Big Love

I think it was justified. It’s not as though “Big Love” has spent the last five seasons politely avoiding an excess of incident or emotion. Like another HBO domestic drama, “Six Feet Under” — a series “Big Love” doesn’t resemble at all, except in its belief in a world beyond this one — it deals in open-ended metaphors and big events, and embroiders them with little moments of recognizable feeling. And it’s not as though there were no warning signs. On TV — as in films and plays and novels — a major character’s death almost never arrives out of the blue. There’s almost always a buildup: a succession of scenes that shows the character unwittingly untangling knots in his major relationships, and either setting things right or apologizing for his inability to do so. You get that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach when an episode starts gearing up for this kind of ending, and when the moment arrives, you’re nearly always a step ahead of the soon-to-be-deceased character. (When Bill’s neighbor flagged him down before he was about to go pick up his mother and launched into a whiny-verging-on-hysterical tirade about Bill resodding his lawn without asking him, you just knew something grim was about to happen.) Then you look back over the drama’s final chapter and think either, “I saw this coming” or “I should have seen this coming.” And if the series plays fair (as this one did) you don’t feel blindsided or condescended to.

As series creator Mark V. Olsen told TVLine, ““What could be the most important testament to the life that that character has lived on the planet Earth?” And it’s not that he had two hardware stores. And it’s not that he had a casino. It’s that he created a family that endured.” For an outwardly inflexible man, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) has proved himself quite adaptable over the last five seasons — especially in this one. In the finale he stretched so dramatically that he became a bendable Mormon action figure. He was besieged on all sides by reminders that his patriarchal authority was either waning or finally being recognized as fragile, maybe illusory. His wives Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) had spent much of the season going their own way, coming up with big ideas on the spur of the moment and executing them without consulting Bill, or even each other.

Nicki had a few doozies along those lines, including her push to marry Bill so that he could legally protect her daughter Cara Lynn (Cassi Thomson), and her torpedoing Cara Lynn’s relationship with her much older math teacher — a relationship with incidental echoes of the statutory rape charges that dogged Bill, not to mention the sexual manipulation that Nicki endured in the compound.  (The scene where Barb makes Nicki sit on the bed and accept a sisterly/maternal hug was so moving that I wish the editors had let it breathe rather than quickly cutting away.)  Margie, at first the series’ most naive and dependent spouse, came to seem like another Barb in the making, planning to go on a social activist cruise to South America and leave her kids at home. Barb, arguably the most independent-minded of the show’s major characters, had several such epiphanies/calls to action. The most obvious were her aborted near-baptism in a more liberal church that would have let her be a priest, and her purchase of a new car (replacing the damaged station wagon that Bill, in a too-on-the-nose scene between them, said was an analog for their relationship — and perhaps for his relationship with all three of his wives). “You’ll be a chipped plate, a second class citizen,” Bill warned her. “You’ll be ashamed of your church for being intolerant of us, and resentful of us for holding you back.”

But in his dying moments, Bill accepted the legitimacy of the wishes that drove Barb to that church, asked her for a blessing, and effectively ceded his patriarchal authority to a woman — and in the series’ last scene we saw Barb almost a year later dressed in a red suit, the unofficial uniform of American women in politics. I like how Bill eventually came to terms with all of these events, and how he made peace with what the rest of the world would consider catastrophic defeats: the politically motivated destruction of his store; the state Senate’s stonewalling of his crusade to delegitimize the compounds, and its incredulity when he turned the hearings into a referendum on polygamy. All these events (and others in earlier seasons) made rhetorical and structural sense even when episodes or whole seasons were creaky and the show got lost in its contrivances.

A friend recently joked, “Remember when their biggest conflict was over a credit card bill?”  I do — but when I look back on those early days, the show’s evolution seems defensible, even fitting. What we’ve seen over time is a move from the private into the public sphere — from invisibility to visibility. The Henricksons and their “plural marriage” started out as a private thing, something that mainstream Latter Day Saints and non-LDS citizens could choose to overlook or ignore. But over time, the skulduggery in the compounds and Bill’s financial and political ambitions brought it all into the light and forced the rest of the state to confront it.  Although some readers clearly loathe this aspect of the series, the (very loose) analogy between plural marriage and homosexuality came through quite strongly in Season 5 — especially in “mainstream” society’s hostile reaction to Bill’s bid to legitimize polygamy, or at least force Utah to acknowledge that it exists, and has been at the center of the state’s history for a century-and-a-half. I’ve got no problem with how you live your life, the mainstream loves to tell people like the Henricksons, as long as you’re not rubbing it in my face. Which translates as, “Stay in the shadows, freak — I’d rather not contemplate your existence.”  Bill’s speech on the Senate floor with his wives serving as chorus was his uptight straight guy version of a Harvey Milk moment — and it paid off in that unexpectedly huge church meeting that perhaps marked the birth of a movement.

