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In a philosophy of film class I took last year, one of the things we discussed was how philosophy of film, how those writing philosophy of film, seem rather fond of setting limits, saying that film is good for certain things, or because most philosophers are pricks, outright denying the possibility that film can do certain things, and of course, the minute you set a boundary for an art form, you’re relegating yourself to be shit on – someone’s going to find a way, barring that it isn’t literally impossible, to express themselves in just the way that you’ve said they cannot do so. Watching “Everyone’s Waiting” though, ruminating on the last five years of Six Feet Under, it makes me really think about the medium of television, what it’s useful for or what it does especially well – and though I’d be a schmuck set a limit, and the boundaries that philosophers of film set are more like “film can’t be art” and other such outright naïve blatherskite anyway, what I do wish to do is outline what TV, especially SFU, is good at, and what even the best films almost always lack, at least profoundly. Character development. This not a limitation of film, but rather the way we make films, the way we view them – it’s about time limitations. Culturally, we’re geared to produce and consume one and a half to three hour films. Some are longer, some have sequels that fit seamlessly into the framework. But as of yet, and perhaps this is a challenge that will be met, no film has ever measured out to the length of a television season, even a protracted HBO season, let alone five seasons, and I have never been affected by a film or emoted in response to a film in the way I have to “Everyone’s Waiting.” And it’s because I’ve had five seasons to watch just fucking devastating acting and writing, to the point where the characters honestly felt real, human. I think Alan Ball talked about, in an interview or perhaps it was the commentary to “I’m Sorry, I’m Lost” (3x13), regardless, he talked about how he saw it SFU like a novel where each episode was a chapter, and the emotional impact that this last episode had was exactly the same feeling as finishing a large, emotionally involving novel – Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser is like this. I finished and just felt a loss for not having these characters in my life.

It kills me when I read whatever message boards I read and there’s always a discussion of each episode after it airs, a post mortem in the parlance of the Home Box Office, and everyone always, without fail focuses on what happened, as if it’s a fucking soap opera. “I don’t like what Claire did” or “Why did they have David get kidnapped” or whatever, just completely missing the point of a character study, it’s not what these people are doing, it’s what they’re feeling, what’s going on in their heads, the things that happen are merely narrative devices to allow these different mental states to find expression. It’s painfully, ridiculously obvious that this is so; they even show us inside their heads, so how anyone bothers to complain about what happens is beyond me, unless of course something inauthentic had happened, but the writing, the acting was so utterly honest, that I don’t remember an inauthentic moment in the entire five years.

“Everyone’s Waiting.” After the emotional tumult of the last two episodes, the penultimate even more difficult to watch than Nate’s funeral, we needed this. We needed the characters to finally come out of their narcissism; and I finally realized why they were such shits this season, although Claire began to turn around when she got the temp job and Brenda when her friend tells her off (as a stand-in for the audience). It’s because the catharsis needed to be complete. If everyone had continued on the paths that were set up by season three and the end of season four, if the character arcs had been smooth, the emotional impact would not have been as great, to see them deal with grief, to see the grief, the process of grieving transform them, and for that transformation to actually lead to acceptance is extremely powerful. As the epilogue shows them each dying, it almost felt like real people passing away, always with that veneer of fiction, of unreality of course, but it kind of just levels you, that they gave these characters futures – it wasn’t like the end of a series where you leave the characters and they continue existing in whatever fictional limbo we accept them to be existing in, awaiting a writer that may or may never come to free them, these characters all had concrete lives that played out before us in mere minutes, they aged and died, and that’s difficult.

It’s difficult to have a show that makes so naked the process of dying and grieving and one that does so every single episode without reprieve, the verisimilitude almost bordering on actual correspondence, and I’m not going to sit here and write about stupid cultural conventions that obscure death or whatever bullshit the academy wants to shove down our throats; it’s silly, death isn’t obscured, as a whole, we don’t try to hide it, it’s painfully there, and we’re all aware of it all the time. In the end, the message of Six Feet Under, if there even is one at all, is a philosophical one, it’s existential, I suppose, death’s there, one has no recourse but to deal with it, to wrestle with the concept, and then to just move on, not to necessarily move on and, you know, live your life! or whatever other trite greeting card folderol people think that entails, but of a simpler, more modest goal of simply living, of simply existing, for what else is there? Maybe there’s lessons to be had from these characters, maybe it was a morality play all along about their egomania, but I find that hard to take – that so many viewpoints were allowed to coexist with no one ever actually being correct, and just because one of the characters may have said something you agree with, that doesn’t make them right – the writers always treated the characters with dignity, with respect, even when they were written as complete assholes, as jerks, they were human.

Six Feet Under at Amazon