Read Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For for Free Online

confirms what Turner describes as liminal: as related to thresholds, transitions and margins. If, as he argues, every society carves out spaces existing on the cultural periphery that are shaped by ambiguity and paradox, then what does Six Feet Under say about ours? It is a question that this collection seeks to address. There is a liminality to this anthology as it considers how the series challenges representation, lifts cultural taboos, says what normally cannot be said on 10
    INTRODUCT ION
    regular TV – as Thomas Lynch points out later, placing a corpse in a room means you can pretty much say anything.
    Each episode begins with a demise: a man suffers a heart attack while taking out the rubbish, a conman cracks his head on the bottom of his swimming pool while Dean Martin croons ‘Ain’t that a kick in the head’, a young woman commits suicide, and a 14-year-old falls off the bed laughing and breaks her neck. Each death will bring the Fishers some business, and often it sets the tone for the episode. The first section of this anthology, ‘Memento mori: spectacle, the specular and observing the dead’, starts from this premise – the idea of death and what it means. David Lavery starts by placing the genre of magic realism within a cultural and televisual context. Arguing that death allows for a moment where normal rules are suspended and everything becomes topsy-turvy, Lavery investigates how this operates at a generic and formal level in the show. Next is Mark W. Bundy’s lyrical piece. It offers a visceral engagement with the show through his own experiences of death and illness. Rob Turnock’s chapter returns us to a more critical study of liminality and how it functions within Six Feet Under . He suggests that the structure of each episode, which begins with a death and concludes with a burial, makes visible a liminal space that allows for possibilities of change and transformation. Concluding this first section, Lucia Rahilly offers a close textual reading of the death of porn actress Viveca St John (Veronica Hart) in ‘An Open Book’
    (1:5). Rahilly makes a case for suggesting a blurring between the
    ‘money shot’ (the physical shuddering of male ejaculation in pornographic films) and the moment of death.
    Six Feet Under premiered only months before the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, and thus was well positioned to respond to the haunting elegiac-ness of a nation in mourning. Peter Krause (who plays Nate Fisher) mused that ‘after Sept. 11, a lot of people who do TV went back to work and thought, “Oh, jeez. This is meaningless”
    but our show is now as meaningful as ever’ (Zaslow 2002). He went on, ‘the basic theme of our show is, you’ve got one singular life and that’s it. It makes people think about themselves and their place in the world’ (ibid.). Part two, entitled ‘Mourning and melancholia: American cultural crisis and recovery’, is grounded in this uneasy cultural zeitgeist obsessed with death and tragedy. Arguably American culture has long been obsessed with death – with guns, violence and 11
    READING SIX FEET UNDER
    killing. We may be able to bear the cause and effect logic of a mobster whacking a miscreant in The Sopranos, but are far more uncomfortable with what Christopher Moore called ‘the cool quiet of actual death’ (2002). The section thus considers strategies of coping and healing, which in turn enable authors to ponder what lies beneath this American preoccupation.
    The first two pieces explore the American Gothic as an historical strategy and how it is used to understand the present in Six Feet Under . Mandy Merck surveys how it works at a thematic and formal level, reading the series through Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’
    and the tradition of nineteenth century Gothic literature. For Dana Heller the American Gothic speaks about America’s repressed traumas such as slavery. She goes further to suggest how Six Feet Under in turn uses these same