Six Feet Under's central trope is the body—dead ones, reconstructed ones, sexual ones—which function as the vehicle through which to articulate a critical realism that challenges cultural and social normative codes. Critical realism is a mode of representation that Robin Nelson argues offers the most productive strategy for generating social change though TV drama. The particular power of critical realism lies in its ability to meet the affective desire in audiences for sense-making narrative frames while simultaneously offering alternative representations.[1] Thus, Nelson calls for TV drama that encourages "a critical disorientation of habitual ways of seeing" (171). It is my argument that Six Feet Under is a TV drama that offers the potential for "critical disorientation" mobilised through grotesque realism.

The program's achievement lies in the excavation and examination of self and identity in contemporary culture enabling profound issues affecting daily life to be raised and explored. The Fisher family, around which the drama revolves, is described on the Home Box Office (HBO)'s Web site and in listing magazines as dysfunctional, but this is an erroneous description. The family members articulate the difficulties and complexities associated with life in contemporary culture, representing what John Ellis has described as a function of TV drama: that of "working through" cultural and social issues.

Uniquely situated within the funeral home, Six Feet Under is marked by its often risky subject matter. The activities of preparing a person for burial and the processes of grief that the Fisher family's work facilitates provide the context for each episode in which boundaries governing what is sayable in TV drama are pushed and redefined. However, it is the matriarch of the Fisher family, Ruth, with her unruly behavior, that presents the central challenge to existing social and cultural norms: freed from the restrictions of the patriarchal family structure by her husband's death in the first episode, her performance of the grotesque reveals the boundaries of propriety that govern the televisual and cultural representation of older female bodies. In addition, her performance opens up the possibility of change and renewal for members of her family.

As Germaine Greer points out in her book The Change, "There is no defined role for [fifty-year-old women] in society" (7). The "utter invisibility" (21) of middle-aged women identified by Greer is nicely challenged through the character of Ruth Fisher who presents us with a critical perspective within which the representation of older women opens up the chance of reconfiguring social and familial relations more generally. As a result of her husband's death, Ruth's performance is marked by a shift in the ways in which she experiences the world around her, and her own position within that world. The exploration of self that this engenders produces unruly (adventurous) behavior that stands in marked contrast to the buttoned-up, controlled, and conventional Ruth, underlining the degree to which she transgresses boundaries of decorum. And we know that Ruth ordinarily behaves herself because she is quietly spoken, wears drab, unflattering clothes, and spends a lot of time in the kitchen preparing food for her family.

Ruth is interesting for the following reasons: Her process of self-discovery is activated and enabled by the death of her husband, indicating some kind of release from the stifling restrictions of the patriarchal family structure and, represented as a dowdy, middle-aged woman (hair pulled back in a stringy bun), Ruth nevertheless transgresses the cultural and televisual norms that position women as sexually redundant once child-bearing years have passed. Ruth's exploration of her sexuality and her representation as being sexually active constitute a risky performance, an activity that Mary Russo equates to stunting, in which "the discourse of risk-taking" introduces the grotesque body—freed from the restrictions of the self-sufficient, smooth, rounded, and closed "classical" body, in Bakhtin's famous formulation—into a space that leaves room for chance and the creation of new meanings. Ruth's behavior often stands counter to "models of progress, rationality, and liberation which disassociate themselves from their mistakes—noise, dissonance, or monstrosity" (11), and her stunts become increasingly risky as the seasons progress. Each opens up a space of possibility, even if that possibility is not fully realized: The fact, and then admission, of her affair with Hiram (discussed in more detail below); her near-lesbian relationship with Bettina, which includes a flirtation with drug taking and shop lifting; the attempts to draw the much younger and more-than-slightly-weird Arthur into an emotionally intimate and sexual relationship.

The pilot episode offers us the first glimpse of Ruth's unruliness. During the viewing of Nathaniel Fisher's body prior to burial, the muted, sedate, proper behavior of other mourners is threatened to be disrupted by Ruth's sobs. On watching his mother being hurried out of the room, her son Nate asks his sister: "She's sad so he has to take her out of sight?" Claire replies: "They always do that. The second someone starts to lose it they take them off into that room. Makes all the other people feel uncomfortable I guess." This exchange underpins the way in which Ruth's behavior breaches the restrictions of official life, which here results in David's rather hurried attempt to contain, restrict, sanitise, and bury the "unseemly" behavior that is the primeval expression of grief. More than this, it serves as a comment on the ways in which uncomfortable, messy, and painful (and therefore embarrassing) emotions are managed within the wider, general context of contemporary Western culture.

