Six Feet Under: A Gothic Reading in Liminality, Death and Grief
Death is no longer considered a social taboo. News coverage reports death on a daily basis. Literature, art, film, and television have a long history of portraying death. Disciplines ranging from anthropology, sociology and social welfare conceptualise death at an individual and community level in terms of ritual and power. Yet, how death and grief are performed is still largely shaped by social conventions. The critically-acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under (2001-2005) uses Gothic tropes to challenge many of the social conventions that shape how individuals perform death and grief. Set in a Los Angeles funeral home run by the Fisher family, death is voiced by the episodic dead, while the complexities of grief are voiced by the families who come to the funeral home to arrange burial services. The Fishers themselves experience death and grief in the pilot episode. At each turn, normative understandings of how death and grief are performed are challenged. While there are conventional Gothic tropes evident in Six Feet Under, notably the dead occupying liminal spaces, it is via a California Gothic trope that the fragility of the American middle class family and its precarious existence in the dystopian American suburb is explored, underpinning the discursive power of the series.
Neoliberalism: The Corruption of Human Nature
This paper argues that 'human nature' is a key factor in understanding the underpinnings of collectivism and proposes that neoliberalism corrupts the innate human need to act socially, ethically, and morally for the benefit of the common good. The evolution of humanity has been grounded in our need to collectivise and act in concert with each other in ways that improve need satisfaction. Evolutionary biology suggests that any economic or philosophical system that fails to conceptualise human systems -communities, societies, collectives- is flawed and likely to fail in the long term. Adopting this position, this paper argues that neoliberalism, in its all-consuming demand for individualism, rejects the premise and evidence of evolutionary biology. As a result, neoliberalism corrupts human needs and human nature. The lynchpin to a more civilised society rests in economic and social systems that recognise the evolutionary reality that human needs are better satisfied when they act in concert with each other, through activities such as the building of social and economic capital in the welfare sector and through unionisation.