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Article Excerpt
Filmic depictions of married life necessarily tend toward formal incoherence and abrupt genre shifts: when unable to contain their contradictions within the plot, the problem often erupts hysterically on the level of form.
--Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic
With the popular HBO original series, Six Feet Under, Alan Ball elaborates on the dark vision of family and desire initiated in his award-winning film, American Beauty, further reconfiguring traditional family drama in a post-network disavowal of televisual preciousness. (1) When Claire Fisher, the tempestuous redheaded adolescent on Six Feet Under, screams at her mother Ruth that they will never have the kind of "touchy-feely mother-daughter relationships like you see on TV" because those kinds of relationships "don't exist" (episode 5: "An Open Book"), the writers decisively depart from idealistic representations of the nuclear family as full of comfort and moral support. In these metatelevisual moments, Six Feet Under comments on its own medium, distancing itself from the conservative historical duties of "cramming every 'citizen' with daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, [and] moralism" (102), to borrow Louis Althusser's description of the media as Ideological State Apparatus. This renunciation of television's conservative use positions Six Feet Under as a potentially radical text in contemporary debates over gender roles, sexuality, and the "true" meaning of "family." Indeed, the Fisher family models a more genuine intimacy because of their honesty about what family can do for you, and what it can't do--or what it does to you, as well as for you.
While the show is structured around this less touchy-feely look at relationships within the nuclear family, the plot is largely driven by relationships between members of the Fisher family and their romantic interests. The embattled relationship between Nate and Brenda dominates seasons one and two, followed by the deeply troubled marriage between Nate and Lisa in season three; season four reintroduced the possibility of a relationship between Nate and Brenda and culminated with a proposal. The promotion for the fourth season hyped the romance angle: "One marriage has come to a tragic end, another is beginning, and a third is on the rocks" (HBO website). (2) Thus, the part of the dysfunctional family plot that seems to be of most importance is the formation and maintenance of new pair-bonds. It is through this focal point that I wish to consider the strides made by this show towards updating existing relationship genres. As the "it's not TV" of family drama, Six Feet Under provides a televisual space in which to propose new near-feminist visions of romance and marriage. (3)
Yet when the narrative of Six Feet Under draws closest to the possibility of primetime feminism, something in the writing snaps. In episode 13 ("Knock, Knock"), Nate and Brenda argue in the car over whether to get engaged, and as their argument heats up, Brenda crosses the center line of the highway and nearly runs head-on into a truck before veering off the road and hitting a utility pole; both of them end up in the hospital: the revision of marriage discourse as car wreck? Nate and Lisa nearly separate, and when they finally decide to forge new roles for themselves within the marriage instead of abandoning it (episode 35: "The Opening"), Lisa goes missing (episode 36: "Everyone Leaves"), and for the rest of the season we are led to believe she has been abducted on her way to visit her sister in Santa Cruz. In the season finale her body is found and her death confirmed: the revision of marriage discourse as random violence? as risk to life and limb? To echo Slavoj Zizek's analysis of Peter Lynch's film Lost Highway, the writers of Six Feet Under seem to "take refuge in catastrophic scenarios in order to avoid the actual deadlock (of the impossibility of sexual relationship, of social antagonism)" (34). Or in Peter Krause's perceptive reflections (Nate), these catastrophes cover up "things that either the writers don't know how to write about, don't want to write about, or haven't chosen to write about yet" (Havrilesky). The actor speaks convincingly in a recent interview about the potential appeal of exploring an "expressive, communicative, conflict-filled relationship--one that's not about what isn't said, but about what's said"--rather than the romantic illiteracy that riddles Nate and Brenda's dialogues. Yet there is a line past which innovations to the marriage plot have been unable to go, and the bodies of husbands and wives end up bloodied and bruised as the series runs headlong into these discursive barriers.
This narrative boundary within Six Feet Under can be usefully situated in the context of contemporary cinematic treatments of romantic relationships. In Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (2003), David Shumway surveys recent films for their representation of heterosexual couplehood, noting a "revival of more traditional romantic comedy" typified by Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998) and P.J. Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding (1997). These films function as a form of backlash against the "relationship stories" developed by Woody Allen over the last three decades, notably in Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Husbands and Wives (1992), a genre that explores the problems inherent in couplehood rather than reveling uncritically in romance. Shumway links this revival of romantic comedy to the contemporary anti-divorce movement, led by research centers such as the Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project, whose visions of marriage as the cornerstone of American society are reflected in romantic comedies that paradoxically prioritize marriage over love. Shumway demonstrates a tone of cynicism in such films, using the example of Bronwen Hughes's Forces of Nature (1999). This lesser known Sandra Bullock film organizes the audience's desires around the hope that the protagonist, Ben (Ben Affleck), will call off his wedding in order to elope with his newfound soul mate, Sara (Sandra Bullock), thereby going with the flow of love and accepting its power as a "force of nature." Instead, the groom disciplines himself to return to his bride, and, as Shumway argues, "We are left to assume that this movie endorses the social conventions of marriage over those of romantic love, in effect repudiating the film's own narrative" (222, my italics). Shumway draws on the sociology of love, via Anthony Giddens, to assert that while American culture may indeed have undergone certain transformations of intimacy as a result of the women's movement and the sexual revolution, there remains a residual anxiety over these changes and a longing for stability made manifest in films that promote marriage in illogical ways, "exploit[ing] people's fears about 'everyday social experiments'" in relationships. In what follows, I want to pick up on this point that film and television shows participate in the cultural conversation about the value of marriage and the possibility of alternative paradigms for pair bonds, and that they often break down on the level of plot at precisely the point where they might say something new, in effect repudiating their own narratives.
Six Feet Under takes Giddens' concept of "everyday social experiments" as a central plot device, dramatizing a wide range of non-normative sexual choices and configurations, from the domesticated homosexuality of Keith and David to the Harold-and-Maude reprise between Arthur, the apprentice undertaker, and Ruth, the widowed matriarch of the Fisher family, not to mention the unapologetically autonomous sexuality of Claire, the daughter, as she couples with a series of men and eventually finds herself in the position of needing an abortion, a choice she makes without the usual melodrama and guilt of abortion narratives. Two sets of "everyday social experiments" in particular--Nate/Brenda and Nate/Lisa--lend themselves to an analysis of the ways this show revisits and expands the available discourses of marriage and monogamous heterosexuality. In good soap opera fashion, each season of Six Feet Under has been driven by the obstacles placed between a central couple. At the end of season two, Brenda and Nate's broken engagement left fans of the show grieving through the summer as we waited, without much hope, for a reunion of some kind. After her compulsive infidelities are revealed, Brenda loads up her car and leaves town, and Nate, having recently confessed to getting an ex-girlfriend pregnant while engaged to Brenda, goes under the knife for brain surgery (episode 26: "The Last Time"). Season three opens with Nate already married to another woman, the ex-girlfriend Lisa, and the portrait of their marriage hardly leads us to root for its success, but when this partnership,...
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