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.

Her?

    Brenda Chenowith is ruining my Six Feet Under rewatch.

    I actually remember this sensation from when the show was on — the unfolding sense in the show’s second season that its main female character has become a nasty, destructive force, not only for the other characters on the show, but for the show itself. It’s not just that she’s serially unfaithful to the show’s original protagonist, Nate Fisher. It’s not just that she spends most of the season sour and depressed. It’s that the show doesn’t seem invested in realistically making her more than her bad acts. She’s allegedly got a genius-level IQ, but the only real evidence we have of her genius is that she talks down to everybody all the time. And what really happens, long before her dastardly deeds are outed and everyone has a reason to be mad at her, is that all of the other characters on the show spend all their time lecturing her on how awful she is. Nate: “You’re depressed and you won’t have sex with me!” Her mother: “You’re a drama queen and this isn’t about you!” Brother Billy: “Our relationship is toxic and I never want to see you again!” That last one is particularly rich, given that Billy spends 70% of the season absent, hospitalized after violent manic episode in which he tried to attack Brenda with a knife. He then shows back up, hair cut, beard trimmed, talking calmly about how it’s Brenda’s fault that he’s a psycho. He doesn’t even know all the stuff that the viewer knows, the stuff that really makes the character distasteful. It’s like the show can sense that its viewer is going to hate her, so it tries to give the viewer the pleasure of seeing her told off as often as possible, long before it makes any narrative sense.

    I quit watching Six Feet Under during its second season, way back when it was actually on the air. This was why. I eventually got caught up through the magic of binge-watching (back when we used to do that on DVD), but man. What a foul, ugly turn the show took in its second season. I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to stick it out, because my memory is that, while Brenda does stage a minor comeback in the likability department, everybody else takes a nosedive. And Lili Taylor’s clichéd nagging earth mother shows up. UGH. On a show that did originally did something most shows don’t even try — present whole, complex female characters (who aren’t superheroes) — it becomes a real shitfest of shrewish women who are constantly on the cases of the men in their lives.

    Anyway, enough about the seasons of my discontent: I meant to get to a related subject: the obnoxious show-ruiner. Many shows have had them. Brenda Chenowith is not the first hot mess to make a good show hard to take. I’m just gonna do some hot takes on a few, and I want it kept in mind that a lot of these are characters from shows I love. Most of them I managed to endure until they were written off, though the show didn’t always recover. (Or, in the case of Smallville, it never really finds its feet.)

I wish I could take credit for making this, but I didn't. I found it somewhere on the internet long ago.

    Cordelia, Angel. Cordelia was originally my favorite character on Angel, a sharp-witted, somewhat obnoxious party girl who grew up entitled enough that she’s willing to say exactly the thing that will puncture someone’s self-image. Though Charisma Carpenter was never really a masterful actor, she got hold of Cordelia’s comedy and could really fire home the punchlines. But the character slowly mutated into Saint Cordelia, a listeny-huggy-super-girl that the real Cordelia would have laughed out of Angel Investigations in the show's early seasons. Her vicious barbs became smarmy tough-love horseshitisms. But it wasn’t until she got kidnapped into the afterlife and then returned as a zomboid version of Cordelia that she became truly unsufferable — officious, obnoxious, disgusting (the incest vibe of Angel’s 4th season was almost too much for me) — and ultimately, the character wanders away from the actor’s strengths. Fred Burkle could be reborn as an imperious goddess because Amy Acker could play forbidding and icy with some skill. Cordelia just becomes flat and awful, not least because Carpenter can’t do what Acker would a season later.

    Kristina Braverman, Parenthood. This is one where it felt to me like the show just lost control of the character. Yeah, she was always self-righteous and entitled, but when she got cancer it just became a total shitfest of mopey whining and “what-about-me”-ism. Doesn’t help that she spends the whole show demanding special treatment for her autistic son at every turn, a move that the show clearly endorses as good parenting. This was another case of a show whose characters talked about a character in one way — Kristina is allegedly smart and competent and brave — when that character unfailingly acts otherwise — in truth, Kristina is just a shitty narcissist, like everybody else on the show. On a show that was always about pointlessly secretive, selfish assholes, Kristina’s plotline somehow managed to stand out. I gave up on Parenthood before its sixth season, because I found myself wishing she would have a relapse of her cancer and die. Did she? I hope so.

    Logan Huntzberger, Gilmore Girls. Gilmore Girls started coming off the rails in its last few seasons, especially as its grumpy love interest, Luke Daines, is transformed for no explicable reason into a total moron after he becomes engaged to the show’s protagonist, Lorelai. But it was Logan, a smug, smarmy rich kid who slots in as Rory’s college boyfriend who made the show insufferable to me. I suspect that this can mostly be laid at the feet of actor Matt Czuchry, whose chops seem to include smiling, smiling smugly, smiling in a shit-eating way, smiling disingenuously, and smiling with all his teeth. The character is glib and cruel, and despite the show’s attempts to rescue him, he never leaves the ghetto of “assholes that Rory is attracted to”, making every second dedicated to their romance feel like a gut-churning exercise in repelling the viewer.

    Andy Bernard, The Office. Maybe this wasn’t so much Andy’s fault — Ed Helms is certainly a better performer than any of the other actors on this list — as it is the show’s. The Office (US) had one season of finding its feet, two very strong seasons of workplace comedy and sweet romance, and then rapidly flanderized and lost momentum once Jim & Pam got together. Andy was introduced during its third season, but became an increasingly loud presence through the fourth, during which his cartoonish fits of rage and weird need to sing yanked the show farther and farther away from the cutting wit of its early seasons and turned it into just another wacky cartoon sitcom. Like I said, it’s possible that Andy wasn’t the driving source of the show’s failures. It’s more like he was emblamatic of a show that had no idea how to soldier on once its main plotline was wrapped up, but was forced to anyway by its status as anchor of a major network’s sitcom lineup. By halfway throug the fifth season, what had once been appointment viewing for me started piling up on the DVR. I still haven’t seen a second of the show from after that point, because it became such a gross self-parody during the Andy Bernard years.

    Lana Lang, Smallville. Clark Kent’s first girlfriend and the character who totally ruined what could have been a pretty good show (if you were willing to ignore its reactionary politics). Lana was boring, selfish, and dumb, and actor Kirsten Kreuk’s main move in the role was to whisper a lot when things got serious. Meanwhile, all the characters on the show talk about her as though she’s a lovely, outgoing, hilarious genius, in a mismatch even more glaring than the one on Parenthood. As it became clear that the show had no interest in treating Lana realistically, I lost interest in Smallville. Now and again I’ll catch an episode of its early seasons and think, This show was never any good in the first place, was it? So maybe Lana didn’t sink Smallville, but she was biggest hole in its hull from the start.