Six Feet Under and Post-Patriarchal Society

Film Reviews | Regular Feature Six Feet Under and PostPatriarchal Society On Christmas Eve, Nathaniel Fisher (RichardJenkins) dies in his family's brand new hearse. He leaves the Fisher family— uptight wife Ruth, 35-year-old ne'er-do-well Nate, closeted gay striver David, and troubled teenager Claire—to run the family funeral business without a head of household. With the loss of this paterfamilias, the Fisher family becomes a symbol of the society in which it lives: the post-patriarchal West, in which all of the rules have to be remade. A world in which mothers and daughters are both in love with the same aerobics instructor perplexes and horrifies the Fishers. To speak psychoanalytically, Six Feet Under confronts its viewers with the departure of the father who seems to bear the phallus. To speak in terms ofmodern cultural politics, Six Feet Under questions whether that bogeyman of the Left—the Straight White Man—really exists anymore. As it exposes this world without fathers, Six Feet Under asks the most basic, fundamental, human questions and makes an ambitious effort to answer them in the new modes required after the death of the patriarch. These questions include: How do we know each other, when we insist on our privacy? How can we care for each other, when we want to be left alone? How can we affirm that our lives and death are worthwhile, when we know we've been cheated out of a full existence? Does God exist? Why do children die? Why do we die? How, in short, are we to live, when, as Claire says in one of her therapy sessions, our shadow is death and silence? As an analysis of the peculiar and bizarre American traditions ofburial, Six Feet Under harks back to the British tradition of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death (1963). Created byAlan Ball, who also wrote and directed many ofthe individual episodes, it also nicely complements Ball's masterpiece, American Beauty. Whereas American Beauty rehabilitated the already impotent paterfamilias in the name of aesthetics (while at the same time depicting his death), Six Feet Under attempts to provide a positive answer to the question of how society should develop without patriarchal guidance. And just as American Beauty sandwiched the troubled heterosexual family between a creepily model gay male couple and a hoary homophobic Nazi marine who's also a repressed homosexual , the queerperspective turns out to be crucial for Ball's post-patriarchal world. In Ball's world, patriarchy's demise has affected women differently depending on their generation. AU of his women are strong and assertive , particularly in the sexual realm, yet their sexual freedombrings them little happiness. As the widow of Mr. Fisher, Ruth (played delightfully by Frances Conroy), learns Michael C. Hall, Peter Krause. slowly and tentatively to express herself, representing a generation ofwomen who had spent their lives entirely underthe thumb of patriarchy. Nate's girlfriend Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) is crippled by the fact that she has been the object of study by psychiatrists since her childhood. She exhibits the trauma ofthat first generation of women who resisted patriarchy's probings by attempting to fool its surveillance. Because a book was written about her childhood, she in turn has become a heroine to the women ofthe younger generation, exemplified by Claire (Lauren Ambrose), who have largely escaped the attention ofthe patriarchy . Claire sometimes feels as if she had been ignored and exhibits flashes ofnostalgia forherfather's presence. But gradually, she seems to be tapping her way forward in life with relatively little resentment about the bad old days of yore. Ball does not submit masculinity to the same generational treatment that he uses for femininity. For men, patriarchy is—as the deconstructionists used to like to say—always already gone. In Six Feet Under, there are no older men who really were patriarchs until recently, or younger men who experienced only a few years of patriarchy. All men live in the knowledge that they do not have the phallus, even if society has been structured by a patriarchy. Even Mr. Fisher, who periodically returns as a ghost (or a figment of the characters' imaginations), seems in...