Viewers, however, are not allowed to similarly manage their discomfort in the face of such grief. Rather, we are moved from the quiet of the viewing room to the out-of-sight-area in which Ruth's unruliness continues. Responding to her son David's concern about whether she is OK, Ruth wails at both her sons that she is "not fine!" She erupts, "I am a whore! I was unfaithful to your father. For years. . . . I met a man at church once when your father didn't come with me. And he invited me for coffee. Said he liked my hair. He's a hairdresser." Ruth's hair is in fact a site at which her negotiation of decorum and unruliness is regularly represented; the bun marks her as an old maid of sorts, but she sometimes takes it down to reveal long, flowing red tresses. That her affair took place with a hairdresser seems all too apt, as he certainly must have helped her "let her hair down." A stunned David responds to Ruth's confession: "Have you even begun to fathom the impropriety of this?" At this point in the series, none of us had begun to fathom the impropriety of Ruth's behavior, but the constellation of contexts that provide the frame for her confession—the church, marital (in)fidelity, prescribed codes of conduct—combine to produce Ruth's body as a carnivalesque text with a grotesque performance at its heart. The very amusing conclusion to this scene comes when Nate responds, "Fuck impropriety," to which Ruth shouts, "We don't say that word!" Although it does seem likely that Ruth is referring to the word "fuck," it is equally possible that she means "impropriety."

David's discomfort with impropriety comes as no surprise. His formal dress code and demeanor signals that he constructs a sense of his self around official discourse, and that this operates as the means through which he manages complex responses to life experiences. His refusal to relinquish formal codes comes into direct conflict with Ruth's impropriety through her repeated attempts at engaging her closeted son in conversation about his sexuality. The awkwardness of the scenes in which Ruth struggles to connect emotionally with her son illuminates the depth of David's shame as well as the ways in which official, proper discourse works to enclose and isolate. Ruth's unruliness operates as a means of breaching this. Whereas the boundary between work and home collapse for the male characters as the Fisher brothers take on the responsibility for running the funeral business, Ruth seeks employment outside the home for the first time. This is a cautious move in that her chosen world of work is in the familiar florist shop that supplies the Fisher Funeral Home. Nonetheless, her developing skill in arranging flowers signifies the gradual flowering of her own sense of individuality and sexuality that is at once deeply tied to the home and business, yet separate from it. So, although the kitchen remains a locus of self-definition (we rarely see her bedroom), the external world to which she moves represents a shift beyond the domestic. As Ruth reconfigures her sense of herself, she renegotiates her relationships with her children, breaching personal boundaries in the process. In this way, Ruth's stunting resembles the work of feminists to dismantle the public/private divide that governs what is sayable or doable and where. Decorum has created distance between her and her family members, and she now hopes to close that gap. In "The Invisible Woman" (episode 18), she corners her adult children on the stairs and indecorously demands more intimacy from them, but her children are not as receptive as she might like.

Another example of this interplay between the grotesque body and the classical body comes in "A Private Life" (episode 12), which begins with the homophobic killing of a young gay man. While the hideously bruised and battered remains are reconstructed for viewing prior to the funeral, the ghost of the young man appears, in all its unreconstructed horror, to haunt and taunt David, goading him into confronting his own attitudes about his homosexuality, of which he is deeply ashamed. Despite Ruth's repeated (if slightly oblique) attempts to broach the subject with her son, a yawning gulf exists between them as they talk across the kitchen table; he is unable to breach the boundary that marks proper (official) behavior. Instead of this home space, it is the flower shop—where Ruth is employed—that provides a site in which her unruly, risky behavior as mother to a self-loathing sexual subject emerges as a "deviation from the norm." Here, she makes a bid to open an intimate conversation with Robbie, her gay male colleague, about his experience of coming out to his parents. This is a conversation he has refused her in the past. Ruth says, "Alright. You want to hear the most horrible moment from my intimate past?" Despite Robbie's firm "No," Ruth proceeds to disclose the fact that during her 30-year marriage she never had sex with anyone other than her husband—until she started having sex with her hairdresser.

Ruth: "And the first time my hairdresser friend and I had [pause] intercourse, he asked me to pleasure myself so he would know, you know, how I did that. And I couldn't. Because I had never pleasured myself in my life. I was 52 years old. And I had to learn how to—"
Robbie: "masturbate"
Ruth: "—from a hairdresser."

