instead each grave ("place of rest" in the euphemistic style of the brochure - which also contains pricelists) is a mere tablet embedded in the grass, over which the mowers can pass without snagging their blades."3 Forest Lawn seems undoubtedly more popular for its museum, stores, art and tons of statues rather than for its actual and original function as a mere cemetery. The obvious commercial aspect and sleek atmosphere pervading the memorial-parks make the cemetery an exceptionally appealing place where dead people already seem to have reached heaven. If even a graveyard in a city is transformed into an attractive and lucrative place, one can easily imagine how much the whole town strives to repress what appears profoundly awkward. This clearly means that what surrounds death in LA is skillfully replaced and hidden by an impression of eternal life. Los Angeles is regarded as a city protecting people. Shooting there is an attempt from Allan Ball to be faithful to a social reality, to the common idea that death does not actually exist. In short, LA appears to be a cocoon or a shelter enabling society to
3

Patterson John, To live and die in LA, The Guardian 21 Feb 2004

overlook the unexpectedness of death.

b. The main director : Alan Ball "The show is about the loss I've felt in my life."4 -Allan Ball Alan Ball is best known today for being the screenwriter of the US movie American Beauty. Yet, Ball's career did start way earlier. Born in Atlanta, Ball was raised a Methodist in Marietta, Georgia. He attended Florida State University, where he majored in theatre, with an emphasis in acting and playwriting. After college, he moved to New York, where he first worked as an art director for various trade publications. Prior to moving to Hollywood, he was a noted comedy playwright in New York. Among his numerous credits are "Five Women Wearing the Same Dress," which premiered February 1993 at Manhattan Class Company, starring Thomas Gibson, Ally Walker and Allison Jane; "The M Word", which premiered at the inaugural Lucille Ball Festival of New American Comedy in 1991, "Made For a Woman", "Bachelor Holiday "The Amazing Adventures of Tense Guy;" and "Your Mother's Butt". Such first artistic endeavours already witnessed his liking for tragic-comic productions. Later, Alan's first produced feature film screenplay was "American Beauty," for which he received the 1999 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Writers Guild of America award for Best Original Screenplay, and the Golden Globe award for Best Screenplay, among others. His other television credits including "Oh Grow Up", "Cybill" and "Grace under Fire" could then foreshadow Ball's interest for the maturation and the evolution of young individuals' psyche. Today, he is the creator and Executive Producer of "Six Feet Under" which has garnered unprecedented ratings for the network, two Golden Globes (including Best Drama Series) and six Emmy awards. Alan, who is now forty-seven, was awarded an Emmy and a DGA award for his directorial debut with the pilot of "Six Feet Under", a reward which stands for a landmark in his carrier and reputation before producers and the public. As far as the origins of the TV serial are concerned, the director stresses : "I cannot claim credit for the premise of SFU. The idea of doing a show about a family-run
4

S.Waxman, www.washingtonpsot.com

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funeral home was pitched to me by Carolyn Strauss of HBO. She had just finished reading The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford, a non-fiction book about the "death-care industry" first published in the 1960s, and was fascinated by the world of funeral homes."5 Besides, Ball is not the only SFU director, there are about ten directors followed by twelve producers and writers. "As sappy as it sounds, I'd have to say my biggest influence is life,"6 Ball stating about the show. It possibly affirms Allan's status as a keen observer of modern society and says quite a lot about the palpable realistic and non-fictional aspect of the whole serial that we shall develop. Ball has exceedingly been indebted the contemporary American poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch : "The books I found most helpful were The Undertaking : Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest : On Metaphor and Mortality (...). Thomas Lynch is a brilliant soulful writer."7 The reason why he made SFU is probably not solely due to his interest in the American business of death. His introduction of the HBO book on Six Feet Under Better Living through Death, edited by both him and Alan Poul,8 in which he reveals his traumatic childhood and adolescence due to his sister and father's death, is an earnest attempt to show his personal investment in the serial. For him, SFU seems like an opportunity to ponder over very serious issues he has had to face in his life, such as his own homosexuality, publicly made official, and his conception of life and death. He brings his own philosophy of life, stressing : "Death is life : an epic, primal force that terrifies and fascinates us, gives our experiences meaning, and ultimately consumes us." Likewise, Ball considers that each member of the Fisher family has to be treated and considered as part of the real world so as to increase the credibility of the Fishers' life. For Ball, this show seemingly goes beyond any financial motives and represents a deep personal commitment. Talking about the realization of Better Living through Death, Ball goes on : "(...) to me, these characters are very real. I realize some might view this as a form of madness, and they'd be right. I've been lucky enough to work with some equally mad people
5 6

Ball's official interview on www.hbo.com Ibid 7 See note 5 8 One the main shows exectutive producers among Alan Ball, Nancy Olivier and others

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on this book - people whose madness I greatly respect - and in the process they have given me a deeper understanding of the Fishers and those with whom their lives are and will always be inextricably bound." The director wants to create a real cinematic environment, a symbiosis between his cast and crew for an earnest collective endeavour to increase the indisputable efficiency of the show's significant realism. c. A histrionic cast for a darkly comic touch

Most SFU characters are built upon Ball's mind and ideas and, as we previously said, the director built his characters' personality through his own experience of life. And this goes especially to the three children of the Fisher family. As Allan Ball puts it : "I'm like Nate in that I remained stuck in adolescence for a long time, I had a crippling fear of mortality and I took a long time to get over myself. I'm like David in that I'm gay, I was always a good little boy who did everything to make other people happy and therefore sat on a lot of simmering rage. I'm like Claire in that I'm creative, and feel the need to express myself artistically, and find myself frustrated by the rampant lies and injustice in the world. I think I'm most like those three characters, the Fisher kids."9 It seems quite a nice quote to sum up very briefly and introduce the three main children of the show respectively played by Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall and Lauren Ambrose. Besides, the other pivotal role is the one of the mother, played by Francis Conroy : Ruth Fisher, who won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama. Then, the last member of the family is the deceased father, exclusively appearing recurrently through the characters' minds all along the show. The tone of SFU can be described as a blend of very rough and straightforward remarks together with sensible authentic comments. Also, the business of death that the family does for a living provides its share of irony and deep tragedy. Perhaps, in a world where death becomes a trivial matter, the natural behaviour would likely be to control and humanize our own dreads, and this is what regularly occurs in this groundbreaking serial : bypassing the fear of death

See note 5

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under a tragic-comic tone. Ball argues : "I wanted the tone of the show to be playful because it is such a potentially upsetting subject. I wanted to establish right from the get-go that we weren't going to wallow in the morbidity."10 The challenge seems to strike a balance between a fair and straight tone, without any excess or unmotivated provocation. He also adds : "There are these wonderful emotional moments that are tremendously moving and funny at the same time. And that's my favorite tone. (...) Most of our actors come from theatre and really know how to play a scene. They have a tremendous amount of discipline and technique, which is such a joy to work with."11 In Hollywood, an actor coming from the theatre is an obvious asset to gain credibility, a sound evidence of quality in a very demanding industry. Besides, after a short overview, it seems obvious to perceive that such a show, in which sensitivity, emotion and deep feelings prevail, could only be played by artists raised in theatres. Regarding the fact that most actors of SFU were more or less unpopular before the serial appears on the screens, the stress has often been put by critics on the quality of this new cast which excels in the most dramatic situations.

2- TOWARDS A MORE DEMANDING AUDIENCE

"American networks realized that catch-all serials turned out to be outdated and consequently asked producers to focus on riskier topics without necessarily touting"12 - Alain Caraz, French specialist on American TV In today's American TV, producers must deal with new expectations and target a more specific audience. The viewer has changed and the kind of TV shows which used to trigger collective hysterias in the eighties are no longer the same at the beginning of this new century. After thousands of Dallas replicas, time has come to realize that people need more excitement

10 11

Vancil Tilton, Primetime TV interview Ibid 12 Psenny Daniel, NYPD Blues , Le Monde 10 Dec 2004

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and that a possible discrepancy between the overrated TV programs and the current audience expectation does exist. Nowadays, producers target a more urban audience, that is to say a more modern viewer watching TV regularly, accurately expecting well-defined TV shows' topics. TV adjusts itself to a fluctuating audience in need of constant novelty. In the UnitedStates TV serials represent 45% of the six biggest channel programs : ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN and WB. Tom Nunan, ex-UPN President, pointed out that only three out of six hundred TV serial projects usually reach the screen. Given that topics are now well-focused, the selection is getting much more draconian. For the past few years, it has been noticed that the viewing follows actual genuine representations and asks for some more true-to-life broadcasts. When shows seem to deal with non-fictional environments and characters, the viewer wishes TV to remain faithful to his own way of life, giving access to an unposed and instant process of identification. As Steven Bochco, creator and producer of this acclaimed serial called NYPD Blue, puts it : "Twelve years ago, TV serials were disconnected with everything happening. Through our recent plots, we've tried to demonstrate that the American reality is not as slick as one may think."13 Indeed, the image one can easily have in mind of the eighties or nineties serials is the one of the typically successful American family, often living in the countryside, enhancing moralistic values and decent social behaviours. What is this in actual facts today? With hindsight, it is likely becoming a redundant American icon, a mythical outdated image disconnected with the real life of the American cities. The audience wants to identify itself more directly. In short, the viewer wants to bridge the gap between the screen and his own life, wants the screen to be attainable, reachable. This phenomenon gave birth to some new TV shows, particularly striking by their realism, like ER, a story taking place in the emergencies of some Chicago hospital. The overall intensity, the acute details in surgical medicine and the shooting techniques make an untypical TV show which mirrors a blatant and mind-blowing realism. From then on, TV got back on the right track and a new generation of series started rushing screens. There is indeed a tendency
13

Ibid

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to transgression and SFU is far from being an exception - the latter being focused on death itself. The question is : how can producers entertain people showing real death? How can they reach an audience conveying a message as brutal as : "Your whole life is leading up to this"? Talking about finding new risky topics, the purpose of SFU has been to exploit the fear of the unknown and to entertain people with the mysterious and polemic reality of the American death care industry. Also, it seems there is nothing more realistic than mentioning the inevitable, isn't there? Louis-Vincent Thomas, an eminent French anthropologist, used to say : "Conceiving death is facing the first of the certitudes." It can be the fear of this unavoidable realism that the audience unconsciously likes to watch through SFU. We could confront the question : what kind of audience do the SFU producers try to reach? First, the serial does not seem to correspond to anyone's taste since, as it has been previously mentioned, the show is not about mere entertainment. Actually, SFU may be within everyone's grasp, but it demands a certain amount of investment from the audience. Right after a viewing, a few American viewers claimed : "This show is too complex, too many sub-plots going on all the time." Yet, talking about complexity, SFU is apparently very far from being as complicated as a few successful serials like Twin Peaks could be. Three characteristics might be retained : feel close to the grieving Fisher family and their suspicious business, get into the characters' psyches and be able to face one's fate through the constant reminder of the impermanence of other people's lives. Naturally, some would retort on the spot that they already have enough to deal with their own life to switch their TV on and watch a broadcast about a mortician family in grief rather than amusing shows like Friends or Seinfeld. The one who would aim at watching demanding shows such as SFU would surely tend to belong to the American middle-class because the show indeed requires commitment, time and wit. Concerning his age, the typical dominant SFU viewer actually seems pretty young, regarding the average age from SFU forum on the web : it goes from eighteen to forty, but the audience must generally be about twenty and thirty. Having said that, the average SFU viewer must be familiar with a weighty American cultural background, open-minded enough to heed and be attentive to the main current exterior events of the world, such as the far-reaching impact of
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9/11. The pilot episode was launched on American screens in June 2001, namely a few months before 9/11, which means that most SFU viewers have had in mind all along the first seasons the pictures of Ground Zero rubble. It seems quite a coincidence that a show focusing on grief encountered success during the aftermath of 9/11 all the more since the main scenario was obviously written before the event. Anyway, the context can be one of the key factors validating the success of the show. SFU faces a more vulnerable and uneasy audience right after the disaster and the viewer is thus more prone to seek identification through harsher issues, topics perfectly fitting a palpable national mourning. Are Allan Ball and HBO visionaries? The term coincidence is surely more appropriate, but the least one can add, is that they must have tried to look deeper into the subject of grieving after the attack, endeavoring to exploit the theme. Images of September 11, 2001 are emblazoned forever in the American minds and collective consciousness and it is very likely possible that the viewer in need of answers finds himself somewhat reassured watching an earnest TV show dealing with the same sorrowful issues he has been experiencing. In a country looking for answers, in the midst of misery and pain, SFU meets and exploits a current American mood.

