Big Love: Season 1 (2006)

(Utah, contmporary)
IMDb

A quirky/poignant drama ala HBO’s Six Feet Under, only dealing with polygamy rather then undertakers, Big Love is the type of program that just gives people at LDS Church public relations headaches. They fail to see a reason for it, as do many other Latter-day Saints, to them it just brings up awkward issues from the past they would rather be forgotten. In fact the official Church response to the program, issued March 6th 2006, goes so far as to say the following: “Big Love, like so much other television programming, is essentially lazy and indulgent entertainment that does nothing for our society and will never nourish great minds.” Ouch, that’s about as hostel as their likely to get in an official statement.

Yet I wonder if this is just another example of the tendency among mainline Mormons to avoid dealing with the tricky issues that abound in our tradition. We (as a whole) don’t like to think about them, we don’t like to have to address them, whether in Church, conversation with a non-member friend, or in popular entertainment. We can handle a brief joke or two on occasion, and once in a great while spend an evening pondering “The mystery’s of the Kingdom” with friends, yet to encounter something like polygamy in a modern context is discomforting for your average LDS, and here is where I think Big Love provides a potential service.

No doubt the bulk of the audience for Big Love, like the other racy HBO family drama’s, is not going to be LDS. Though having now watched the entire first season, it would certainly help the viewer if they were. Distinct LDS references, along with those to the broader Mormon tradition are dropped with little or no elaboration, terms like “sealing” and “garment” and “temple recommend”, may not be fully understood by “gentile” viewers not immersed in our own unique jargon. Though despite this, Utah’s largely Latter-day Saint populace acts as a kind of stand-in for the viewers perspective, the ’regular people’ who encounter, to one degree or another, the polygamous Henrickson clan around whom the series centers. This ironically is something your average member could support, having the “Mormons” on the show be the ‘regular guy’s’, yet then they have to encounter the “Mormons” of a quasi-19th century variety, which brings the typical Saint back into uncomfortable territory. Before I go one I do need to stop and acknowledge the semi-explicate depictions of sex on the show, though adding that other then a cameo appearance by Bill Pullmans posterior, no real nudity is shown. This degree of sexual frankness will be anathema to many members, yet also provides a convent cover for them dismissing the show, and by extension, the things it may have to teach us.

I’m afraid I have to take some exception to the folks at PR, but my “great mind” found some nourishment in Big Love, it found a rare canvas on which is depicted the cognitive dissidence of Mormonism past and present, where big business achievement and mounting credit card debt come face to face with sister wives and communal orders. Here we have a character, a successful businessman by the last name of Kimball, who invites our major male protagonist Bill Henrickson, (the owner of a growing chain of Utah based home improvement stories) into a civic organization composed of Salt Lake area business owners.Kimball is the epitome of the modern successful Mormon, he even has a rather common Mormon last name, one shared with a dynasty of LDS Church leaders going back to the earliest days of the movement. Kimball see’s I think a bit of himself in Bill Henrickson, and is practically impressed by his compelling narrative, having been thrown out a polygamous group at the age of 14, and then building himself a life and successful career as a “true” Latter-day Saint. Bill used to tell this story on a kind of inspirational circuit, while a practicing member of the mainline Church, before circumstances thrust him back into the world of polygamy. That Kimball finds this all so compelling and heroic is ironic in term of his name and his heritage, he says he can’t get over the barbarism of the modern fundamentalist, yet they practice what in the 19th Century would have made him the definition of a successful Latter-day Saint. Heber C. Kimball by the way, was the only Mormon Church leader of his day to have more plural wives then Brigham Young.

The way all the mainline Mormon characters deal with polygamy is in fact fascinating. Hendrickson daughter Sarah’s (Amanda Seyfried) best friend Heather (Tina Majorino) is a “Molly Mormon” who has some “very strong views on polygamy”, yet keep’s the Henderson’s secret out loyalty to her friend. First wife Barbara’s (Jeanne Tripplehorn) sister Cindy, likewise telegraphs a desire to get her nieces and nephew away from those practicing “The Principle”, but keeps mum to the authorities because she doesn’t want to inflict any destruction on her family. Even the Henrickson’s lawyer, played by former Clinton staffer Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., chooses to treat them simply as clients and friends, making no apparent judgment calls. In fact what was once called ’the Mormon Creed’, “Mind your own business”, seems to still be in effect among many of these Latter-day Saints, which perhaps explains why practice of ’the principle’ has remained such an open secret in stretches of the mountain west.