Her tone suggests that she is aware of the near comedic ridiculousness of this past repression, and that she is no longer willing to keep hands or words to herself.

I have argued elsewhere (Wilson) that confessional television talk shows represent an enactment of grotesque realism through which the fragility of self in the postindustrial age can be thought through. In such shows confessional practice enables the exploration of the grime, grind, and debris of daily life in close up. I would argue that, likewise, Ruth's confessions—in the florist shop as well as at her husband's funeral—articulate a grotesque realism, as risky performances through which profound issues affecting self and identity are rehearsed in dramatic form. Ruth's risk-taking, or stunting, here precipitates the turning point in her relationship with Robbie within the narrative of Six Feet Under. The intimacy engendered by the disclosure allows each character the possibility of renewal through this more open relationship. Stunting provokes an ambivalent response, however, simultaneously attracting ridicule and admiration. Thus this episode also represents a risk in terms of audience response. "A Private Life" does end with David coming out to his mother. Although we do not expect a conventional narrative turn that would see the mother and son in some mutually affirming embrace—and indeed, this does not happen—there is nonetheless an expectation of a narrative movement toward closure in which this incident leads to a catharsis for David, a release from his torment of secrecy. But this does not happen either. Rather, Ruth remains isolated from her son while David is prostrate, locked in the agonies of self-revulsion and despairing in his aloneness. While David's struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with the social homophobia that threatens him physically and psychically is powerfully drawn, it is a subject already known to television audiences. Ruth's disclosure is more transgressive because it dramatizes a less familiar form of coming out.

What we see are the difficulties of working through sexual identity in constricted normative spaces and the possibilities opened up through a grotesque performance. Although her unruly behavior speaks to the messiness of everyday life, it is not the raucous noise produced by Patsy and Edina in Absolutely Fabulous (Arthurs; Kirkham and Skeggs). The high-octane level of hedonism that functions as the narrative fulcrum of Ab Fab operates as a comical commentary on the respective excesses of the 1960s and 1980s cultures. Nonetheless, while Patsy and Edina transgress boundaries of propriety, theirs is a one-dimensional representation of unruliness that does not necessarily challenge existing social norms. Ruth Fisher has a depth and complexity attributed to her character that arises from the juxtaposition of her sedate demeanour and attitude of continuing maternal concern with a resolve to move beyond the inner life that the domestic space represents, to exhume certain aspects of her psyche. Although this exhumation begins at her husband's funeral with her confession of adultery, the "adventure" of self-exploration continues throughout the series with the development of her sense of sexual selfhood. Other aspects of Ruth's personality are revealed—to her and to us—through this experimentation; we see new sides of Ruth through her playful friendship with Bettina, her near-fetishistic pleasure in Arthur's handkerchiefs, and her sustained effort to engage with her children through the intimate, messy and awkward aspects of lived experience. This juxtaposition of stunting—sexual and otherwise—and maternal care gives her character a powerful three-dimensionality as she breaches the official discourse of motherhood with embarrassing but intimate revelations of her inner life. In rendering the middle-aged woman visible in this way, Six Feet Under produces the "critical disorientation of habitual ways of seeing" that Robin Nelson calls for in television drama. Ruth presents us with a critical perspective within which the dramatic representation of older women opens up the possibility of re-evaluating social and familial relations more generally.

Works Cited

Arthurs, Jane and Jean Grimshaw, eds. Women's Bodies: Discipline and Transgression. New York: Cassell, 1999.

Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.

Ellis, John. Seeing Things. London: Routledge, 2000.

Kirkham, Pat and Beverley Skeggs. "Absolutely Fabulous: Absolutely Feminist?" In Geraghty, C. and D. Lusted, eds., The Television Studies Book. London: Arnold, 1998.

Nelson, Robin. TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values, and Cultural Change. Basingstock, UK: MacMillan, 1997.

Six Feet Under. Created by Alan Ball. HBO. 2002–.

Tullock, John. Television Drama: Agency, Audience, and Myth. London: Routledge, 1990.

Wilson, Sherryl. Oprah, Celebrity, and Formations of Self. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2003.

Endnotes

1. Nelson's notion of critical realism stands in contrast to postmodern dramas such as Twin Peaks. Nelson argues that, despite the critical potential that lies in Twin Peaks' refusal to center the subject and its subsequent recognition that identities are not fixed, the series' inclination toward fun works to preclude social criticism. While viewers may be actively engaged in the playfulness of Twin Peaks they may not be freed from reactionary attitudes. [Return to text]