There is spoiler material here, so if you have not seen this and intend to, you have been warned.
Bill Henrickson, the hero, is a driven man. He has three wives, children by them all, three houses, runs his own successful business. Born on a polygamous compound, he was kicked out as a teenager --not uncommon in real life; to keep the male to female proportion in control-- and made his way in the world of Utah but kept The Principle* --plural marriage.
He starts out as likeable --if there is a decent hardworking serious white male around, it's him--but over time his obsession with this idea, despite any consequences, made him seem egotistical and infected with tragic hubris. When the show was over, however, I realized that he was doing what a man should do. He consistently showed strength and power, courage and skill. He fathered children with his wives, he fought for them and he provided for them. Bingo. Being likeable is not a primary value.
But he is a modern patriarch. The women --who themselves become complex and ambiguous characters-- have a lot of power, individually and as a group, because he actually does love each one of them, no foolin', but in the end as the male "priesthood holder", his is the final word. A word he sometimes refuses to impose and only offers. The women take care of the household and the children, he handles business and religion, but all have outside interests or connections.
The women also act independently, transgressively, destructively, secretively. I hear echoes of the archetypal Eve. Of course, if no one misbehaves, there is no drama. Indeed, there is no history. As, without Eve's bad behavior, there would not have been.
And their daily lives and interactions are often far removed from the common image of repressive piety. All the human drives are there, full on and on display.
Another "conservative" theme gets played out in the series, where the best of intentions, combined with human flaw, create tragic outcomes. Airhead Marjean, wife #3, by her unselfcritically good intentions and her desire both to serve and to be important, creates a situation in a neighbor's marriage which leads to awful destruction in her own. And what literally triggers that is Bill's own rather blind sense of decency and justice.
A funny exchange between Nicky, the blond wife #2, and Barb, the brunette and older wife #1.
Nicky, emotionally: I know I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness in my veins. I am jealous and vengeful and full of spitefulness.
Barb: I know.
Nicky, continuing: No, Barb, I'm serious. It's true.
Barb, after a short silence: I know, Nicky. Believe me. I do.
Nicky: silent, but shocked.
One thing this series makes clear for men is that if they want to have several wives, they'd better have a helluva lot of money and endless energy. Polygamy is not a poor man's game, unless you want to live poor and deal with the labyrinth of the sister-wives' emotions and a ton of kids. In a way, the superhuman energy required of Bill to have a "humane" polygamy tells you why most polygamists enforce patriarchal monarchy as a bulwark against chaos and emotional depletion.
What strikes me too is that if you took out the plurality of women and made this a show about a couple, no one would have produced it except as a condemnation of patriarchal oppression and a relic of barbarism. Bill would have been an ogre and his wife a self-hating pathetic victim. Only under the rubric of an embattled outsider cultural group --and the dynamic of a group sisterhood in relation to and contention with a strong male--could this celebration of traditional patriarchal family have been viewable. Says so much about our cultural biases now.
The schmaltzy epilog should not have been written. I wonder if the two gay men who authored this show may have realized in some vague way that they were celebrating a very traditional family, a really traditional family, and they had to make up for it by part of how the series ends, the final act and words of the ending, and the outcomes in the epilogue. To imagine that a church full of polygamous, and therefore very traditional Mormons, would suddenly allow female priests is absurd, a sop to liberalism and feminism.
Now that I think of it, Bill's closing exchange with his first wife represents a failure of nerve as well.
As moving as some of the final moments were --especially the unexpected crowd of traditional Mormons who show up at Bill's church, and the vision he has of their shared ancestry-- I am still supportive of the Republican Party's founding goals, to rid the country of "the twin relics of barbarism: slavery and polygamy."
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*Plural marriage seems to me to be at the heart of the Mormon cosmogonic religious myth. It has been replaced, under US pressure ("Statehood or polygamy") by the centrality of the nuclear family. Mormonism is nothing else but the elevation of the family to divine status (something it has in common with Sun Yung Moon's movement). It is one of the strange tensions of Christianity's hybrid Bible that its Jewish scriptures, especially the early patriarchal stories, are essentially family dramas but that its New Testament centers on an unmarried man who upholds marriage but is suspicious of family (His own especially) and whose movement privileges celibacy. Some "extreme" post-Christian sects choose the celibate path (like the Shakers), but others, like Joseph Smith and Moon, choose to resolve the tension by a worship of the family.
IMHO, the Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They are post-Christian because they accept a follow-up prophet whose work is to recreate the Church to make a success of what Jesus failed to do . They are not Reformations within Christianity, like Protestants, but break definitively with the definitive Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation.
Mormons are polytheists, just for one**. Jesus Christ is the Old Testament "Jehovah" god come to earth, the literal son of Mary and The Heavenly Father. They worship Heavenly Father (the Old Testament "Elohim") as just the God of this universe. Christ is a separate being. There are many other universes, with other Heavenly Fathers. And the goal of each Mormon male is eventually to achieve, with his family, exaltation, that is, transformation into another Heavenly Father who will organize and reign over his own universe. This is the traditional, but little known (in the West) doctrine of deification, but on steroids.
**That's funny. Polytheists. One. Ok. I'll move one.
1 comment:
I wonder, does the out of nowhere elevation of women to the priesthood in the epilogue taht isn't integrated into the previous narrative a vingette on the Absent Divine Father in the western welfare administration's Major Plural Marriage system?
No longer even a welfare "state" (charismatic, legitimated), so the sons and daughters are fatherless in terms of charisma bequests. Elevating mothers the priesthood is an attempt to fill this void — which maybe occurs even in "middle-class" families where the father is absent except for charisma-less support payments in loco welfare?
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