Sunday, May 15, 2011

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    *  "Six Feet Under (pilot)." Six Feet Under. HBO: 3 June, 2001. Television. 15 May 2011.



Six feet under is a demented dark comedy based around a family of undertakers with an almost sick view on the life. The pilot starts off with three siblings discovering the news that their father died in a car accident. Son, Nate who works for an organic food co-op in Seattle must come home and deal with his demented family, his brother David who is a closet homosexual who has been seeing a police officer, his mother Ruth who has to face that she has been having an affair with a hairdresser, and his sister Claire who is your average rebellious high-schooler.



This first episode gives you a look at HBO's interpretation of how this out of the ordinary family deals with the after effects of their father's death. It shows that even those surrounded by death, these people we call experts are not immune to deaths many turmoil’s.





    * "The Will." Six Feet Under. HBO: 10 June, 2001. Television. 15 May 2011.



In episode 2 the inventor of a franchise dies leaving his widow and daughter in an ocean of debt and no money for a proper funeral, hearing this Nate offers them a solution which is to rent a impressive casket just for the viewing then cremate the body afterwards, which is perfect accept for that fact that by law you can not sell back a used casket. Later at the reading of Mr. Fishers will, Ruth receives stocks, cash and insurance money while the funeral business is split between David and Nate (leaving David humiliated), and Claire gets a college fund which she considers trading in for cash.



This second episode explores the dealing of the death of a family member, from settling affairs to properly dealing with the will. It sheds some light on how we as humans tend to process our emotions when it comes to this topic.


    * "The Foot." Six Feet Under. HBO: 17 June, 2001. Television. 15 May 2011.



In episode 3 a bakery owner suffers a tragic death, which then Federico (a partner in the fisher funeral business) has to take care of. The fisher's consider selling the business to Kroehner but decide agaProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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st it when they meet with gilardi, to which they respond with purchasing the building across the street and turning it into a cheap crematorium but not before it suspiciously burns to the ground.


The third episode drifts away from the other two episodes exploring more of this concept of giving up. Then explores how this family can rise up from their tragedy (in a way) and learn to almost move past it.




Six Feet under is a dark, dramatic, (almost) comedy. It explores the emotional rollercoaster that is care of the dead. It shows that the people we call experts, who have associated and in some cases pride themselves on being able to handle death in a professional manner with no emotional instabilities are still subject to the emotional stress that comes with dealing with the death of a loved one and in this case the loss of direction regarding their lives.


This show challenges the dominant social practice when it comes to their way of grieving for a loved one but consolidates the way that we attempt to deal with everyday problems. Six Feet under shows that we are never prepared for other peoples deaths, no matter how much we surround ourselves with it we can never really fully be contempt with it. Our dominant social practices all explore this idea of grievance that the characters in the show all experience, granted that some do it differently than others they all do it. This show did however challenge the idea of being able to move past this experience. Each episode is centered around death and therefore it is almost like saying it is really impossible for this family to escape death, something that a majority of other people who aren’t surrounded by death can do very easily compared to these characters.

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