HBO’s Six Feet Under was a show that helped redefine television drama in the early 2000s. Set in a funeral home, it was an unlikely hit. Its honesty about death, its meaningful portrayal of gay relationships and its dark satire — including how it poked fun at the Hollywood culture that intersected with its characters’ lives — accounted for much of its success.
For me, the show’s a meditation on life, as much as an exploration of death. Memorable quotations are interwoven through every episode of Six Feet Under. Whether funny, macabre, shocking, inspiring or heart-warming, they’re at their best when inviting the viewer to join the characters on a journey, exploring not just their feelings about death, but also life.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from SFU.
“You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone.” — Nate (in ghost form, so, really Claire)
Nate’s imagined quote to Claire as she leaves for New York in the SFU finale captures everything sad, bittersweet and even joyful about leaving somewhere old for somewhere new.
Our lives consist of stages — school, life in a particular town, those years that we worked at so-and-so company, before/after we married and so on. It makes total sense that we arrange our thoughts to correspond with these stages. But reality also isn’t quite as neat as that. Life is a series of moments. Change happens all around us. We can’t bank on the stability of “stages”; by definition, they come and they go. Yet, we find comfort in the illusion of stability in an uncertain world. It even comes to define us.
When we prepare to blast off into the unknown, we try to clasp onto the secure world we feel we’ve known and we feel we’re still part of — even though it’s already gone. We’ve already lived it. A snapshot of everyone posing at the finish line of a race is not a picture of the race itself (or whatever analogy you like.) The world’s already changed and so have we. In fact, the world’s always changing — and so are we. There’s no going back.
“You should do whatever brings you deeper into the reality of your life. Not the life you think you [could] have, but the life you’ve got.” — Father Jack
Each time I’ve watched Father Jack give this advice to David (at a difficult time in his relationship with Keith) I think I hear the clergyman say “could” (see my square brackets). A few SFU “best quotes” websites suggest he simply says “have”, which changes the meaning. I write the following as though he says “could have”.
We spend a lot of time dreaming of a different life. We set goals, we visualise, we make plans, we emphasise aspects of ourselves that reflect the life, the identity and the eventual autobiography that we want. All these things are fine … to a point. But there’s a problem if we’re eternally focused on the person we want to become and the life we seek … and we end up failing to notice the person we are, let alone fully live the life we have. There’s not necessarily a problem in not reaching our preferred destination — but we need to make sure we appreciate the life we’re living in the meantime.
So, what is the life that we’ve got? What’s around us? What’s within our grasp? What’s already in our hands that we can make better use of? Instead of the life that we could have, how do we make better use of the life that we’ve actually got? To paraphrase Nietzsche and Juliana Hatfield how do we become what and who we are? The best versions of our own selves, in the best version of our own — and not some unattainable — reality?
“I spent my whole life being scared. Scared of not being ready, of not being right, of not being who I should be. And where did it get me?” — Nate (in ghost form, so, really Claire)
A theme in these favourite SFU quotes of mine is that many of them are products of Claire’s mind. They’re what she imagines Nate saying to her. They are, of course, not Nate, but Nate as imagined by Claire in relation to the way that she’s living her life. Nate’s regrets, now that he’s dead, are Claire’s fears. Whatever Nate regrets not doing while alive, is what Claire fears not doing before she dies.
Nate’s lesson for the living here is to not spend too much of your life rehearsing. Or waiting to be asked. Or seeking permission before you act. Or waiting for the perfect moment. Or worrying what others will think of what you say or do. Because there’s no right time. Or to put it another way, there is a right time: it’s while you’re still alive. Life isn’t perfect. But the perfect time to live, as Nate tells us, is while you still can. So, get on with it, Claire! Live!
“Stop listening to the static … Everything in the world is like this transmission, making its way across the dark. But everything — death, life, everything — it’s all completely suffused with static.” — Nate (in ghost form, so really, Claire)
This is Claire again, via an imagined conversation with Nate. Life’s full of noise. So, too, are our minds. The noisy, chaotic mess of everyday life can overwhelm us. If we lose focus on what’s important. So, what’s important? Not the static.
But the static distracts us. It confuses and angers us. Or maybe it allures and entertains us. It’s not, however, what’s important. Our family, our friends, our health, and that of the world we live in — those things are important. It’s only what matters that really matters. But we need to learn to live with the static — it’s a byproduct of what’s important. We just must learn to focus — relentlessly — on what’s beautiful as we make our way across the dark.
“You sit in such judgment of the world. How do you expect to ever be part of it?” — Olivier
Olivier Castro-Staal is a wonderful character. Completely inspirational to the innocent idealist — and totally see-through to the world-weary traveller. By the time he delivers the above advice to Claire, he’s past the point of having any right to expect her to listen.
But there’s something about this line that — although condescending — is wholly relatable. For the idealist, reality is a bitter pill to swallow. The world is a mess. People are not what they seem to be. The limitations of your own abilities — let alone your mortality — are catching up with you. Who hasn’t awoken to all that’s wrong with the world and wanted to rise above it? To stand outside it. To transcend it.
It’s noble perhaps — but also limiting. Especially if the outcome is not rising above it, but judging the world too harshly, forgetting that its ugly and empty parts do not comprise its whole. Living in the world is succumbing to being part of it. Accepting it for all its deficiencies and disappointments. Amid the rubble, there’s beauty to be found. That beauty’s hard to spot from afar.
“The world’s not your own private chemistry set.” — Edie
I don’t have a lot to say about this quote, other than it’s poetic and wonderfully scathing. There’s a theme running through Claire’s art school story arc about the artist and their right to experience every flavour and passion the world has to offer.
Edie’s anger at Claire — justified or not — is a reminder that the world doesn’t belong to any one person. Actions have consequences, and everyone person we encounter, engage with and experience something with is as complex an emotional, spiritual and intellectual being as we are.