Pushing Up Daisies

You know how, when you finish a satisfying novel, the characters wander around in your head for a few days afterward, and you feel a longing for them, an ache and an empty place in your heart that comes with the realization that you can never know more of them and their stories than you know now? There's that bitter knowledge that you'll never get to look forward to the next scene, the next interaction, the next terrible mistake or death or epiphany on the part of the characters. The pleasure of immersing yourself in a fresh piece of their lives and history for a while is now over. When the story ends there's some sense of closure and peace in finishing the book, but if it's a good enough story, it is, in a way, more painful than satisfying, and you want to open to the first few pages again and remind yourself of the self you were when you last read those words, and of how it felt to be invited into that world the first time around. Which you can never do again with that story.

That's how I feel now that the television series "Six Feet Under" has ended. The last episode was very satisfying, since we did get to see that there was a way out of the difficult present into the hopeful future for all the characters. But it also underscored my feelings of loss and sadness about the end of the characters' lives, since the ten-minute "valedictory," as some have called it, which ended the show and the series was a fast-forward skip through time to the highlights of the characters' lives to come, and to the deaths of each of the remaining major characters. The show centered on the people who live and work in a family-owned funeral home and the continual requirement that they focus on and deal with the deaths of others, as well as their own debilitating pain and inability to cope with the deaths of those they love. Thus, the natural, appropriate, and organic resolution to their stories is the brief but solid and final ending of each of their lives, whether in the present day or in a future glimpsed through a montage during the final moments of the series. The ending was wonderfully, sadly appropriate to the subject matter of the show, and, as the show did every week, it forced viewers to acknowledge the inevitable yet mysterious end of life, the one certainty we all face.

I loved that aspect of "Six Feet Under." Every week's show began with a death, often presented in a shockingly humorous way. Sometimes it was a stranger whose funeral arrangements would be dealt with during the show; sometimes, as in the very first episode, it was the death of someone dear and integral to the lives of the characters in the story. There was no escaping the specter of death; the characters sometimes courted death, sometimes cheated it, but always had to deal with it, ultimately.

Sometimes the inability of the Fisher family (and most of the people with whom they created relationships) to face emotion straight-on and work through it made them do reckless or thoughtless things out of their own fear and denial of their feelings or desires. Nate, the one family member who was devoted to working through his pain and considering it carefully, ended up wallowing in it, citing it as an excuse for egregiously bad behavior, and he became a narcissistic pain in the ass. But Nate also brought other fascinating characters into his orbit, and one could sympathize with the universality of his concerns at times, when he wasn't being such a selfish, careless S.O.B. His navel-gazing, his constant questioning about whether this is all there really is to life, and his whining about whether we should give up and live with what we have or whether we should always strive for something more meaningful, were presented in a way that made me and, it seems, almost everyone else lose whatever tender feelings we had for him. But he felt real. His questions were annoyingly asked and the answers he found led him to ignore the needs and rights of others when they got in the way of his own personal vision quest, but who among us hasn't asked himself or herself variations on those same questions? The imperfections in his character, his choices and his lashing out at others, made him fascinating to watch, and he often acted as a catalyst who set other emotional fires burning in other characters.

All of the characters in "Six Feet Under" could be quite wonderfully, humanly appealing in one scene, then maddenlying selfish and carelessly destructive in another. This fluidity of behavior was always well grounded in a carefully constructed understanding of each character, though; their actions could be surprising, but they were always understandable and had some weird internal logic given what we knew of the character. They were fully rounded, fleshed out, so well understood by the writers and directors of the show that there was a satisfying consistency to them that allowed me to enjoy it when they acted out and did surprising things when under pressure, because whatever craziness they indulged in was a natural outgrowth of their experience, their personalities, their well-established patterns of behavior and choice when faced with problems.

Some people gave up on the show along the way because they found the disasters, deaths, pain, and bad fortune too unrelenting and therefore either overwhelmingly sad or laughingly unbelievable. But the show was never meant to be a perfectly realistic, day-to-day depiction of actual lives. There were elements of fantasy and the supernatural in it from day one. Dead characters come back and have conversations with living ones regularly, and it's never made crystal clear whether they're actual ghosts or just the darker sides of other characters' own natures who are asking the questions or exposing the fears or insecurities that we all share. They serve as catalysts who force characters to face demons, to get angry at those who have left them, to remember what's important, and to come up with cogent arguments against their worst fears.