B. REJUVENATING HACKNEYED AMERICAN ISSUES

1- A DISCONCERTING HOMOSEXUALITY "Other kids of my age were going to frat parties. I was draining corpses and refashioning severed ears out of wax." David Fisher a. Trivializing the gay couple

All through the show the homosexuality issue is focused on the the second son of the Fishers : David, a very uptight character particularly committed in his work, and Keith, a sturdy black American played by Matthew St. Patrick. What is striking from the very beginning is the contrast between these two characters belonging to different cultural backgrounds. Yet, throughout the different seasons they keep breaking up and making up,
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emphasizing a kind of love-bird relationship despite the obvious gap that seems initially at stake. David Fisher argues : "Keith's got a lot of anger issues he inherited from his father and I've got a lot of doormat issues I inherited from Mom." This quote pretty well sums up the opposite tempers of the two gay characters. Besides, making homosexuality an essential issue of the whole serial, the director tries to incorporate any element that could trigger reactions from the audience. This relationship is very likely to be one of the most disturbing plots for a novice viewer, and I remember myself being bewildered by the odd authenticity of the many homosexual scenes shot quite naturally and intensively. But it must be this harsh realism, the fact of shamelessly entering the intimacy of a gay couple that the neophyte heterosexual audience tends to reject. On a more psychoanalytical level, the real disturbance for the male audience surely lies in the fact that, unwittingly , it cannot help but see itself through what is frequently found profoundly appalling, through what could be perceived as the end of its own manliness, threatening and disturbing as a result its usual sexual standards. This rejectedidentification process some viewers may witness is very well tied up whenever they kiss each other - all the more since nothing is made to give an impression of a vulgar portrayal of these gently intimate scenes. Likewise, the divergences between the two characters, and especially the black and white dichotomy, must render the scenes even more baffling for a typical American viewer because, besides the mere repulsive idea of homosexuality itself, they establish a notion of acceptance within the gay community, as if gay people were strong enough to be over any racist prejudices. The tolerance that has indeed long lingered within the American gay community is deliberately made visible. This plot confronts the American family with its own prejudices both on racism and gender and appears as a lesson to the most reluctant viewer to move away from his clich homo representations. Being a homosexual himself, Alan Ball strives to follow a social reality and aims at projecting mainly through David his own personal troubles he has had to face. About this character, the director points out: "Here is somebody whose main obstacle in life is himself, and that's something that's very interesting to me. I get bored by television or entertainment that sort of presents gay characters as victims of such an oppressive society. I mean, yes, there are oppressive elements of society. But you make a choice to be a victim, and so I get really bored with those kinds of shows
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telling me, "Hey, America, it's OK to be gay!" Because duh. It's the same feeling I have when TV shows tell me it's bad to be a racist. It's like thanks for thinking I'm an idiot, and I can't figure that out on my own. But what really interests me is that internal struggle that someone like David has to go through because you don't see that on television."1 Highlighting that the choice of our sexuality does not directly hinge on some social pressure or external event, the director explains that blaming the American society for being gay seems like a lame excuse not to face man's own demons. The reasons could more likely be found in education and upbringing rather than bullying the society. The manner David has also become a homo very late in his life, is a technique from Ball to remind his viewers how much our sexuality can be shaky, unstable, how much everyone is prone to find himself in David's position one day. But this is a novelty that David cannot really handle and bear. He has to struggle between what he has actually become and what we would have liked to be, that is to say a normal person who should not hide himself, should not be ashamed, not feel threatened by this society frowning upon him as an alien. This role has had quite a huge impact within the gay community in the US a journalist of gay.com argues about Michael C. Hall's role : "He's the middle Fisher sibling, arguably the most complex and compelling gay character on television today." Indeed, emphasizing his complexity is a recurrent process throughout the serial. There is this episode in which he has to embalm and take care of a gay man body severely injured and killed by a group of anti-homosexual thugs it deeply takes its toll on his imagination and ruthlessly confronts him with the harshness of a homophobic culture. David sees himself through this cadaver and realizes how much the society has become a threat and how much he could pay for a distinction as insignificant as his sexuality, commonly thought to be out of the American norms. It seems pretty essential to remind the reader that choosing one's sexuality is usually not a mere choice : it deals with feelings, and mostly feelings include no option, no alternative. This must be one of the reasons for homosexuals such as David to feel guilt, being trapped in their predicament. The purpose here is not to write as a gay community defender would do - it is more primarily about clarifying that beyond this SFU gay portrayal, there is a will to unveil a truth of the American society which does not accept sexual
1

Champagne Christine, www.gay.com

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difference, even when the homo is seemingly a genuine heterosexual. Most homos in the serial are far from being stereotyped and it gives the audience a new representation of the gay community, as if the latter could no longer been perceived, been seen or pointed at. The gay in SFU is actually behaving as a heterosexual, that is to say homos are normally represented outwardly. When disconcertedness turns out to be invisible, the result gets even more bewildering. And this is the trick of the serial : depicting what is supposed to disturb as a trivial matter. But why does it seem so disturbing? The answer must lay in the fact that there are no more benchmarks to classify and distinguish people according to their sexual choice. There is no clue in David's behaviour to identify him as a homosexual and this nonstereotyped representation could directly perturb the viewer in the way that it means any citizen might be homosexual. In other words, the viewer is forced to assume : the one who appears like me might actually be gay. When the homo wears the mask of heterosexuality, judgment is made impossible. This depiction is an attempt to spur the audience to go beyond its prejudices. It underscores the fact that judging people on a mere physical criterion has clear limits. Likewise, what is deeply feared is that trivializing the gay people can be regarded as a specter of a democratizing homosexuality in which one's sexual preference could be openly revealed and eventually wildly accepted. As portrayed in the serial, this is a thought thoroughly banned by the puritanical America, still considering homosexuality as an infamy.

b. Religion and homosexuality in SFU : an image of puritanical America. As Allan Ball puts it: "Also, one of the things about David is he's religious. And as we go through the course of the season we touch on all the stuff that is going on in the religions right now. To me, it's fascinating that these bureaucratic organizations have these meetings, and they're like, "Well, it's still not OK to be gay. We hate the sin. We love the sinner." I want to go : "You know what? You people don't have any authority here to separate me from God, and you can act like you can all you want, but it's such a fucking joke. "2 As a homosexual, Ball is likely to face homophobic religious institutions. In the serial he
2

Ibid

19

depicts David as someone who does not understand the reasons why God would resent him for his homosexuality, for a non-deliberate choice. Ball brings out these following questions and dilemmas through Michael C. Hall's character : isn't the Church supposed to welcome any faithful follower? Are there limits or conditions to be accepted and tolerated by supposedly altruistic institutions? In the United-States homosexuality and religion homosexuality and religion have become a thorny issue after recurring scandals such as the recently elected Bishop of New Hampshire of the Episcopal Church, Robinson, who publicly revealed his homosexuality to the congregation and to the people in 2003. This scandal still keeps splitting followers to the point of creating a schism within the community between conservatives and moderates of the same Church. The Church has spent a great deal of time studying and debating the place of homosexual men and women in its life, but it is allegedly becoming such a frequent debate that parishes seriously disunite over the awkwardness of the subject. Canon Gene Robinson points out: "I think it will calm down when people see that not a lot has changed. Let's be clear. We've always had gay bishops. All I'm doing is being honest about it."3 What most Robinson's foes dread must be this potential wave of Bishops and Churchmen who might confess their homosexuality in public after the Robinson's impulse and support. They believe homosexual sex is contrary to Scripture and to the church's teaching about marriage. Robinson retorts: "There is no one beyond God's love, all of us are children of God, and are welcome in this church of ours."4 Is the Church supposed to practice discrimination? These methods may sound somewhat racist for the most democrat parishes of the Church willing to greet any sincere follower and boost the community to perhaps make up for the numerous divisions which have long been a handicap for the innumerable Christian denominations. The hypocrisy of religion in America must lay in the fact that, beyond any "holy" argument based on the Bible to demonize homosexuality, unsaid prejudices remain and given that it turns out to be impossible for a Churchman to openly reject and question someone's faith on behalf of his so-called dubious sexuality, the latter is likely to use God's
3 4

www.cnn.com archives Ibid

20

voice as an excuse to hide his own fundamentally human prejudices, shared by many citizens, to only and mainly reach one purpose : not tarnish the image of the Church. Actually, if homos were wildly accepted by American society, would the Church be that hostile? It seems religion just strives to be as close as possible to the majority to be more influential, gain respect and support. More specifically, the hypocrisy of American religious institutions in SFU is enhanced through Father Jack. Played by Tim Maculan, Father Jack is the priest taking care of many funerals at "Fisher & Sons". Though he seems pretty close to the Fishers and especially to David, the latter being the most religious individual of the family together with the mother, we learn that the main churchman of the serial is a homo. Yet, being directly committed into the Church, he has to keep his homosexuality secret. While David honestly reveals his sin to the leading group of his parish which wanted him to become a deacon, Father Jack has no determination to face religious institutions. The churchman fears inevitable retaliations and appears as a coward before David's motivation to improve the situation. Ball aims at highlighting what Canon Gene Robinson states : in a milieu where the fact of being gay is a reality that still remains strongly tabooed and repressed, silence is the only resort. This is an indictment of the severity of the religious dogmas opposed to the reality of their disciples. What Robinson eventually teaches us is that God could likely find out more sincerity in a parishioner trying to get through his own predicament rather than a staunch disciple willing to turn a blind eye on this or that only to keep on establishing at any extent law and order. On a more general perspective, one could also add that in the United-States, there have always been conflicts and disagreements on how to construe the Bible, either reading it literally or symbolically.5 The debate on homosexuality is an evidence of the difficulty religion in America has had to confront to gather people. Religion is split between fundamentalists with a strong puritanical legacy that has wildly contributed to shape American values and a more gaining-ground moderate side willing to adjust itself with current trends and moods such as the acceptance of homosexuals in today's American religion.
5

Debating on the veracity of Darwins theory of evolution and the question of mans ancestry, the Scope Trial of the American twenties historically epitomized the disparities between modernist and fundementalist preachers.

21

2- LICENTIOUS MATERNAL REPRESENTATION

With a very suave voice, Ruth Fisher is apparently depicted as a real mother hen, mostly quiet, sensitive, taking care of the house as well as her big children. After her husband's sudden death, she desperately needs to feel daily surrounded by her three children. The viewer's first impression about Ruth is that she seems to be a helpful altruistic person, deeply religious with a strong puritan heritage. Physically speaking, Ruth must be about sixty year old, mostly pretty well-dressed in traditional gowns with her long hair tied up in French pleat everything is actually made to give an impression of a conventional and tender mother. However, left to live as a widow, Ruth has been trying to build a new life to partly reconcile feelings of guilt due to her unfaithfulness towards her husband, when life seemed to be full of possibility.2 At her husband's funeral in the first episode, while sobbing and yelling she confesses her children: "I've done a terrible, terrible thing. (...)I'm a whore! I was unfaithful to your father for years. And now he knows, he knows. (...) And now your father sees me. Like God sees me."3 Outwardly very common as a typical matriarchal American representation, Ruth's complexity turns out to be focused on a more straightforward attitude contrasting with the coyness of usual puritanical accounts. From the pilot episode, the pious mother is equated with adultery and the way she occasionally seethes with anger may seem quite unsettling regarding the image she initially conveys. A good illustration can be given when, attending a selfempowered American seminar called The Plan to help her go through the consequences of her husbands death, she is forced to externalize her anger and grievances in public - she shockingly retorts: "You want me to complain. All right then, fuck this. Fuck you. Fuck all of you with your snivelling self-pity. And fuck all your lousy parents. Fuck my lousy parents while we're at it. Fuck my selfish Bohemian sister and her fucking bliss. Fuck my legless grandmother. Fuck
A hint at one of her speeches, later, when she marries George some years after the fathers accident : When Im with George I feel like life is full of possibility. And I havent felt that way in so long I had forgotten what it feels like, and I dont want to forget that again. 3 See the pilot episode
2

22

my dead husband. And my lousy children with their nasty little secrets." Regarding such excessive but seemingly cathartic behaviours, what appears important to underline is the representation of some sixty-year-old persons portrayed in the show. It clearly underscores that anyone can lapse into sinful habits in a society where parents are supposed to be spiritual guides. Here, adultery or anger openly puts trustful parents in a demeaning position directly assessed by children, losing their natural family markers. Unlike most typical American serials representing sex through a much more innocent image, SFU bre aks parental sexual taboos and tries to highlight the fact that sex is a matter concerning the majority of people, even the least expected ones. Ruth's amoral and subversive attitude could easily make parents uncomfortable for it tends to bridge the commonly pictured wide gap between the child, whatever his generation, and his so-called exemplary protecting mother. A very astonishing and comical part of the show is also when going camping, Ruth takes drugs accidentally. Mistaking a pill for an ecstasy the mother suddenly feels so well that she has to go for a nocturnal stroll in the woods. What prevails throughout that part is this feeling of utmost bliss, a unique enjoyable emotion she must have seldom experienced in her life. Strange as it may seem, none of the numerous SFU scenes dealing with drugs warn the supposedly simple-minded audience and at one point or another every member of the family does drugs.4 This may be explained by Ball's will to speak to a responsible viewer, thought to be aware by himself of drug consumption fatal consequences.5 Actually, it is somewhat unsettling that a sixty-year-old mother should enjoy the pill she swallows and the fact that does not realize what happens also justifies her hasty genuine joy - one may assume that she would not have been so enthusiastic if she had known more about the reality of the situation. But showing a mother about to become a senior citizen who apparently likes narcotics is to demonstrate that parents such as Ruth actually often reject things simply on principle, simply because they fear what they do not know. Without delving into the issue, they follow social collective opinions which keep warning people on the devastating effects of drugs,

Curiously enough, this controversial episode won an Award ! See Trivializing the gay couple , Ball stating : Its like thanks for thinking Im an idiot, I cant figure that out on my own .
5

23

disregarding the amount of consumption or any other factors. This is a gesture of protection for younger generations that SFU made irrelevant, all the more since the mother did not get any harmful repercussions after this episode. The serial depicts a more realistic picture of narcotics in that it openly points out that drug consumption does not necessarily imply addiction. Even though the mother would have been utterly hostile to drugs, the outcome of the part ironically vindicates how much she needed them to feel a moment of complete delight, to get out for a little while of her miserable daily routine. All of these issues about the mother make her younger and then rejuvenate old American representations of the typically pious mother, often solely equated with wisdom, acumen, love and compassion. The taking-drugs episode goes even farther since it somewhere implies hypocrisy from protective parents who, having no clue about what they claim, just repeat to children what the social pressure expects them to do for future generations.

