I have recently been working through the HBO series Six Feet Under and highly recommend you do the same. It is the best television I have watched since The Sopranos and deals with issues in ways that cut closer for me as a middle class white geek than a show about the mafia really could. Fear of death, belonging, duty, regret, self-knowledge; it’s all excellent.
It takes advantage of two techniques I have rarely seen used elsewhere. We often see imagined conversations between the main characters of the show and dead or absent people from their lives. We are also frequently treated to actions the characters imagine performing – typically crazy-brave ones – before cutting back to reality where they do something different. It is not always obvious to the viewer whether you are in their imagination or reality, which keeps you on your toes.
This technique is highly effective at giving us insight into the characters without requiring overacting, or contrived conversations between them. It makes the show more like a book, where it is easier for the author to let us into the mind’s eye of their characters. It is so effective I wonder why it isn’t more often used.
Dreams are frequently appropriated for this purpose, but they are only part of our internal lives and to my mind a more random and less insightful part. Conversations in our head and things we imagine and fantasise about doing make up a huge share of our internal world and memories, and say a great deal about us because they are entirely our own invention. Their absence from movies and television is unfortunate.
Tagged: art, personality
