The Exquisite Corpses of "Six Feet Under"

Feature on the visual poetry of "Six Feet Under" by Joy PressVillage Voice

If you'd asked me what I thought of Six Feet Under last year, I would have shrugged noncommittally. Something about HBO's funeral-parlor series bugged me—the way it seemed so damn proud of its eccentricity and broodiness, even while it resuscitated cheesy gimmicks like talking ghosts, best left to melodramas like Providence and Sisters, and compulsively unleashed soap opera plots (psycho-killer brother, illegitimate baby, etc.). I never got attached enough to these remote, pent-up characters, though I loved Brenda's exquisitely nihilistic sex spree last season (culminating in her ménage à trois with a couple of teenage surfer boys), and I was secretly thrilled by the gradual cracking of Nate's saintly veneer and the prospect of his impending doom via brain surgery.

All my reservations vanished as I watched the first half of the new season—Six Feet Under has been transformed into TV's most visually ravishing experience. (The first three episodes will be rebroadcast together on March 22 if you missed them.) It has achieved a vibe redolent of contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, who create dramatic, magical tableaux out of humdrum, real-life moments. As if to confirm this connection, producer Alan Ball hired Crewdson to shoot the promotional photo for this season, an eerie image of the cast sitting around the kitchen table, the floor engulfed by flowers. Ball told the New York Post, "[Crewdson's] works seems to be about the sort of secret, surreal life that exists just beneath the surface of mundane surroundings—and that's very much what our show is about."

Six Feet Under has been delivering its own startling tableaux in regular doses: A highly strung Hollywood producer hides inside a white cocoon she's made with her Fratesi sheets; frumpy family matriarch Ruth (Frances Conroy) sits alone on a giant, oversized bench, her legs dangling down like a toddler's; strapping ex-cop Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), now demoted to security guard, fishes a dead dog out of a Hockney-esque swimming pool. 

And of course the whole season starts out with the ultimate existential montage. Nate (Peter Krause) hallucinates alternate realities during his cranial surgery, visions that include a serene moment with new-agey girlfriend Lisa (Lili Taylor) and their baby Maya; a more boisterous vision of himself with his ex, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths); and a glimpse of a world in which Nate never existed at all. Although he emerges from the surgery without brain damage, he moves through the series with the glazed look of a man wading through honey. Everything in subsequent episodes seems to radiate out from Nate's near-death experience; instances of déjà vu are scattered all over the place. This lends the show a gentle, hazy pace—a marked improvement on the forced edginess that sometimes afflicted it in seasons past. 

Director of photography Alan Caso, who has shaped Six Feet Under's visual sensibility from the beginning, says he deliberately avoids what he calls "the kinetic, almost chaotic movement style of network TV—you know, the NYPD Blue thing. We don't move the camera a lot unless there's a reason to move it, motivated by the emotional intent of the scene. We do a lot of very formal shots where you let things play out on a proscenium, treating the frame almost like it's a stage."

Caso admits that the show's look changed a lot this season—the crew switched to a wide-screen format that evokes a more cinematic feel, and he's made the lighting moodier. "I feel like we're always in a bat cave. We're in their environment and the rest of the world is always trying to invade, but never really gets into all the dark corners of the Fisher house. Every character on the show is so messed up that the lighting really works with them—there are so many dark areas in their psyches."

He says the main component of "the Six Feet Under look" is the wide lens, which rarely gets used on television. "It gives us a much more in-your-face style than traditional television. Have you ever talked to somebody at a party and they stand a little too close? It's a very creepy, uncomfortable feeling, and that's what we've been doing, putting the audience in the shoes of someone who stands too close, so you feel you've invaded the characters' space."