3- CAN WE FIND TYPICAL HOLLYWOOD1 LANDMARKS?

a. Death and the American cinema

As previously mentioned, the mere subject of the show is prone to repulse the average American. Indeed, the American cinema history has always corroborated the idea that death is part of a reality which has to remain inevitably disguised. Hollywood Cinema has commonly been synonymous with great aesthetics blended with zestful characters, thus intensifying life and eliminating everything that would appear tedious and monotonous. Mostly till the sixties, death had long been sidestepped on screens - when directors had to deal with macabre scenes, producers strived to suppress any ghoulish clues by representing either death or dead people through remarkable spiritual connotations, "stylizing it as a religious apotheosis."6 Even old people were sometimes played by disguised young actors to force the audience to forget about their unfortunate destiny - as Louis-Vincent Thomas puts it : "Oldness is the expression of

Bidaud A. M.s lecture, Le Cinema Hollywoodien, Paris X University

24

death under process, of death already there."7 Death was thus minimized and left out. Actually, optimism has regularly been at the bases of any cinematic American process to entertain the masses. The American cinema has to be equated with myth, supposed to deliver notions of hope and dreams. It is basically out of any realism. However, the American cinema has evolved over the last few decades and death representations have started erupting on screen. Producers had to adjust movies along with the development of the American society and studios aimed at reflecting more realism for an environment much more familiar with pain and morbidity, probably due to the frequent wrenching wars American have been involved in, still taking their toll on citizens' minds. Though some representations may have changed, the message still remains very positive and it must be this recurrent hopeful notion of life that keeps American endlessly going back to movies.

b. The hero in SFU

In fact, SFU represents death much more differently. Unlike cinema, there is a strong and direct identification by the neophyte viewer with any defunct of the show. The fact that mortuary scenes and atmospheres are fraught with realism compels the audience to think about its own fragility and fate. The impact of television, this small familiar box in the middle of the house, also makes death closer to the familial cocoon, thus becoming more frightful. Likewise, the absence of intermittent morbidity, which is seldom the case in movies, provides no spectacle of death in SFU, passing away turns out to be a peculiarly ordinary matter : it becomes a biological and natural phenomenon. Having said that, if a hero had to be found in SFU it would surely be the character on which the show tends to focus the most : Nate Fisher, played by Peter Krause. He is the eldest son of the family, the most handsome character of the serial, has quite a strong personality compared to his siblings and, to put it in a nutshell, the actor cuts a figure. While he can be seen as a very reassuring and confident person within his familial environment, Nate is at the same time a
7

Thomas Louis-Vincent, La Mort, Que sais-je 2004

25

rebel : maybe the good bad guy of the show. Intrinsically afraid of his own fate, being quite insecure in his life and relationships, Nate felt very early the need to flee from the gloomy mortuary location he grew up in. This contrasted combination of extreme qualities and major flaws are essential elements that helped shape his originality and duality - from this viewpoint the image this character conveys does not seem far from the Hollywood hero icon, often striking by its humanistic side. There is yet no minor character in the Fisher family : they are all more or less equally treated in the serial and this broadens perspectives of identification for the spectator. Nate's leadership is indeed regularly counterbalanced by either his mother's authority or his brother's skills in the mortuary business. The conclusion is that viewers do not solely identify themselves with him9 and that there is in fact no real hero in the serial since every character's psyche is cautiously tackled. Though remaining much more subtle, what could eventually be similar with usual Hollywood portrayals is this notion of hope. Subtle, in that the spectator has first to go beyond his primary prejudices on the serial and find out that the whole show is more about life than death itself. Hope and the endless possibilities life provides are persistent intentions - a philosophy that will be developed in our next chapter.

To conclude this first part, there are many levels at which SFU breaks away from conventional American TV and cinema. Tackling traditional American taboos is a process seeking to trivialize the unsaid and unveil through reality in fiction what is individually thought but seldom clearly highlighted within a modern society exposing its limits. As Alan Ball has reminded us a few times thus far, this disconcerting show tends to confront the viewer with his own fears in order to ponder over it. The director aims at addressing a responsible audience and, regarding hot social issues such as drugs or sexual promiscuity, there is as a result no clear moral message intended. It could be this deliberate moral ambiguity that sustains the interest of the spectator in view of the fact that it subsequently blurs the tracks to
9

Most internet forums polls astonishingly portray Claire as the most favourite character of the show. Her youth, innocence, physique and earnest desperate quest to find a purpose in her life must explain this choice, made by an audience likely to feel likewise very young, whatever its age.

26

any hasty assessment and invites him to take part in this indistinctness the show witnesses. Similarly, being depicted as intrinsically unexpected, death invades the whole show but remains uncertain, hazy and ambiguous, all the more since none of the characters are good or bad enough to be pigeonholed and doomed. Far from being Manichean, this serial is outwardly not purely didactic and, considering that people can identify themselves with any character, there is a division of identification that leaves the audience with a wide range of options. SFU boldly lifts the veil from death, a subject too often viewed in the American culture through filters of fear and ignorance. Death and the American culture is part of our next chapter.

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CHAPTER 2 : SFU AS A SOUL-SEARCHING DRAMA

A. PSYCHOANALYTICAL DIMENSIONS

1- DYING AND GRIEVING IN THE US "The idea is to die young as late as possible" Ashley Montagu

a. Death denial : causes of the phenomenon

Denying death has generally been applied to the most modern societies. Due to several different factors, this widespread attitude towards death has now become an indisputable reality. The first factor to take into account is simply the environment : the effect of the apparent modernity on the individual. The modern citizen, well-established and protected in his massconsumption society, behaves as if he could not die, his own safety being supposedly keenly controlled by the technocratic institutions. Our modern societies seem like a shield against any danger, the latter being mostly conceived as a jeopardy which concerns any other but us. This idea could be a fine illustration of the New-Yorker attitude before September the nth that shall be discussed later on. On the other hand, the Medias, which surround and manipulate the individual, air overabundant discourses and representations about death that eventually suppress their essential aspects; death just turns out to belong to a fictional world whose unceasing repetitions blur the emotional impact and take away the tragic reality. The second factor is that death has moved away from home and family. In his article, Jeffery A. Johnson argues: "A major factor contributing to the American view of death is the fact that it has been hidden from us."1 Indeed, while in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the dying remained at their
1

Johnson Jeffrey, Denial : The American Way of Death, www.orthodoxytoday.com

28

homes and their primary caretakers being family members, "our cultural denial of death"2 began as the medical profession took over what had been the family's role of caring for the dying. Doctors initially saw death as a failure and since most people went to hospitals their impending death was greeted with denial. Modernity increased medicine efficiency and doctors started regarding death as a real enemy. Nevertheless, dealing with denial, although time-intensive and arduous, is an obligatory skill for physicians caring for patients and families with life-threatening illnesses. With regards still to the American families, the other contributions to this decreasing visibility of death are a generation rift and the scattering of families which scattered all around the country. These factors make contact between the old and the young rare, all the more so now that seniors are frequently left in long-term care facilities. In short, dead people are becoming more and more invisible, and this invisibility leads to an unawareness of death. For Ernest Becker, an eminent American anthropologist, the origins of denying death have to be found in human being psychology. Death denial has to be equated with this ever-present fear of death felt from our childhood emblematized by our first nightmares. Largely indebted by Freud and Kierkegaard's theories, Becker points out that man's true essence is a union of opposites, of self-consciousness and physical body: "Man is beaten by life and the world; beaten because he fails to face up to the existential truth of his situation the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and that he is bound by a definite body, which limits that freedom. The attempt to ignore either aspect of man's situation, to repress possibility or to deny necessity, means that man will live a lie, fail to realize his true nature."3 In other words, denying our own death is linked to the dichotomy between our constant corporal fragility found hard to bear and our self giving us a sensation of endless strength and opportunities. This essential antagonistic phenomenon inevitably brings about frustrations. In life, "fears are naturally absorbed by expansive organismic striving,"4 we then endeavour to fall into oblivion and forget our major impotence in acting like a "hero", attempting to go far

2 3

OConnor Nancy, Letting Go with Love : The Grieving Process, La Mariposa Press 1986 Becker Ernest, The Denial of Death, Free Press Paperbacks 1997 4 Ibid

29

beyond our basic apparent capacities in order to control our future and have the conviction that we are shaping our own existence. Likewise, the fear of death has to be closely associated to the fear of life in that we fear the hugeness of our mysterious nature. Becker goes even further: "From his childhood, man represses his own anality, his compromising bodily functions that spell his mortality, his fundamental expendability in nature. And with all this, and more that we leave unsaid, he must repress the primary awesomeness of the external world. (...) The basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world."5 Man is thus overwhelmed by the immensity of space and the forces of nature that confront him once again with his incapacities to subdue his own vital sphere. Another of Becker's idea, both historical and psychological this time, is also worth noting: "One psychologist remarked to me that the whole idea of the fear of death was an import by existentialists and Protestant theologians who had been scarred by their European experiences or who carried around the extra weight of a Calvinist and Lutheran heritage of life-denial. Even the distinguished psychologist Gardner Murphy seems to lean to this school and urges us to study the person who exhibits the fear of death, who places anxiety in the centre of his thought; and Murphy asks why the living of life in love and joy cannot also be regarded as real and basic." Debating about the weight of the harshness of Puritanism imported to the US undoubtedly takes its toll on the American ethic, but the most important for Becker here seems to be to wonder whether death anxiety is based on experience or primarily natural phenomena. The answer must be that death fear is universal and it is present in our mental functioning. Nevertheless, each civilization has its own rituals and behaviours towards death, and considering the fact that we all entertain different relationships to death, the fear of our own extinction, indeed naturally present in each of us, goes with an indispensable relative intensity which may be assessed by our culture and upbringing. To conclude this part, two kinds of denials are regularly distinguished. A healthy and deliberate one that allows people to keep going - it characterizes a will to resist and may serve as a protective and adaptive mechanism to absorb deleterious and life-threatening information in a manageable and self-determined time frame. Then, the most common and more natural

See note 3

30

denial, which strives to hide reality and avoids conflicts leading to delusion. This last form of denial is unconscious and aims at negating a disease-oriented threat to the integrity of personhood and daily life.

b. Current manifestations of denying death in America

Modern America appears to be preoccupied with the preservation of youth and beauty the society seems content to cling to the illusion that youth and life can last forever. Americans are notorious for their preoccupation with physical perfection, which is evidenced by their diets, cosmetic surgical procedures and exercise programs. It is a world of appearance. However, the millions of dollars people spend to stay young will not delay the inevitable. The fact is that life will end, and how Americans choose to cope with this reality gives us an overall picture of this society's position on death; generally speaking, the American attitude is one of avoidance. As it might be expected, denying one's death inevitably goes with refusing other people's death. Denying a loved one's death may be seen as a way to immortalise oneself and deny our own demise. And immortalising oneself is a fact that fits today's America ideals because death is labeled as morbid, it is a dark symbol in the American culture that has to be thwarted and not to be stirred. According to Nancy O'Connor: "We live in a death-defying society. We fight and resist death; we hurry through our mourning and rush to get back to normal."6 This above-cited American stand might be a direct consequence of the numerous death denial factors suggested in the previous part : the fact of having gradually been deprived of the presence of death within families has played its role in making death invisible. We enter an era in which the demise of humanity is thought to be contrary to any technical evolvement and progress, where modernity is regarded as a hopeful tool to longevity. Feeling protected in a sheltered world, modern urban Americans may be guided by the illusion of their highly modern surroundings that they unconsciously project on themselves. And in view of the fact the man cannot be conceived without his own environment, social improvements are then
6

See note 2

31

directly linked to endless biological developments. In short, progress is a way to immortality. A good example to show that Americans are prone to deny a loved one's death and then decline grieving is how they cope with the passing of major celebrities people whom they idolize to the point of assigning them a godlike status. In 1977 Elvis died and people began questioning whether he had actually died. Fans theorized and speculated that he had planned to fake his death in order to escape the pressures of his daily life, or that he phoned the President to promise a comeback and so on and so forth. To say that Elvis's death affected Americans would be an understatement : "His death was a challenge to American popular culture and to its self-confidence"7 says Christine King. Events like the sudden confrontation with the demise of a national icon abruptly stand as an evidence of the end of a fairy tale which forces us to be aware of our own fragility. Christine King goes on with penetrating brilliance: "I think people wanna believe Elvis is alive, because if Elvis, the American Messiah...can die, then so can they. Our culture loves to pretend that death doesn't happen."8 Fans see themselves through their idol and establish a strong intimate relationship that has to be eternal; they naturally seek perfection through this process of identification that keep providing hopeful prospects for the future. This is all a prime example of discomfort with death that people would endeavour to immortalize a celebrity as they did Elvis.

c. Grieving in the US : the ever-present taboo

On a linguistic level, one can start defining the three different English terms generally used to describe the main feelings and states after the death of a loved one:9 Bereavement : state of sorrow over the death or departure of a loved one (corresponding

to French the expression "Etre en deuil") Grieving : Intense sorrow caused by the death of a loved one including a

psychotherapeutic notion that spurs to gradually get over one's predicament (corresponding to the French expressions "Faire son deuil" or "Travail de deuil")
7 8

King Christine, The Death of a King : Elvis Presley (1935-1977) Ibid 9 It seems worth noting that the French language does not have any specific words unlike English

32

Mourning : showing one's predicament via outward signs socially imposed and

acknowledged (corresponding to the French expression "Porter le deuil")

