the six feet under ending (alternatively: claire-voyance)
okay. i know alan ball + co have said that the montage really is the canon outcomes of all our characters, and that the purpose was to tie up loose ends + give closure to the story because the series is about life and death. everything ends! which is great. im not in denial about their endings per se but when i watched it i had such a strong draw to the concept of claire imagining these endings for everyone that i needed to put that interpretation somewhere too...
for a show so concerned with encouraging the characters and audience to live in the present, it's so interesting that we actually do go to the future at the end-- i think that's why i was drawn toward an interpretation that the future montage is all happening in claire's mind.
claire, like nate, struggles with life's unpredictability + the pressure of making the most out of the time she has. this is in contrast with david and ruth, who are comfortable with the idea of death, but spend a large amount of their lives putting themselves into societal, career, or familial ways of being that butt up against their real wants, causing them to lash out erratically. unlike nate though, claire does not "fear" death to the point of being unable to conceptualize life--instead, it causes her to change course pretty much wherever her whims take her. she sometimes over-commits, structuring her whole identity around whatever is attracting her at the time, whereas nate struggles to tie himself down to anything at all.
claire's constantly looking for her "purpose." since large facets of life are unexplored or unclear to her, she gets frustrated when the world does not respond to things in the way that she believes it should. such as: american politics, her artwork's reception, how her family should act or engage with her, the men she's with mistreating or lying to her, her inability to be sexually attracted to edie despite having an amazing connection with her; and, her being unable to understand russells sexual experimentation even after having her own similar experience.
when she starts dating ted, it's a big departure from her other boyfriends, but there's a fundamental mis-matching of their moral systems--she is liberal, and he is republican. their big point of contention is the iraq war actually... SFU as an accidental exploration of american crisis during the war on terror ...obviously it was not created with that in mind since it premiered in june 2001 but the resulting seasons are obviously going to have some of that post 9/11 cultural anxiety present and it's wild that they so directly addressed it in the final episodes. anyway that's for another time
one thing that stuck out to me visually about the end montage was the fantasticalness of it. in SFU's visual language the heavy white balance + blurriness of these clips would imply that they're taking place in someone's mind. when we enter the montage, we do so through the visual of claire leaving LA behind, we consistently cut back to her driving, and we exit the series through match cut close-ups of her eyes as an old woman and her present self.
on a narrative level, each character's life story makes sense when considering claire's point of view.
ruth, very old, dies in a hospital with george, david, and claire at her side. since claire has moved to NYC, it seems this is not an unexpected death because she has traveled back for it. but it's a long life after the death of her son and husband, and that is what claire would want for her. ruth sees both nathaniel and nate right before she dies--nathaniel in his suit as we've seen ruth imagine him, but nate is in his running outfit from the pilot, with no wedding ring. what he dressed in when he first moved back to LA.
even though sfu isn't strict about the imaginary/ghost-versions of characters appearing in the same outfit the entire time, it remains pretty consistent: ghostnathaniel is typically seen in his black suit unless the fantasy is more dramatic (except for claire's depiction of him in vacation-attire and one time when he was in a casual quarter-zip and jeans with nate), one-ep deceased people are usually in the attire they died in or what they are currently dressed in, but nate's clothing varies in the last few episodes. perhaps their image of him is more wholly realized (in comparison with nathaniel, as no one feels like they really Knew him), or perhaps the freshness of his death hasn't afforded nate's memory the ability to be sort of homogenized and mythologized into one image of him.
some picture him most often in a brown long sleeve, others in his leather jacket. nate imagines himself in his running attire during his coma dream in 301, but claire also sees him this way when she's leaving LA. one, because of the actual context of him running behind her car and two, because in her memories, nate went for a run every morning, so that's what he would have been dressed in at the time she was getting ready to leave for NYC. but both times ruth saw nate in the episode, she pictures him in this white shirt with his wedding ring on. despite nate stepping out on his marriages!!! nate's womanizing is an aspect of him that ruth lives in some denial about, because it taints his good-guy image (and because she committed her own infidelity). still, her perception of him is consistent--white shirt with brown details.
later, when ruth imagines him at the hospital, it is in this running attire instead. which, though everyone holds an image of nate in this state, i think would primarily be a claire-association.
ted shows up at ruth's funeral and he and claire reconnect. thinking about claire's perception of ted in this moment, she's upset that she has to leave him behind when he's been so good to her so she imagines this future where they reconnect and get married despite her major hangup on his political beliefs.
keith, sometime after pledging his and david's savings to buy rico and brenda out of the funeral home and renovate the house, starts his own security business. he is shot and killed by robbers while completing a transport. from claire's perspective, the bulk of what she knows of keith is that he was a cop and security detail--it would make sense to her that he would never give up working in security to help run the funeral home. afterwards, david remarries (presumably "for companionship" as the two of them had that conversation earlier in the series) and dies at a family picnic after having a vision of young keith. this is the romantic outcome--claire would want david to be happy with someone else while he is alive, but reaffirms that his heart belongs to keith. claire is also present for this death, despite still presumably living in NYC (because her obit states that she lives there through her life).
rico has a heart attack while he and vanessa are on a cruise in puerto rico (again, an ending for rico that is limited mostly to what claire knows about him).
brenda remarries and has another child. she dies at home while billy is talking her ear off about claire and ted and still needing closure. to me, this is claire somewhat narcissistically assuming that billy’s life has no depth other than obsessing over her, and that if she moves on with ted, billy is going to keep having episodes and making it brenda’s problem even into very old age. still, she gives brenda the happy ending of happy remarriage and another child.
additionally, ruth's published obituary is the only that mentions nate predeceasing her--brenda, david, and claire's do not. brenda's omitting nate is understandable because of his betrayal to her and asking for a divorce before his death, but david's obituary omits keith, and claire's only mentions ted. brenda's obituary states that she goes on to get a doctorate and write several well-decorated books about parenting, but it also mentions that she was the subject of "charlotte light and dark" somewhat abruptly. when i think about cl+d, i remember that it was something that made claire revere brenda as this cool anti-establishment rebel, but was the source of a large amount of brenda's trauma. i find it hard to imagine that her family (those who would be responsible for publishing the obituary) would make mention of it, because it didn't seem like brenda's life work led her to confront or embrace it.
on a series scale: to me, a main point of the series is that life and death are both unpredictable--fantasy sequences, in addition to giving us a peek into each character's inner perversions/points of view (i.e. david's theatricality, nate's hippie/fatalistic sensibilities, claire's laissez-faire teenagerdom, rico's religious lens, etc) do a lot to tell us each person's fears and hopes about their lives. nathaniel (all of the ghosts, really, but nathaniel appears most often) is a representation of each characters' inner voice. sometimes he is supportive, sometimes he's introspective, sometimes he's cruel. the series also very much leveraged an episodic format on the macro and micro level-- the story existed when it was on screen and sort of ceased to exist when it wasn't, even if things happened to the characters between episodes. like there were sometimes ambiguous time gaps between episodes even in the same season, but the show only wanted us to consider what was on the screen at the time.
sooo yeah. it would make sense to me that the ending is claire's imagination of what happens to the rest of the family, conceived as an idyllic fantasy to reckon with her own fears about the uncertainty of leaving to start her life in NYC. idkkkk
drifted off briefly and had a dream which mentioned the concept of 'killing someone ascyter' in which 'ascyter' was an adjective meaning 'in concord with the landscape' hmmm
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