But in the end, this series has always been less about political analogies than personal relationships — specifically the intense but uneasy interaction between women and men in a still male-dominated society. Like so many HBO series (“The Sopranos” most of all) this one put an unsettling new frame around familiar, very basic conflicts, in a way that pushed viewers to consider their essence. To quote my friend Lisa Rosman, the show “underscored what I’ve always thought about relationships: that what goes on between two people has nothing and everything to do with anyone else at any given moment.” The relationship between Bill, Barb, Nicki and Margene can be read as a metaphor for this, that and the other thing; yet at the same time, it is what it is, and nothing more. I love stories that reject “either/or” thinking and embrace “both/and” instead, and “Big Love” was absolutely one of those stories. It reimagined the component parts of a monogamous relationship by fracturing them into facets and distributing them among four major characters — and it did it within one of the most unabashedly spiritual frameworks in network TV history. Even when the series got lost in its own often-tangled and distracting subplots, it never relinquished its distinctive viewpoint on religious people living in an increasingly secular nation — a viewpoint that was detached and matter-of-fact but never cold or doubting. We always got the sense that there was a world beyond the one we were looking at, and that everything that happened in this world was affected by, and leading toward, that other existence. Margene’s final change of direction in the kitchen — heading for the door, then turning in slow-motion for one more embrace; Bill visible at the table behind his wives, out-of-focus but unmistakably there — was a knockout, and consistent with the series’ style and tone over the years.

Most of all, I love that final image, with its echoes of the crane-shot-through-the-glass in “Citizen Kane” and the soul ascension at the end of “Easy Rider” – swing for the fences, “Big Love,” why don’t you! — and the way it revisited the series’ original theme song, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” in a cover by the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines. You could read the song’s lyrics from five or six different angles: God only knows what Bill will do without his wives, and what Barb and Nicki and Margene and all Bill’s friends and enemies and colleagues will do without him. The shot’s quasi-omniscient point-of-view also merged Bill with the God he invoked so often, complicated or obliterated the idea of God having a gender, and made “God Only Knows” sound like a loving, vaguely sheepish apology: the Heavenly Father (or Mother) as easily distracted, inconsistent patriarch (or matriarch).  The first thing you hear in the very first episode of “Big Love” is a man singing “God Only Knows,” and the last thing you hear is a woman singing it. It all fits.

I’m going to miss this show.

The fifth and final season of “Big Love” is making good on Bill’s promise and then some — keeping virtually all of the threads developed in the preceding four seasons (including Bill’s surprise, successful run at the Utah state Senate and the “Godfather”-like skulduggery at the Juniper Creek compound), but running them through the Henrickson family household and back out again. “Big Love” is one of the densest, most tightly written series on TV. Every week it presents an immense amount of plot. But what’s on-screen never feels like a flurry of pointless activity because it all ultimately comes back to Bill, Barb, Nicki and Margene. What’s most important to the series (and the viewer) is what they think of whatever’s happening — how it makes them feel toward each other; the effect it has on their self-image, their faith and their attitude toward the complex and precarious life they’ve built together.

Last night’s episode was especially strong. A lot of subplots came to a head, including Bill’s still-embattled tenure in the Utah state Senate, the continued troubles at Home Plus, the renewed (ultimately violent) resentment of Juniper Creek patriarch Alby Grant (Matt Ross) toward Bill’s activism. By coming out as a polygamist on election night, dedicating himself to legitimizing polygamy (or as Bill prefers to call it, “plural marriage”) and casting light on the mistreatment of women by more backward sects, Bill threw a spotlight on a corner of American life that preferred — for various, often sensible reasons — to remain in the dark.

“The body politic is going to expel you like antibodies attacking a virus,” predicted Senate Majority Leader and mainstream LDS member Richard Dwyer (Gregory Itzin) early this season. His prediction came to pass. But it wasn’t just the mainstream and so-called normal part of the populace that rebelled against Bill’s activism; it was Bill’s own, mostly Mormon workers (most of whom are monogamous) and the more extreme variants of plural marriage practitioners, such as the Juniper Creek bunch and … well, almost everybody, it seemed, except that band of stragglers that came to the Henricksons’ open house and thanked Bill for standing up for them at great cost to himself.