Sometimes characters have conversations with the bloody corpses they're cleaning up in the basement of the funeral home before a viewing, and these conversations are jarring and disturbing, and the visuals are occasionally more than I want to watch. But I love the realizations that come from these conversations with the dead, and the reminder that our relationships with others don't end just because one of us dies before the other; we continue to consider what those whom we've lost meant to us and mean today. We can get angry or forgive or question or understand them differently for the rest of our lives, and alter our understanding of our relationships as a result. I have found this very true, and both painful and helpful in considering my relationships with my late parents. My relationships with them continue to change and deepen, though one has been dead for four years and the other for over ten.

The writing on "Six Feet Under" was exceptional. It was witty and wicked and often vulgar or shocking, but, I felt, refreshingly so. There were many well-crafted lines, but ultimately the words sprung from each character's lips for a reason and in line with what we knew of the character's motivations and means of expression. The dialog grew out of the characters, the characters didn't have to bend themselves around the dialog in order to stroke the egos of the writers, directors, or producers.

The acting was first-rate. It was a pleasure to be introduced to so many fine actors, many with a strong theatrical background, most of whom I was not familiar with. I'm especially fond of the work Lauren Ambrose (Claire) and Michael C. Hall (David) did in this show. David was my favorite of all the characters; I loved his uptight prissiness and his hatred of himself for being uptight and prissy. When he unclenched his fists and let go of his grimace and showed that wonderful, open, loving face to the people he loved, I believed totally in his character and his essential goodness. I loved his devotion to his lover (and, eventually, husband), Keith (played wonderfully by Mathew St. Patrick), and felt his angst and agony and his self-loathing over being gay, and his constant battle to be respected by others, and by himself, despite and sometimes because of his being gay. When he got to take on crazy fantasy sequences or let his hair down in sex scenes, his relief (and my own) was palpable. I would love to have seen his portrayal of the Emcee in "Cabaret"—he took over from Alan Cumming (whom I also love) in the extra-bawdy Broadway revival a few years ago. The revival of "Cabaret," one of my all-time favorite musicals, was directed (to wild acclaim) by Sam Mendes, who directed the film "American Beauty," which was, of course, written by Alan Ball, the creator of "Six Feet Under." (So now we see how it all comes together....)

Alan Ball has made it to the pantheon of great television writers and directors for what he did with this show. He directed and wrote many of the episodes, including the final one. His ability to look ugliness straight in the face, turn it sideways, and find the beauty in it for us is uncanny. I fell in love with his work when I saw "American Beauty," which he wrote. So many people loved that movie instantly when it came out that it has suffered a backlash. Some now call it pompous or mannered, a good outlet for middle-brow angst, which is just what the few critics who don't like "Six Feet Under" have said about it. I say, what's wrong with wonderfully presented angst? How could I not love a show which shows families in all their ugly disfunction and trauma, which drags us into people's breakdowns and bad behavior and cruelty, but also shows us how much pain people are willing to go through because they refuse to stop loving, stop trying, stop hoping? There was a great deal of pain in this show, but there was also immense heart, much laugh-out-loud humor, delight, hope, and, most of all, love.

Ball's "American Beauty" has violence, inappropriate sexual desire, casual drug use, a lovable pusher, a harridan of a wife, transgenerational discord, and murder. But Lester Burnham, played so beautifully by Kevin Spacey, leads us through the movie to the death he has prepared us for by showing how, oddly and surprisingly, he made his way to a place of great love and happiness in the moment of his death. The disturbing and unexpected deliverance of Lester, of his daughter Jane and her boyfriend Ricky, and even of Angela, the teen object of Lester's obsession, are, like Ricky's videotape of a plastic trash bag swirling in the wind, oddly, disturbingly, incongruously, and, at the same time, perfectly beautiful. Ball's insistence on finding treasures in the mundane, and hope and love among the frightening and painful, raise his talent above most other Hollywood writers. He makes me think, ask myself big questions, and care deeply about his characters. And I love that.