There are those among the LDS by-and-large who might have interest in exposing the Henrickson’s, but here they take the form of the sitcom staple ’nosey neighbors’ (who’d like to fellowship that ’single mother’ across the street into the Church) and a women of obsessive tendencies. By keeping mostly to themselves and taking a few other common sense precautions, the Hendrickson’s can functioning rather well in the modern world, where the biggest issue might be who runs who to their recital or baseball practice.

The Henrickson’s have those average, every-day problems, but there dramatic significance is heightened by having them played out among three wives and seven children. First wife Barb balances a career as a substitute teacher with family responsibilities and feels as though her husband has been “stolen away” from her by his other ’responsibilities’. Second wife Nikki (Chloe: Sevigny), who grow up on the polygamous compound of Juniper Creek, has succumbed to a shopping addiction now that she is out among the modern world, and tries desperately to keep the existence of her excessive debt from her husband, lashing out at others in the family in ac effort to deflect her mounting sense of personal guilt. Third wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), only 23, is suffering the standard feelings of isolation and overwhelment that affect young mothers. All the while son Ben (Douglas Smith) struggles with puberty and a sexually aggressive girlfriend, and daughter Sarah copes with intense social unease. These are all typical modern problems, very 21st Century, very contemporary Mormon, save for the marital arrangements, they could be any Wasatch area family.

No the Mormon past comes more to the front in the form of Juniper Creek, the polygamist compound in which Bill grew up, and too which he reluctantly returned seven years prior, when his wife had cancer and he desperately needed a loan. Trips to visit relatives in the desert community, and visits from members of a vastly extensive family bring that place, and that life style, to the forefront. While 19th Century in its social arrangements and cultural conceptions (one polygamist wife viewing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on television mutters “uppity”), it to, like the Henrickson’s suburban homes, is also in dissonance to a modern reality. Cheaply constructed country homes whose residents drive Hummers, plural wives tending the field and polishing the private plane. It’s a world of both pot lucks, and corporate style board meetings. All presided over by a cowboy hat wearing prophet, a former accountant who enjoys folk songs and the poetry of Emily Dickinson (Harry Dean Stanton). He’s authoritarian, yet genial, ruthless, but sentimental. At 76 years of age the importance of sex has waned in his mind, yet he keeps 14 wives including a 15 year old he seems more interested in teaching diction to then sleeping with.

The modern and primitive join hands and show there not that different, which is perhaps more disconcerting then comforting to the modern Mormon mind, even if we’re not likely to tell you that. (When you talk to a young Mormon women about polygamy, their response will most likely boil down to, “I’m glade I don’t have to deal with it, we don’t practice that anymore“.) When some long time polygamous wives are told they are to be reassigned when their husband falls out of favor with the groups leader, Bill tell’s them they don’t have to listen to him. “But he’s the one true prophet of the Lord” one responds. When Bill’s brother Joey confesses to Barb that he is a closet monogamist, but won’t tell his wife Wanda that he doesn’t want another wife, because he knows she’ll be upset, fearing they then won’t be able to go to the Celestial Kingdom, I see the modern parallels, and wonder how many other Mormons can be brought to acknowledge them. The source of the greatest meaning in their lives is also the source of most of their pain, yet they cling to ‘the principle’ as many of us cling to the Church, because it has become or axis, and we’ll never be able to see our own spirituality through any other prism. This may be good, this may be bad, but its something were wedded to as Mormons, a light by which we both see and are blinded.

I am thankful for Big Love. Thankful for the odd kind of Mormon every-family that are the Henrickson’s. Their adventures in dissonance truly nourish my soul, and expand my mind.