"No Need for Fear or Secrets": Ruth Fisher and Grotesque Realism in Six Feet Under
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.
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