The concept of grief describes the emotions and sensations accompanying the loss of someone or something dear. The word itself was originally derived from the Old French grve, meaning a heavy burden. In English, grief connotes an experience of deep sorrow, one that touches every aspect of existence. Grief can literally "weigh down" the person who must face the reality of a gut-wrenching loss, taking both a psychological and physical toll on the bereaved. Complex physiological and psychological responses may be extremely painful but can be overcome if faced and experienced. Given that grief is at the crux of the Six Feet Under plot, it seemed inevitable to analyse how American people tend to consider the loss of a loved one. The first episode of the serial establishes the bases of the opposite attitudes between the two brothers : Nate and David. While Nate advocates a more sincere and open behaviour, David's approach remains much more traditional, believing that grieving is fundamentally personal, intimate and individual. Right after that David blames Nate for having publicly externalized his sorrow and rage at their father's funerals, they both have arguments on how grieving should be construed David Fisher starts : David : "Because maybe they (people) don't wanna make a spectacle of themselves. Because maybe they'd prefer to grieve in private." Nate : "Why? Why does it have to be such a secret? It's nothing to be ashamed of." This scene is reminiscent of the two brothers' different tempers : on the one hand, the youngest is very attached to his family life and reflects the harsh education he received from his parents, and on the other, the oldest who tries to enjoy life as much as possible, more sociable, outgoing and extrovert. In fact, while Nate appears as the eldest brother who dared to live his own life in Seattle, far from the mortuary business in which he spent nearly half of his life, David is perceived as a mere follower, the one who unsurprisingly stayed home to keep up the family industry, paying so much respect for traditions and conventions. Unlike his brother, Nate thinks that grieving should be acknowledged and not tabooed. This antagonism

33

is essential in the plot of the serial since it sums up their personalities that linger over the whole show and provides much of the raw material for the discussion of grieving in this series. Actually, David's silence towards his father's death reflects a common national outlook on grief in the US. The idea is basically the same : the American society strives to bypass the reality of death by turning a blind eye on its unbearable consequences that grief is. Some people may turn out to be unable to bear the discomfort of being around the bereaved, thus prone to rejection by friends who do not know how to help him. While the society insists on love, wonderful relationships and families, it overlooks love in death and seems to put pressure on the bereaved to keep grief silent. For instance, modern employers bear responsibility for taking away people's much-needed time with dying relatives, as well as interrupting the grieving process after a loved one's death: "In modern corporate settings employers are typically given just three days leave, even if it's a spouse or other very close relative who died. Then, employees are expected to go right back to work.10 What is described here is the idea of a callous society which favours output, money and capitalism at the expense of its citizens' well-being. Similarly, five years ago a tragedy shook the nation : the Columbine school shooting. The country and the local community mourned the horrific loss of life, the reality of death confronted Americans through the hour-by-hour television broadcasts. The outpouring of grief was made visible to all. In fact, a number of journalists thought it was too visible, hinting that the community should keep its tears to itself. One bereaved mother witnessed how she felt pressured by some in the community to "mourn quickly" : "Even during the first weeks...there were others who were eager to "get over all the fuss" and move on...many students were "getting pretty sick of all the memorials and stuff." It's become a drag."11 This testimonial underscores the reality of the situation when America has to deal with major disasters : mourners are kindly invited to grieve in private, not to show themselves for fear of worsening the already dreadful circumstances. In America's ultra-violent society, too
10 11

Rodale and Stocked, Beyond Grief, A Guide to Reconcile Life After Loss, Prevention 1994 Fast Jonathan, After Columbine, HowPeople Mourn Sudden Death, Social Work Oct 2003

34

many survivors are left with sudden and overwhelming holes in their lives. Unexpected deaths administer a powerful shock to those left behind, allowing very little time for survivors to take in, much less deal with, the magnitude of their loss. At worst, the loss comes to dominate survivors' lives by draining them of meaning and joy. At best, they not only cope but also reach out in a way that changes their lives and those of others around them. No other society and no other era has so distanced itself from the ubiquity of death, nor pseudo-mystified it to the extent that grief itself often seems an embarrassing and shameful disorder.

2- THE PHILOSOPHY OF SFU

At the opposite of the optimistic American ideals, SFU message is primarily a denial of eternal life. At the end of the very last episode so far of the fourth season currently airing, a moving dialogue between David and his deceased father coming from the son's imagination acutely sums up the philosophy of the series with unique depth. The Fisher son has been trying to cope with difficulty from a severe hitchhiker's assault that deals a heavy a blow. Ball saved his best for last with this concluding scene:1 Nathaniel : "You're missing the point." David : "There is no point. That's the point. Isn't it?" Nathaniel : "Don't give me this phony, existential bullshit. I expect better from you. The point is right in front of your face." David : "Well, I'm sorry but I don't see it." Nathaniel : "You're not even grateful are you?" David : "Grateful? For the worst fucking experience of my life?" Nathaniel : "You hold onto your pain like it means something. Like it's worth something. Well, let me tell you something. It's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine." David : "Well, what am I supposed to do?" Nathaniel : "What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard. You're alive. What's a little pain compared to that?" David : "It can't be so simple." Nathaniel : "What if it is?"

Jack Myers, American writer and journalist, dared to argue : One of the best written and most thought provoking scenes in the history of dramatic television www.jackmyers.com

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a. SFU as a cathartic show

What could dead people and death teach us? This question can be raised after the reading of this dialogue conjuring up Carpe Diem notions. The key lines may be : "Infinite possibilities", or "You can do anything (...). You're alive." "Life is too short", "life does not wait", "life goes on." They are recurrent motives that permeate the whole show insisting on the value of life. Seizing the day is at the basis of any episode of the serial, the viewer being unceasingly reminded of the impermanence of things each episode starting with someones death. Some deaths are peaceful, some sudden, some the result of a long illness. But all are unflinching reminders of the destination awaiting us all. SFU teaches us how life is like Larry Rosenberg's book title : Living in the light of death, and as he writes it : "No one is guaranteed even one more breath." Nate often provides, more or less abruptly, the voice of morality when comforting the bereaved customers at one point he tells the father of a child who has died2 : "Your chance to be in that boy's life is over. Did you use it well? Or did you just piss it away?" Such interrogations inevitably call for a reaction from the audience and the moral dimension, if there would eventually be one, has to be found in metaphysical issues rather than social. It is because death never strikes too late that it belongs to any of us to find out how some seemingly trivial moments spent with the people we love have their share of uniqueness. Some like this father apparently lost any occasion of intimacy with his deceased son, but this is those gloomy fictional events that actually enable us to avoid finding ourselves in such a remorseful plight in taking advantage of opportunities life brings us. SFU spurs the audience to conceive death as part of everyday life and as a natural phenomenon. The antic wisdom, rejecting the fear of death, is a philosophy very close to the show's ideals. It is based on reason to establish a lucid knowledge of reality and aims at overcoming fright. Following the path of reason is giving up and going past irrationality, affectivity and imagination which feed our anxiety. Death is perceived as a universal rule to which any living being is inexorably submitted - it is part of his essence or true nature and is engraved in the living's gene pool. As the end gets closer and closer, living is dying and as Seneca put it :
2

A father who has not coincidentally been negligent and absent for most of his childs life.

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"We die everyday : the more our age increases, the more our life decreases...We lose childhood, adolescence then youth : until the day of yesterday, all the time that past is dead. Even the day we are living is shared with death."3 Strange as it may seem, the fact that Seneca forces the reader as such to face his own death has to be understood positively : the thought of death sets us free from the desire of immortality and as a result gives us the opportunity to enjoy the ephemeral nature of existence with tranquility. Similarly, Epicure's philosophy advocates Carpe diem and emphasizes the idea that the awareness of death can turn out to be a weapon to seize the day as much as it should be, according to our reason. It deals with a quest for piece of mind and serenity. Besides, the utmost serenity regarding death is likely to be disconnected from it, as Epicure put it : "We are not related to death. For as long as we do exist, death is not there. And when death is coming, we no longer exist."4 The least that can be added is that nobody has heard about someone lamenting for being dead. Even though it may look particularly tough to go so far in one's death concept, Epicure's beliefs are still said to be cathartic in that they seek to erase any form of useless fear to ban anxiety. The purpose of tragedy, according to Aristotle, is to let out our painful emotions fear of death, anger at the unfairness of the universe so we do not have to carry this burden around all the time. As it shows us human beings being forced to make accommodations with something that will not compromise, SFU offers not reassurance but catharsis. There is no alternative to death; the only possible option is to acknowledge our fundamentally temporary nature. Real death5 is rarely welcome in the anodyne bubble of popular culture, and seeing it treated the way SFU does as an omnipresent part of life's structure is sometimes sad but never depressing. It is a relief.

b. A secular humanistic series

As a priest, Father Jack often stands for the wise adviser : "You should do whatever brings you deeper into the reality of your life...Not the life
3 4

Seneca, Lettres to Lucilius, 24 Gaarder Jostein, Sophies World, Seuil 1994 5 Not the death-as-plot-device of cop shows

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you think you can have, but the life you've got." This penetrating suggestion is an attempt to dissociate dreams and reality, hope and life. It is an urging to deal with what we are living now before desperately longing for what remains hypothetical or imaginary, because the present is ephemeral, because reality is the first of certitudes. SFU is a secular humanistic series : while it spurs the audience to watch the inescapable, it likewise believes in man despite his weakness and finitude. It emphasizes human's capacity for self-realization and bloom through reason. The term "secular" does not mean that the serial has no apparent spiritual connotations, for it actually has, but the overall picture strives to remain somewhat down-to-earth and this is not a coincidence if most of the parts tackling post-mortem issues turn out to be fairly prudent and moderate. One of the most eloquent parts of the whole show confirming this previous statement is when, in the first season-two episode called In The Game, Nate has a dream in which he sees his father teasing him between a woman and a man who, playing Chinese checkers, respectively embody life and death. After a car accident, Nate contracted IVM6 and this dream is likely to stand for his deepest fright and anxieties of his own near death experience. This dazzling passage wittingly depicts a partnership between life and death regarded as "a mutually beneficial arrangement." What has to be deciphered is their intrinsic indivisible relationship, epitomized by a final sexual intercourse which translates the end of a life captivated by death. In life, anyone is In the Game sooner or later and we can see that Nate's dream harshly gains on his own reality : the dying-process is on, more than ever. Afterwards, his father whispers something that suddenly wakes him up: "All that lives, lives forever. Only the shell, the perishable, passes away. The spirit is without end. Eternal, deathless." The idea that this sentence comes from his unconscious mind spurs him to believe that despite his terrestrial finitude, he could still in some way be alive. Clinging to a hopeful rebirth, Nate seeks reassurance at any means. But those hopes are all shattered when Brenda, played by Rachel Griffith, reveals the dreary truth : there have not been any revelations in his dream this previous quote is in fact an extract from the Bhagavad-Gita7 that Nate did read at Brenda's
6 7

A potentially fatal brain tumor The most popular Lord Krishnas discourse of all the sacred scriptures from the ancient India

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place some days before. Aghast at this disclosure, Nate sees himself walking straight into the ocean, lost and overwhelmed by a sense of delusion. The series tends to remain so realistic that it equates any form of belief and creed with human reassurance believing is restoring confidence and a means to stand against uncertainties of life. It follows a secular humanism doctrine. Even though philosophers such as Plato would say that death is a new beginning, eventually liberating the soul from the body, SFU strives to stick to reality without any supernatural comforting ideals. Though it may seem quite pessimistic, SFU utmost realism seeks to enjoy life fully rather than being lured by the possibility of somehow avoiding death after life. In other words, better living through death8 and clinging to life than hiding ourselves our undeniable human condition. Let us close this part with one of Nate's emotional answers to a sobbing bereaved: The bereaved : "why do people have to die?" Nate : (a long silence permeates the scene) "To make life important. None of us know how long we've got. Which is why we have to make each day matter. And it sounds like your Aunt Lilian did exactly that." The bereaved : "Yeah, she did." Nate : "Then you can be happy for her. For a life well-lived. (his voice is breaking) That's the most any of us can hope for."

B. DELVING INTO A GRIEVING AMERICAN FAMILY : THE INTIMACY OF THE FISHERS 1- THE LOST FATHER FIGURE a. Therapeutic visions of the dead

It seems essential to first keep in mind that Nathaniel Fisher, the deceased father, provides throughout the whole show a unity and a firm constant. Most family's feelings, reactions or deeds, have to be perceived and understood through this tragic underlying incident at the basis of the main SFU plot : coping with the death of a loved one. The parents seem traditionally very different, following a conventional familial American
8

A hint to HBO & Balls Better Living through Death book

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representation with on the one side a helpful sensitive mother close to her children and on the other a more distant and strict father deeply involved and devoted into his work. This father's everlasting presence firmly fixed in each Fisher characters' mind is an attempt to show externally how people are secretly affected by death. He does not appear like a ghost unlike some wrongly assert, he is a figment of the characters' imaginations and those flashes they exhibit are not merely memories either : they are inwards made-up discussions mainly witnessing nostalgia. It is essential not to mistake those visions with supernatural events, this would be far from the message initially conveyed - those visions are only subjectively real through the characters' imaginations. As Ball puts it: "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. (...) We decided to play the reality of those moments the same as the reality of any other."1 The trick is that these dialogues are shot and performed realistically so that the father appears as alive as a living, as alive as a bereaved could imagine his loved one and confide in him. The purpose is to demonstrate the impact of death on the bereaved and the difficulty to overcome grief through the recurrent omnipresence of the defunct. It can sometimes help the characters to overcome difficult situations. While Nathaniel often appears with deep irony to tease his children, he eventually comforts and advises them as if death could necessarily make us wise and untroubled. Actually, these visions are part of the whole plot since they are not limited to Nathaniel : the Fishers indeed even imagine themselves talking to some of their dead customers. In the second season-two episode, Nate is stalked by a dead black footballer he does not dare to face and stare at who keeps repeating him : "Look at me, look at me." Later on, Nate finally fights his fear and watches him in the eyes. Facing death eventually enables him to confess his IVM to his brother and sets him free from an obvious burden. Seeing dead people is meaningful in SFU and belongs to a therapeutic procedure. Similarly, what seems worth noticing is that Nathaniel's appearances gradually tend to be on the wane seasons after
1

