Six Feet Under opening analysis 

In the opening to Six Feet Under, you can hear straight away a happy tone of music with a bright but plain background, with a crow that flies overhead in the sky, the crow is used throughout the opening to symbolise death, so there are many different shorts of the crow, and the only time you see the full body of the bird is when it’s extremely far away from it, they use close ups and extreme close ups of the bird throughout the whole opening, they do this with nearly every other shot in the opening sequence, the fact that you don’t see a face fully in the opening with the close ups of different body parts or objects, can provoke mystery as people are going to be not able to see the full picture of what is going on, this will create a little puzzle in their head of them wanting to find out what is happening.

The whole way through the opening the lighting is of a high key lighting, but all extremely high key where you can see everything very clearly, although the music and lighting seem to enhance the feeling of something happy, all the scenes are used very clever to suggest death, such as when the death bed is being wheeled away with the camera, in the background it’s an extremely bright light with a silhouette inside it, symbolising passing over to the other side or “going into the light” this is commonly associated with death itself, also other things that can be suggested to symbolise part of the opening with death is, at the very first scene the camera pans down towards a tree full of leaves, and at the end it pans again to the same tree but the tree appears to be dead, this could also be indicating the circle of life as the opening starts and finishes with a very similar scene.

The items used throughout are all do relate to death, the person washing his hands with water can represent a surgeon washing before performing, or a murdered washing blood away from killing their victim, also when the liquid that is inserted into dead bodies is being poured, giving you an obvious example that someone has died, further leading onto the scene where the people are carrying the coffin in the graveyard. All of these items and places being used show the audience without thinking that this is clearly to do with someone dying, a murder perhaps, but all ending with certain death which explains the title of Six Feet Under.

The close up and long shot angles used, also a wide shot with one or two extreme close ups used, with the text of the producers and characters in the show popping completely in time with the music, on beat. An on beat piece of music shows that something is meant to be happy, compared to an offbeat track with usually indicated fear. The music as a whole is very contrapuntal with the footage being shown. The text sometimes follows the scenes, such as when the liquid is dropping the titles follow it all the way down, this engages the audience more because they have to follow what is being shown to them.

The music starts off being slow and builds up throughout the opening, which then calms down and becomes slower again, with less texture of instruments making it represent the concept of the circle of life again, where it starts slow and ends slow. The music completely stops/becomes very quiet when the scene where the fully alive and well flowers come up, and they track the speed up the flowers death, flowers are considered to be beautiful and representational to health as they are a gift when someone is in hospital, but to see them die very quickly on screen gives them a completely different meaning to the audience, instead of them being related to happiness and health they are related to death and decaying, just like the opening progressively shows.