Although it's set in L.A., you won't see many tan lines or tube tops. A lot of scenes take place inside the family's cloistered kitchen, with its flocked wallpaper and cluttered cupboards, or in the white-tiled embalming room. Yet the show is drenched in indirect light; sunshine pounds so hard on the kitchen windows they ought to break, and it slices through the vertical blinds of the shrink's office where David (Michael C. Hall) and Keith are undergoing a humorous bout of couple's therapy. Now that he's out of the closet, David is venting emotions like crazy. ("I feel shamed," he announces when Keith snaps at him for adding too much pepper to the bok choy.) In Six Feet Under, Californian expressiveness doesn't necessarily lead to happiness, though: Brenda's let-it-all-hang-out psychiatrist parents thoroughly screwed her up, and Ruth's flirtation with a cultish program called "the Plan" left her more estranged from the world than ever.

Even if it didn't have anything else going for it, Six Feet Under has the juiciest, most complex female roles on TV. And unlike Sex in the City's femmes, these women don't have to swap outfits with every scene—Ruth wore identical ankle socks for two years straight. This season, two of the female characters come into spectacular relief—in both senses of the word. While Nate and David appear faded and anxious, unable to find their bearings, redheaded mother-daughter duo Ruth and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) spring to life. No longer do they look like wax dummies left out in the heat too long; now both women glow euphorically, each with the help of an accomplice. In Ruth's case, the angel sent to mess with her coupon-clipping life is Bettina (Kathy Bates), a friend who introduces her to the pleasures of massage and shoplifting. During Ruth's first-ever massage, she makes gasping and squeaking noises as if pleasure is being forced out of her body—one of the series' most grotesque and affecting moments thus far.

Meanwhile, Claire is having a parallel epiphany at art school, as her creepy Eurotrash professor and a gorgeously geeky fellow student shower her with adoration (whether for her talent or her body remains to be seen). You can understand why: Her skin is absurdly luminous and her features in constant motion, clashing thoughts skittering across them. Aside from giving her a chance to blossom, Claire's enrollment in art school allows the writers to weave the show's obsession with light and painterliness into the plot itself.

Although the Fisher family continues to deal with corpses in every episode, death has become the subtlest element ofSix Feet Under—a constant, unremarked presence. The real theme of the series might be that old Bob Dylan line, "He not busy being born is busy dying."

-- March 18, 2003 

"Game of Thrones": An epic with a different ring

Game of Thrones premiere feature, Sunday Calendar cover of Los Angeles Times
by Joy Press

Gargantuan dire wolves, frozen tundras, corrupt royals, brutal deflowerings, gullets slit wide open — oh, and don’t forget the debauched dwarf. The chilling slogan “Winter Is Coming” only hints at the epic scope and brooding cinematic feel of the much-anticipated series “Game of Thrones,” which premieres April 17.

Based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels, the 10-episode saga is a high-stakes move for HBO — an expensive leap into spectacular fantasy for a network whose reputation was built on nuanced, character-driven dramas geared toward adults. The show’s stars merge actorly skill with genre-movie magnetism: Sean Bean is best known as Boromir in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Lena Headey starred as Queen Gorgo in “300,” and indie movie veteran Peter Dinklage played Trumpkin in “Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.”

“Thrones” has been in development since 2006. That’s when friends David Benioff and Dan Weissdecided they wanted to bring to life Martin’s magnum opus about bloody power struggles, dark mystical forces, and children grappling with the sins of their forefathers, all set in a gritty yet vaguely medieval fictional kingdom.

Benioff and Weiss have known each other for decades, and their meet-cute story is pretty unusual for hot Hollywood show runners: The Americans befriended each other while getting master’s degrees in Irish literature at Dublin’s Trinity College.

“Dan was studying Joyce, and I was studying Beckett,” Benioff says with a slight grin. The pair are sitting in a Pasadena hotel, both looking rakishly groomed, with 5 o’clock shadows in force midday.

Having studied two of 20th century modernism’s towering geniuses and later published literary fiction themselves (Benioff wrote several novels, including “The 25th Hour” and “City of Thieves,” while Weiss penned “Lucky Wander Boy”), it might seem strange that they were drawn to Tolkien-esque fantasy.

