Big Love

I spent some of the summer watching episodes of HBO’s Big Love. It’s a show with an interesting set of tensions at its center: a tension between, on the one hand, intense and powerful female bonding that questions the standard couple form, and, on the other hand, a dedication to the logic of neoliberalism that tends to prop up the exact heteronormative family form that the show seems to want to question. (I’m setting aside, in all this, questions of actual fundamentalist Mormon polygamy–it is my sense that the show actually cares little about that world, and uses it largely as a prop, but I might be totally wrong there. More on that below.)

The plot circles around the trials and tribulations of the Henricksons, a fundamentalist Mormon family (headed by Bill Paxton) in Utah that has embraced “covenant marriage,” the taking of plural wives who also, interestingly enough, marry each other, calling each other “sister wives.” In the show, Paxton’s character married Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Barb; they had three children before Barb required a hysterectomy due to a bout with cancer. It was at this point that Bill met and married Nicolette (Chloe Sevigny), who had been caring for Barb. Later, Bill adds Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) to the family; she has been working at his office (he runs a home construction company) and is hired into the home as a babysitter for the expanding brood.

Bill and his family spar continually with Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the 70-something patriarch and prophet of the fundamentalist Mormon group (and compound) from which Nicolette came (she is one of Roman’s many daughters). Roman’s clan is largely country, implicitly lower class even if monied (cued by their location, their SUVs that are actually used on dirt and gravel roads, their homes, etc.) ,whereas Bill Henrickson and his three wives live in three newly built houses one right next to the other, on a cheery, clean, all-white, upper-middle class suburban street, with a shared set of backyards and an in-ground pool.

It’s through these two locations (the upwardly mobile, suburban/sprawl life of Bill and his three wives, and the back-country compound life of Roman) that the show generates much of its tensions and energies, specifically its critique of the contemporary couple form along with its embrace of the very logic that underwrites that most proper version of that form in the contemporary US.

In the role of critiquing the couple form, the show interestingly links heterosexual marriage to labor — Bill meets his plural wives (those two after Barb) when he hires them as workers; specifically, they move from working in the home for pay (as Nicolette the caregiver and as Margene the babysitter) to working in the home in the unpaid labor of being wives. Further, as was pointed out to me by another viewer, much of the show (especially, arguably, its first season) was most invested in tensions and connections within the home. In many episodes, Bill seems far less important to the sister wives than their bond with each other. As was pointed out to me, the show arguably critiques the couple form by allowing viewers to imagine different ways of organizing family and intimacy. Admittedly, it’s all about marriage, but there is the slightest whiff of something queer here–although that remains sadly unexplored (it comes up most closely, perhaps, in the plot line revolving around the possibility of a fourth wife, where Margene seems far more in love with the possible sister wife than does Bill).

In the second place, the show has a vested interest in a form of upwardly mobile liberal citizenship that has gained significant power by borrowing the vocabulary of identity politics. Bill and his polygamist Mormon friends distinguish themselves from those at the compound (and others signified as crazier and, notably, queerer) by insisting that they are good citizens, regular tax-paying folk who have the right to be left alone, to do what they will and harm no one else in the privacy of their own homes. Naturally enough, Bill’s money comes from a successful home-building company he runs– his money arises from the construction of private domestic space, and the characters (and, in large part, the show) insist that their right to privacy is exactly their primary defense against a meddling state.

That privacy is largely an economic one: these are not simply private homes in which Bill and his wives live. After all, Roman’s rural compound is equally private property. Rather, these are new, open-floor-plan McMansions decorated in Pottery Barn style. Given all that, the setting in Utah and the show’s extreme whiteness makes sense: it’s not just that Utah is demographically relatively white, but that the show uses the supposed blankness of whiteness as a generality upon which to fix the supposedly one little thing that makes the Henrickson family different, and from there to insist that they are “normal” and entitled to their privacy. The Henricksons are, in many ways, treated as an average family with a single identity-politics quirk. Can’t they just be left alone to live as they wish? To ask otherwise, the show seems to hint, is to be hopelessly bigoted, as is the policeman father of the friend of one of Bill’s daughters, who insists to Barb that there must be abuse going on in the home. We are invited to share in Barb’s outrage, and in her outrage when she is quietly “outed” as polygamist and thus removed from a contest for Utah mother of the year.

