IMAGINARY FRIENDS
I lost some friends Sunday night: the Fishers and the Chenowiths. David, Nate, Claire, Ruth and Brenda were not people I could call up for an in-depth, analytical chat when I had a bad day, or smoke a joint with to celebrate a good one. Still, I have spent many nights basking in the cold comfort of their company and I miss them already.
The Fishers and Chenowiths were characters on the HBO series, Six Feet Under, which aired its final episode this past Sunday. That I think of them as friends is not a comment on my tenuous grasp of the differences between real and imaginary companions so much as a testament to the emotional veracity of this stand-out television program.
It’s not as if I felt this way about Ross and Rachel, Greg and Marcia or even Cagney and Lacey. In fact, none of these characters ascended beyond the acquaintance level in my imagination. Because, let’s face it, you can’t be friends — even the imaginary type — with people with whom you have nothing in common. I admit, I hung out with “Friends” — maybe I even used them to get through a few tough evenings when I was lonely or didn’t have access to cable — but we were never really friends.
The Fisher family, however, were people with whom I had a scary abundance of things in common. For the first time in 45 years of watching TV, on Six Feet Under I saw my own life reflected in, not just one character, an aspect of a single personality or in a very special episode, but in a whole clan that trouped across my Trinitron, week after week.
Much like Nate, I was ambivalent about relationships, but desperate for connection. Similar to David, I was gay, passive-aggressive and filled with anxiety. Comparable to Claire, I was an artist who was unsure what to do with my unsquelchable urge to create.
The Fisher matriarch, Ruth, was much like my own mother: often padding around all day in her robe, paralyzed with regret about the consequences of poor life choices. Brenda, Nate’s, Sylvia Plath-stand-in, on-again-off-again mate, was the embodiment of all the smart, damaged, fantastic best friends I’ve collected for decades.
And these are just some of the main characters. The peripheral cast, including Brenda’s mentally ill brother, Ruth’s similarly disturbed second husband and her wacky, Topanga Canyon-lovin' sister, plus David’s boyfriend, Keith, all spoke to me as recognizable folks as well.
What’s more, all of them inhabited the bleached-blonde landscape of my childhood and much of my adult life, namely, Los Angeles. Not the Los Angeles of Entourage, where everyone is a celebrity or aspires to be, but the day-to-day, ordinary Los Angeles of working people looking for their slice of the pie and dying a little bit each day whether or not they find it. That much of America probably didn’t recognize this world as a reflection of real life is not my concern. I don’t recognize The Bachelor as real life either.
I will continue to watch TV, much as everyone else does. But I will sorely miss the one program that showcased the existence of characters who had a lifestyle to which I did not have to aspire — because, for once, I was already living that life.
