Grave affair

Six Feet Under digs into death

by Camille Dodero

Rachel Griffiths

Every beginning is an end, and in the pallbearing hands of a creator like American Beauty writer Alan Ball, every opening to Six Feet Under (Sundays at 9:30 p.m. on HBO) carries an epitaph. An aging porn star's tabby cat knocks an electrified set of curlers into the bathtub, frying its naked owner and her perky double-D's. Screaming "King of the world!" from a limo sunroof proves to be a mindless move for one tipsy divorcee when a dangling traffic signal smashes her bobbing melon. A bakery owner clambers into a dough mixer and a distracted employee accidentally switches on the cask-sized mincer, scalloping his boss into fatty cutlets.

Death, as Six Feet Under demands, has little to do with fear. The series pilot takes off on Christmas Eve, with hearse-driving Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), patriarch of Fisher and Sons Funeral Home, promising his wife he'll quit smoking but then, as he leans down to light another cigarette, getting mashed by a bus. Meanwhile, teenage daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) sucks down crystal meth for the first time, middle child David (Michael C. Hall) pinch-hits for papa at a wake, and Nate Jr. (Peter Krause) screws a stranger named Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) in an airport closet. Junior gets word of Dad's death in a post-coital haze, so when his quickie companion shuttles him to the morgue and he lambastes Pop for his lethal stupidity, she objects, "Are you mad at him or the fact that we're all going to die?"

Henceforth, it's obvious not only that brassy Brenda gets all the pithy lines but that Ball is begging us pomo Americans not to take death so personally. People here do die of less outré causes like old age and war wounds, yet Six Feet Under plots to kill the caricature of death as a feverish, fickle, and feared reaper -- mortality, Ball contends, is not a violation. Rather, death strikes more like an urban flasher: sometimes it catches you off-guard, other times it runs toward you for a mile and you don't bother moving. And though both fatality and ugly naked men are uncomfortably laughable and supremely upsetting, exposure of either one shouldn't be considered an individual insult.

In the Fisher family, wastrel Nate has spent his 35 years dodging the creepy family business; meanwhile David has postponed law school to slave at the LA mortuary. Gay and semi-closeted, David is also historically pissed-off at his prodigal sibling, but never more so than when dead Dad bequeaths the funeral parlor to both boys. And a childhood set in a cemetery rankles cranky Claire, a bedeviled high-schooler who often yells things that sound written for Thora Birch's scowl: "You know what I wish? For just once, people wouldn't act like the clichés that they are."

As Ball is the first to admit, Six Feet Under is "very similar to American Beauty" -- which in my mind is a high compliment for any television show. Both pieces feature a dead father who secretly tokes joints, a cloying wife whose marital ennui segues into infidelity, and strains of dark, disarming humor. And Six Feet Under's marketing provocation, "Your whole life is leading up to this," rumbles with the same solemn bass as Lester Burnham's self-narrated knell: "Remember those posters that said, `Today is the first day of the rest of your life'? Well, that's true of every day except one. The day you die."

Every day is the day you die on Six Feet Under. Even the living wear a sort of pallor, as the Fishers' tawny environs -- their drab kitchen, Claire's cream-colored classrooms, the Los Angeles landscape -- all appear filtered through a sepia tone, wrapped in a layer of burlap, and caked with a film of mildew. "We're all wounded," mulls Brenda in the second episode. "We carry our wounds around with us and eventually they kill us."

But the most exquisitely wounded is Brenda, Nate's girlfriend, a shrewd sylph with a soft resemblance to Juliette Lewis, a gothic tattoo, and an IQ of 185. A child prodigy pestered by psychologists, Brenda is rife with intimacy issues, and she wields semantics like a US passport, sins of omission allowing her all the freedom in the world. And though her cryptic complexity is harrowing, in Griffiths's sharp portrayal, it's an ornately carved relic of hurt, evidence that injury (which, by definition, is foreplay to death) can be beautiful.

When Nate shows Brenda a shadowy room that his father used to rent on the sly and gets despondent, she challenges him, "Why does it have to be sad?" That question could be Six Feet Under's commentary on death, damage, and dysfunction. As could Brenda's follow-up: "I find it fascinating."