However, we are never asked to share in any outrage over thinking that Roman’s clan, on its equally private property, is thought of as a dangerous bunch of serious misfits. And that is to say nothing of the Abbot clan, the looniest of the polygamist factions and providers of moments that are a true, strange, oddball joy to watch (including what seems to be hints at queerness that are worth celebrating).

I wouldn’t step into the fray of decrying or defending fundamentalist Mormon polygamy. Rather, I’m thinking about these issues in part from recent reading, particularly McRuer’s Queer Theory and its use, in turn, of Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Democracy? Both of these books ask us to question the cultural politics of economic conditions that celebrate a certain form of citizenship. The proper neoliberal citizen is exactly one who is flexible and supportive of diversity in its surface forms, but whose diversity never questions distributions of wealth and power. So as much as I love the set-up of Big Love, and as much as I adore its opening credit sequence and use of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” as the plural family skates on thin ice, I find myself slightly discomfitted (even while admittedly drawn to) a show that has such a limited imagination of sexual diversity: difference only when made accessible through upwardly-mobile, well-dressed, and well-decorated whiteness.

There is, admittedly, a lot else going on here, especially around viewer’s pleasure in drama and difficulty: we might be asked to love Barb and read her as essentially the “real” wife, but the real fun comes from Nicki’s (Chloe Sevigny) machinations and difficulty with her parents, and Marg’s tendency to get drunk and smoke and raise hell (in a very minor key–perhaps raise heck?). There’s more fun in the possibly cross-dressing member of the Green clan and clan head Hollis Green’s tendency to treat phone calls as dictated letters, ending them with phrases like “sincerely yours” before hanging up. And in the possibility that all will come to rack and ruin, that the family form itself, and not just the couple, will be under scrutiny.

What does it mean?

Below is a message received today, Wednesday, September 19, 2007, from new BGSU Provost Dr. Shirley Baugher. I am not sure what to make of it, what exactly it signifies, or where it will lead, although I am nervous about its mention of both the Spellings report and a European commission, both of which seem to be interested in the standardization of higher education. I am all for access, and increased access, to higher education, but I find myself nervous about exactly this sort of rhetoric (or, I should say, around the rhetoric and ideas in the Spellings report, which I take to be largely at odds with truly successful higher education).

I also note, with some worry, this description from the email of the tripartite purpose of higher education: “personal/professional development… developing citizen engagement in our society… sustaining competitiveness in a global society.” I feel decidedly old-fashioned in insisting that I care primarily (if not only) about the second part of that list, although I hate the nominalization “citizen engagement.” As an educator, I am most interested in helping students to become the best, smartest thinkers that they can be in order that they might best be members of (and promote the ongoing creation of) just societies. But I fear that education is sliding more and more toward professional development, seen as a way to maintain or improve a certain form of national corporate competitiveness.

Katrina, Levees, and K-Ville

On Tuesday, September 18, I caught the second episode of Fox’s new crime drama, K-Ville. It was an interesting moment to come across Fox’s show, one made noteworthy by being filmed in, and thus employing the residents of, New Orleans, still devastated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina—interesting because I followed K-Ville by watching the final act of Spike Lee’s four-part documentary about New Orleans and Katrina, When the Levees Broke. One evening, then, offered two different takes on Katrina, from two quite different genres. And most interestingly, Lee’s documentary helps to make sense of K-Ville in a way that reviews of the show seem to miss.

It is nothing new to say that Lee’s four-part, over-four-hour documentary is the far superior product, even based on so small a sample of K-Ville as the second episode of the first season. It is possible, I suppose, that I might change my mind, although the episode I saw gives little hope for that, the New York Times‘ surprisingly forgiving review (on Monday, September 17, dealing with the first episode and focusing on star Anthony Anderson) notwithstanding. As many reviewers have said, what K-Ville does at its production end deserves applause (and, more importantly, deserves emulation): it films in and around New Orleans, thus offering one small set of jobs (hopefully union ones) to residents. It seems to hope to do for New Orleans what Homicide did for Baltimore: to make the location itself a primary character, a source of information, an honest locale from which the drama would arise.