American Cinematographer, www.theasc, Nov 2002

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seasons and this perhaps painfully captures the real ways we keep the dead with us : when we remember them and when we try to forget. The fact that we also unconsciously imagine our deceased loved ones in an everyday-life trivial appearance demonstrates the inability of the living to construe the unfathomable mystery of death; for one should not forget that the idea of being dead is a mere living conception.

b. A missing paternal guide

Throughout the unsung paternal image, a psychological ambiguity is at stake : was he in life wise, careless, domineering as he appears to be in turns to family members? Or are they reinventing the man to suit how they would like to remember him? How could we, as simple viewers, know the truth considering that even the firstborn, Nate, has tried for some episodes to find out who his father was? His questions basically remain unanswered, the father replying: "You're never going to know." We though have a clue in the first episode of the kind of education the children received. As Nate puts it: "My dad really rode my ass when I was a kid. I couldn't go rafting because he buried a girl who drowned. He buries this dip shit loser who OD'd at a Flock of seagulls concert...and suddenly I'm not allowed to go to concerts for a year." No wonder the eldest son left home to live his own life as soon as he could, far from his demanding mortician father. Nathaniel's authority seems quite essential to take into consideration, it lays bare how much he stood for, and somehow still does, an emblematic familial figure : he was a guide. However, as previously mentioned, we do not know much about him actually as a living character, he can solely be assessed in death through the characters' subjective minds and imagination. The Fishers are left to mourn the family guide, the one who left his name to the family, to his funeral home and whole enterprise to take over. This sudden loss compels the Fisher community to find new marks in its life. To a larger extent, finding new marks in life is a fact the American had to resort to. Based on the individual quest of territories and new roots, American origins had to be refunded and the idea of a lost paternal figure has historically been a recurrent process in the making of the
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US, in the making of a nation devoid of models. The American essayist Leslie A. Fiedler dared to speak the truth about a civilisation which symbolically had to rely on a one-parental education: "The American had finally denied too many fathers to survive except as the fatherless man. The fatherland abandoned, the Pope rejected, the bishops denied, the king overthrown - only the mother remained as symbol of an authority that was one with love."2 The rebellious country indeed broke from its former roots and established new principles and conventions on its own. Its symbolic umbilical cord initially linked to England did cut off. Lacking patriarchal icons, the solidity of the American culture rapidly turned to the more trustful image of the mother a mother who, just like Ruth, had to replace the lost fathers authority. A parallel can thus be drawn between Nate's earnest will to know more about his deceased father and the image of a country constantly looking back on its past and origins. However, when answers cannot be found, when the long-awaited guide seems no more perceptible, the US somehow inexorably resorts to some more spiritual directions. After having killed its patriarchal models, God, the immortal divine Father, seems to be a wise alternative for a culture in search of redemption. Right after the collapse of the Twin Towers, a few American artists such as the old patriotic Californian glam-rock band WASP started writing lyrics about a nation in grief, about citizens looking up at heaven and trying to find answers toward their national Father - here are a few lines: "Oh Father take me, unto where I'll lay me down, oh Hallowed Ground Oh the sky is falling, and I don't know where my home is now, my Hallowed Ground Father, oh do you hear me?"3 These lyrics illustrate both the sudden general sense of despair after the attacks and the American attempt to find spiritual clarifications to such an inhuman deed. The father figure is replaced by God, a Father whose reassuring presence never ends. The US does not turn to history and origins, it turns to religion to elucidate the reality of the situation, because in time of grief, praying and honouring the Father of all Americans appears to be the last resort to alleviate a national sorrow and enjoy the luxury of a temporary sense of common belonging.
2 3

Fiedler Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel, Dell 1966 See lyrics p.80

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2- THE CULTURE OF SILENCE WITHIN THE FAMILY

a. Deathlike silence

While Nathaniel's sudden death contributed to gather the family and grieve in community with the firstborn's home return, the impact of the tragedy largely intensified the ever-present awkwardness within the family. For instance, Nate feels guilty of not knowing his father as it should be and is aware of the fact that it is now too late to find interest in his father. It is in death that he attempts to be acquainted with him, talk to him and endeavour to get information here and there about his father's life, maybe to repress any sense of remorse. Death does sometimes stimulate consciousness, but in such cases the unavoidable coming-out guilt does not facilitate the grieving-process. Each member tries to cope the way he can, on his own, pretending everything is fine apparently but hoping for the best secretly. The family's paternal visions are all individual and personal in that they are all kept secret, to the point that nobody dares to say how much their father's spirit is still daily part of the Fishers. They all remember him and imagine him physically, they all have this common point, and yet, even though it permeates everyone, nobody is gutsy enough to speak his mind and cross the line of the unsaid. Only Nate dared to find out the truth about the others' feelings, asking his brother: Nate : "You know sometimes I kind of feel like Dad's around. Do you ever?" David (after a long silence) : "Nop" The silence David witnesses before he answers betrays his incapacity to communicate his inner thoughts and grief to such an extent that he has to lie to his family, probably believing he is the only one who finds it hard to cope. Another quote from Federico, the Fishers' embalmer, underlines to absence of communication in the Fisher family. Talking to his wife, he says: "You never laugh or smile anymore. You don't act like you, you act like like one of the Fishers." Federico is Hispanic and is probably the most objective character living among the Fishers to judge the overall familial mood which is far from his own roots and life-style. Disregarding the father's death, one must bear in mind that they all live in a Funeral Home and
43

that both sons had to take over the mortuary society. Taking too much stock of this situation, Nate cannot bear the daily gloomy environment: "I'd like to seriously kick back and unwind and forget about the fact that I spend my days surrounded by death." The vicious circle is that the family desperately seeks a loophole to a peaceful mind to forget the demise of their former guide in a setting pervaded by death. How can we mourn properly, externalize our sorrows, when our daily life is nothing but taking care of mourners and dead people? We sometimes feel as a viewer that the family is trapped in their predicament, that this silence is also a result of those dismal circumstances. In such a context, while unknown persons' death has to be spoken out loud everyday with clients, their father's passing is kept silent day by day.

b. The family life as a catalyst of frustrations

The awkwardness and the unsaid within the family widen the gap between each member and more specifically between the lonely mother and the three sons. Ruth seeks more familiarity and closeness with her sons for she cannot bear her husband's sudden loss. She seems quite miserable, staying home everyday, sometimes having dinner on her own her loneliness does not help her get through her plight. Through this absence of communication due to repressed feelings from the entire family, she feels like gradually losing her own family which has been everything for this tender mother. As one episode called The Invisible Woman suggests, she feels invisible in her own house surrounded by her own children. As invisible as her heartbreak affliction, the widow requires less distant relationships from her sons in a moment of exasperation : "All I want for us is not to be strangers. I want intimacy! Give me intimacy!" She is aware that her husband's death cannot but dramatically intensify this familial discomfort and tries to clumsily re-establish a sense of harmony and community in talking to her children about supposedly tabooed topics such as her new boyfriend: "He and I are having a sexual relationship now. (...)We're adults, we're sexual beings, we should acknowledge that. (...)Sex is an important and healthy part of life, its nothing to be ashamed of." She is in return scoffed at by her children, not knowing what to answer to such a

44

bewildering maternal attitude. Trying to get contact with her children, she goes too far maybe because it is also a way for her to liberate herself from her sorrows. She willingly wants to break the familial taboos, talk openly and leave out all those frustrations felt by everyone. Her endeavours to replace the lost father's authority mainly turn out to be of no avail, given that her real image of a careful mother seems definitely truer and genuine to her children. But she finally realizes that nobody could replace her husband's role within the community. Later on, the family intimacy is somewhat restored naturally after Nate's unexpected baby. Ruth finds here an opportunity to focus her brimming-with-love interest on her first grandson, a new generation which opens hopeful horizons and enables her to stop confining herself into this smothering mother-son relationship. This silence and lack of intimacy raises one main question : how can we as viewers be acquainted with the characters if they are nothing but repressed? The truth is that we get to know their psychic functioning out of the family context : their inner life is turned inside out. At home, children do not talk to each other that much and it is the mother who sometimes makes an attempt to break the habit in either forcing them to speak about embarrassing issues or inviting other people at dinner. The kitchen is the locus gathering the Fishers and enabling the audience to enter the intimacy of this family: "The kitchen is the heart of the home, the source of nourishment and sustenance, the congregating place, the hearth. But it's not a completely warm and rosy place, because the Fishers live in the constant presence of death. Death is like the fifth family member. But I wanted the kitchen to feel safe, almost like it has its own protective bubble."4 The kitchen indeed sharply contrasts with the rest of the house : it is a locus made to enhance a touch of unity among the family members. Everything is more alive, humanistic and caring, as if for a while the directors purpose was to depict, out of the oppressive reality of living in a funeral home, a standard American family. The aim may be to clearly separate this dubious professional life from anything being private, intimate and familial - actually from anything being more ordinary and usual for the audience. Therefore there is on the one hand the business and the peculiarity of the Fishers and, on the other, the more trivial American

See note 1

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family with their own repressed feelings and deep need to act out enabling the viewer to identify and find common interests and concerns. These characters could after all be anyone considering the fact that they eventually become themselves out of the family life which remains synonymous with frustration. SFU tends to describe the real life of families in which the unsaid prevails and lingers. It demonstrates how people usually share their existence between two separate worlds : the protective but oppressive familial life and the relieving external world. The family is a catalyst of frustration to be opposed to hopeful prospects that the external world offers us : endless opportunities to build our own life perceived as occasions to escape a restricted parental sphere too often reduced to authority and childhood.

To put this second chapter in a nutshell, many familial issues are at stake throughout the whole series. These issues are all treated realistically in that it dares to put the stress on the hypocrisy of families and the tabooed topics, and as Ruth's sister puts it at a very crazy dinner : "God, there's so much emotion to navigate where family is concerned..." SFU describes how families are frustrated and repressed, how each member does love each other without ever acknowledging it for fear of possible shame. Insisting on a resulting loneliness, emptiness and eternal silence, this psychoanalytical show encourages the audience to speak its mind. The successful paradox is that SFU is at the end a taboo-breaking serial dealing with a repressed family. The series unveils what is seldom seen, mainly hided and kept in the American family private spheres - it is a window on the frustrated family of today's demanding modern America which, more often than not, resort to specialists consultations to try to bear familial ficklenesses. At the antipodes of a dynamic and idyllic American society, SFU philosophy casts a slur on a country lured by the idea that nothing perishes and everything lasts. In the way that SFU judiciously brings us deeper into our own reality and fate, it seems worth wondering whether TV fiction could not turn out to be realer than life itself not in the plot, but in the whole message conveyed. Why considering life more natural than death? The answer must lie in each of us, but it appears that some have equated materialistic improvement with endless natural wellbeing, as if our standard of living or social involvement could somehow transform this
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universal foe into a more controllable fear. The ubiquity of death has to be subdued, at any means, to the point that it is now generally transformed in the United-States into a source of high-margin profit.

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CHAPTER 3 : THE AMERICAN SPIRIT AND THE UNDERTAKING BUSINESS

A. THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE UNDERTAKER IN THE US "The ones who last in this work are the ones who believe what they do is not only good for the business and for the bottom line, but good, after everything, for the species."1-Thomas Lynch 1- THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR'S THREE MAIN FUNCTIONS a. A merchant

The business of death in today's America, also more poetically renamed "the dismal trade", is a seventeen-billion-dollar market and alleged to belong to the three largest expenses of the average American after his house and his car. At the crux of this trade, stands the mortician commonly associated to a repulsive pernicious image. Except for the few curious people who already showed interest to delve into this alleged macabre profession, the American funeral director's various specificities have actually remained fairly unheard-of. Dying is much more elaborate and costly in the US than in most other countries. Competition in the usual sense is absent in the US funeral business, but there are paradoxically too many mortuaries and half of them receive only one or two cases a week. Their prices must be high to stay in business, while those with more business reap great profit at the consumer's expense. Although he may not be regarded primarily as such, the American undertaker is a restrained merchant. Just like any businessman, the undertaker has to sell his available items and discuss the type of services required. However, while some sell usual firsthand vital products like food or anything else, morticians essentially sells caskets, vaults and urns. Today, the average American funeral, including services, merchandise, facilities and cars, a casket and a cement vault, the sexton's income to open the grave and put up the tent, flowers and newspaper notices followed by tax, rapidly rises to seven thousand dollars and this lump
1

Lynch Thomas, The Undertaking, Vintage 1998

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sum dramatically increases years after years. But, undertakers usually retort that when funeral cost is compared to other major life cycle events, like births and weddings, it is not expensive. The American casket directly sold by the undertaker to the bereaved is generally chosen according to two key factors : protection and permanence. It is very reminiscent of the American attitude towards death, believing that even in death we need security and protection to last in this world it seems dead people are treated as if they were still part of the living, as if they did care, as if nothing really ended. The importance given to this gloomy box is largely justified by the innumerable varieties of the American casket : different kinds of metal, supposed to be durable, long-lasting and more protective, about two thousand dollars, then hardwood caskets, plain wood or bronze, all stuffed with the most luxurious pillows and mattress ever. The metal casket is quite a recent trend of modern America which remained unknown in past days and in other parts of the world. Of course, no matter the materials or construction of the container, the body will return to nature and any of these caskets turn sour years after years, but the idea that they must be sealed against air and moisture is essential to many American families, even though the whole thing is just about delaying as far as possible the bleak but realistic intimate vision of our loved one's rotting. To close this subpart on a more linguistic level, it appears worth mentioning the difference between the words coffin and casket. First, the shape is not similar : while coffins are octagonal, corresponding to the shape a human form, caskets look more rectangular with hinged lids. Besides, the casket is an ornate box made to hold something precious and valuable which eventually turns out to be more adequate and distinguished to truly honour a loved one than a humble coffin.

