'Big Love' is a big mess
 HBO series ignores ugliness of polygamy and reaffirms East's ignorance of West
 
By Jon Talton
The Arizona Republic
 
I realized we've taken the express elevator further south from the point in the 1980s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down." Still, I expected quite a backlash to HBO's series Big Love.

As you know, the show is about polygamy and came to television after several years of shocking revelations about the true nature of the practice.

Yet Big Love, which has been renewed for a second season, is not about that reality. "Think having three wives is a dream come true?" HBO's promotional blurb teases. No, Bill Paxton's main character "struggles to balance the financial and emotional needs of Barb, Nicki and Margene."

The wives are all of legal age, live in separate suburban houses, drive, wear contemporary store-bought clothes, and help manage the family finances. They're all lovely, smart and frisky. HBO gives product placement for Viagra and sells Big Love coffee mugs and "baby doll T-shirts." What's not to like?

Apparently not much, and the backlash I expected never much materialized.

What happened instead is more revealing than our willingness to lap up any titillation that the television masters throw into our cultural trough.

The New Yorker praised the series for a Twin Peaks-like achievement: showing "the way deep weirdness can hide in plain sight, right on our own street."

Felicia Lee of the New York Times watched an episode with five women who were said to have lived in real polygamous marriages. "Despite the show's flaws," she wrote," these woman called Big Love a cultural benchmark, one with the potential to cast a warmer light on their lives."

On the Times business pages, Robert Frank used the series to do some clever noodling with economic theory. His conclusion: The most likely victims of widespread plural marriage would be men. "In short, the logic of supply and demand turns the conventional wisdom about plural marriage on its head."

The liberal New Republic ran a column by Michelle Cottle saying that Big Love illuminates the American hunger for greater support within families, which might be met by a second spouse, or "marital intern."

And although some conservatives have used Big Love as another way to attack homosexuality ("see where the slippery slope will take us if gays are allowed to marry"), that wasn't the take by critic Catherine Siepp in National Review.

"The remarkably well-written and engrossing Big Love is no more in favor of polygamy than The Sopranos is in favor of mobsters. Instead, like its lead-in, the new series uses the dynamics of a bizarre but functioning suburban family to underscore tensions inherent in all families."

Now the last thing I want to be is a dreary scold, especially in the midst of the Memorial Day weekend. But this cluelessness across the cultural spectrum, in some excellent publications, carries at least two lessons.

First, most of America doesn't yet understand the beastly reality of "modern-day polygamy" as practiced in Colorado City, Ariz., and Hilldale, Utah.

As anyone in Arizona who has been paying attention knows, it is closer to modern-day slavery for women and girls.

It is not an alternative lifestyle among consenting adults.

The FBI's wanted flier on polygamist "prophet" Warren Jeffs tells of a man wanted for sexual assault on a minor. Child rape, kidnapping, welfare fraud, failure to pay child support and towns held under Taliban-like tyranny are the real "struggles" that come from the practice.

Big Love makes only passing and elliptical references to this world. And no wonder. I doubt viewers could accept it as easily as they do when faced with the "metaphor" of Tony Soprano and the boys feeding a stoolpigeon goomba into a meat grinder.

The second lesson is that most of America - especially where the big decisions about capital, policy and the nation's future are made - still doesn't get Arizona and the West.

Just as the cultural elites are blissfully ignorant about real polygamy, they are also in the dark about the consequences of undocumented immigration, destruction of the environment, threats to water resources, careless urbanization and exploitation of public lands.

These are not all uniquely Western issues, but they are felt here the most, and get the least response from the powers of the East.

As for those seeking entertainment, a better alternative is Betty Webb's mystery novel Desert Wives, which doesn't flinch from polygamy's dark side. Publisher's Weekly said, "this book could do for polygamy what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery."

We can only hope.

Reach Talton at jon.talton@arizonarepublic.com. Read Talton's blog at www.taltonblog.azcentral.com.
 
azcentral.com
Originally published May 28, 2006
 
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