Gay Today: Viewpoint

Six Feet Under

By Jack Nichols

HBO's flourishing new series, Six Feet Under, is the creation of Alan Ball-who gave us American Beauty-and who now delivers-without flinching-another black comedy dissecting family values in the good ol' USA.

As its title implies, Six Feet Under references the graveyard. The Fisher family is in the funeral business. When Daddy Fisher dies a comic death in the first episode, his progeny are left to keep the business going. American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball gives life to Six Feet Under

I say "comic" because Daddy Fisher is shown proudly driving his new hearse, talking to his wife Ruth (Frances Conroy) on a cell phone and attempting simultaneously to light a cigarette. Ruth, on the other end of the line, asks him if he's smoking. He lies, but guiltily extinguishes the offensive butt only to attempt an immediate re-light while crossing at an intersection where he's wiped out by an oncoming vehicle, turning his new hearse into a virtual pancake.

One of his two sons-the straight one-returns home to Daddy's funeral. En route, this son Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) meets a mysterious and attractive young woman whom he boinks in a semi-public venue. David (Michael C. Hall) the other Fisher son, who is gay, and a painfully dutiful inheritor of his father's business, also inherits the job of preparing his own dad's body for burial.

Michael C. Hall plays David, the show's gay center

Mother Ruth, it soon becomes clear, is something of an emotional basket case which may or may not account for Claire's (her wacko daughter played by Lauren Ambrose) seemingly dysfunctional approaches to life. The difference between this mother and daughter, perhaps, is that Claire often seems somehow more darkly determined.

David's gayness-demonstrated with kisses that are every bit as graphic as those to which viewers have become accustomed in Queer as Folk-is tempered by his straight-laced assimilationist manner, one which leads him to volunteer as a deacon at the family's local church.

His handsome Black lover, Keith (Matthew St. Patrick) who'd previously managed to steer him to a gay-friendly church, feels disappointed when their Sunday morning worship rendezvous must end. David then returns to his family's mainstream religious closet where he rubs elbows with parishioners who, he seems half-consciously to hope, will die and thereby add big bucks to the family business.

Death, said Gore Vidal eons ago, is one of three buzz words (the other two being Money and Sex) that, like a terrible automobile wreck, will always attract public attention most. In Six Feet Under death is omnipresent, with each episode giving focus to embalming, make-up, and even saggy breast-propping, performed on nude corpses.

In spite of the Fisher family's foibles, we're reminded that what we see as their faults can be softened by some often engaging strengths. Nate, at first appearing to be a loose cannon in the funeral parlor, shows his uptight gay brother that he can, in fact, connect emotionally with the parlor's bereaved clients. Following his discovery that he's got a queer for a brother, Nate ends by assuring the gay man that he loves him deeply. When David replies that he too loves his straight brother, however, he sounds nearly perfunctory by comparison. He knows how to talk the talk, at least.

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Six Feet Under: Official Site
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Claire, while skating on insanity's edge, has, thus far, shown some signs of improvement. But just as she seems to be connecting with a hunk, she discovers she's been used in a discolored plot. How she'll respond to such traitorous behaviors-with crazed fury or with a balanced calm-- remains to be seen. When the camera returns to her problems, the viewer will be familiarized with many of those difficulties that otherwise ordinary women experience at the hands of cleverly unprincipled men.

Ruth Fisher, being a widow, tells us up front that she's too young to languish hereafter without a comforting male presence. A middle-aged fellow who provides her funeral parlor with its flowers has, in a recent episode, become her beau, calming her obviously discombobulated nerves. Where these two lovers will take us is anybody's guess.

I'm not really sure where, in the long run, Six Feet Under is headed, but I do know that when I've flipped over to HBO and see that its playing, I take my finger off the remote and find myself enjoying soap opera, a genre I'd never ever expected to like. Can it be actually true that in my dotage I might become a Soap Opera Digest reviewer? Yikes!