b. An embalmer

Embalming is by far the most representative characteristic of the American funeral. It is a widespread phenomenon commonly carried out on the deceased and provided by any funeral home to the customer. In America, the funeral director is also an embalmer, a specificity requiring accurate tuitions and knowledge : instruction in pathogenic microbiology, systematic
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pathology, thanatochemistry, gross anatomy, clinical mortuary science, embalming, restorative art, applicable laws and regulations, and special services such as cremation and preparations required by specific religious communities. The programs and requirements vary from state to state, but the general requirements tend to be a high school diploma or equivalent, plus an associate's degree from a college or university and graduation from mortuary school. Most mortuary school programs last a year, but that may vary as well. Embalming is part of the American way of death, and the funeral director is there, more often than not, directly associated to this capacity of fixing dead people. Causes and principles of such a procedure will be developed later on.

c. A lay psychiatrist

The purpose of a funeral is also to comfort the bereaved who seek some answer to the meaning of life and to assert the individuality of the deceased. The undertaker-customer entente cordiale in which the funeral director's function is to offer helpful advice is crucial. Let us take a quote from a mortician: "The new funeral director is a Doctor of Grief, or expert in returning abnormal minds to normal in the shortest possible time."2 The quote explains how funeral directors have to pretend being therapists and provide the very first answers to the bereaved's questions in a limited time. Watching SFU and the systematic sobbing clients who expect the Fishers to soothe their grief may seem redundant after a while, but it actually follows once more the reality of such an underground business. There is this dialogue in which a distraught widow straightforwardly asks the two brothers:

- The widow : "We think it's a day like any other, but we don't realize that anything can happen. And then it does. It happens. And there's so much left, unsaid. And it was all just wasted time. I just want somebody to help me understand. Just to help. Can you help me?" - Nate : "The first line of C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed is : "No one ever told me grief felt so like fear". I'll get you a copy, I think it'll help. It's gonna be okay."
2

Mitford Jessica, The American Way of Death, A Fawcett Crest Book 1963

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- The widow, frowning upon him : "No it's not." In almost each episode, the Fishers have to face mourners and provide them with the very first answers. For this, the funeral director is likewise supposed to be prepared. Though American mortician's studies include learning the psychology of death and dying and how to counsel people in mourning, the limited time he is given and his lack of sheer psychiatric knowledge naturally prevents him from launching real consultations. Therefore they often end up linking survivors with support groups at the funeral home or in the community. The truth is that after a sudden death the funeral director is the only person in charge of the living and the dying, the bereaved and the deceased, and as a result it is utterly wrong to assume that he only deals with death. Because he knows so much about death, he likewise knows about life and comforting mourners. When a loved one dies at home, he provides the first assistance, comes over and takes care of the body at once. American undertakers must be aware they are probably not the best therapists, but they find themselves in such a position towards the bereaved that they have to take stock of the situation from necessity. Thomas Lynch ventures a harsh critic of the American society on grief: "And what the networks offer us is the therapy of spectacle, excess and sedationour humanity dulled by megadoses, like too much pornography dulls real sex, too much volume deafens, and too much information dulls the truth."3 How can we mourn if the society we live in distorts reality, magnifies or transforms emotions and relationships? It looks like the funeral director has to deal with the consequences of an excessive media-related society on which everyone is focused, by which any citizen's life is guided. No time is given to ponder over the reality of life and death, and in a sudden unbearable harsh realism the unprepared devastated American bereaved is left to seek the first assistance to the one in charge of his loved one's misunderstood demise.

Lynch Thomas, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, Norton 2000

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2- THE SOCIAL VALIDITY OF THE SO-CALLED DISMAL TRADE

Since the American sixties Jessica Mitford's bestseller The American Way of Death, dying in the US has triggered widespread controversies. From then on, every American's outlook on the business of death has radically changed. This book which questioned the seamy and lucrative side of the trade has clearly contributed to arouse suspicion on the funeral director's honesty towards mourners. Mitford's foe has always been the NFDA,4 the National Funeral Directors Association. Today, this old rivalry still epitomizes all the social inklings sparked by this dubious profession in the US. The excess of the dismal trade has been publicized by the success of Mitford's book. Now, more than four decades after, everything is made to welcome and greet the baby-boomers' demise. Some say that we are reaching the "Golden Era of Death", and considering the fact that there are two and half millions of dead people in the US each year, in less than thirty years there will be about four millions. Tyler Cassity, the owner of a luxurious American graveyard stresses: "Don't forget that the baby-boom generation has changed our consumption habits of any business for forty years. So it will inevitably change the death business."5 Indeed, some American multinational companies and conglomerates are prepared to

Indeed, some American multinational companies and conglomerates are prepared to hug the deceased baby-boomer and buy back cemeteries, funeral homes and societies related to death at any cost. The aim is simple : making death a consumption moment like any other. Investors seek to invent new markets, new trends, new knick-knacks and souvenirs, new ways of dying like scattering the deceased's ashes in space, while some funeral directors are specialized to emblazon and transform slumber rooms by what the defunct used to like to eventually honour his life delightfully. Besides those whimsies, the major heavy blow dealt on the American funeral director community is essentially an ethical question : how far can we go into taking

NFDA is headquartered in Brookfield, WI, and has an office in Washington, D.C. It is the oldest and largest funeral service association, serving about 13,500 members. 5 Dubois Jean-Paul, La Mort en Folie , Nouvel Observateur, October 2003

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advantage of people's sorrow? Today, Americans are greatly encouraged to pre-plan their own funerals, that is to say paying in advance for their own death. Pre-planning is an emerging trend in the US and, according to the NFDA statistics, seventy-two percent of about nine hundred respondents favour pre-planning their own funeral. This procedure, called "pre-need", is supposed to relieve families of having to make important financial decisions during a period of great stress and grief, insisting on the fact that skyrocketing prices endlessly increase. Evocative of a limitless American capitalism, all those very singular schemes surrounding the dismal trade do not involve directly the American mortician but inevitably tarnishes his image. In SFU, the excess of the trade is ironically and clearly denounced right from the beginning of the show via satirical adverts, claiming : "We put the fun back in funeral!" These fake TV adverts are attempts to ridicule the death market and an America which seems desperately in need to find money-making sectors. Is seems the death businessman's trick is to deprive death of its gloomy and realistic side to attract people, as if death was merely fictional, as if its reality was not part of this world. On the other hand, the funeral director is often accused of taking advantage of the bereaved's predicament, like for instance deliberately concealing the cheapest caskets and selling more expensive funerals with costly services. Most American funeral home's websites make sure to directly answer the frequent questions customers could ask : "Is it right to make a profit from death? Why are funerals so expensive?" Those clients' recurrent enquiries are systematic and the fact that they become part of any funeral society website is an evidence of the growing doubt that has permeated the country for a few decades.

However, this inflexible public opinion has allegedly changed for the past few years. In America, there is a great deal of funeral associations6 and as Jessica Mitford points out in her bestseller: "A major reason for the existence of most professional organizations is the maintenance of standards of ethical practice among its members, and the discipline of members who deviate from these standards."

Here are a few examples : Jewish Funeral Directors of America, Federated Funeral Directors of America, American Board of Funeral Service Education, American Monument Association, Casket & Funeral Supply Association of America

53

In other words, they all try to establish a kind of homogeneity carried out by common ethical rules to make the American mortician more publicly credible and acceptable. Right after the Twin Towers' disaster, NFDA proved its efficiency in launching a donating-toNFDA-9/11-Relief-Fund campaign to support relief and recovery efforts. NFDA Acting Chief Executive Officer Christine Reichelt-Pepper claimed: "The outpouring of funeral directors across the country has been incredible. NFDA collected the names of over 1,500 members who stand ready to help, though it looks like these volunteers may not actually be needed. We were also proud to see the meaningful ways so many funeral directors have been helping their communities unite in their grief. There are many great ways for the funeral service community to continue to show support and to help their communities grieve. Funeral directors care for individuals every day, providing meaningful help to those in need. This disaster collectively represents your important work and humanitarian role on a much more intensified and larger level." 7 Reichelt-Pepper spoke to NFDA's role as a resource and proactive voice with the media, communicating important funeral service messages in the wake of disaster, as well as the goodwill occurring among funeral directors around the country. NFDA President John Carmon has been interviewed by reporters and covered within the following national media outlets such as CNN, NBC, magazines and radios. In time of deep tragedy, the most popular undertakers' association proved its efficiency and gave evidence that, beyond the wayward public opinions, American mortician's services are indeed very helpful for the nation. The following NFDA claim sums up its general intention : Our nation grieves; our community unites.8 Established to aid with expenses related to terrorist attacks on the nation, this call to funeral service professionals in order to support a national mourning served as a positive outreach for both mourners and the whole funeral community credibility. The second argument vindicating a new social acceptance is the undeniable recent influence of the TV serials dealing with the death business. SFU is naturally the one which goes deeper into the funeral director's everyday life, bringing a more humanistic side to the trade and attracting people: "Funeral directors probably have the highest profile they have ever had due to the HBO series "Six Feet Under". Still, on our list of professional services it is definitely the most
7 8

www.nfda.org Ibid

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overlooked occupation. There are currently more than 22,000 funeral homes in the United States, and that number is growing, according to the NFDA."9 Though it appears very hard to enrol people in such a dubious profession, TV turned out to be very useful. Insisting on compassion and empathy with the bereaved, SFU publicly rehabilitates the image of the so-called demonic undertaker with very acute details following the morticians' real life. As a funeral director puts it: "Six Feet Under fills a curiosity in people. It answers many questions. It shows what we, as funeral directors, encounter on a daily basis. Generally, people think the industry is macabre, but if you watch the show, [you'll see] it conveys a feeling of hope and peace. The characters are real. They live their lives even though they are constantly surrounded by death. That is the way it is and the way it should be. Alan Ball has displayed the industry in a respectful and tasteful way, and for that, I am truly honoured. I believe the show has helped and will continue to help the funeral services industry. People are becoming more aware of the importance of the business and the role that we play, as grief-management workers. Th*'re learning from the series. I am very proud of the show for that."10 Watching the show, one may find out that the characters are all as genuine and acute as the death business can be, and this perception brings them right into the reality of a supposedly macabre work. It bans any prejudice that used to linger over this questioning industry. Even NFDA itself argues about SFU: "The public has become more open to the discussion of death and memorialization. This trend is evidenced by a recent influx in funeral service and death exposure in the media; the successful. HBO television series "Six Feet Under," a drama that focuses on a fictional family owned funeral home; and communities coming together to memorialize and honour those who died in tragic events such as September 11, 2001."11 NFDA chiefly endorses SFU because the show has clearly separated earnest funeral homes from unethical death businessmen, the latter being often equated with conglomerates. This is a detrimental phenomenon for independent mortician families and a recurrent theme in the first SFU season.12 The SFU crew is sometimes even invited to the annual NFDA meeting to be
9

The Counselor, March 2005 Jeff Wilson working at The Simple Alternative in Toronto and interviewed in www.showcase.ca 11 See note 7 12 See the eleventh first-season episode in which David and Nate go to Las-Vegas for a recreated NFDA meeting where David publicly spurs independent funeral owners to resist the high-pressure of international firms.
10

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informed of the current discussions and debates about the trade. Besides, it is right to assert that there is a real trend about death in the US today, mostly due to the increasing number of other TV shows as well, such as CSI or Law and Order dealing with medical examiners' life. Death sells more than ever, at least on TV, and it becomes so fashionable that A&E Television did launch a couple of years ago a reality show about the day to day operations of an actual California Funeral Home : Family Plots. It proved to be quite popular but very unethical and criticized by the funeral community, as Thomas Lynch stresses it : "Family Plots shows funeral directors trying to be actors, SFU is the opposite."13 It may sound extremely paradoxical to some, but here is a blatant example in which fiction may be more real than reality. Anyway, after the success of the first SFU season, the prospect of a lucrative death on TV played its part in democratizing its most dubious aspects. Death on TV is part of a current American trend, but the conclusion remains the same : dying is acceptable when profit is at stake. The irony of the situation is that often denouncing the excess of the trade, the networks themselves, aware of the potentially positive public reaction this business sparks off, lavishly market new books, new reports, new series and profitable products. Delving into the reality of death, it seems undisputable that the Family Plot makers and other followers sought to take advantage of the first success that SFU earnestly encountered in 2001.

