Quick Thoughts B4 Six Feet Under

I owe the internets some updates. Hello, internets!

In a bit less than an hour, we'll head off to our friend's house to watch one of the last-ever episodes of Six Feet Under. (A few salient facts on friend: 1. Has Tivo and cable and therefore will sometimes supply us with DVDs of Deadwood or Robot Chicken to get us through our not-cable-having time. 2. Is writing sure-to-be-excellent dissertation on Don Quixote which is VERY CLOSE TO BEING DONE 3. Won lots o' money in a quiz show some years ago such that they have to pay him quiz show money for, like, the next 20 years, how cool is that?)

Those of you who follow: as you know, Nate reinvented himself as MORE of an asshole this season, had sex with a Quaker (cheating on his pregnant wife the former sex addict who is now trying to be sane and healthy with a career!), then dropped to the ground, briefly to recover last episode before dying again at the end of the last epidsoe and we're pretty sure he's actually dead this time because the series is now nearly over, we know some important character's supposed to die, and WE HATE HIM FOR CHEATING ON BRENDA AND WE ARE QUITE WILLING FOR HIM TO BE DEAD.

What I want to write about, as the above paragraph perhaps suggests, is the extent to which we (I, I mean) become emotionally inolved with a TV show. I have the usual skepticisms and stopgaps, but the thing is that in spite of this my emotions are weirdly bound up on this show. I doubt I'll cry... as my adorable husband K. does EVERY SINGLE TIME HE REWATCHES THAT EPISODE WHERE BUFFY'S MOM DIES, but I do tend to get testy and -- and this what you might call my thesis for this post -- I tend to judge REAL people by the behavior of these CHARACTERS. For a long while, the important iffy couple was the white "he's the woman" David and his hot black ManMuffin Keith. My adorable brother, who is white and is man enough to admit that he, like me, is the stereotypical girl, seemed to go through a period where, if Keith and David were seeming like they were going to break up, would feel huge tension with his own adorable black ManMuffin. But then when Keith and David were getting along great, my brother would feel optimistic about his own relationship. It happens for me, too: I have to admit that what with how FABULOUS Keith and David are doing this season, and how great they're doing with those adopted boys and all... I feel terrific about my brother's new move halfway across the country to resettle in a new city with his boyfriend. (Also, since my brother once asked if I would be the surrogate mother for his and his partner's child, and I was like NO FUCKING WAY, we thought the episode where David asks Claire to have Keith's baby was really funny. Also, speaking of Buffy, don't you totally think that the "embarrassing secret" Keith will discover tonight is that Michelle Trachtenberg had his interracial baby? Oops!)

So the gay interracial relationship is ONE measure by which I assess actual persons I know. The other has to do with Nate, who is Hot, but for the last couple seasons Really Really Annoying. Obviously, the character with which I most identify is Brenda, because she is brunette and smart and Neurotic, but you can tell how most of her neuroses are reasonable, in their own way. She meditates, she's trying to get herself a career. And she decided to settle down and to take a gamble on Nate, just as I, after my "wild" (okay, semi-wild) early twenties, decided to risk settling down with a set-in-his-ways former Bad Boy.

An interesting thing for me this season is to note JUST HOW MAD I get at Nate, when he doesn't settle down a BIT into marriage because MARRIAGE IS HARD BUT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WILLING TO WORK ON IT, and because I too just got married and I want marriages to WORK. Also, he beat a bird to DEATH this season which I really didn't like. But what's really weird is how Nate's behavior (all season he's been giving cow eyes to Maggie, which has really gotten on my last nerve and made me go from liking her to wishing she'd leave, doesn't she have a job or something?) has made me testy with my OWN husband, as if the fictional character, Nate, just PROVES that men can't be trusted. I caught myself announcing in ALL CAPS after one recent episode viewing that HUSBANDS CAN'T BE TRUSTED, and thinking evil thoughts about my husband's friendship with an old ex who he hasn't seen in more than a year.

I realize that this is crazy. But it is also interesting to me, that this happens. After the episode two episodes ago, in which Nate Sleeps With Maggie/Collapses to the Floor, I was so agitated that I had to stay up for two or three hours and read all the Six Feet Under related discussion forums I could find. I was SO PISSED at him for cheating on Brenda -- so much that I yelled GOOD! when he collapsed... and yet I still LIKE Nate even though I've been mad at him all season , so I also felt disappointed that his life story wasn't working out like I wanted.

I'm not the only person who has overly emotional identifications with these characters. The boards were evenly split between people who were SO MAD AT HIM and who said mean things about Maggie, and others, who clearly wanted to marry him, who just couldn't accept that the Six Feet Under writers would kill Nate off.

That they would kill him off is in fact the brilliant thing, and that they would make him a jerk this season both so that you can accept his being killed off and also so that you can feel totally full of regret that he didn't have a chance to pull himself together (or so that Brenda doesn't have a chance to punch him/make him regret his decision) is the other brilliant thing. WE CAN'T CONTROL THE STORYLINE, just like we can't control people who we really WANT to like but who just won't let us. Nate was awake long enough to tell Brenda that he wanted a divorce, which is both HORRIFYING and satisfying... better than if she'd never gotten to confront him about knowing he cheated (after just a couple episodes claiming I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE) to her. If the storyline had continued and he'd ACTUALLY been at peace with Maggie, I could have been reconciled, but as it is now it's just so much more affirmation of my assumption that he's a jerk becuase, really. He's gonna be happy with Maggie FOREVER? I think not.

The more I watch TV (which I have to do mostly via Tivo and DVDs, which means I get to watch each episode more times), the more I like it and kind of wish I'd arranged to write for it. Yet it's still weird. I'm getting the wires crossed between my Bakhtin and my Lukacs, those important Theorists of Novels, yet I think what one calls Competing Discourses and the other attributes to something filtered through the unconscious of the Writer, is going on here. It's always given me pause, about fiction, that the characters aren't Real People but are made up out of the bundle of prejudices and mistaken assumptions that are part of the author's worldview. I've always been really reluctant to say yeah, it's good that readers would be asked to LEARN from that what to think about the REAL world.

And yet here I have totally fallen for it, admitted I measure "real life" by these fictional characters. Even though I supposedly have an advanced degree in it, it's clear I still don't understand fiction, at all. If I'm so skeptical of it's very fiction, yet at the same time so susceptible to it.

Now I have to quickly scan for spoilers, just like I had to do at the end of Buffy. I need to be PREPARED to accept the horrors I might see. LIFE should have such a cheat sheet. Which I guess makes me feel differently about that question, would you want to know when you will die? I used to think now, but now, I think, yes.

KNOWING allows you to work out the narrative around it, to figure out once and for all what you can live with calling the Motives and the Reasons and the Triumphs and the Shortfalls.