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jaeleslie at 01:11pm on 20/03/2003
jaeleslie at 01:11pm on 20/03/2003I have to thank ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stealthpup for mentioning that the first season of the HBO series Six Feet Under has been released on video. It's about just a normal family, that runs a funeral home. Ever since I first read a review of it I have wanted to see it, and even briefly discussed getting cable teevee access for this purpose. Then when I discovered the Playstation would play DVDs (haven't actually been trained to use it yet tho) I thought of buying it. But we found a whole shelf of them at the video store this week, and started in on the first three episodes last night. Yeah, all three, the network programming was crap. Tonight we'll have episode four with our CSI network feed.
And I am enjoying it immensely. In fact we all are. The first five minutes I laughed so hysterically that the kid came out of his room and we had to rewind it and watch it again (still funny). We had just had a conversation earlier in the evening about whether with the apocalypse and all I could be allowed to smoke cigarettes (I am told no), and here is the wife of the funeral director telling him, It's not just that they'll make you sick and die a horrible lingering painful death, but they'll stink up the new hearse... (and who is going to care, if they are riding in it?) Oh how I laughed. The forthright language and sexy plotlines were, like, hey this is not the network is it mom. (And a good thing too, I say.) Each show begins with a little expendable-crewman scene, just like the cop shows which always set their plots in motion with an opening murder. It is such a fine thing to find a show that satisfies all the appetite for gore and grim wisecracks that the cop shows cultivate, but entirely without violence, and with warm-hearted sympathy, humanity and humor.
Why I would be so drawn by such a thing has to do with the three years I worked at the cemetery. I had a lot of time to read, while I was minding the office, waiting for the phone to ring, and I read all the stories I could find about the funeral industry, but that's a surprisingly small number. Considering it's a big part of life, I mean, one might think it would get more attention, but we tend in our culture to deal with death by compartmentalizing and then forgetting and ignoring it as quickly as possible. People who deal with it every day often have a fine philosophical attitude, or at least the appearance thereof, and I think some sense of humor is essential. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, ridiculing the funeral marketing language by applying it to a pet cemetery, is a bit gimlet-eyed, but the kind of jokes that the gravedigger makes with Hamlet are completely characteristic of people who work in that field.
stealthpup for mentioning that the first season of the HBO series Six Feet Under has been released on video. It's about just a normal family, that runs a funeral home. Ever since I first read a review of it I have wanted to see it, and even briefly discussed getting cable teevee access for this purpose. Then when I discovered the Playstation would play DVDs (haven't actually been trained to use it yet tho) I thought of buying it. But we found a whole shelf of them at the video store this week, and started in on the first three episodes last night. Yeah, all three, the network programming was crap. Tonight we'll have episode four with our CSI network feed. And I am enjoying it immensely. In fact we all are. The first five minutes I laughed so hysterically that the kid came out of his room and we had to rewind it and watch it again (still funny). We had just had a conversation earlier in the evening about whether with the apocalypse and all I could be allowed to smoke cigarettes (I am told no), and here is the wife of the funeral director telling him, It's not just that they'll make you sick and die a horrible lingering painful death, but they'll stink up the new hearse... (and who is going to care, if they are riding in it?) Oh how I laughed. The forthright language and sexy plotlines were, like, hey this is not the network is it mom. (And a good thing too, I say.) Each show begins with a little expendable-crewman scene, just like the cop shows which always set their plots in motion with an opening murder. It is such a fine thing to find a show that satisfies all the appetite for gore and grim wisecracks that the cop shows cultivate, but entirely without violence, and with warm-hearted sympathy, humanity and humor.
Why I would be so drawn by such a thing has to do with the three years I worked at the cemetery. I had a lot of time to read, while I was minding the office, waiting for the phone to ring, and I read all the stories I could find about the funeral industry, but that's a surprisingly small number. Considering it's a big part of life, I mean, one might think it would get more attention, but we tend in our culture to deal with death by compartmentalizing and then forgetting and ignoring it as quickly as possible. People who deal with it every day often have a fine philosophical attitude, or at least the appearance thereof, and I think some sense of humor is essential. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, ridiculing the funeral marketing language by applying it to a pet cemetery, is a bit gimlet-eyed, but the kind of jokes that the gravedigger makes with Hamlet are completely characteristic of people who work in that field.