13

Fisk Alan, Morticians dig Six Feet Under, www.detnews.com 12 June 2004

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B. THE AMERICAN CULTURE OF EMBALMING "There is nothing like the sight of a dead human body to assist the living in separating the good days from the bad ones. Of this truth I have some experience."1 -Thomas Lynch

1- PRETENDING LIFE : THE MEANING OF EMBALMMENT

a. Origins and principles

Many cultures such as Egyptians or Incas first developed the process of mummification. They believed that preservation of the mummy empowered the soul after death, which would return to the preserved corpse. In Europe, embalming had a much more sporadic existence and was attempted from time to time during the Crusades, when crusading noblemen wished to have their bodies preserved for burial closer to home. Later, contemporary embalming methods advanced markedly during the American Civil War, which involved many servicemen dying far from home, and their families wishing them return for local burial. Regarded as "the father of American embalming", Dr. Thomas N. Holmes, who popularized the idea of preserving the dead on a mass scale, received commissions from the Army Medical Corps to embalm the corpses of dead Union servicemen to return to their families. Even military authorities also permitted private embalmers to work in military-controlled of embalming. In 1900, the idea of preserving the dead started generalizing gradually, especially in California where the new trend was to take the body to the funeral parlor after death for dressing and embalming. In fact, besides America, embalming in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had and still has never been a common practice in Europe. Thus, the recent embalming conception comes from an American initiative deeply indebted to antiquity. Embalmment is seen today as a cornerstone of the modern American funeral. Embalming as practiced in the funeral homes of the US mainly involves the injection of formaldehyde and methanol chemicals2 into blood vessels, usually via the right carotid artery.
1 2

See previous note 3 See pictures p. 76 and 78

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Blood is then drained from the right jugular vein. After these embalming endeavours, cosmetics are applied to the corpse to make it appear more living and create a "memory picture" for the decedent's friends and relatives. A photograph of the deceased in good health is often sought to guide the embalmer's hand in restoring the corpse, especially if the body is severely injured.3 In SFU, Rico, the main skilled embalmer, sometimes acutely explains what his job is about: "I'd start with some heavy duty armature material and plaster of Paris. Mastic compound for her face...Tissue builder and wax for her features. I'd finish her off with a good sealer...A little airbrushing and a high-quality foundation and she's good to go."4 Confirmed by undertakers, such details follow the ordinary American embalmer's precise work: "The program depicts exactly what we do. I really can't believe how accurate the show is. Just like Rico, anytime that there is a challenge, anytime that there is a traumatic case, I try my best to bring that person back to a life-like state. Not just for my own personal satisfaction, but for the sake of the deceased's family. Really, that's what the job is all about."5 Surprisingly enough, the word "challenge" is used here to refer to the embalmer's capacity to get through the worst situation via his embalming knowledge whilst the distraught bereaved simply hope to remember his beloved the way he was. Restoring bodies is indeed commonly thought to be art by funeral directors, but what sounds pretty disconcerting is the way undertakers may also use someone's body to likewise improve both his own art and reputation. Are American morticians artists? The least thing to answer must be that the inevitability of embalming dissociates them from any mere European funeral director where embalmment is only practiced when needed.

b. An attractive American way of death

How and why did embalming become a necessary feature of the American funeral ritual?

3 4

See picture p. 77 Ibid 5 See previous note 10

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As previously mentioned, the common American ideal is to reach a permanent preservation for the deceased put inside a beautiful sealed casket supposed to keep him safe as long as time wishes. Likewise, embalming the defunct consists of the same notions : the loved one pumped by chemicals is thought to last as intact as the way he is stared at and immortalised before burying. After this, if the most airtight casket is then added to the American embalmer's specific assets, the deceased can rest in greatest peace inside his box. In other words, death leaves no trace in funeral homes and as some funeral director puts it: "One of the effects of embalming by chemical injection, however, has been to dispel fears of live burial."6 There is apparently nothing surprising to see that embalming has wildly contributed to reduce macabre prejudices on funerals; in fact, it sounds more like a hidden justification of embalming rather than mere "effects", for embalmers know that beyond any earnest reason, their duty eventually hides a reality, the one that nobody wants to see : the decomposition of the beloved. Deliberately or not, dispelling fears at funerals seems to be the best means to attract people and show them that ceremonies for the dead are far from the frequent dismal beliefs and representations - at least outwardly. Regarding fears, Thomas Lynch explains: "When someone dies, it is not them we fear seeing, it is them dead. It is the death. The sad truths I've been taught by the families of the dead are these : seeing is believing."7 Americans still have the opportunity to see their dead beloved the way they were, not the way they are, which is likely to lessen the fear of being confronted with death. If "seeing is believing", can we really believe in the reality of death facing a body seemingly full of life? Still about embalming, no wonder the open-casket has become a tradition of the American funeral : it is made to display the loved one carefully rearranged by the embalmer to fit the living's refined customs. The open-casket tradition betrays the will of the American funeral to show in public the life-like appearance of the dead and display the funeral director's work of art. They are from then on no more perceived as mere morticians but as careful altruistic funeral directors. And although Europeans may seem stunned at staring at dead people in an open-casket, it is part of an ordinary funeral procedure in the US.
6 7

See note 3 in The sociology of the undertaker Ibid

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2- MASKING DEATH a. Current American justifications of embalmment

Modern embalming is done to delay the dead's decomposition so that funeral services may take place. It has nonetheless essentially been justified by health public measures. It is said to be a necessary hygienic and sanitary treatment against potential pathologies emanating from cadavers. Yet, though bacterium may turn out to be harmful after death for the living, there is today clearly no scientific proof validating such an assessment. The health public justification has sparked controversies in the country for it does not vindicate the systematic necessity of such a highly-priced practice which at the end appears to be pretty wasteful, all the more since embalming is not an option : it is part of the regular funeral services where the bereaved is generally not even asked whether he wants his beloved to be embalmed or not. Embalming is not a rule in the US, it has just become a natural custom years after years. It seems worth noticing that sanitation was the only common reason between ancient Egyptian and modern embalming. Egyptian embalming had actually more religious motives unlike today's American embalming which refers to ideas of preservation, presentation and sanitation. Modern Embalmment is moreover frequently defined as the treatment of a dead human body in order to achieve an aseptic condition, temporary preservation and a pre-mortem appearance. The most recent reason related to grief is more psychological. American undertakers' specificities as first grief therapists are not only due to the support they give to the bereaved : they are also directly linked to the embalmment work. According to embalmers and some therapists, embalmment could be therapeutic because the vision of the embalmed defunct is thought to help grieve. It enables to view a loved one the way he really was, possibly even nicer, and to be confronted in the same time with the reality of death. Thomas Lynch argues after a journalist's question: My cousin died in a car accident a few years ago. There was an open casket. My sister went in to see the body and ran out screaming, knocking chairs over on the way. Did that help her? "I can't tell you if that helped her, but I can tell you that I know an awful lot of parents whose daughters and sons were killed in car accidents, who never saw them, and who
60

are still searching. I have stood with parents whose young children have been terribly disfigured; they might see a damaged child, but it proves to them that this terrible thing has happened. That's why it hurts. While your sister may have been traumatized, there's no question for her that this person is dead."8 In short, seeing the restored body in an open-casket might stand as a healing function and a means for mourners not to deny the harsh reality of dying. Through embalming, maybe Americans are just trying to find ways to reconcile themselves with the dead and get somewhat closer to death in a society where everything about dying has been "hidden". Regarding that death has been hidden and neglected by a zestful civilization too busy to think about its latent demise, embalmment could be perceived as a weapon to thwart the heavy blow dealt by the unexpected reality of death. Then, this procedure, specific to the American civilization, would be a result of their old careless attitude in relation to their own downfall.

b. Embalmment : a symbol of the American death denial

Let us introduce this subpart with one of Nate's boldest retort at his father's funeral: "No! I refuse to sanitize this anymore.What is this stupid saltshaker? Huh? What is this hermetically sealed box? This phony Astroturf around the grave? Jesus, David, it's like surgery. Clean, antiseptic, business. He was our father!(...) You can pump him full of chemicals. You can put makeup on him, and you can prop him up for a nap in the slumber room, but the fact remains, David, that the only father we're ever going to have is gone. Forever. And that sucks, but it's a goddamned part of life, and you can't really accept it without getting your hands dirty. Well, I do accept it, and I intend to honor the old bastard by letting the whole world see just how fucked up and shitty I feel that he's dead! (throwing the fistful of earth onto the coffin) God damn it! " The two brothers openly disagree on how to honour their father. Nate has in mind an old traditional funeral he glimpsed in Sicily, where people openly mourned their beloved, a funeral where everything seemed truer, more natural and human. Those modern funeral American methods supposed to honour his father look like an undignified spectacle to him. The lift to bury his father, the earth dispenser likened to a "saltshaker" not to soil fingers, the cemetery

Wright Chris, www.bostonphoenix.com

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surrounded by precious artificial lawn, the caterpillar machine recovering the grave right after the funeral, the overabundance of flowers all around the casket 9: all of this represents the new artificial American way of dying with which the bereaved is left to mourn. Nate denounces the sterility of the situation, the grotesque and farcical aspect of the American funeral : no touching, no close contact with the dead, as if the latter had hence become entirely repulsive. How can the living grieve properly through such an unnatural context of burying? Nate tries to explain his father deserves a more sensitive ceremony and that, in the event that the supposedly mourners had forgotten, there is actually a real dead person inside the superb metal casket. He is repelled by the determination to transform this tragedy into a scornful greedy display. The scene is an indictment of the excess of the whole money-making dismal trade by which the callous American funeral, euphemistically renamed "modern", has been corrupt. Today the American funeral is generally criticized for its lack of authenticity and spirituality tarnished by his palpable material side. Material is a term one could use to depict the embalmed defunct whose life-like appearance is nothing but illusion. At the crux of a supposedly mortuary ceremony stands the image of a body full of life. This paradoxical situation is similarly exaggerated by the fact that every guest in the slumber room, aware of being close from a living cadaver, bend over the body in morbid curiosity. A churchman stresses: "Modern embalming featuring that alive-look has enabled corpses to look more and more like window-display mannequins, and visitation with them has become quite popular. The whole industry has been moving steadily beyond the reach of satire."10 Although this quote dates from the sixties, the Church would still surely condemn the obvious show side of the American funeral. It anyway reveals how the picture of obsequies in the US is permeated by the embalming performance. The presentation of a living cadaver has now become a curiosity attracting the macabre appetite of Americans. Can death be aesthetical? A beautiful dead person is what fosters visual interest and it is in such an environment that the mortician has never been as close as a mere beautician, either linguistically or realistically. Cosmetics and make up are what the dead is covered up with, or
9 10

See picture p. 75 See note 2 in The sociology of the undertaker

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rather hidden by, to live down the way the deceased could have been eroded by death. Originally mapped on beautician, the term mortician witnesses an interesting semantic evolution by which the word is unswervingly assimilated to notions of market and appearance. It is today reminiscent of the American undertaker's skills using makeup and selling services. Both beauticians and morticians' skills are to increase beauty and bring out a healthier look, but the technique somewhat differs : while beauticians simply hide facial blemishes, morticians mask any hint of the presence of death. The cover of SFU11 where the face of a dead body is being applied makeup is an illustration of the idea that the dying is disguised by the living. The irony is that even in funerals and graveyards, the only place where dead people should be accepted, death does disturb. Whatever the reasons given to vindicate embalmment, dignity is required to the dying maybe because we want them to resemble us, maybe because we, as living, cannot take the unbearable truth. Americans are all left to mourn and grieve their relatives through the image of a dead embalmed body. Fake or "phony", as Nate would suggest, is the picture of death they will have to keep in mind for ages. The end of the natural human existence is thus kept artificial. At one point, Nate says to his committed embalmer brother: "Is this really what you want to be doing with your life or are you just trying to make a dead man happy?" This remark raises the illusionary side of the procedure and underlines how the living strives through the embalming process to somehow immortalise the dead. Embalmed bodies are not dead, they sleep restfully in a room euphemistically called "the slumber room" and it is in this idealistic context that the living is expected to accept death. Is it the most appropriate environment to grieve? It did not turn out to be that effective for the Fisher family in which the grieving-process seems like an everyday struggle. Though it seems quite hard to confirm, one may assume that the show just depicts a typical American family bearing never-healing wounds because of the inefficiency of the supposedly therapeutic modern funeral rituals. Far from old traditional funerals, the real usefulness of the embalming ritual is under question. Considering the fact that embalming has never been a necessity to help the bereaved in Europe, it does not seem very sensible to deem such a ritual essential and vital for the American civilization, mostly shaped by former
11

See picture p. 79

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Europeans for that matter. Embalming may be fruitful but it is not a necessity for the living unlike most American undertakers suggest in systematically making the procedure part of their funeral services. It has become a trend, an ordinary appealing ritual that customers usually never decline, and most of all a source of undeniable profit for the whole dismal trade. Disregarding any of the reasons given to justify embalmment, the fact remains that the practice would surely cast a shadow on the future of the funeral industry if one day it appeared on the brink of disappearing from the American funeral. Nonetheless, given that embalmment is a deeply entrenched custom, the previous assumption is anyway not a topicality.

To conclude, embalming embodies the US approach on death. Masking and sanitizing the dead highlights a deep fear of death and an American care of protecting themselves from their own demise. Similarly, because bereavements compel us to fear our own future, embalming or choosing the most protective casket might be endeavours to hinder death under process. The bereaved going to see an undertaker to demand the most shielding "funeral set" and immortalise his loved one are possible ways to deny his own extinction. Throughout these modern funeral rituals the US most likely seek ways to alleviate sorrows and guilt-feelings by caring for the dead. It is for the living a means to temporally diminish the trauma and be reassured on the prospect of his fate. Dead people inflict obsessive fear to the living but, according to Thomas Lynch, a good funeral is to serve the living by caring for the dead. As he puts it: "A funeral is not a great investment; it is a sad moment in a family's history. It is not a hedge against inflation; it is a rite of passage. It is not a bargain; it is an effort to make sense of our mortality. It has less to do with actuarial profits and more to do with actual losses. It is not an exercise in salesmanship; it is an exercise in humanity."12 Beyond any suspicion, doubt and rebuke on the American funeral trade, each civilization has to find its own ways of burying the dead. Sometimes more humble or sometimes more luxuriant, who could pretentiously assert one method is better than another? In the US, it belongs to the undertaker's humanity to suggest the most appropriate rituals to the family often

12

See note 3 in The sociology of the undertaker

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in need of guidance; yet, conmen and funeral conglomerates contrasting with the reassuring portrayal of earnest funeral homes cannot be excluded from this paying-off industry in which the concern about material rather than spiritual has forged ahead. However, today's American funeral development is curbed by the emergence of the latest fad : cremation. Because a simple container can be placed in place of an expensive casket, because there is no cost associated with the purchase and perpetual care of a tombstone, because embalming is then worthless, cremation offers a financial alternative and allows scattering of the remains in a place of significance to the deceased. While cremation demands are frequently not profitable options for the industry, prospects for the future of the business will however meet the longawaited wave of the rewarding baby-boomer generations. A growing trend with cremation is the consumers' choice to hold creative funeral services, rather than a simple direct cremation, and in matter of devising new manners to honour their loved ones, it now does not seem too bold to assert that Americans remain by far the most inspired. The American visionary thinker Benjamin Franklin once said : "Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes". He had probably no idea of the mind-blowing veracity of his assertion as nothing seems to have changed after so many decades...

