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

positioning the viewing as a catalyst for spiritual healing. The series riffs repeatedly on the parallels between LA’s image-centric commercial focus and the funeral industry’s imperative that the cadaver look not just ‘real’, but optimally attractive; as the voice-over for a mock mortuary product commercial intones, ‘she looked her best every day of her life … don’t let one disfiguring accident change that’ (‘Pilot’, 1:1). The figure cut by the corpse, then, meticulously revamped, docile and at rest in an ex-orbitantly marked-up coffin – David pitches one such box as ‘more than just a casket. It’s a tribute, really’ (‘The Will’, 1:2) – represents a startling accretion of capital, the extravagant finale on which the successful functioning of the entire funereal apparatus rests. Mes-merising in its claims to verisimilitude, the image of the corpse can prove unsettling in its relationship to ‘truth’, the pinnacle of the cultural emphasis on the body as semiotic surface. Yet, for the bereaved, the consumption of this spectacle remains primarily a passive enterprise; the Fishers hover at a respectful distance, poised to enforce standard behavioural protocols – to prevent ‘casket climbing’, for example, or usher those who succumb to excessive outbursts of misery to a heavily curtained private mourning area. In the end, the ritual of the viewing seems clearly in the service of perpetuating a docile citizenry, providing a publicly acceptable forum for controlled affective expression and diligently schooling subjects as to the norms for containing grief.
    The money shot, by contrast (homing in on the moment of unfettered bodily expression), epitomises what is sometimes deemed transgressive in porn; as Kipnis contends, ‘the out-of-control, un-53
    READING SIX FEET UNDER
    mannerly body is precisely what threatens the orderly operation of the status quo’ (Kipnis 1996: 134). In the context of Six Feet Under as a series, Viveca’s demise is only one of a proliferation of ‘money shots’, revealing an ongoing preoccupation with the trope of the body out of control. The opening act of each new episode, for example, depicts a death – ironically, the archetypal instantiation of closure. While usually less patently eroticised than Viveca’s passing, these sequences provide a similarly voyeuristic glimpse of climactic physical ex-penditure, moments of departure that are at times peaceful but more frequently convulsive and grotesque. Although predictable in their adherence to a standard format (they invariably start off the narrative, providing a certain structural under-girding for the ongoing and more complex Fisher family storyline), these prefatory money shots actively subvert expectations, playfully misleading us to evoke surprise; we’re never quite sure who’s going to die or how. By angling for a collective gasp – trying to provoke moments of shock or horror – the images jar the audience into a state of active viewership, temporarily rupturing the seamless suturing process characteristic of the classic spectatorship paradigm. For a fleeting few seconds, therefore, these initial images
    ‘pester and thwart the dominant’ (Kipnis 1996: 165) by putting the coherence of the self in jeopardy; as film scholar Barbara Creed writes of the effects of horror on sci-fi spectators, ‘the viewing subject is put into crisis…the “self” is threatened with disintegration’ (Creed 1990: 137).
    This ‘crisis’ of unexpurgated, surprise visibility, moreover, as juxtaposed with the carefully choreographed ritual of the viewing, establishes a fundamental tension that structures and informs the broader narrative arc of the Fishers’ process of healing. The first episode of Six Feet Under, in which Nathaniel, the Fisher patriarch, is instantaneously crushed by a bus while leaning behind the dash of his brand new hearse to light a cigarette, immediately establishes the
    ‘shock value’ of