One hopes that exactly that happens. The problem, however, is with the drama itself. Much of the episode I watched insults our intelligence, including but not limited to the heavy-handed attempts to represent Boulet’s (Anthony Anderson) traumatized state: he was the good cop who stayed while others, including his former partner, fled the city, and he has a very police-procedural tendency to fly off the handle, threatening everyone around him, suspects and partners, in an attempt to signify that he is a cop who cares, dammit. And further, he is a cop on the edge, dammit (although to be fair, a post-Katrina New Orleans is about the only place one could get away with a cop show with yet another cop on the edge from day one). The police procedural aspects of the show could use some serious work, and that along with the scenery-chewing hint at the shows biggest problems. The mystery of the first episode was one of the most obvious I’ve ever seen on television. The police, then, end up looking like fools for having such a hard time figuring out a crime that seems so clear that it had no hope but to be found out. One starts to wonder: weren’t there shows with smart, driven, genuinely complex homicide cops, once upon a time?

Reviews I’ve read (I’m thinking of both the Times and Entertainment Weekly) fault K-Ville for its far-fetched conspiracy theory plots. In the first episode, a murder investigation goes all the way to City Hall (don’t they all, these days?) and in the second, a seemingly good rich white woman, supposedly working to help rebuild the decimated Lower Ninth Ward, is in fact in the process of furthering its decimation, buying up properties. She is revealed as the quintessential white liberal whose do-gooder veneeer barely covers a seething racism (admittedly supposedly created by the murder of her brother at the hands of muggers a year before); her revelation comes complete with angry words about “those people” of the Ninth, a code that, thankfully, the show doesn’t, at that particular moment at least, insult our collective intelligence by explaining.

However, having watched K-Ville along with When the Levees Broke, I find myself interested in a different reading of the paranoia and conspiracy theorizing that seems to structure its first two episodes. This re-reading does not resurrect the show as some sort of dramatic success, but it does make make think of a different way of reading what happens on the small screen. For a white, non-New Orleans audience, Lee’s documentary offers a tour of the conspiracy theories that structure some of the African-American response to the tragedy, but of central importance is the way in which Lee gives viewers the information and evidence through which to see these theories not as products of wild imaginations, but rather as perfectly reasonable hypotheses based on the historical and present-day treatment of New Orleans residents, and especially black New Orleans residents.

Lee (or the New Orleans residents, hurricane experts, and historians who provide almost all of the content of Levees) takes us back to previous hurricanes and floods, describing intentional breaks placed into flood walls that drown out poorer neighborhoods while protecting richer ones, in order to best understand the theory that the Lower Ninth Ward flood wall had been intentionally dynamited to save other parts of New Orleans (or its suburbs).

Add to the mix the well-established fact that a white suburb of New Orleans turned back New Orleans residents at gunpoint as they tried to flee the devastation of the flooding. Add again the incredibly slow response of FEMA and the federal government, the lack of support, of food, of water, of trailers for living. Add President Bush’s early reaction of not seeming to take the hurricane seriously, and the utter failure of his government to ever step up to the plate, while being incredibly adept at passing the buck on the reasons for that slow response. Add the bodies left rotting in houses by a government that seems to have no trouble funding its expensive war abroad. Add the way that mass media termed hurricane survivors, displaced from their homes, as refugees (as if, as many in the documentary point out, they had somehow ceased to be citizens of the United States because their homes were destroyed). Add to that the fact that many were treated as if they were, in fact, not citizens (witness the way that the National Guard’s attempt to offer aid was felt by many to be an occupation). Add a black man’s story of being shot by a white man while just walking down the street in the days following the hurricane.

Add all that and more, and K-Ville’s supposedly outlandish plots start to look slightly different. They still might not quite work within the well-established structures of the cop-show paradigm, and the fact that this show seems hell-bent on bringing out cliches of these shows from the pre-Homicide days does not help (Homicide being the show that was supposed to have put to death the cliches of the cop show, although those cliches seem to rise again and again, like the undead). However, those plots, and their conspiracy twists, might prove more compelling if one views them as the dramatization of the very reasonable (and in many instances seemingly quite accurate) conclusions, by many in New Orleans, that repeatedly the powers that be treat their city and its residents as disposable objects to be used and discarded (and, if possible, to be turned into profit).

 

And yet: Boulet’s partner Cobb (Cole Hauser) turns out to be not a cop who has transferred from Cincinnati but an ex-con who decided to restart his life by being a cop? I assume it’s meant to add depth and complexity to he show—all that noir-ish connection of cop and criminal—but, seriously?

But finally, if anyone has read this far, accept no excuse for not seeing Lee’s documentary. Don’t be put off by its length. Rent it and watch it in one-hour chunks over a few nights. It’s riveting, and more so, it is simply important.