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Conclusion

Ambiguous, amoral but pedagogical, Six Feet Under dares to expose the most intimate moments of our lives : when we try to cope with a relative's loss. Tackling the most awkward subject of our common disappearance, the series subtly raises psychoanalytical, philosophical, and sociological issues through an apparently odd family, which finally turns out to be familiar and close to any ordinary household considering that dying and grieving are indivisible components of the familial circle. Grief is, according to Thomas Lynch, "the tax we pay on our attachments, not on our interests or divisions or entertainments," and this tax has never been so distinctly disclosed to everyone. Disclosed, for it represents the ultimate human sorrow, an invisible affliction remaining so deep that nobody seems capable to break the usual unsaid either in reality or in fiction. Only Allan Ball, who made this show knowingly, spoke the truth on the reality of life, on a theme which has never been perceived as potentially attractive or interesting. Unlike movies which regularly bring out a wider range of themes, it seems TV is generally restricted to a perspective of mere entertainment to divert as many families as possible, yet regarding the success the show has encountered, there is no doubt TV can hence convey more serious and disturbing topics. It paved the way for a collection of bolder serials and wildly contributed to making death a trend in the US. A trend may sound pretty excessive, but the fact that the show sparked new vocations in favour of the funeral industry cannot but be positive, in that the upcoming funeral directors influenced by SFU will undoubtedly keep in mind the importance of the ethical dimension of such a business so alarmingly tarnished by sharks and hucksters. On the brink of its fifth and last season, the show's reputation seems to have decreased moderately. After four seasons and a peak of popularity during the second and third, critics claim the series is over the edge, too predictable, unrealistic, frantically misguided with too much sorrow and too many deaths. Did the series far exceed its reach? If there was only one main message conveyed by the serial, it would be that nothing lasts forever; this is why the show has to remain ephemeral despite the fad it did trigger. Mentioning "Everything,
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everyone, everywhere, ends" in the trailer of the upcoming new last season is an attempt from the directors to justify the end of the show by its own basic message : the ubiquity of death finally puts any existing thing at the same rank. Though diehard fans may find it hard to accept the extinction of the show, there is no need to maintain at any costs this series that has always been distinguished by its credibility. In SFU, the triviality of life becomes fascinating and captivating, yet the reliability of the show depends on how to measure and construe this triviality. Throughout the last season, it seems the plot is less surprising, more tedious, while death and grieving, notably after Nate's wife dies, become somewhat too constant and recurring. Its regeneration is not that obvious and even though characters all evolve gradually, they seem incapable of finding out the necessary answer to get out of their endless predicament. The show is still profoundly emotional and well played, but if we tried to cast an overview from its birth up to now, the drama perhaps loses some of its basic meaning. In any case, influenced or not by the television audience, Ball would certainly have stopped the progression of the show because, similar to an authentic portrayal of the reality of life, the essence of SFU is nothing but ephemeral. On the other hand, the popularity of the show, the way it pedagogically tackles metaphysical issues and strives to enter the viewer's psyche are reasons to assert that the fame of this groundbreaking serial could linger and not deter a novice audience from watching a program that would then be labeled and characterised as cult. Here are only hypothesises, but the fact that the show is often described objectively or not as the best television show ever by specialists is a good omen for a potentially unprecedented neverceasing fame. The cover of this work could emblematize the landmarks of the whole memoir. It illustrates a dichotomy between the advancement of a great and idyllic America and the hindering reality. The cemetery in the foreground stands for a hindrance of the evolution of a civilization that has always distinguished itself by a particular care in innovation, greatness and immensity. In the background, the skyscraper epitomizes hopeful American horizons and the rise of a dominating nation in need to remain on top of the hill. The picture could be divided into two separate worlds : the white and pure everlasting sky whose access could be perceived as a divine ascent opposed to the dark and tainted earth as a repelling reminder of our mortality.
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Witnessing our constant rejuvenation centuries after centuries, trees and nature symbolize our most intimate wish, which is to be able to naturally regenerate and last. Here, the tombs are surrounded by rejuvenating trees contrasting with the stillness of the dead. The main three elements which are the trees, the tombs and the skyscraper are all connected to each other in that they respectively stand for : what we whish to be, what we are and what we do to forget what we are. According to Ernest Becker, we are all fighting death in one way or another, we feel the need to control our fate and build a life strong enough to thwart our basic anxiety of dying. Here, what is built is the strength of this skyscraper which stands erect as a seemingly indestructible weapon, a divine breakthrough capable of overcoming death. American skyscrapers are like ramparts to protect society, a reassuring manner to forget human vulnerability in an environment where work and progress are regarded as rewards of God. Skyscrapers embody the American will to go beyond human capacities and reach the sky to leave the door open to sacred dimensions. Yet, no matter what we do in life or what we believe in, reality stalks and follows us until death, here represented by the cemetery. SFU is a harsh reminder of this truth - a truth showing that despite the American will to seek shelter, human ideals are likely to be shattered someday. The disastrous reality of September the 11`h and the collapse of the Twin Towers crushed a part of the American dream and forced people to confront Americans with their intrinsic vulnerability. The height and the magnificence of the unassailable symbolic American shelter suddenly fell down. Taken by surprise, today's America is aware that its ramparts are actually not flawless, but the unexpectedness of the situation leaves a nation unprepared to face its fragility and mourn peacefully. Having said that, one may assume that the contentious and disputed legitimacy of the American crusade against terror focused in Iraq is likewise a way to pull a veil over a national mourning that never heals. Overwhelmed by the ruthless reality, by the impossibility of controlling death, men try to transform it. In the US, death has been renovated and used as a source of profit - it has been hidden and transformed via the embalming process followed by excessive modern rituals which evince a will to distance itself from European traditions. A distance explained by the fact that Americans have had to rebuild a new country with its own norms and values far from
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its original roots kept in a remote Europe. Inevitably, rebuilding involves a challenge in innovation and improvement with greater rituals and more personal traditions whose importance is today particularly palpable.1 Death is a clear enemy to the American civilization and just like any potential threat that has been encountered after a few centuries of intense construction, the enemy shall be wiped out to carry on an undying hegemony. Transforming or erasing death is a way to deny it. Death is part of the American society but it is usually hidden, and the paradox is that, through movies and media, modern American culture is permeated by violence and macabre obsessions. While death is enjoyed virtually, real death is hidden. There is indeed an antagonistic vision where the cult of death is part of everyday life, fascinating and praised, but systematically turned into a consumer good and dollars. On the other side, lies SFU whose message is now clear to us. Two different approaches to characterise death can hence be distinguished : the artificial death, denied, left out and transformed, and the natural one, human, biological, wisely expected. Thomas Lynch, who was the main inspiration for the show, wrote : "To ignore our mortality creates an `imbalance' a kind of spiritual irregularity, psychic impaction, a bunging up of our humanity, a denial of our very nature."2 Denying our finitude is indeed lying to ourselves to cling to an illusionary hope, live a frustrating life in the idea that death is an alien concept, incongruous to our basic sense of existing, an unnatural or even supernatural incident that cannot be. Perhaps, some would affirm that thinking about death is demeaning to our species, tarnishing the portrayal of the greatness of life and having dark pessimistic notions of existence which cannot but already infect reflection. Is conceiving death such an awful plague? What is feared in death is this inescapable and uncontrollable unknown. To borrow Thomas Lynch's image, death has always been like sex when we were younger, a time when we knew about the thing but did not know the thing itself. Thinking is not conceiving. Life and death shape a syncretism, a union of indivisible opposites where nothing is chosen, where birth and death outline an accidental and natural circle. As the Bhagavad Gita puts it : "Invisible before birth are all beings and after death invisible again. They are seen between two unseens.
1 2

See chapter 3 Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking, Vintage 1998

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Why in this truth find sorrow?" Life is not unilateral and has to be conceived together with its hidden face to perhaps understand our existence is an osmosis between the perceptible and the invisible. The dying and the living need each other. The dying need the living to perpetuate memories, be outlived and remembered. Similarly, we need to remember the dying - mourning teaches us the value of life. Maybe our existence is after all nothing more than a mere test on how to construe the invisible, how to go beyond human understanding. And this is why any reflection upon bereavements, like SFU, can be regarded as a way to cultivate death and control the dread that stems from it. Allan Ball acknowledges that running through his show has enabled him to subdue a few components of his intimate fear of dying : "Even though I can't possibly say that I've erased all my fear and anxiety about death, I've certainly erased any denial that it does indeed exist - and that it will happen to me."3 Ball certainly learns how to live through the awareness of death and probably tries to impart his knowledge through his own show. Life is an eternal quest of meaning in which each step forward should never be seen as a way to hinder human fatality but rather as a rewarding attempt that our mortality alone enables us to increase tenfold. This work cannot be properly concluded without stating Lynch's profound and penetrating quote: "The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these essential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us."4

3 4

Greenwald Jeff, www.ethicaltraveler.com Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, Norton 2000

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APPENDIX

The main Six Feet Under cast and crew

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The Six Feet Under genealogy and the Fishers relatives

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The Fisher family in grief at the fathers funeral

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The magnificent Fishers Funeral Home based in Los Angeles

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Inside the American Funeral Home : the casket wall prominently displays like ordinary items the different types of unyielding caskets

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The embalmers paraphernalia

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Federico fixing dead injured bodies : the results of a dubious but challenging work deeply entrenched in todays American funeral rituals

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An old zestful American advert suspiciously promoting embalming fluids like revolutionary cosmetics

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The Six Feet Under icon : more real than any realism, dying in the US has never been so appealing

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APPENDIX

Hallowed Ground
Lyrics written by WASP from the full-length album Unholy Terror (Sanctuary Records)

Come and take me down The dark beyond And take me there Where I come from Take me down To the place where I'll kneel And let me lay my shadow down In through the eyes Of a child's inner me No pain to heal my bloodied brow There is no rain To save this silent town There is no rain to save at all There is no place To save this silent ground There is no place to save at all Oh father take me Unto where I'll lay me down Oh Hallowed Ground Oh the sky is falling And I don't know where my home is now My Hallowed Ground Oh and can you take me For I have tasted Hallowed Ground Oh all around Father - oh do you hear me This pain I will not cry aloud Father - I know you hear me My head is bludgeoned but unbowed

Ground Zero : The unfathomable vision of despair etched in the grieving American mind

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APPENDIX

Death Quotes Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Francis Bacon The fundamental law of the social order [is] ... the progressive control of life and death. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. Woody Allen Our life is made by the death of others. Leonardo da Vinci Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Joe Louis Only those who have dared to let go can dare to reenter. Meister Eckhart The last to be overcome is death, and the knowledge of life is the knowledge of death. Edgar Cayce The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Mark Twain No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow. Euripides Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage. Jean Anouilh Death is life's way of telling that you've been fired. R. Geis Birth, and copulation, and death, That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks. T. S. Eliot
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS 1st Rank - CIEUTAT Michel, Les Grands Thmes du Cinma Amricain, Les Editions du Cerf 1991 - FIEDLER Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel, Dell 1966. 42. - GAARDER Jostein, Le Monde de Sophie, Seuil 1995. 37. - KING Christine, The Death of a King (1935-1977), St Martin's Press 1997. 32. - O'CONNOR Nancy, Letting Go with Love : the Grieving Process, La Mariposa Press 1986. 29. - ROSENBERG Larry, Living in the light of death. 36. - THOMAS Louis-Vincent, La Mort, Que Sais-je? 2004. 25. - TURNER Graeme, Film as Social Practice, Routledge 1990 - WAUGH Evelyn, The Loved One, Penguin Classics 2000. 09. 2nd Rank - BALL Alan and Alan Poul, Better Living Through Death, HBO 2003. 11, 39. - BECKER Ernest, The Denial of Death, Free Press Paperbacks 1997. 30, 31. - LYNCH Thomas, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, Norton 2000. 51, 57, 65, 70. - LYNCH Thomas, The Undertaking, Vintage 1998. 48, 69. - MITFORD Jessica, The American Way of Death, A Fawcett Crest Book 1963. 50, 62.

WEB SITES 1st Rank - www.cnn.com archives, 20 - www.detnews.com [FISK Alan, Morticians dig `Six Feet Under' 12 June 2004] 6, 56. - www.gay.com [CHAMPAGNE Christine] 18. - www.jackmyers.com [MYERS Jack] 35. - www.theasc.com [MAGID Ron, American Cinematographer, Nov 2002] 40.

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 2nd Rank - www.bostonphoenix.com [WRIGHT Chris] 61. - www.ethicaltraveler.com [GREENWALD Jeff] - www.hbo.com 6, 11. - www.nfda.org 54. - www.orthodoxytoday.org [JOHNSON Jeffery, Denial . The American Way of Death Nov 2004] 28. - www.showcase.ca 55. - www.washingtonpost.com [WAXMAN Sharon, Allan Ball's interview] 10.

ARTICLES 1st Rank - PATTERSON John, To live and die in LA, The Guardian 21 Feb 2004. 09. - PSENNY Daniel, "NYPD Blue", Le Monde 10 Dec 2004. 13. - RODALE and STOCKED, "Beyond Grief : A Guide to Reconcile Life After Loss", Prevention August 1994. 34. 2nd Rank

- DUBOIS Jean-Paul, "La Mort en Folie", Nouvel Observateur October 2003. 52. - FAST Jonathan, "After Columbine : How People Mourn Sudden Death", Social Work Oct 2003. 34. - The Counselor, March 2005. 55.

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