Dream a Dream with Me

    I cry at TV shows a lot, but always at a weird moment. When they’re actually trying to get you to weep openly — when a character has a slow, drawn out death, most of the time — I’m dry as dirt. But then, sometime later, I lose it for no reason.

    At the end of Six Feet Under there are a few big cry moments, but the first one is the long dream, followed by Nate’s death, which is simultaneously sudden and the most-telegraphed punch in the history of TV. Nate’s had brain troubles since — what, is it the first episode? And he’s spent the whole season talking about how short and precious life is. But they fake you out, send him into the hospital with bleeding in his brain only to have him wake up. I remember the sensation of watching the episode the first time and feeling cheated. Like, were they seriously not going to have the guts to kill of Nate? Or were they gonna make us wait till the finale? It seemed like a cheap move for a show that had never been afraid to put its characters in danger. But then, at the end of “Ecotone”, Nate and his brother David fall asleep next to each other in the hospital, something mystical happens in their dreams, and David awakes to find that Nate’s gone, lying there lifeless with his eyes wide open.

    Maybe it’s the fakeout shock that kept me from crying, but in the very next episode, I lost it at a scene that barely had any content. David has made himself a checklist for the day. A lot of it involves setting up his brother’s funeral. He stands up from the kitchen to put on his tie and go to work — and that’s when I start bawling.

    I could go into a lot of personal shit about why that is, but I suspect I might just be reverse-engineering reasons. I think it’s really this: when people die, it’s not sad for them, because they’re gone. It’s sad for us. It’s those who live on who have to get up the next morning and put on a tie and make a list of things to do in their absence. And David, who is a character who is so often cold and remote, is now doing the thing he does, without the one person he really relied on to do that thing. It’s heartbreaking, even if it isn’t meant to be.

    My read on Six Feet Under’s relationships that the most important one, the one that holds the show together, is that between Nate & David. Maybe that’s because I have brothers and those are the most important relationships in my life. But it feels like the show understands that, too. It’s David who is there when Nate dies. It’s David who washes his body before burial. It’s David who is so overcome that he can’t help put his body in the ground.

    And it’s David who shares that last dream with Nate. I’ve now seen the episode twice, ten years apart, and I’ve watched it a couple of times on YouTube. And I still can’t figure out — I don’t think the show wants you to be able to figure out — who is dreaming in those last moments before Nate goes.

    It seems to me that there are three possibilities: (1) the dream is David’s, as he’s gifted a vision of his brother in the seconds before he moves on; (2) the dream is Nate’s, his mind telling him in his sleep that whatever is happening is happening; and (3) the dream is a shared dream, and something magical happens that allows Nate and David to say goodbye to one another, though neither of them yet knows they have to.

    The dream itself is pretty interesting: Nate wakes up in his old bed at the funeral home, he walks out the door to go jogging, and he meets David — but a different David. He’s a pot-smoking, sandals-wearing surf bum, and he takes Nate on a ride in the old van that they used to carry bodies in. (Michael C Hall’s acting as this otherwordly David is among the uncanniest things I’ve ever seen. He’s almost more natural as this hippie than he is as a straightlaced control freak.) Just as Nate decides that this really is David, that the clean-shaven guy who wears a suit nearly always was some kind of prolonged hallucination, they pull up at the beach, and their father, Nate, Sr, sticks his head back to let them know that they’re lost. They smoke some pot, get out of the van, and Nate decides to go for a swim. Then, suddenly, David is transformed back into the real David, the man in the suit, and he and Nate, Sr, watch Nate, Jr swim off into the Pacific Ocean, crying out, “It’s great! It’s really warm!”

    There’s evidence for every possible interpretation here. The dream starts when Nate falls asleep, and at first it follows him on a surreal dream-journey not unlike the various dream-journeys people have taken on this show. It’s his room, his old life that we start in. And the David we first meet is uncanny and not real. That feels like Nate’s dream.

    But the dream ends with David, as Nate swims away from shore, left alone with the memory of their father. If we’re in Nate’s dream now, why are we hanging around with his little brother, far from the action, with him transformed back into himself? And the dream ends when David wakes up, and hands off to David’s continuing life after Nate’s is over. That must be David’s dream, right?

    I think that the dual nature of the dream is the strongest argument for the “shared reality” interpretation of the dream. Though Six Feet Under often takes people’s behavior to bizarre places, and indulges in a certain amount of magical realism, the fact is that most of the time the show bites back against these things, and we’re left to understand them as fantasies or ephemera. I can’t remember another time when one of these fantasy sequences is left in the hands of more than one person — when any indication is given that it exists outside the mind of a single character, ie, that it actually happens. For a show so concerned with religion and so indulgent of surreal impulses, mysticism usually far from the picture. This time, at probably the series’ most important moment, mysticism seems possible.

    Now, maybe that’s a whimsical reading of what happens, or maybe I just didn’t see it right. But that’s how the dream reads to me. It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? And yet it didn’t make me cry.

    Of course, I did cry, both times, when I watched the big montage at the end of the finale, “Everybody’s Waiting”. I mean, I’m not a monster.