Six Feet Under Six Feet Under
More than a few people who worked with Alan Ball knew exactly the basis for Lester Burnham’s place of employment in American Beauty even before knowing who wrote the screenplay. There seems to be something within Mr. Ball that speaks to the human experience and knows how to frame it for all to see. American Beauty had that quality and the tragedy that was Lester Burnham’s life and death had an American familiarity. Six feet Under and the selfish yet ultimately sympathetic Nate Fisher, a fictional kindred spirit to Mr. Burnham, took us a to a dark side showing us that it is exactly on the dark side where we live if not necessarily where we die.
Linda Stasi in today’s New York Post tells us this:
“…So it was with great curiosity and not a little bit of anxiety that I screened the the final Six Feet Under … let me say right up front that somehow Alan Ball … found a way to push the envelope so far … speechless and breathless … more shocking than how they end the show is that Alan Ball thought of it in the first place … this show goes where no TV show has ever gone before. Ever.”
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Death with dignity on '6 Feet'
David Bianculli in the Daily News on Aug 2. 2005
Death came naturally to HBO's "Six Feet Under" Sunday night, when its central character, Nate Fisher (portrayed by Peter Krause), died quietly at the end of the episode.
Since this series started, death has been the elephant in the room - and sometimes, the elephant has haunted people and trampled dreams.
Never, though, has death struck more closely than in Sunday's shocking episode.
In 2001, the series pilot established the precedent to which "Six Feet Under" has adhered ever since. Each show opens with the last moments of a person's life - a person whose body is destined to be prepared for burial at the Fisher funeral parlor. In the first show, the victim was Nathaniel Fisher Sr. - Nate's father and the patriarch of what then was called Fisher & Sons.
Nate Sr. (played by Richard Jenkins) began haunting Nate Jr., appearing to him in visions, or as a vision, to offer advice and ridicule, to spout both sense and nonsense. That, too, set a precedent. In time, Nate Sr. would be seen and spoken to by all other members of his family.
The principals of "Six Feet Under" have been haunted literally as well as figuratively over the years, working their ways through largely unhappy relationships, one after another.
Two seasons ago, when Nate suffered a sudden aneurysm, the threat of death came front and center. Nate struggled with his sense of mortality, and his personal definitions of love and happiness ever since.
That's why his surprise collapse, soon after having illicit sex, was in retrospect clearly foreshadowed. Even more so, when you reflect on it, by the appearance during the opening credits of the black crow as an unwanted visitor at Nate's 40th birthday party.
That episode ended with Nate's creepy, sudden slide into incoherence and unconsciousness: "Arm is numb ... numb arm ... narm ..."
Sunday's episode began with an ambulance ride to the hospital, after which Nate emerged from his coma, greeted his family, and marshaled the will to tell his unstable and pregnant new wife, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), he intended to leave her. Only David stayed behind to watch TV with his brother as Nate went to sleep - a sleep from which he never awoke.
After one last vision, in which Nate, his dad and a hippie version of his brother shared a joint and drove a surfer van to the beach, "Six Feet Under" shifted back to the hospital room, where Nate's vital signs had hit zero. David called to his brother in vain, and the scene faded not to black, but to its trademark white, followed by the final placard and a ghostly lack of music on the soundtrack: "Nathaniel Samuel Fisher Jr., 1965-2005."
Three episodes remain until the series finale Aug. 21, and previews for this week's episode included scenes of the wake and funeral - but none of Nate being prepped by his own loved ones, if that's to happen, or of Nate following in his father's spectral footsteps, and haunting those he left behind.
That almost has to happen. It forms such a poetic full circle, and gives such cosmic closure to "Six Feet Under," that Nate virtually had to die for this series (which has languished in its own misery for more than a year now) to end satisfyingly.
In this case, Death, be proud.