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Main >> News Listing >> June 2004 >> Article ID 5131
 No Business Like the Funeral Business | Type: Internet Article |
| | No Business Like the Funeral Business | Jun 11, 2004 | by Alessandra Stanley
Summary:
Keith, a former police officer who has started a new job working for a private security agency to the stars, is so intent on stopping intruders from disturbing his first client — a Christina Aguilera/Brandi-like diva — that he tries to block the host of "Ellen" from entering the star's dressing room.
Read on for the whole article. |
HERE is more to "Six Feet Under" than just sex and death. There is also show business.
And one of the quirks of this dreamy, overly precious HBO series about the Fisher family and its Los Angeles funeral home is that whenever it seems on the verge of miring itself in its own claustrophobic mystique, it cracks open a window and lets in some hot air — from Hollywood.
The fourth season, which starts on Sunday night, buckles a little under the weight of Lisa's death and Nate Fisher's bereavement. It even offers a celebrity cameo: Ellen DeGeneres, somewhat disconcertingly, pops in to play herself. Keith, a former police officer who has started a new job working for a private security agency to the stars, is so intent on stopping intruders from disturbing his first client — a Christina Aguilera/Brandi-like diva — that he tries to block the host of "Ellen" from entering the star's dressing room.
There have been small side steps from the funeral business to the movie industry ever since the series began three years ago, but they seem to be getting broader. Those sudden shifts in mood and milieu are a show of confidence on the part of its creator, Alan Ball: he has nurtured a spooky, hothouse orchid of a soap opera that is so removed from the real Los Angeles that he can afford to take a break occasionally. But the comic relief is also a sign of boredom, a parlor trick that signals that the usual high-flown dinner conversation is growing a little stale.
Last season Catherine O'Hara swept in as Carol, a neurotic Hollywood producer who hired Lisa, Nate's wife, as her live-in personal chef. Carol was a bipolar tyrant who was particularly needy when Lisa wanted to go home. ("Bring my cinnamon toast up to my bath, and I'll tell you how I made Melissa Gilbert cry.") However clichéd, Ms. O'Hara's parody was irresistible; as someone once famously said, everyone has two businesses, his own and show business. But Carol introduced an incongruous flash of Day-Glo color to the Fishers' pallid, stone-washed world.
This season introduces an even more garish stick figure, Celeste, a spoiled, self-involved pop star (no, really?) who berates underlings by cellphone and goes everywhere with her rabbi/lawyer. When Keith uses her private toilet, he is almost fired for lèse-célébrité.
There were macabre Hollywood jokes. In one episode the brain-fried friends of a starlet who had overdosed on cocaine end up snorting her ashes. But earlier in the series Hollywood was mostly a background device to enrich the characters, particularly the gay couple, Nate's brother, David (Michael C. Hall) and Keith (Mathew St. Patrick). In one episode, they attended a brunch given by David's choral group friends and played a deviation on charades called "Diva," in which one player had a celebrity's name taped to his back and the others supplied clues to the actress's identity. Even though all the other players yelled what they considered an obvious clue — "Waterworld!" — Keith couldn't guess Jeanne Tripplehorn. He had a brief anxiety daydream that all those men turn into mean girls: the scene cuts to them shouting "Waterworld!" dressed in little plaid skirts and wigs.
Even that quick sendup had some originality. And there are other sly show business references that suit the mood. Nate and David's younger sister, Claire (Lauren Ambrose), still mired in alienation and slacker ennui, says of an attractive boy in her art class that he is the Matthew Barney of their school but she is "so not" Bjork.
One of Claire's charms is that her flip, speedy speaking style mirrors the way smart middle-class kids really talk. It is entirely plausible for Claire to use one of America's best-known art stars (and his girlfriend, the pop singer) as a backboard for a girlish, self-deprecating joke. (For all her gloomy despair, Claire provides her own comic relief from characters who express their innermost truths in emotive, perfectly wrought paragraphs. ("I would give anything to have her back," Nate (Peter Krause) says of Lisa. "But when she was here all I wanted was to be free.") |
 Source: NY Times | |
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