Did anyone watch this last night on HBO, while in a post-Sopranos coma?
I wanted to watch it so I could fairly and accurately comment on it (unlike, say, certain people who said they weren’t going to see Brokeback Mountain or Million Dollar Baby or Syriana but felt entitled to review them anyway). I was cleaning the kitchen and cooking during my usual Sunday-night burst of energy, so I taped The Sopranos and missed the first 15 minutes of Big Love. So I’m a bit fuzzy on some of the exposition.
Big Love, if you’re not familiar with it, is an HBO series about a plural marriage of Mormons — all consenting adults, and living in a more mainstream environment than they grew up in. Bill (Bill Paxton, memorably turned into a pile of talking shit in Weird Science and snarfed by an alien in Aliens) owns a home-supply business and lives in a three-house suburban SLC compound with first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), sister-wife Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) and sister-wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) and their collective seven children.
Oh, the wacky hijinx that ensue. Everyone puts demands on Bill’s time and money. Margene is an incompetent mother. Nicki hates living in the city and wants to go back home, to the Colorado City-like compound where her father is the prophet and has just married his latest wife, a 14-year-old named Rhonda who disdains Barb because Barb had a hysterectomy. Bill needs Viagra to keep up with all the sexual demands of three hot, horny wives. There are all kinds of scheduling issues, because of course they’re keeping up the fiction that they’re not in a plural marriage — which causes some consternation for the daughter, who connects with a religious coworker at the burger joint but can’t reveal her family status.
This is the part where it appeared that the series was going to be glorifying plural marriage, because it presents it with such a golden glow, albeit slightly tarnished. Hey! We’re all consenting adults here!
In fact, from what I had originally heard about the series, I thought it was based on polyamory, not polygamy/plural marriage as practiced by certain Mormon fundamentalist sects. I’d be thrilled, in fact, to see something like that, in particular a series that wasn’t just one guy with a harem but a more complex web of relationships. But it is not to be, even on HBO.
Things got much more interesting when the action moved to the Colorado City-type compound, where Bill and Nicki had grown up and from which Bill was desperately trying to escape. But his family found him when his father became very ill, and he went to the compound with Barb and Nicki. This is where we meet Nicki’s father, the prophet Roman (Harry Dean Stanton), her mother, Adaleen (Mary Kay Place), Roman’s new wife Rhonda, 14 years old, and Bill’s parents Frank and Lois (Bruce Dern and Grace Zabriskie). Frank has been poisoned, we learn, but Lois doesn’t want to call a doctor because their living arrangements (did I mention all the sister-wives hanging around?) might be found out.
There’s some dramatic tension generated when Barb, who is so serene in her own little roost, loses it when she discovers that Rhonda, who is the same age as her own daughter, is now Roman’s new wife (and perhaps begins to see that her marriage is not so different from Rhonda’s), but most of it is generated by Roman’s efforts to pull Bill back into the fold and to shake him down for 15% of his new store.
I don’t know that I’ll be watching it again. I really have an issue with a show that puts a rosy glow on a marriage where the husband can say to one of his wives, when she asks him for money, “Come on. You’re the only one I gave a checking account to.” On the other hand — Harry Dean Stanton.
Thoughts?
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I didn’t watch it, but I thought I heard on NPR that they point out early in the show that they are NOT Mormon. Did I hear that wrong?
I did miss the first 15 minutes, so I don’t really know. Could be that they were fundamentalists, or at least raised that way, so they could not be considered members of the LDS. There was a brief bit when the daughter was talking to the religious Mormon friend where they bonded over her mother’s involvement in the church but she clammed up when asked if they were active (the mother, Barb, does not appear to be FLDS).
Yeah, they’re not Mormons, but a renegade, opposed sect. Mormons officially outlawed polygamy quite awhile back. As for the show, I loved it. I’m not sure it’s less shocking than a polyamory series though: polyamory enjoyed a brief flowering in hippy America that polygamy never did, and to some degree, most sitcoms (and soaps) thrive on unofficial polyamory.
All of which is to say, I don’t think it’s that HBO would have faced more oppobrium for a polyamorous series than a polygamous one. Indeed, i think the end result, as a certain misogynistic elements get flushed out, will be quite the opposite. Not to mention that a polyamorous show would be less dramatically fruitful, I think, than a normal sitcom where the various intragroup pairings require secrecy and confrontation. Where’s the fun in consensual, transparent relations, save for their eventual breakdown amidst jealousy and in-fighting?
Maybe during the season finale, he’ll start to go blind and think it’s the judgment of God. Hilarious!
