'Big Love' is Back

(HBO)

This Sunday the HBO series "Big Love" returned for its fifth and final season. There's no question the quality of the show has declined significantly over time -- so much so that one of the show's stars, Chloe Sevigny called last season "awful" "as far as I'm concerned." Still, I'm hooked on the show and couldn't help but tune in.

In some ways, the success of "Big Love" is curious. The fictional drama is focused on a tiny sliver of a tiny minority: Mormon polygamists. Mormons, according to the most recent census estimates, at 3,158,000 self-identified individuals make up just over 1 percent of the total U.S. population. Yet Mormons are surprisingly prevalent in public life. The U.S. Senate is the workplace of six men who self-identify as Mormon (an impressive representation considering there is currently no African American member of the U.S. Senate), including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the U.S. House of Representatives has 15 Mormon members. Obviously the representation is concentrated in the Southwest region of the United States. But though the presence of Mormonism in public life is prevalent, the focus on polygamous Mormons seems almost absurdly outsized. (The Church of Latter Day Saints officially ceased the practice of plural marriages in 1890.)

"Big Love" is also a sliver of the wealth of pop culture out there about polygamist Mormons these days. Last year saw young adult novels Keep Sweet,The Chosen One: A Novel, and Sister Wife as well as the more grownup novel Hidden Wives. (I read a meta review of these books in the last issue of Bitch magazine, so I can't attest to their quality individually.) TLC also started airing its reality show "Sister Wives" last fall.

Last season, "Big Love" definitely tapped into the fascination with Mormons in public life with its main story arc. The show seemed to be exploring the question, what would happen if someone, in this case Bill, were elected to office while keeping the secret that he is a polygamist under wraps? Because it would be nearly impossible for this to happen on a national level (although you never know), it seemed obvious to turn to state office, something the press pays little to no attention to.

At the end of last season (spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it), Bill publicly acknowledges the fact that he is in a plural marriage, to the disgust of many of his supporters and employees. The premise for this season seems to be dealing with the aftermath of that. If you think living in a secret plural marriage is hard, the show seems to be concluding, living in a public one is infinitely harder.

Big Love will end this season, but it doesn't look like the fixation on polygamy or plural marriages will end anytime soon -- after all, TLC's "Sister Wives" has been renewed for a second season. In this way, popular representations of polygamy has become a way of exploring alternative sexuality, family, and gender issues in a community that typically adheres to the very traditional "family values" nature of conservative Christianity. Popular culture will continue to look for skeletons in the closet of Mormonism, whether they're fictional or not.

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.

Big Love: Family Planning Episode

I know most people probably don't watch Big Love anymore because it's been more than a year between seasons, but I'm still totally into it, even as a feminist I should object to everything it stands for. Last night's episode might as well have been called "Family Planning" because of all the (spoilers ahead) reproductive talk.

At the beginning of the episode, we also see third-wife Marge and Bill in the middle of their "marital duties" and Marge begging Bill to "pull out." Marge has just had a baby and isn't ready to have another. I should take a minute here to note that pulling out is not a recommended form of birth control for anyone who doesn't actually want to get pregnant. It also puts you at just as much risk of STDs as if you didn't pull out. Marge asks Bill, "Why can't Nicci have the next child?"

Marge gets suspicious about the fact that second-wife Nicci, who came from the Mormon compound, hasn't been pregnant in over 4 years. It turns out that Nicci is more than reluctant to go through another pregnancy -- she has secretly been on birth control the entire time. Finally, after some shame from her husband and sister wives, she stops taking the pills. When hauled into a fertility clinic, she admits to the gynecologist that she's been on birth control. The gyno (a dude) asks Nicci to be honest about whether or not she wants to have more children and adds that it's her choice. Nicci objects that she's never had a choice about anything in her life. When the doctor asks her if she wants another prescription for birth control, Nicci nods.

To me this is a big message about coercion of having a large family. Oftentimes women that most strongly desire control over their own reproduction are women that already have children. They don't want to have more for one reason or another, and might lie to their husbands (and, in this case, their sister wives) about taking birth control. Both Nicci and Marge have both had two and three children respectively and don't want more. But their religion points to the role of women as child-bearers.

Additionally, Marge voices a desire to go into sales, something she discovers she has a knack for. She is restricted by the family, and first-wife Barb says that they all agreed it was Nicci's turn to work. Barb herself in this episode is terrified of a return of cancer, something that caused her to have a hysterectomy seven years earlier. She dares not tell anyone but her husband until the results of the biopsy return.

Finally, the oldest daughter, Sarah, is sobbing at the end of the episode. At her feet is a book about options for expecting mothers. Sarah, who became sexually active at the end of last season, breaks up with her boyfriend because she's not in love with him and tells her parents she wants to go to college out of state for nursing. Sarah, because of her conservative Christian upbringing (even if she wasn't raised as a polygamist until late in life, her family had always been a member of the LDS church before), is unlikely to have an abortion. I'll be interested to see how they deal with Sarah's pregnancy moving forward. She has always been one of my favorite characters on the show because she protests her family situation.