But for all their education and high-end novels, Weiss and Benioff quickly point out that they’re not just literary geeks: They are also Dungeons & Dragons geeks. “We were both dungeon masters,” says Weiss, whose novel “Lucky Wander Boy” is steeped in video game culture. In fact, the huge popularity of Martin-style fiction seems to go hand in hand with the immersive, drawn-out and escapist entertainment of video gaming.

The duo’s earliest attempt at collaboration — a horror script called “The Headmaster” — went nowhere. But Benioff got a boost in 2000, when Tobey Maguire took a liking to “The 25th Hour” and enabled Benioff to write a screenplay for the Spike Lee movie of his novel. This launched his career as an in-demand writer on movies like “Troy,” “The Kite Runner” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”

In the meantime, Benioff married actress Amanda Peet, completing the aura of Hollywood fairy tale. And then “Game of Thrones” landed on Benioff’s doorstep. Literally. Martin’s agent sent him a hefty package of the books, several of which run more than 1,000 pages. Initially the cheesy fantasy covers repelled Benioff, but after he started reading, he was hooked. “At some point I e-mailed Dan and said, maybe I’ve lost my mind, but this is more fun than anything I’ve read in years and years.”

Dan felt similarly exhilarated. “You almost literally disappear into those worlds, and I hadn’t done that since I was 12 or 13 years old. It’s the kind of experience that’s very hard to have as an adult reader. … A crack-like propulsion to get to the next chapter.”

The duo decided that cramming Martin’s complex saga into a two-hour, PG-13 film would be “an act of mutilation” and wondered if Martin might turn down the payday of a “LOTR”-style movie franchise in favor of a cable TV series.

Martin recalls meeting them at a West Hollywood restaurant for lunch: “They were very enthused, they said all the right things. They didn’t even ask, ‘Does it have to medieval, can it be contemporary?’ ”

The 62-year-old Martin — who, with his hulking frame and his long white locks and beard, could be a character in his own saga — had spent a decade working in TV (“Twilight Zone,” Ron Koslow’s live-action “Beauty and the Beast”) and was fed up with scaling down his vision for the screen. “With my first drafts, they’d always say, ‘It’s great, but it’s too long, it’s got too many characters…. Ultimately I’d come up with a shootable script, but I always liked my first drafts with the huge, juicy stuff in it.”

These books were his attempt to escape Hollywood’s constraints and, as Weiss puts it, “write something that you could never, ever make into a television show or movie. And sure enough, we are now making this unmake-able world into a television show.”

Benioff tries to keep his vision for the series — and Martin fans’ expectations — in perspective.

“There are certain things we are never going to be able to do the way Peter Jackson could with ‘Lord of the Rings,’” he says. “On the other hand, we have a lot more time to spend with our characters. And at this point in my life as a 40-year-old man, I am much more excited by George’s stories than I am by ‘Lord of the Rings.’”

“Because Frodo never gets to go to a brothel,” Weiss pipes up impishly, as Peter Dinklage’sfabulously saucy character, Tyrion, so often does.

“Game of Thrones” is much more raw and graphic than most fantasy of “The Lord of the Rings”-”Harry Potter” kind. It offers beheadings and bare breasts, as befits the show’s home on HBO. “The [movie] studio conception of fantasy — and the more you edge toward high fantasy the more this becomes true — is that who would be interested in what is limited to 13- to 15-year-old boys?” Weiss says. “But frankly, a 13-year-old probably should not be reading Martin’s books.”

Having a pre-existing narrative to work from is naturally a huge advantage to the show runners. Unlike the creators of a TV show like “Lost,” they don’t have to make up plots as they go along. “Somebody very, very smart has been thinking about [‘Thrones’] 24 hours a day for the past 20 years,” Weiss says. “It gives you such a head start in terms of structure.”

 “Thrones” arrives amid a boom in historical and pseudo-historical cable dramas, including Starz’s “Camelot” and “Spartacus” and Showtime’s forthcoming “The Borgias” and recently concluded “Tudors.” Although Martin has done much historical research, “Thrones” is not shackled to any specific reality. According to Benioff, “It’s built on a vaguely Western medieval skeleton, but he’s pulling from the Mongols, native Americans, India, all these elements get woven together into this new tapestry that feels very organic and real but also feels fresh.”

