Big Love's Experimentation with Feminism

If you watched the series finale of Big Love last night and if you're not ready to give up on Big Love, be sure to read my piece that ran in The Atlantic over the weekend in anticipation of the finale:

The hallmark of Big Love is its ability to dive into modern social issues that are seemingly beyond the scope of the Utah polygamist family at its center. One of the show's creators said on a HBO featurette about the series, "There was something almost a little bit retro, you know, '50s American suburban family about the Henricksons and I think we were turning that idea on its head a little bit."

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Spoilers ahead with some final brief thoughts on the finale.

The series ended more or less with the same themes they'd established throughout the show. I thought the way they did away with Bill's character was a bit cheap, but it seemed obvious that Bill couldn't continue in his role as the patriarch of the family. This whole season demonstrated that he was slowly losing control over the life he had built for himself. Eventually everything gradually slipped away -- the casino, the state senate seat, Home Plus, his wives, and finally his life. Each of the women began to express desires for something beyond the family (which I talk about in my Atlantic piece).

I agree with Aileen at Vulture, in that Nicki clearly had the least satisfactory resolution. Though I really loved many of her lines in the series, she was by far the least complex character, often reduced to a stereotype of the bitchy, jealous wife.

Still, the final message of the show really did demonstrate the show's major theme: that the bond between the sister wives is strong. They things they'd been through together would bring them together for life, even as they start down their diverging paths.

Thoughts on Treme

In case you're interested, I have thoughts on Treme over at The Atlantic.

Reviewing Eating the Dinosaur

BOOK
Eating the Dinosaur
Scribner
Published: Oct. 20, 2009

Chuck Klosterman, depending on your opinion, is either a brilliant and hilarious cultural critic or a self-indulgent and trivial asshole. His latest book, Eating the Dinosaur, will only seek to magnify the opinion you hold of him.

I happen to be one of those people that thinks Klosterman is the former. But this is probably because after reading Fargo Rock City, I’ve come to believe he and I had roughly identical childhood experiences. And if Klosterman and I are so similar, I could never admit that he’s an asshole. It’s true that he tended to gloss over the sexism of metal when writing, City, his fanboy manifesto on the genre, but I’m willing to forgive it since Mötley Crüe played a similarly important role in my teenage years.

Dinosaur incidentally doesn’t actually contain anything about dinosaurs and is Klosterman at the peak of what he does best: writing rambling yet pointedly funny essays on pop culture and news events. The topics in Dinosaur range from Mad Men to NBA giant¹ Ralph Sampson to ABBA to the siege at Waco, Texas to Garth Brooks to the Unabomber to a meta analysis of the concept of the interview. There definitely isn’t a plot, a unifying theme, or even a question that Klosterman sets himself up to answer. But he does carry the reader on a rather entertaining and thought-provoking journey through some of the key components of culture today. Some are enlightening, others are silly, but they are all entertaining.

In short, reading this book is roughly what I believe sitting with Klosterman for several hours at the bar would be like. Klosterman, if you’re reading this, I’ll buy the next round.

8 out of 10 bets that Klosterman drinks Budwiser non-ironically

1. In this case, the word "giant" should be applied to Sampson in the literal sense. His NBA performance was ultimately disappointing thanks to his injuries, but the man was 7-foot-4.

Part of Campus Progress' weekly Under Review roundup.

Reproduce -- Or Else

I have to agree with Stanley Fish on this one. If you haven't been watching Big Love this season, you should be. If you haven't seen it before, get the DVDs in your Netflix queue immediately.

While at first the early episodes of Big Love were targeted at humanizing polygamists, showing that in their own weird, fucked up way, they were a family that loved each other very much. They looked out for each other. They protected one another. (Spoilers to follow.)

This season, that meme has been turned on its head. Slowly, the Henrickson family is falling apart. This high-drama series has steered away from the mafia-esque themes in the last season and has begun focusing on the internal fissures within the family. Earlier in the season, an attempt to add a fourth wife crashed and burned. Members of the family are diverging from their firmly held conservative beliefs.

Nicki has emerged as one of the most fascinating characters this season. She is both fiercely loyal to her biological mother and resistant to the manipulations of her father, a character eerily modeled after Warren Jeffs, while still helping him to be acquitted of charges of statutory rape. Meanwhile, she's lying to her husband and sister wives about trying to get pregnant -- she is secretly taking birth control. Just a few episodes ago, Nicki's sister wives escorted her to a fertility doctor to see why she hadn't been conceiving. While in the room with the doctor, Nicki asked for another birth control prescription.

One of the scariest things about the last episode that I just watched last night was when the family discovered that Nicki was intentionally trying to avoid pregnancy. In a terrifying moment, her husband, Bill, orders her to stop taking the pills immediately. He accuses her of defying her heavenly duty by not wanting to bear children.

The episode also showed the trials of the eldest daughter, who is pregnant. In a moment of great irony, Barb accuses her daughter of taking birth control pills. If only Sarah had been taking birth control, she wouldn't be faced with the difficult situation of what to do with her pregnancy. At the end of the episode, she miscarries. (A plot twist I find a little too convenient.)

The reason the character of Nicki is so fascinating is because she has grown up on the fundamentalist compound. She still remains close ties to her family there, and she often guilts her own family when they are going against the "principle." She knows the rules of polygamy and believes in them -- but she still resists having more children. The last episode reveals it may be because she doesn't necessarily feel attracted to her husband. She's even been toying with the notion of an affair with her boss. And this family is supposed to represent the "normal" polygamists.

The problem here is a question of autonomy. These are battles that we like to think we've already fought and tucked away long ago, but some women are still living out the battles of control over their reproductive lives. The character Nicki is lucky -- although she had to lie to her husband, she still had the ability to obtain a prescription for birth control. There are women that are in a similar position where they don't want more children, but don't have as easy of access to birth control.

McDonalds v. Starbucks

Well, this oughta get the next round of political analysts going. Pew has a survey about if people would prefer to have a McDonald's or a Starbucks in their neighborhood.

Overall, people preferred McDonald's (43 to 35 percent), but demographic breakdowns show that the richer, younger, and more liberal you are, the more likely you are to prefer coffee to a quarter pounder. I guess the stereotype about the wealthy latte-sipping liberal is true, sort of. In any case, the data is worth spending five minutes with and laughing at.

Progressives Read More

Our friends over at ThinkProgress brought this up earlier in the week, but it turns out that we're smarter than conservatives -- or at least we read more. A full 34 percent of conservatives haven't picked up a book in the last year, while that number for liberals was only about 22 percent. The average number of books per year was kind of a wash, eight for conservatives versus nine for liberals (although I wonder what the distribution of Dan Brown books is).

This reminds me of what I learned in my wonderful voting behavior class in college. The people at either end of the reading scale tend to not change their minds very much about which party or candidate they support. This is because if you read a lot, you tend to either read things you agree with or immediately discount the things you don't agree with. Those that don't read a lot or are generally uninformed about public affairs tend to have a sort of blind loyalty to one party. The people that change their mind lie somewhere in the middle.

Cross-posted at campusprogress.org/blog.