Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For by Kim Akass, Janet McCabe

acutely felt, Six Feet Under can make a radical intervention and propose profound social change.
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    four
    Sex, shocks and stiffs: Six
    LUCIA
    Feet Under and the
    RAHILLY
    pornography of the
    morbid
    Season one, episode five, ‘An Open Book’: ageing porn star Jean Louise McArthur, screen name Viveca St John (Veronica Hart), is killed by her own pussy. The segment is brief but rife with innuendo: panning the cosmetic paraphernalia scattered across Viveca’s bathroom, the camera settles on Viveca, wooing her pet cat tub-side like a lover, preparing for an impending rendezvous by reclining into a bath. ‘He’s got a big fat dick. And he fucks like a jackhammer,’ she confides of her date, swooning in a swirl of bubbles and sighing,
    ‘Those never last.’ Within seconds Viveca’s pedicured toes are tensing convulsively in a visual allusion to orgasmic ecstasy. Her cat has nudged her hot rollers into the bathwater, electrocuting her.
    In the parlance of porn, this image – Viveca’s final, climactic shudder – constitutes a kind of ‘money shot’, a depiction of an irrepressible bodily spasm that, in this instance, ironically blurs le petit mort with the moment of death. Within the framework of hard-core porn, the money shot fulfils an essential function: testifying to the authenticity of the experience being filmed – and the limit of acting, or ‘faking it’ – by zeroing in on a moment of reflexive, involuntary physical expression, the paroxysm of male ejaculation. By highlighting a body that is quite literally unable to contain itself, the money shot provides a fleeting glimpse of ‘genuine’ affect, of the private self un-inflected by the norms of public performance; porn scholar Linda 50
    SEX, SHO CKS AND ST IFFS
    Williams calls it ‘the ultimate and uncontrollable – ultimate because uncontrollable – confession of sexual pleasure in the climax of orgasm’
    (Williams 1999: 101). Resonating with the quality of unadulterated
    ‘truth’, therefore, the money shot represents the logical culmination of what philosopher Michel Foucault describes as the ‘will to knowledge’
    regarding sex – the irremediable cultural compulsion to exact sexual confessions as a means of understanding one another and ourselves.
    As Foucault writes (1998:78):
    We must make no mistake here…the West has managed…to bring us almost entirely – our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history – under the sway of the logic of concupiscence and desire.
    Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key … Sex, the explanation for everything.
    In the case of Viveca St John, the connection between sex and self is unusually overt; as a porn star, Viveca’s persona – and, what’s more, her livelihood – are inextricably bound up with her legibility as a sex symbol. For Viveca and her partners in porn, sex is not a secret but rather a source of pride and profits; at her funeral, her former colleagues shamelessly bring sexuality to the fore, tearfully eulogising her career break as a fledgling fluffer, her peerless flair for fellatio and her near-sacrosanct successes in the sack (as one mourner laments,
    ‘fucking Viv is at the top of my list of things to thank God for’).
    Indeed, by the time a sobbing former co-star (Sandra Oh) bursts in on one of David’s client meetings to exclaim, ‘Her tits have never looked better!’ the funeral proceedings have come to seem less a testament to truth than a burlesque of grieving; the sheer surfeit of sexuality imbues the proceedings with the spirit of ribald farce. The cardinal question of identity, in this sequence, hinges on performance – and specifically on whose self-presentation is less ‘genuine’: Viveca, the actor whose hypersexual affect is nakedly in evidence (David calls her surgically enhanced bosom ‘beautiful, in a completely artificial way’), or David, the closeted gay man who’s trying