Because it is a work of pure imagination, they can throw in a dragon here, a sword-wielding heroine there; they can even invent a new language. And so they did — hiring linguist David J. Peterson to create a Dothraki dialect spoken by the barbarian tribe that beautiful would-be heir-to-throne Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) marries into.

It’s a full-on geek move that should stand them in excellent stead at Comic-Con International, though neither has learned Dothraki yet. Weiss quips, “It’s on my to-do list. I’ve been told Klingon was hard to learn, so we asked that it be easier to learn than Klingon.”

This lapse could be forgiven, considering that the duo spent most of last year on location. (Weiss’ wife gave birth while he was shooting in Northern Ireland, while the Benioffs had their second child during postproduction.) Over the last half decade, they have juggled other projects, like the “Halo” movie that Weiss was attached to for a while and the Kurt Cobain film that Benioff is scripting. Of the latter, Benioff says he’s handed in what he hopes is the final draft of the movie, to be directed by Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”).

But Benioff and Weiss are committed to riding “Thrones” as far as they can, and neither foresee having time to return to writing fiction soon. Did their years as Irish literature scholars go to waste?

Benioff pauses, his mop of curls shaking slightly. “One of the experiences we were studying in Ireland was really close reading,” he says. “Paying so much attention to the text and trying to extract meanings from it. Obviously George’s books are very different from Beckett’s. But he is creating these worlds that are entirely unlike anything I had read before … and we want to do it justice.”

-- March 15 2011

Notes on Girl Power

Riot Grrrl, Jane Magazine and the Mainstreaming of Girl Power 

Village Voice

by Joy Press

From the moment do-me feminism was coined (by a male Esquire writer) in 1994, it was inevitable that a magazine like Jane would be born. Although the term was reviled by the women it supposedly defined—attractive, prosex feminists of the Naomi Wolf genus—it did expose a growing trend among young women: a backlash against the perceived puritanism of traditional feminism, and a move toward the politics of pleasure.

But do-me feminism also described an emerging niche in the marketplace: young, free, and single 18- to 34-year-old women. Targeting this demographic, Jane—the monthly that made its debut last week—is the grown-up sister of Sassy, Jane Pratt's legendary teen magazine of the late '80s. Sassyhad a serious agenda: to break through the sickly sweet fodder of Seventeen and its ilk, and put teenage girls in touch with the pleasure principle. Says Debbie Stoller, coeditor of the zine Bust and one of many then-twentysomething women who guiltily enjoyed reading Sassy, "The other teen magazines were about 'just say no' to everything, whether it was french fries or dick. Sassy was all about yes—the older you get, there's more and more things you can say yes to, and isn't that cool."

Jane arrives with little of this heady idealism. With more than $5 million of Fairchild money riding on it, Pratt's not likely to make many daring moves. At an idle glance, it looks a lot like your standard women's magazine: beauty and fashion advice, and endless ads featuring models so skinny it's hard to see where their internal organs might fit. Yet, within the narrow confines of the genre—one pretty much defined by its ability to stoke female anxieties and insecurities—Jane makes some subtle inroads. It avoids old chestnuts like "How to lose 15 pounds in 10 days," or "How to trap a man," instead continuing Sassy's emphasis on fun and independence with first-person accounts of a nudist retreat, kickboxing, and the hazardous life of a female pirate-radio DJ. The tone is feisty and the attitude is encapsulated in the subscription card: "Ever notice how most magazines are either for teenyboppers or baby boomers—filled with lame stuff about how to get a life? Hey, you've got a life! You're in your prime."

