Big Love? More Like Fresh Hell

I've been following the new HBO series "Big Love" with interest - while it has been quite entertaining I'm getting the impression that it's an illuminating portrait of what Hollywood thinks its male viewers will find fascinating about polygamy and less a genuine portrait of the modern day practice.

At first glance it is: Ooh, a man with three wives! Kinky! And he has to rush about sexually satisfying all of them, to the tiring point of him being forced to take Viagra to keep up! (Keep up? Get it?). But really, it's all one big happy family, other than some ominous foreshadowing emotional undertones between the wives, but hey! He's constantly having sex!

And then boo - a villian appears on the scene - it's the devious "prophet of Juniper Creek" - the way out there fundamentalist cowboy preacher (but he drives a Hummer - see how up-to-date he is?) living up in the ungovernable hills with his gang of bullyboys and a compound full of wives, including a 15 year old girl, my candidate for "Character We'd Most Like To Slap", a smug and priggish teen "promised" to him, who flounces around flaunting her future staus with a rather Damien-like mien. (But intriguing! Spunky and recalcitrant underage girls!).

We discover many connections between the bad prophet and our innocent hero, those of marriage, business loans, bad blood, the hero's childhood in that community, etc. We are introduced to his family, still deeply entrenched in the renegade community and who are so incompetent they can't find their way out of a paper bag.

As the series proceeds, we are given glimpses into the lives of our hero's two teenage children (thankfully for them, I guess, legitimate), who have to deal not only with the ordinary angst of adolesence but with their hidden lives and the routine lies they tell. And of course having three wives in one family means three times the emotional impact (3 times the PMS - what a gag!)

Conflict! Hey, really? Who knew that plural marriage could be more than a bowl of cherries?

Add a heaping handful of nosy mainstream Mormon neighbors, a dash of independent thinking, stir in a generous helping of paranoia, a cup of varied matrimonial and societal secrets, and voila! This is the picture of a modern polygamist's life.

But I ain't buying it.

Polygamists, whether they are Fundamentalist LDS or an offshoot, are basically living in a closet inside a closet - a good concrete analogy are Russian matroyosha nesting dolls - one opens up each successive doll to reveal a smaller perfect replica within. My experience with the dolls is not vast, but I marvel at seeing even seven of them, all perfect replicas, nestled snugly within each other.

The outer closet is the relation of mainstream Mormons to the larger community, in the sense that they consider themselves very much and very happily out of step with mainstream humanistic society, and proudly refer to themselves as peculiar people. Those inhabiting the inner closet, then, must naturally feel even less at ease with the outer world but perhaps can find themselves more comfortable with their compatriots in the outer closet.

Yet in the series, we see that the characters who choose to inhabit this inner closet, who have selected the most restrictive of all possible choices, are penalized, marginalized, and deserving of sympathy or pity but not viewed as admirable, not to be emulated.

And as the episodes progress, the noose of their choice is finding its own way to softly strangle all of the main characters, putting paid to the notion that plural marriage is just a lovely way for an enterprising businessman to fulfill his religious principles and stroke his own ego.

While the three wives of our hero Bill are all old enough to make their own decisions and enter into their inevitable tanglements, this should be a cautionary tale. Let's face it - if you're a woman looking to snag the man of your dreams, you shouldn't be looking in his direction.

My conclusion, based on the series and my footnote**, is that there is nothing modern or progressive about polygamists - HBO can gloss this until the cows come home and I will still see nothing of value coming out of this other than entertainment.

**Historical Footnote: I used to be a Mormon. My family converted when I was 9; I left mentally when I was 15; the last time I ever set foot in an LDS church I was 18; I was excommunicated by my choice when I was 33. I lived in Utah from 1970-1984 (minus two years in Illinois). Members of my family are still active LDS. I have personally seen members of polygamist sects in southern Utah (not on their own turf but at WalMart), have heard all the rumors and read all the stories, newspaper articles, and books about them. Nothing they could do, even now, could suprise me.