« Object-centered sociality | Main | Administrative Gesture... please ignore! » Alan BallAlan Ball's HBO series Six Feet Under is powerful and mysterious as life itself, and so difficult that I found myself complaining that I must be a masochist to be watching the final season of the series (which ends Sunday). A couple of episodes ago Nate, the lead character, died, and everybody else in the series is falling apart - major tragedy. But life is like that, and Six Feed Under is all about life's inexpicable leaps from comedy to tragedy and (sometimes) back again, and our attempts to throw a saddle that isn't real on a horse that doesn't exist. Somewhere in all that, there are unmistakable threads of wisdom. The Buddhist journal Tricycle once interviewed Ball about the parallels between his work and Buddhism (though he's not a Buddhist, just a Buddha). Now Salon's published an excellent interview explaining some of the thinking – and searching – that's gone into the series. I'm not interested in writing characters who figure it out, and get it right, because I feel like that's too simplistic, and then you're writing about something that vaguely resembles life instead of writing about life. Because even if you figure out something, something bigger is going to come along that confuses the hell out of you. And for characters who are soulful and have a soulful connection to life ... One of the enduring themes of the series is that trying to figure out the right thing to do is such a mystery, it's so baffling. So many times when you do the quote right unquote thing, it makes your life harder, and you don't get rewarded for it. Then you get into the whole question of what is right and wrong. Is there a black-and-white universal right and wrong, or is there what's right for you, or is there what's right for people you love, or is there what's right for the global community? Life is infinitely complex and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work jon posted this at 8:41 AM |
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