In her debut letter from the editor, Pratt, the perpetual teenager, admits that her first choice for a magazine name was Girlie. The appeal of that word is no fluke. Girl power has come to represent a whole new school of softcore feminism for thousands of (mostly) white, hip, middle-class young women. Girl reserves the right to think about clothes and makeup, but she still expects to be taken seriously. Girl isn't afraid to be obnoxious or snarly for fear she'll be seen as unfeminine. Girl wants a boyfriend but values her female friendships more. Girl knows she's as good as a guy, but she's proud to be girlie and to wield her girl power. Independent but not adult, pursuing a career but not exactly a "career woman," fierce but feminine, girl is a mess of contradictions and conflicts, sure. But when you get right down to it, she expects a lot from the world. As the online girlzine Minx puts it: "Can we please be smart AND want to get laid? We propose: Yes. We demand satisfaction. Meaning: Don't waste our time. Stay true to your word. Equal pay for equal work. And make us come."

At 34, Pratt herself is pushing the upper limits of girldom, heading toward arrested development. Yet she cannily understands that girl power is more than just a passing trend; it represents a new life stage. "It used to be that you would go from your family's home to your husband's home and that family," Pratt told the Voice. "Now there's this whole time in your twenties that gets ignored. The things you're interested in as a teenager don't necessarily drop off when you hit your twenties. Women in their twenties are not all dying to settle down and get married." In fact, in Jane's premiere issue a survey of women 18 to 34 conducted by Yankelovich reveals that "82 per cent believe a woman does not need to marry and have kids to have a full and rewarding life." Even more remarkably, "One in five say they don't know when they will feel like a grown-up."

Jane is a pioneer in the impending gold rush for the girl-power dollar. Waking from a great sleep, marketers, trendspotters, and product developers are discovering that the single-female 18-to-34 demographic is dripping with disposable income. (The average 25- to-35-year-old woman makes $25,000 a year, and spends about $1000 more than her male counterpart.) Several new young women's magazines are now in production hoping to capture this market (one of which, Siren, hit the newsstands this summer with the tagline FOR WOMEN WHO GET IT).

In the wake of Daria, the Beavis and Butthead spin-off about a supercilious teengirl, MTV is developing more female-centered programs, including a video show hosted by a Tank Girllike animated character called Cyber Cindy, and a program created by the editorial team behind Bust.

Lifetime, the cable channel for women, has been working on a block of programming for twentysomething women called The Place, which they hope to spin off into a separate channel someday. Videogame creators, once fixated on the testosterone target, are struggling to create girl-friendly products such as Sega's new Enemy Zero game, which stars Jill Cunniff of the band Luscious Jackson. As for consumer goods, according to Nick Bennett of the brand-design agency nickandpaul, "It'll take about a year, and you'll start to see loads of products that reflect this new idea of femaleness. That's what everyone's salivating to tap into."

Originally, of course, girl power was never meant to be consumer friendly; it was supposed to stick in the mainstream's craw. When Riot Grrrls rehabilitated the word girl in the early '90s, they were looking back to the wild, unsocialized tomboys of prepubescence for inspiration—chiming with sociologist Carol Gilligan's idea that adolescence is a calamity for female confidence and self-esteem. Riot Grrrls had seen firsthand, through their mothers, that being a grown woman involves making awful choices and sacrifices. Whereas girls still had all options open to them—none of life's roads were blocked off yet.

In place of sugar 'n' spice 'n' all things nice, the new grrrl was bratty, angry, and as nasty as she wanted to be (something Courtney Love made visual by wearing frilly, sexy little-girls' dresses that she called her "kinder-whore" look), while brandishing protofeminist slogans like "Grrrl Power" and "Revolution Grrrl Style." These attitudes circulated over the years through bands like Bikini Kill and fanzines with names like Girl Germs, Hungry Girl, Bust, and Bitch and their more recent webzine successors like Maxi,Wench, and gURL. All share a cynical, sarcastic tone—imagine Heathers meets Valerie Solanas with a smidgen of Parker Posey thrown in—that Bust's Stoller calls "shebonics."

Gradually, the shebonic voice and the nasty grrrl attitude hit the mainstream, first through Love, and then, in much diluted form, with the multiplatinum-selling Alanis Morissette. Faint echoes of girl-power edginess persist in such crass post-Alanis pop product as Meredith Brooks's "Bitch," and the Spice Girls' anthem "Wannabe." The Spice Girls' official book, Girl Power!, is plastered with slogans like "Girl power is when...you believe in yourself and control your own life."

