The publicity for the 4th season’s opener for “Big Love” reminded me that I hadn’t watched the 3rd season yet, so I downloaded it and have been watching it at the gym. I’ve got somewhat mixed feelings about the show. Don’t get me wrong; I love it to death as entertainment and think there’s a real brilliance to use polygamist Mormons as fodder for soap opera levels of drama. Polygamy is such a straight up bad idea precisely because it’s bound to create so much drama (amongst other reasons). Throughout the show, they’ve had fun exploring why that would be, and a major reason is that polygamy encourages people to set aside so many common sense objections that it simply inculcates the crazy. The Hendrickson family of the series have built their lives on a lie, which is that they can somehow make polygamy work without inculcating the same crazy drama. And of course they fail.
But my unease with the show has always stemmed from occasional sense that the writers wish to glamorize polygamy. They’ve certainly downplayed the sexual jealousy aspects, and often the women in the Hendrickson family seem just a little too unquestioning of the vicious patriarchy they’ve submitted to, even as they feel superior to the polygamists on the compound. Are the writers intoxicated by the exoticism of polygamy, I asked myself. What are they trying to get at here? The name of the show is a really bad indicator here, since it implies that the driving force behind polygamy is big-heartedness, not patriarchy. There’s a lot of hand-wringing on the show about how the polygamist Hendricksons have to hide away, due to mainstream LDS bigotry, and it always comes across as a ploy to make you feel that polygamists are some kind of victims of religious bigotry, which overshadows the severe fucked-up-ness of the religion.
That said, I have to point out that “Big Love” is the only narrative TV show that I’ve ever heard use the word “patriarchy” in a straightforward, descriptive manner, instead of being used in a jokey context to mock feminists for their supposed paranoia. But on at least one occasion on the show, the first wife Barbara refers to her culture and belief system as the patriarchy, and there’s nothing offered to suggest that the word is an overreaction. Which is good, because duh, they live in a polygamist family where the husband’s word is law and female bodies are seen primarily as vehicles for men to control and use as they see fit.
I realized what the show is doing when it humanizes patriarchy isn’t actually so different than what “Mad Men” does in its straight up feminist mission to expose the lies we tell ourselves to justify the oppression of women. In both cases, we’re treated to a cast of female characters that squelch their concerns because they’ve bought into the values system of their culture/have managed to scratch out a small advantage within it/don’t have other options. In both cases, we’re given an example of patriarchy that seems extreme compared to the ones we’re used to, so that we can really think hard about how far from those horrors we aren’t. “Mad Men” perhaps feels more relevant to liberal, secular audience, however, because we’re the heirs of the professional, secular characters on “Mad Men”—-we’re the lapsed Catholics, the indifferent Episcopalians, the people for whom the center of life is commerce, not religion, the people who define ourselves by our jobs and social roles and not by our faith. (And I for one think that’s a healthy development, even as I maintain criticism of capitalism.) But “Big Love” is sending up something else entirely, and I’d say that after watching much of the 3rd season (I have a few episodes left), that they are making their themes quite clear. They’re sending up the patriarchy, the religiously-excused patriarchy. And they’re doing it by taking it to the extreme of polygamy.
This season especially, you begin to see how the Hendricksons are deluded if they think they’re so much better than the compound polygamists. After two seasons of suffering the great pains the family goes through to rationalize their behavior in relation to the worst extremes, the way this has become more explicit is welcome. The Hendricksons justify themselves by pointing out that they eschew certain “abuses” of polygamy: the rape, the way that women’s choice in marriage is ignored, the child brides, the police state the prophets keep their people under. The Hendricksons don’t do that, they tell themselves. Their patriarchy isn’t a problem, because they respect women. Women have to submit, sure, but they get respect and care in exchange. Their women are happy! Happy! Look at them smiling, unlike those dour compound wives. They believe in consent and choice and even women’s education. Totally different, right?