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Monday, August 08, 2005

Dealing with the deaths of our imaginary friends (SFU spoiler warning!)
Posted by Jill | 6:41 AM

A few months ago I posted about what seemed to be evolving into a pen-and-ink violation of the Turner and Hooch rule in the comic strip "Sally Forth", in which the situation was "$3400 of surgery or your cat dies.

Right now, television watchers and newspaper comic readers are dealing with the dual excruciating crises of Nate Fisher's death on Six Feet Under and potentially cruel fallout from Wally Winkerbean's ill-conceived Honeymoon in Afghanistan.

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I can take much more of this.

Six Feet Under has seemed of late, particularly last season, as if it had devolved into NOTHING but a soap, its particular brand of screwy, snarky moralism lost in the crises of the various characters that make up Casa la Fisher. But while the series has been difficult to watch this season and often almost intolerably depressing, the last three episodes have been oddly cathartic at the same time. I don't know about any of you, but watching last night's episode felt like being drawn into the television set itself, into the maelstrom of Fisher family drama. Nate Fisher had become such a Peter Pan immature asshole this season it was hard to mourn his death, and yet the imagery of Peter Krause diving into the Pacific Ocean to the strains of Strawberry Letter 23 (23? Discordians, please take note) while "Stoner David" watches, have lodged in my head for the last week.

This week's episode, dealing with the funeral and immediate impact of an unexpected death on a family we've come to know, just ripped apart these characters and let their pain out for us all to see. Say what you will about what's happened to this series lately, there's no denying that you've seen some of the most powerful performances you'll see out of any actors this year. It's not often that an actor is able to pull the viewer inside the character's skin, so you're not just seeing the character, but actually becoming the character -- Diane Lane is an example of one who always can -- but what was so exhausting and subliminally disturbing about this week's episode is how Frances Conroy, Michael C. Hall, Lauren Ambrose, and Rachel Griffiths ALL managed to do that. So if you watched last night, you probably tossed and turned all night the way I did, and are probably just as tired.

The good news is that there are only two more episodes of this, for which I'm truly thankful, though I'm going to miss the Fishers when they're gone. I'm especially going to miss seeing Keith and David thumb their noses at Rick Santorum by doing a great job turning that punk Durell and his adorable brother into Fine Upstanding Citizens.

But if the emotional wringer that is Six Feet Under is almost over, it looks like the emotional wringer that is Funky Winkerbean could go on for another week. For those not familiar with this strip, Wally Winkerbean is the title character's brother. Wally was thought to have been killed in the first Gulf War, but was later found, came home, married his one-armed sweetheart Becky, and the two went off on a honeymoon to Afghanistan, where Wally wanted to go to find and disarm land mines. Well, you can kind of write the rest of this one for yourself, but strip creator Tom Batiuk has spent the last four days presenting Wally wanting to take "one last picture", showing his heel perched dangerously close to what looks ominously like a mine, and finally with a "ta-chink", stepping on the mine itself. In today's strip, Batiuk is essentially rehashing yesterday's Sunday strip, which could go on for another three days.

I don't know about you, but again -- I can't handle much more of this.

I'm not sure why fictional characters on television shows and even more oddly, comic strip characters, seem so real to us, especially when dealing with Great Cosmic Hoo-Hah issues such as death. I suppose that it gives us a kind of "dry run" for dealing with our own demise, a way to try to safely wrap our minds around our own nonexistence by seeing the reactions of those around those characters to theirs.

Which of course brings us to the death of Peter Jennings yesterday at the age of 67. For nothing exemplifies the person we think we know like a news anchor. For millions of Americans, Peter Jennings was their dinner guest every night for over twenty years. The first of the "pretty-boy anchors", Jennings over time proved to be more than a pretty face. He never went to college, but projected a calm authority as he covered tragedies from the 1972 Olympics massacre to the 9/11 attacks. What I always liked about Jennings was that for all that he was deadly serious in front of the camera, he seemed to realize the utter ridiculousness of a guy reading a teleprompter having gravitas and authority. If you ever saw any of the guest segments he did on The Daily Show, you know he was well aware of the absurdity of what he did for a living.

Today, news readers seem to come out of modeling agencies, and the Fox News-ification of news seems to make the intelligence that a Peter Jennings could project a thing of the past. While Jennings wasn't an American institution the way, say, Harry Reasoner or David Brinkely were, his passing seems to be yet another nail in the coffin of television news.
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