Pushing sisterhood ("You stick with your mates and they stick with you") and equal rights ("I expect an equal relationship where he does as much washing up as I do"), the Spice Girls have done the seemingly impossible: they have made feminism, with all its implied threat, cuddly, sexy, safe, and most importantly, sellable. As Paul Bennett admits, "All our clients are like, Find us the next Spice Girls!"

With their boisterously physical, unladylike antics in videos and a kung fu kicking member whose nickname is Sporty Spice, the Spice Girls have tapped into what looks like the next stage of girl power: a weird mix of tomboyish athleticism and coquettish seduction. Call it "rad femme": rad as in surfer and skate-punk slang for cool, femme for the traditionally feminine trappings like lipstick and barrettes.

Gwen Stefani of No Doubt could be the poster girl for rad femme. In concert, she cuts a striking if somewhat unnerving figure: her buff body stomps boisterously around the stage, sweat dripping from her quarterback shoulders and washboard abs as she lunges and leaps, while that squeaky, Betty Boop voice emerges from her heavily made-up, almost doll-like face, complete with lacquered '40s bob. Stefani simultaneously revels in her femininity ("I'm a girlie girl type and I like to...get all made up and do all that stuff," she told the online zine Foxy) while mocking, in the hit song "Just a Girl," those who would rein her in or belittle her.

Marketers seem to be betting their money on the rad femme: Both Lady Footlocker and Mountain Dew have recently run commercials that showcase feisty but feminine girls. Lady Footlocker's ad features a menacing grunge remake of Helen Reddy's saccharine pseudofeminist anthem of the '70s, "I Am Woman," while Mountain Dew's ad relies on a punked-up version of an old standard—the condescending Maurice Chevalier ditty "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"—sung by Ruby (a/k/a Lesley Rankine, formerly the aggressive front woman of Silverfish, for whom she coined the protoRiot Grrrl slogan "Hips, Tits, Lips, Power"). Crooning the patronizing lyric "Little eyes so helpless and appealing," Rankine tilts her shaved head sardonically and sneers, "then they flash and send you crashing through the ceiling." All this is intercut with shots of lanky, raucous girls, and footage of wildwomen—young ski champion Picabo Street, a skydiver, a rollerblader attached to helicopter—careening off dangerous precipices. As they take the plunge, they each let loose a savage girl-holler—the kind of roar you might hear in a Hole or Bikini Kill song, but stripped of anger and transformed into purely joyous exuberance.

It's thrilling to see such female fierceness portrayed on TV, something unthinkable even a few years ago. Yet below the surface lies a very traditional kernel. The commercial ends with a bunch of dopey, awestruck skate dudes who gaze dizzily back at the gang of tough girls; one of the boys bleats, "I think I'm in love." A crucial coda, these boys have been tacked on to reassure the target market of young women that you can be ferocious and girl-powered but also desired.

The rad femme's composite of tomboy and hyperfemininity raises the question: Is this new Mountain Dew-approved version of girl power merely feel-good feminism, with all the struggle and critique removed; a defanged politics that's about being active instead of activist? Probably. But it could be argued that, in this mediagenic age, being stylized and diluted is a fair price for being disseminated throughout the wider culture. Sure, these commercials leech on girl power, but in a weird way they also act as advertisements for softcore feminism as much as for a soft drink. You might even say that the Spice Girls, those sex kittens in rebel's clothing, have given many prepubescent girls their first taste of feminism, however compromised. As Bust editor Marcelle Karp says, "Let [the Spice Girls] get up on MTV or in the movies and remarket feminism and call it girl power. Put that out there, let the girls soak it up and think about what girl power really means."

Girl power may turn out to be fleeting, edged out by the culture's perpetual hunger for ever more risky pursuits, but chances are that in the process, it will expand society's ideas about what is acceptable and what's possible for young women. So perhaps, in the end, it's worth the price. 

-- September 23, 1997