Intimations of mortuaries

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 6 APRIL 2003

I DO HOPE YOU can read this column today – if the writing is too faint and spidery and trails away, I can only offer my apologies and the assurance that it won’t go on forever. I am getting older, you see, and my hand is not as firm nor as steady as once it was. Today is my birthday, and at my back I have the distinct impression that I hear the snorts and whinnies and muffled hoofbeats of time’s winged chariot drawing near. Either that, or the neighbour has made up with her boyfriend again.

And yet I am not downcast. Age creeps up on one, like a Gurkha in the jungles of Malaya, belly-down in the tropical ferns and a kukri between his teeth, but not everything that stirs in the night is an assassin. I am in good spirits today. I greet the advancing world with a smile and a whistle and I offer it a sip of my drink. The rest of the year is for worrying; on your birthday you deserve a break.

In the run-up to my birthday, I must confess, my mind has been turning to matters of mortality. Last Monday I tuned in to Six Feet Under (e.tv, Mondays, 9pm), to see what insights I could glean. Six Feet Under – a sort of quirky American drama series set in a family mortuary – is gathering some sort of international cult momentum. It is billed as a black comedy because it has dead people in it and because it has moments of idiosyncrasy. Idiosyncrasy is what people without humour offer when they want to be amusing but they don’t want to crack one-liners or tell jokes.

The show is written by Alan Ball, who won an Oscar for writing American Beauty. I was never that impressed with the script for American Beauty. That famous scene in which the gawky teenage boy shows Thora Birch the video-tape of a plastic packet blowing in the wind only worked for me because that is precisely the kind of self-conscious, inarticulate groping for an arresting point of view that is characteristic of gawky teenage boys who have spent too much time on their own, and most of that time hoping that they are in some way special. (I say “they”, though of course I mean “we”.) “There is so much beauty in the world,” says the gawky teenage boy mistily, looking at the footage of the plastic bag, “I don’t know if I can take it.”

I would be far more impressed by the scene if I could shake the nagging suspicion that Allan Ball intends us to take the gawky teenage boy and his plastic bag seriously. Certainly audiences around the world did take it seriously, and loved it, but that is not always the writer’s fault. In this case, though, I think the writer was with his audience all the way. There is a lumbering, over-obvious earnestness about the story and its so-called twists which, if it isn’t a case of ultra-ultra-refined satire, are so dull as to paralyse the brain.

I have the same feeling with Six Feet Under. It is a series about people straining to make sense of their lives against the perpetual dark backcloth of death. As are we all. But – aha! – the show takes place in a funeral parlour. See! Death is all around us! The death, I can’t shake the feeling, is there in the way that Death or Sin or Virtue appeared in medieval morality plays – to spell itself out so obviously that even the most chuckleheaded viewer can’t miss the point. Even worse, in this particular version of black comedy, the dead people provide all the blackness and all the comedy, and that is really why the show does not work for me.

The comic vision, and especially the black comic vision, is one that – if it is genuine – permeates the entire story and its characterisations. It has many forms and avatars, depending on whose vision it is, but one of its consistent qualities is a sense of the ridiculous that comes of human beings’ attempts to take themselves and their doings seriously.

I say “seriously”, but really I mean “earnestly” or “self-importantly”. It is possible to be simultaneously comic and serious; it is possible to perceive absurdity while believing that one’s relationship with absurdity is a matter that has meaning. Six Feet Under is not black comedy, it is a drama series that regards itself with a great deal of self-importance.

Death is in the script simply to provide macabre gags and to provide the silvering on the mirrors in which the characters endlessly examine themselves in a series of interminable monologues posing as conversations. There is a thumping predictability, as though it were written by a gifted teenager who still has the gifted teenager’s blight of imagining that he is the first to have discovered the tortured minutiae of hormonal existentialism.

Six Feet Under is not bad television. Indeed, it is because it is good television that I have taken it sufficiently seriously to figure out why I don’t like it. There is pleasure in that. Of course, bad television has its own pleasures – they are fugitive pleasures but none the less welcome. This is the 300th column I have written in this newspaper about the variegated pleasures of watching television, and I thank you for reading them. I don’t imagine you have read all 300 – not even I have read all 300, and my mother certainly hasn’t – but every bit helps. I can’t imagine that I shall write another 300 columns – there are younger television viewers out there with sharper eyes and tongues and newfangled palmtops in which to take their notes, rather than a tatty notebook and a leaking biro. But I have enjoyed being here, and if you will have me, I shall stick around a little longer yet.