Opening scenes convey spiritual side of death
By Frazier Moore
Associated Press
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| Michael C. Hall, left, and Freddy Rodriguez, center, star in HBO's darkly comic "Six Feet Under."
HBO 'Six Feet Under' HBO's offbeat series is in its second season 7 p.m. Sundays, HBO; repeats 8 p.m. Mondays, HBO Digital |
Even after you see it dozens of times, the "Six Feet Under" opening can give you a start with its trippy take on life and death, despair and hope, the kookie and the divine.
Of course, it also lists the stars (who include Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall, Frances Conroy and Rachel Griffiths) and behind-the-camera principals. And it performs a most basic function: telling viewers the show's name.
And does it all in less than two minutes.
The opening-title sequence for any TV show is a valuable part of the program it serves. But in the case of "Six Feet Under" (whose second season is unfolding Sundays at 7 p.m.), it earns special notice. And deserves appreciation as a cinematic gem in its own right.
Here's the fade-in. A raven cuts across a cloudless sky. Tilt down to a tree on the crest of a grassy hill. Then, in the foreground, clutching hands rise into view and fly apart (a graphic display of death's divisiveness?).
Next: Someone's hands in tight close-up, one clasping the other. In grief? No, they're scrubbing up. These are hands of a mortician about to prepare a body. Then the body gets its close-up: feet with toe tag attached.
Onscreen credits come and go. One name appears on a beaker of embalming fluid. "Executive Producer Alan Ball" is digitally etched into a headstone.
Finally, back to the hill. The raven wings past. The tree sprouts a taproot in the shape of a rectangle (the casket?), which borders the words "Six Feet Under."
Then the last couple of credits. Fade out. The episode commences.
Did we mention that the haunting music that accompanies these images was created by Thomas Newman? It was he who composed the score for the 1999 film "American Beauty," for which Alan Ball wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay.
In the fall of 2000, when time came to craft the opening titles for Ball's latest project, he invited Newman to supply the theme.
As Newman recalls, "I wanted to capture some of the show's humor, wonder and profundity" he found in the pilot episode.
But he had no idea what the visuals would be, "which is quite unusual. It's hard to imagine what the music will sound like against the images, when you don't know what the images are."
Ball knew what they wouldn't be: "one of those cheesy TV openings where the actors' faces are all over the place.
"We wanted it to be kind of mysterious, evocative, with bits of humor," he says. And nothing flashy, dark or ghoulish.
"The opening should be a point of departure," says Newman, who brought Ball numerous musical ideas. Eventually the theme revealed itself as a transcendent brew of English horn, keyboards, gongs, ocarinas and what seems like a ticking, pulsating clock.
Then Ball turned his attention to finding someone who could match the sounds with pictures.
Enter Paul Matthaeus, whose Seattle-based production house DigitalKitchen did main titles for the film "The Sixth Day" and TV series "The Agency" and "The Mind of the Married Man," as well as advertising for such clients as Microsoft and Sears.
He pitched Ball numerous concepts that aimed to juxtapose "the material aspect of undertaking with the more spiritual side of death: deliverance."
When an approach was settled on, he and his team got cracking — and got introspective. For instance, someone thought of the lone tree on the hill as a symbol of life's circularity.
"A tree grows from the decomposed remains of the generations that preceded it," Matthaeus notes, "just as everything we have was given to us by prior generations. Then WE return to the earth."
When Newman saw it, he wanted to call and say thank you. The imagery not only supports the music, but unfolds along with it in perfect synch. A bouquet wilts as the music seems to sigh. A wheel of the gurney bearing a corpse makes an abrupt turnabout as the music does the same.
All the filming was done in Seattle. The cemetery is in the city's Queen Anne Hill section. The scene with the tree was shot near Lake Washington.
But according to Matthaeus, that emblematic tree was, so to speak, a plant. Since no suitable tree stood on the grassy expanse, the producers found a robust holly in a Seattle resident's yard, paid $400 to cut it down, then dispatched it to the shooting site, where wires held it erect.
What could be more fitting, perverse and hopeful: a dead tree representing life.
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