Big Love

The New York Times Magazine has a piece on "Big Love" today.  If you haven't seen the show, give it a whirl.  TV is the best place to see women tearing up the screen and Bill Hendrick's three wives don't disappoint.  Nor does Bill's mother, his sister-in-law, his recently deceased sister-in-law, his compound mother-in-law, Barb's sister and mother, the almost fourth wife.  It's rich in acting, character and story.

A Polygamist's Polygamist

Friday was day two of the Warren Jeffs' trial.  He's the leader of a group of polygamists in Arizona.  I'm a big fan of the HBO show about a polygamist family, Big Love. The issue of forced under-age marriage isn't addressed on the show the way you imagine is the dirty truth. The Jeff's compound profit character, Roman Grant, played with evil glee by Harry Dean Stanton, was supposed to marry a young charge but she stowed away in the Hendrickson's SUV to reek manipulative havoc on greater Utah. That's not how girls raised in a compound are portrayed in the excellent documentary about Warren Jeffs, Damned to Heaven. As a lone investigator into the compounds many illegal activities says in the doc, "You can't deprogram them." All you can do is try and teach ex-members to survive in the outside world. While in the TV world of polygamy, Bill Hendrickson's tenuous hold on family unity, his business interests, and his relationship with a power-giving God are fun to watch, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Jeffs. One of the lost boys from Colorado City, Arizona, said that Jeffs is actually shy, but power drives him to drone on in a flat monotone for mountains of taped lectures.

Damned to Heaven is in the same category as the wonderful and terrifying book Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. Krakauer appears briefly in Damned to Heaven. Watch the Damned to Heaven trailer on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1cTk2cJQac

Big Love

The August 29, 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times, "Not much to like in 'Big Love' finale," Patrick Day complains that Barb, wife number one in a three-wife polygamist family trying to live a middle-class life in Utah, has been griping at and questioning her husband Bill's decisions all season only to turn 180 degrees during the finale to support Bill. What Patrick misses is the theme of big love: power. Bill wants the invisible hand of power over the compound because he was kicked out and became a "lost boy" as a teen. Barb wants power as first wife. Wife number two, Nicolette, tries to manipulate Bill and the other sister-wives to keep power but without the security of the compound where she grew up and knew the power structure, is imploding into a gambling addiction. Third wife, Margene, was so young when she married into the family that she's just growing up and trying to figure out what she wants and how to get it.

Why did Barb back Bill in the last moments of the show? One of Barb's sister-wives, Nicolette's mother (played with intense gravity by Mary Kay Place) gives Barb advice. You lose power when you work against your husband. Barb took it to heart. In for a penny, in for a pound. That's how she'll go into next season and I'll bet the other wives will feel the shift and connive and manipulate to get a bigger piece of Bill. Something I want to see.

As another article in the Times reported recently, the only place to find actresses in their prime, 40's and older, is TV. Actors want to work and the best scripts are for the small screen. And "Big Love" is full of complicated, self-interested women trying to get what they want at any cost, just like the men.