For anyone who doesn't know what Big Love is, it's a show about a successful Mormon pillar of the community, Bill, his legal first wife Barb, and his illegal second and third wives, Nicki and Margene (and their collective eight children) set in contemporary Utah. As we all know, mainstream Mormons
do not condone polygamy, so the Hendricksons live in three houses that open up on the same backyard but no one knows they're "all" married. This is a secret it is very important they keep. It is a secret they share with the much scarier, much larger, and much more illegal compound run by Nicki's father. And as for the plot...
So that's the show. I really like it. I think it's extremely clever and well-written. But you know me and small towns, religion, family relationships, and "politicking". That's just me all over.
Anyway, Stanley Fish is writing about it for some reason, so I read
his column (mostly for the updates about season 3, because I don't have access to HBO anymore... cry) and then I read the comments below. Here's a sampling:
Oh, Stanley, your patriarchy is showing. “Big Love” is the cliche man-as-the-center-of-the universe social construct. I’m big on family, and most of my writing (plays, other) is about family, and maybe if this tv series were about Big Mama with her stable of servile male sex partners and her progeny with her last name, I might enjoy it. But since woman-in-charge is only man-in-charge in drag, I doubt it. Good night, Stanley, and go read “The Feminine Mystique.”
I find nothing at all to love about “Big Love.” It is weird, unrealistic and decidedly misogynistic. Not until the “sister-wives” stop acting like Stepford wives and get themselves some “brother-husbands” will this show hold any interest for me. totally unrealistic and decidely misogynist.
I also watch Big Love, but I find it disturbing as it tries to make me comfortable with polygamy.
Big Love sends the message that men can treat women like a smorgassbord and expect their undying love and loyalty, and it tells women to expect a fractional return at best on the love they give in marriage.
But there is still something distasteful about the show because of the way it portrays the women who live vicariously. My own view is that polygamy would only be acceptable if I didn’t love my husband, and was actually repelled by him. This show just seems completely psychologically unrealistic.
In my opinion, “Big Love” is the Morman version of “The Color Purple” with patriarchal domination and chiild sexual abuse so rationalized it’s unremarkable. These characters are only likeable because their self-delusion is almost total. The women don’t know what it’s like to have a mental fredom to choose... Yes, there are many different kinds of families and marriages, but let’s hope that this series doesn’t make polygamy more popular, socially acceptable, or legal.
I don’t enjoy watching women compete endlessly, and miserably, for a man’s attention, their ‘turn’ with him the high point of their existence, especially when the man is as bland and paternalistic as Bill. I kept waiting for a scene where one of them packed a suitcase and slipped away in the night–if just for a break and some privacy. The fact is that this show portrays a lifestyle that, at least according to girls who have a been subjected to it and run away, relies on oppression, not love, to exist.
I watched an episode in horror. I wanted to shake all of those women and tell them to snap out of it!
Now, marrying several men…
Now, Stanley Fish's odd comparison to The Waltons aside - never watched The Waltons and I don't think that Big Love is sentimental at all, though I agree that the characters are likable (likability to me =/= sentimental, something that people all over the column seem to not be getting) - are you joking? Of all the television shows I have watched (and they are many), Big Love is like the last show I would classify as "misogynistic". Yes, it depicts a patriarchal situation. News flash: they're Mormon. They're fundamentalist Mormon. Probably some of the most overtly patriarchal people in the U.S. So of course that's how they live. Brother-husbands? Servile male sex partners? Slipping away for the night? You're talking about a different religion, one that I have never heard of (check out Xena: Warrior Princess? Maybe? No wait, they're Amazons).
So yeah. They're living in a patriarchal society. But they all still behave in very human ways. Barb and Nicki and Margene are all fully developed characters, as is Bill, for that matter (the psychologically unrealistic angle is so self-obsessed I don't want to go into it). The fact I enjoy the show does not mean I want to participate in polygamy. In fact, anybody that thinks this show glorifies polygamy has severe problems with their critical thinking faculties. It actually depicts polygamy as having serious fucking issues, but it doesn't clobber you with a moral hammer, it just shows, okay, here's a family that's polygamous. This is what could happen, given that these people are real human beings and not allegorical symbols of Certain Values. Very God starts the world running and just lets it go style of storytelling, not God is hanging over you with a thunderbolt or God is directing your every move to make an example out of you. It's a very, very difficult style of storytelling, but I admire the hell out of people who can do it.
Actually, Big Love doesn't glorify anything (where Stanley Fish is wrong) - and I wish people would stop trying to find moral compasses in fucking television shows! I'm looking at you, fucking Oscar Committee. So you find polygamy creepy? You don't like that Nicki is being pressured to have more children? News flash: that's allowed. You're allowed to not like what the characters do. That may mean you dislike the characters for a while (hell, I certainly go through those phases with BSG, which is why I have a love/hate relationship with pretty much everybody except Sharon, Helo, Baltar, and Six, who I love unconditionally - whoa, just now realized I have a thing for Cylon woman/human man couples), but so what? Are you watching the show as a replacement for your Sunday sermon? As a replacement for your friends? If it makes you uncomfortable to watch characters do what you don't want them to do, maybe you need to go into a little box by yourself, because you're clearly not ready for mass media. Or the world.
And as for this obsession with "strong female characters"... I just want strong characters. Whether they're male or female doesn't matter (then again, I am very opposed to gender quotas in legislatures; talk about your classic 3rd-world-tries-to-emulate-1st-world-and-lands-on-its-fucking-face). Now I think a tv show with no women at all is unrealistic, but on a slight tangent, the insertion of female characters for the sake of having female characters is beyond dumb. They have no chance of being strong characters - and I don't mean strong in the sense of oo-rah, I have a gun and control over people, which is what most people seem to want in their "strong female characters", I mean strong as in, fully-developed, three-dimensional, realistic, flawed, a character you can tell apart and not by a stereotype, a character who makes decisions, whether or not they're the right ones or for the right reasons. A character that has discernable reasons.
Unless we're just going to say that no television show should depict an extreme patriarchy. Is that what this is about? Because that makes more sense logically, but sucks even harder. Cuz guess what, guys? Patriarchy (and extreme patriarchy) exists. Just like sadness and death and prison and the mafia. And you know, patriarchy exists too... everywhere. Just in milder, more hidden/embedded forms.
Then again remember when people were calling Battlestar Galactica misogynistic because there was rape in it? Yeah. Wow. Even when they get a deluge of strong female characters (both classic mode, a la Starbuck and Roslin, and unconventional, a la Sharon, Six, Dee, and yes, Callie) they're still not satisfied.
Anyway, thank God for this commenter:
Dr. Fish, for an English Professor you seem oddly (in this case, anyway) oblivious to irony, as are most of the commenters thus far. Only one comment has noted the similarity of Big Love to The Sopranos, which leads to the point you have missed. The subversive appeal of Big Love is that, like The Sopranos, it takes a bizarre American family and suggests how it is a distillation of the “normal” American family itself: hierarchical, superstitious, corrupt, and hypocritical at the same time that it is, as you point out, loving, solicitous, and loyal. This family’s religion is–shall we say?–weird. So is that of nearly all American families. This family is over its head in debt. So are nearly all American families. This family claims to be utterly devoted to the welfare of its children yet the oldest daughter is pregnant and lonely (gee, where have we heard that before?). I could go on.
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