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

Chambers to interrogate and question the whole notion of heterosexuality as the norm, and he posits the question: do we now need to out ourselves as heterosexuals?
    Section five investigates the use of music as well as giving poetic insight into death and mourning. Peter Kaye begins his chapter by contextualising the musical influences in Six Feet Under – Thomas 13
    READING SIX FEET UNDER
    Newman’s musical pedigree and the Hollywood connection. Offering two close textual readings allows him to reveal not only how the original score functions as a brand but also how licensed music works alongside the narrative to give additional meanings. An interview with Richard Marvin, musical supervisor and composer for the series, concludes his contribution. A personal response from the man who provided the main inspiration for the series, Thomas Lynch (an American poet, author and professional undertaker in Milford, Michigan), ends the anthology. Alan Ball asked the cast and his writing staff to read Lynch’s award-winning books Bodies in Motion and At Rest (2000) and The Undertaking (1997), along with Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), before starting work on the show (Ross 2003: 12). Lynch’s contribution here weaves his personal experience of undertaking with a poetic reflection on Six Feet Under .
    The last three sections prelude with poems written by Peter Wilson. Each directly responds to both the series and individual deaths: one (‘S&D @ HBO (TR for SFU )’) conveys an impression of the moods and themes that pervade the show, while the others (‘Emily Previn, 1954–2001’, and ‘Nathaniel Samuel Fisher, 1943–
    2000’) adopt the personae of those in the thralls of death. Adapting stanzaic patterns such as terza rima and triolet gives order to the poetic form. With these elegiac attempts to give voice to the melancholic we come full circle. We end where we began – with a death. How Ball describes his own experience of familial loss tells us much about the series. When he was 13 years old his sister Mary Ann was killed when a car ploughed into them as she was driving him to a piano lesson. He says of the tragedy (Ross 2003:11): That separated my life into a life before and a life after. It was really my first experience of losing someone close to me in the worst possible way – out of the blue and in front of my eyes …
    nothing else in my life has affected me quite as profoundly as that.
    That nothing is ever quite the same again after you put that dead body in the room is realised in the series and explored in this collection. Each article carves out a new direction, some by revising old debates and others by seeing culture and theory anew. It is hoped that this collection will go some way in addressing the absence in language and pauses in discourse identified by Lynch (2000: 227).
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    INTRODUCT ION
    A good funeral, like a good poem, is driven by voices, images, intellections and the permanent. It moves us up and back the cognitive and imaginative and emotive register. The transport seems effortless, inspired, natural as breathing or the loss of it. In the space between what is said and unsaid, in the pause between utterances, whole histories are told; whole galaxies glimpsed in the margins, if only momentarily…Good poems and good funerals are stories well told.
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Part 1
Memento mori:
    spectacle, the
    specular and
    observing the
    dead

    one
    ‘It’s not television,
    DAVID
    it’s magic realism’:
    LAVERY
    the mundane, the
    grotesque and the
    fantastic in Six Feet
    Under
    Prologue: Getting Six Feet Under
    The sequence to which I call attention at the outset of this examination of Six Feet Under ’s generic allegiances is as baffling as it is unclassifiable. In ‘Parallel Play’ (4:3) Federico (Rico) Diaz, the Fisher family’s Puerto Rican restorative artist, has a strange dream (confirmed at the sequence end), clearly the product of his dalliance with the stripper Sophia (Idalis