(Spoilers in this paragraph) Speaking of Juniper Creek, blowback from the Mormon mainstream and fringe dominated the last couple of episodes. The intense climax of last night’s show found Alby threatening to kill Nicki (who had become an almost vigilante-style activist on behalf of the compound’s women who were “no better than slaves”) only to end up killing his chief henchman and lover instead. Then there was the federal investigation into the revelation that Margene was underage when Bill married her, and that Bill’s first wife, Barb, had “procured” Margene for her husband — a description that prompted Barb to grouse, in Nixonian fashion, that she was not a pimp. Nicki’s daughter Cara Lynn (Cassi Thomson) is poised to repeat Margene’s story by falling in love with her 37-year-old math teacher. The mainstream of the church is boycotting Bill’s stores. Bill’s right hand, Don Embry (Joel McKinnon Miller), who was brutally attacked by Alby’s henchman, told Bill he’d had enough and was selling his shares in the store to Alby (a terrifying thought). Margene, meanwhile, has become immersed in the pyramid scheme of Goji Juice and enamored with its frontman, a charismatic entrepeneur-singer-prophet. It’s funny and unnerving to hear Barb and Bill arguing about which organization is actually more of a cult, the Goji Juice organization or the Henrickson compound. That Margene is suddenly obsessed with the idea that she’s become a part of a cult is funny; that she was pushed into this revelation by a cult leader is even funnier.

What makes “Big Love” so unusual — and has sustained it even during weak seasons — is the richness of its premise. The Henricksons’ plural marriage is a “real” thing — a genuine social contract, portrayed more or less realistically, with writing and performances that encourage us to see things from every major character’s perspective. But the premise is also a vehicle for metaphor and has been used that way. There have been many moments over the last five years where the Henricksons’ situation (not just their polygamous living arrangements, but their out-of-the-mainstream religious beliefs) have seemed to stand in for homosexuality, gay marriage, new-ish belief systems such as Scientology (which Barb disparages) and the Muslim experience in America, among other things.

But it’s all mixed together — intriguingly — so that one metaphor, one experience, seems to morph into another. For non-polygamists, the series has the allure of good genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy and horror especially), by which I mean it’s metaphor and not-metaphor at the same time. During any given week, there’s a moment where you’re sitting there thinking, “Ah, right — this is what happened to gay marriage in California,” then five minutes later you feel pretty sure you’re seeing an analogy for the trumped-up outrage over sharia law in Oklahoma, or the scapegoating of Mexican immigrants for various social ills; then just as suddenly all of that falls away, and you’re watching a domestic drama about believably idiosyncratic, self-centered people who cannot understand the effect that their actions have on others, and thinking,  “Wow — something like that happened to my uncle about five years ago,” or “My sister should watch this — it’s exactly like what she’s going through.”  This season  is filled with what seem like allusions to anti-Muslim bias (the aborted inquest into whether Bill violated the state constitution, which bans polygamy, was framed in a way that echoed the radical Muslim and Obama-is-an-immigrant hysteria). But the code-for-homphobia strain has continued as well. (Early this season, Don joked that after Bill came out as a polygamist, a few employees quit because they were afraid of being “recruited.”)

The metaphor/not-metaphor approach has served the show well. But as “Big Love” heads toward its series finale, it has been right to focus on not-metaphor, and just dig into the characters — their tangled self-justifications, their delusions, their idealism, their halting efforts to know themselves and become more enlightened. If “Big Love” were mainly interested in making statements about this or that contemporary political issue, it would have become boring and pointless almost instantly. What saved the show from position-paper dullness was its committment to portraying the Henricksons as people, and treating their plural marriage as a simple fact that is as impervious to public scorn as the weather.

Other characters on the series express opinions on whether it’s right or wrong for a husband to have more than one wife, and “Big Love” has been happy to hear them out and allow one or more of the Henricksons to make a rebuttal. But the show is also determined to confound knee-jerk reactions and stop viewers from being smugly judgmental. I was moved by the moment where polygamists showed up on the embattled Henricksons’ doorstep and thanked them for being pioneers, and I’ve found myself cheering for Bill as the entire world turns again him. But in the past couple of weeks, I’ve also found Bill’s protestations that Margene’s underage status is not a big deal and “what’s past is past” and that their own domestic arrangement is not a cult to be grotesquely self-serving and oblivious. And I’ve found myself thinking that Bill’s political gamble wasn’t idealistic but horribly selfish. He’s a sensitive-piggish, visionary-fool of a man; when I look at him and his three screwed-up, independent/dependent wives, I’m torn between wanting to cheer them and slap them. Heading into its final stretch that’s exactly where “Big Love” needs to be.