Nate is DEAD - a real life TV look at Grief Critic's Notebook
On 'Six Feet Under,' Grief and Authenticity
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: August 8, 2005
For those of us who have been trying to come to terms with the death a week ago of Nate Fisher (Peter Krause), the hero of HBO's "Six Feet Under," last night's ambitious episode of the upper-middlebrow melodrama offered several alternative ways to grieve.
Skip to next paragraph
Peter Krause photo, Doug Hyun; Justina Machado, Larry Watson/HBO; Joanna Cassidy, J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times; others, John P. Johnson/HBO
From top left to bottom right, the "Six Feet Under" cast: Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall, Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose, Rachel Griffiths, Freddy Rodriguez, Richard Jenkins, Mathew St. Patrick, James Cromwell, Lili Taylor, Justina Machado, Jeremy Sisto, Joanna Cassidy, Patricia Clarkson, Kathy Bates, Peter MacDissi, Ben Foster, Tina Holmes.
There were, of course, drugs. Nate's mother and sister - both panicked with misery as the episode opened - turned to pills and pot, respectively. But when Nate's pregnant widow, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), was offered shots of edge-eroding vodka, she declined, saying, "I don't want to take the edge off."
Then there was the poetry: three kinds. First, the Republican lawyer who last week saw Claire (Lauren Ambrose) through her brother's sudden hospitalization made the case for pop music, as treacly ballads, including the Dixie Chicks' version of "Landslide," played in his car. "I love Top 40," the lawyer admitted. "I'm sorry. It just sounds so good sometimes."
Next came an extremely pretty, slightly anodyne poem by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi that Nate had requested be read graveside. It entreated the assembly, "Regarding him, say neither bad nor good."
"Mystical, maudlin'' stuff, said Brenda, whom Nate had dumped on his deathbed.
Finally, the episode took its title, "All Alone," from a lyric to the Nirvana song "All Apologies," which could be heard twice as Claire reflected on her brother. The first time, the music came with a memory: Nate in 1994, stoned, weeping at the suicide of Kurt Cobain, whom he called "too pure for this world." The music's reprise came later as Claire herself lay grieving, the acoustic version of the song back on the stereo, and then on the show's soundtrack, with Cobain's echolalic "All alone is all we are" repeating and repeating and repeating through the closing credits.
In choosing among these idioms of mourning, Lionel Trilling's great series of lectures, "Sincerity and Authenticity," published under that title in 1972, comes to mind. Sincerity - what Trilling calls "congruence between avowal and actual feeling"- once seemed (to the Romantic poets, x say) like an exalted state of existence that could be achieved only with conscientious attention to the heart.
But the ideal of sincerity has long ago been devalued, rendered commercial or quaint. Today, for example, it is associated with Coldplay, mewling God-and-country Republicans and weepie cable-television dramas like "Six Feet Under" that appeal mostly to women and gay men.
Authenticity, on the other hand, is regarded as rougher stuff, a man's job. Authenticity is gin to sincerity's chardonnay. (Look for it on "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood.") It suggests, as Trilling puts it, "a more strenuous moral experience" than does sincerity, as well as "a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life." Authenticity, in other words, is a confrontation not with the self, which its practitioners regard as elusive and false, but with death, horror, being, nothingness.
On "Six Feet Under" these days, authenticity's name is Brenda, the Woman Who Won't Take the Edge Off. On last night's episode, she looked with contempt on a gift bought by Maggie (Tina Holmes), Nate's recent concubine and the show's avatar of sincerity.
"What is this, some sort of Quaker thing?" she asked, continuing her challenge with profanity: you have sex with someone's husband till he dies, "and then you bring them a quiche?"
In a caustic, near-Jamesian dressing-down (the episode was written by Kate Robin), Brenda went on: "He certainly wasn't in love with you, even if he said he was. Nate could be very convincing that way. All he ever wanted was someone who could make him feel like he was a better man than he actually was. It could have been anyone."
The dutiful brother, David (Michael C. Hall), by contrast, has so far dodged the imperatives of sincerity and authenticity both; these ideals are the prerogatives of authors, and David has typically been too afraid of gay-bashing and too busy with make-work to assume real authority. On last night's episode, he was more scared than ever, abandoned by his handsome, straight older brother, whose presence - we see now - David had conceived as his hedge against mortality. With Nate dead, the specter of the menacing hooded hitchhiker from last season appeared again to David. He fell apart. At last, for solace, he admitted needing the ministrations of "smooth jazz," shorthand for the show's (and everyone's?) lowest form of aesthetic experience.
There were other outlets, speeches and bromides. The ones by Sarah (Patricia Clarkson) seemed especially fatuous, even manipulative; the one by crazy George (James Cromwell) - about Nate the idealist - seemed passably good.
But only Nate's colleague at the funeral home, Rico (Freddy Rodriguez), managed to get Nate's virtues just right. Like Fortinbras in "Hamlet," Rico told his wife that he intends to concentrate on bottom-line business now that the melancholy heir is out of the way. But even while scheming, he recognized that Nate in his dreaminess brought something to the art of death that was good for the enterprise and - who knows? - maybe even good for souls.
"He had a natural sense of what to say to people when they were grieving," Rico said. For this viewer, at least, that clicked. Nate may not have been able to face death and tell the truth, in the cold and unadorned way that Brenda idealizes, but he was able to speak to survivors from the heart.
When confronting the dead, as characters on this show often do, anything but an idiom of absolute authenticity ("all alone is all we are") sounds hollow. But in life's much more familiar experience - speaking to the bereaved - we could do worse than to be sincere.