The most irritating part for me was “Sister Rhonda’s” hissyfit over the coffee. It’s almost like the writers wanted to justify her marriage to Rhonda with “But, look! She gets to boss other people around, so it can’t be that bad!”
Er, her marriage to Roman. Sorry. Too many “R” names.
I really liked the show. I spent some very dark years of my life in a fringe religion that, like Mormonism, doesn’t officially have polygamy– but rather the fringe of that fringe sometimes practices it.
I have some issues with the show, but I felt that, over all, it humanized the people involved in the story. And that was meaningful to me.
Did anyone else think that there was WAYYY too much of Bill Paxton visible in that episode? I was a bit confused as to why we had to be present for so much of his sex life. (Not even Sex and the City got quite as involved and it has “Sex” in the title!)
Do any of the folks who say ‘it’s ok, she gets to boss people around’ consider that it may be innapropriate for someone of fourteen to be made to take on that much responsibility? Of course she adapts to her situation and makes the best of it, but that doesn’t make it right.
Kim, I think it was a nod (albeit an enthusiastic one) to the majority of people who have that curiosity about a polygamous relationship. They wonder how the sex works, if it’s one big party all the time, if the man can keep up, etc.
I get that people would wonder about polygmaous sex…. but I mean, c’mon. All I needed to know was that he rotated beds each night and needed Viagra. Not the details of whether he was hittin’ it from the back or getting a blowjob. I’m no prude… but I thought the scenes were needlessly prolonged. And awkward. (But then, I was watching with a roomful of people.)
And on the 14 year old girl thing: I thought that her being bossy was used to illustrate the unhealthiness and absurdity of her situation. (Especially since it came on the heels of her “God gave the elder wife cancer for being sinful” speech.)
I think my polyamourous friends have *plenty* of drama in their lives.
Re: the excessive sex, how many scenes were there? I only remember the one with the third wife and the attempt at one with the first wife, after the shot of the viagra bottle, which only received the brushoff; but I didn’t catch the whole show. Two scenes is too much? What about six feet under, and Brenda’s shenanigans? Those were rather graphic, or no less graphic than in BL, and not always short IIRC – or am I mistaken here? In other words, to me it seemed par for the course for an HBO show.
Re: the Rhonda, new wife of the prophet, I don’t understand viewers’ attempts to subtextualize her behavior. She’s 14. She’s been honored (or “honored” if you prefer) with marriage to her community’s absolute patriarch. She’s not behaving like a brat because the writers have a point; she’s behaving that way because when you’re 14 and placed in a position of great power in your community, you will likely act like a complete brat.
I thought that the Rhonda scene also served to hint at the humiliating position of young, unmarried males in the fringe Mormon communities. The girls are the obvious victims, there’s no question about that, but I’ve read about young males who weren’t fortunate enough to be the favored sons of powerful men being thrown out of their homes and literally abandoned at roadsides. When you have numerous powerful men with three, four, eleven wives, where are the girls for the young men to marry? These boys, I’ve read, are sometimes just tossed out or even excommunicated.
I thought that Rhonda also served as a reminder that the “good” polygamy practiced by Bill, Barb, Nicki and Margene is of a piece with the “bad” polygamy practiced by Roman et al.
I think Rhonda also stands as a brief foil for Barb (the first wife? haven’t picked up all the names yet). She’s quite clearly horrified at the prospect of Rhonda. We already know that she hates even visiting the Compound, and here she is presented with what appears to be her worst nightmare. And for those who are not in the know about some fundamentalist LDS practices (I would not call myself one of those), it serves to inform what it is that Barb hates about them. Really, in terms of what the writers were going for, I’d say Rhonda’s brattiness has a lot more to do with Barb than Rhonda.
reddest: pointing out the action of the young man – the immediate servitude – in the scene is a subtle perception, very interesting. It’s interesting to wonder if she could boss around a _married_ young man. I have a hunch not, but I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just me projecting onto the show, but I didn’t see anything that (successfully) glorified plygamy. Everyone in the marriage(s?) seemed pretty miserable and unfulfilled by the situation. And I didn’t see a golden glow anywhere. Everything “pleaseant” seemed purposefully artificial.
Before the show I did wonder how HBO would manage to insert their signature gratuitous nudity (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and language. Silly me. They always find a way. Remember, it’s not TV, it’s HBO.
I have tried to stay out of this discussion, because I do not have HBO and therefore probably won’t see Big Love any time soon, if ever.
…But maybe “glorified” is the wrong word for this kind of portrayal? Maybe “softpedaled” instead?
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