death

the trip back from chicago went well, thankfully no further problems at the airport. Spent the week applying for some jobs, nothing too exciting or promising. The rest of the week I sat around the house mainly watching netflix movies. Most notably, I just finally finished Six Feet Under, which I started a little over a year ago. While I think the show lost its way a bit in the middle few seasons, the first season and last part of season 5 are particularly amazing.

The final episode, and specifically the final 15 minutes of the last show, make for probably the best conclusion to a series I’ve seen. The final montage in the last episode is painfully beautiful and straightforward, and a logical fulfilment of the premise of the show. It’s one of those beautiful moments of film/video where the music and the images magically combine to create something neither of them would be alone. With the images showing us what to feel, and the music informing how we should feel it.

For me, the best episodes of the show were the ones in which the ‘death’ of the episode informed and revealed something about what the characters were struggling with at the time. The technique is similar to the way the island ‘manifests’ shadow issues or undigested material for the cast to deal with in LOST. The deaths in Six Feet Under do much the same I think, though the episodes that do that are certainly more prevalent earlier in the series before it turns into more typical soap-opera esque character issues.

While a little cheesy, predictable, and overly dramatic at points in the series, overall I’m so impressed. This is a show about how life is, not how we want life to be. Nobody is perfect in the show, but everybody has moments of perfection. Issues don’t always get resolved, things don’t necessarily end happily, and people don’t always come around as we might hope. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Death is that strangest of things; the one universal experience that every living being in the world shares, something completely universal, but also simultaneously the loneliest thing in the world for anyone to experience or witness.

That probably wasn’t the best show in the world to watch during my unemployed-what-the fuck-am-i-doing-with-my-26-year-old-life period right now. Meditating on death does little to alleviate existential angst.