HBO's Big Love shows us the inequalities in every marriage, writ large Big Patriarchy

By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON The Boston Phoenix

For four seasons and five years, HBO's Big Love has dominated the edgy-soap-opera niche once inhabited by Six Feet Under. Having tweaked the well-worn family-drama genre to make room for Mormon fundamentalist polygamy, Big Love has become a funhouse mirror of contemporary American marriage. The show has succeeded in making the lives of a man, his three wives, and their myriad children appear almost normal. On a recent visit home to Chicago, I sat at a neighborhood bar with three of my best girlfriends. As we sipped our drinks, I told them which sister wife they most reminded me of. Sensible Bekah was Barb, crafty Sarah was Nicki, and perky Kate was Margene. Rather than throw their drinks in my face, my friends welcomed these appellations, identifying with the sister wives as easily as they might identify with Carrie or Samantha. The wives are so easy to relate to, in fact, that people often overlook the best part of the show: Lois Henrickson, the wizened, bug-eyed mother of patriarch Bill Henrickson. While praising Sensible, Crafty, and Perky, many miss sour, glorious Lois. Twin Peaks alumna Grace Zabriskie's performance is a revelation: whether she's wheedling, shaming someone, or lying outrageously, Lois always appears to be sucking a lemon. Her pursed lips and twitchy glower steal every scene, yet she never descends into caricature. For this, Zabriskie's empathic grotesquerie puts her in league with Peter Lorre. Locked in an endless sadomasochistic battle with her ex-husband, Lois provides a modicum of comic relief, a harrowing cartoon with real pathos even as she endures graphic beatings. Torture aside, she is perhaps the only character on the show with any sense of irony. There's a fierce understanding and a mischievous glimmer behind her squinty eyes: like the viewer, she sees through the system she inhabits and can laugh at it from afar, no matter how horrible it might look up close. The new Waltons? Lois is a product of Juniper Creek, the Mormon fundamentalist compound that Bill has tired to leave behind, but just can't shake. Here, women are only as clever and as culpable as children, and the clapboard houses are so squalid that homelessness seems almost preferable. Even the big house occupied by the Prophet is an eyesore; the tawdry midcentury décor resembles an abandoned Elks lodge. Juniper Creek houses murderers, crooked doctors, closet queers, countless garden-variety morons, and at least one fingernail-free, incest-oriented eugenicist. Its inhabitants are a Coney Island freak show and a welcome respite from the attractive supernatural beings that dominate popular culture. Sarah Palin notwithstanding, television is woefully bereft of credible monsters. Best of all are the Greens, lawless Mexico-based Mormons who make the Grants look like the Bouviers. The first time they appear, they are cast in a sickly green light and resemble extras from a David Lynch film, or the best possible casting choices for some future adaptation of Katherine Dunne's Geek Love. Through her facial contortions, Zabriskie hints at the unfathomable nightmares Lois must have witnessed in that place with those people. Juniper Creek is so awful that it verges on the uncanny. It is clear that Lois had to twist herself in order to survive. Yet last year, the famous humanist Stanley Fish wrote a puzzling op-ed on the New York Times "Opinionator" blog praising Big Love for its wholesome sentimentality. "They really like each other and they really are likeable," he said of the Henricksons, praising the "participatory democracy" through which they make family decisions. He closed by comparing them to the Waltons. Fish's reading is naïve, but shared by many. Some critics seem to want Big Love to be an affirmation of the American family in all its messy pain and glory. Their aim is to draw a tidy, well-intentioned parallel between the Henricksons' marriage and those of other non-traditional unions: loving marriages come in all shapes and sizes, and we're all the same. But Fish and Co. have disregarded Big Love's very real critique of straight marriage and overlooked the show's true complexity. Love and power To see Big Love as a paean to the American family ignores the fact that Bill Henrickson is a blatant misogynist with the sex appeal of a boiled potato. He holds much of the power in his marriages, and the ends to which he wields that power are frequently sociopathic. Equally damning is the portrayal of Barb, Bill's long-suffering first wife. She has been martyred by her devotion to her marriage. Throughout the years, she has gone from put-upon matriarch to an unholy mix of battered wife and Gorgon. I want to tug on her curls until she socks Bill in the face and runs away. Likewise, Fish forgot about Juniper Creek. The filthy urchins and patchy scrub grass of that netherworld lie at the threshold of the Henricksons' Pottery Barn existence, a gruesome reminder of what life would be like with more wives and less money. Juniper Creek gets as much airtime as the Henrickson's suburban compound. These worlds are always overlapping; characters bounce back and forth in every episode. Juniper Creek isn't outside, but of the Henricksons. Its point is not to show polygamy gone wrong, but to show polygamy without the pretense of suburban civility. Just as Juniper Creek exaggerates the Henricksons, so do the Henricksons exaggerate us. In the real Utah, as in the rest of the United States, men still make more money than women do. Even the most evolved marriage can't help but internalize that power imbalance. The Henrickson households multiply the power imbalance intrinsic in one marriage by the power of three; Juniper Creek does it exponentially. Big Love's genius is that it shows these workaday inequalities for the ugly, destructive things they really are. Each character must reckon with the perks and limitations of the strange system in which they operate, as must we all. I guess there's a little Lois in everyone. Eugenia Williamson can be reached at ewilliamson@phx.com.

ThePhoenix.com Originally published January 12, 2011

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