Several days ago, I wrote this note to myself, right on my WIP: “I want to make my readers feel the way watching Six Feet Under makes me feel.” A tall order, and then there’s the thing about how I have no idea how to go about actually doing it.
Jennifer Stevenson suggested I take notes about the parts of this HBO series that make me feel–oh, I don’t know–hopeful and full of a kind of shimmering happiness. The positive feelings the program evokes seems sort of strange given the fact that it’s a show about death.
But maybe that’s part of the power of Six Feet Under. It reminds me that life is precious and can be over in an instant. The in-the-face death moments overlayed with the complex relationships of the living have some sort of combustible magic that make me feel like maybe I have an opportunity to be better at my own relationships. I watch these people struggle for or against connection and it just somehow raises me up and gives me faith. It’s significant. It matters.
Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the first season:
Brenda: “We carry our wounds with us through life and eventually they kill us.”
Nate on childhood: “…blissfully ignorant of what a sick joke life can be.”
Nate to Dave: “Sorry. I forgot we’re all supposed to live under a shroud of secrecy.”
Dave to Nate: “Sure, let’s just invalidate my entire life.”
Nate: “All my life, I’ve been a tourist.”
Ruth: “You wake up one day, and your baby’s stolen a foot.”
Maybe these quotes lose something out of context, but I find it interesting that I’m drawn to two distinct types of lines. Those that purport to be about “deep” matters and those that make light of serious ones. The “deep thoughts” need to really be slipped in very occasionally, if possible in the midst of a more playful conversation. And the joke stuff needs to be there when the story starts to sink under too much heavy stuff. It’s all about balance, I think. You can write about anything if you know when to push forward or hold back.
And “when” is really what I have to learn.