In a television show about a modern family practicing polygamy we get ringside seats as the family members navigate the seamier side of politics, gambling and fringe religion, but one thing is clear: fertile women rule.
There are plenty of plot twists and surprises packed into each hour-long episode of HBO's Big Love. One can only wonder how Bill Henrickson manages to get through a day with three wives, eight children, two complex business ventures, a run for state senate and his mother and father intermittently plotting each other's death.
Hidden beneath the layers of overt plotting, power struggles and intrigue is a less obvious but consistent thread where the women on the show are concerned: where there's fertility there's power. We learned in season one that Bill's justification for a second wife, in part, came from a divine need to father more children. Since his first wife's bout with cancer leaves Barb infertile, Bill takes Nicki as his second wife.
After Nicki delivers two sons, enter bubbly Margene, the babysitter whose sex kitten appeal soon leads Bill to decide he has a calling for a third wife. Uber fertile, Margene spends more time pregnant than not. Three children later and lonely with no adults to talk to, she befriends neighbor Pam Martin. The contrast is immediate. Margene has charm and fertility to spare while Pam is distressed and ashamed, revealing she's an infertile woman unable to live up to the expectations of her religion's child-centric community. (We learn in season four that Pam is on anti-depressants to cope with her childless state.)
Margene meanwhile would like to give her uterus a rest and all but becomes a feminist demanding equal rights. Eager to focus on her budding career hawking homemade jewelry on a home-shopping TV network, Margene presses Nicki to pick up the slack in the baby-making department. Displeased and not ready to lose her independence, Nicki secretly uses birth control pills until the day she pisses Bill off with her fundamentalist clan dabbling. Realizing a pregnancy will return her to his good graces Nicki tosses her BC pills only to find that her uterus is no longer hers to control. Faced with infertility for the first time in her life she feels powerless.
Meanwhile there's Anna, a Serbian waitress who was once in Bill's sights to become wife number four. An introduction in season three to his polygamist lifestyle and the catty infighting among her future sister wives unwinds the arrangement. Anna exits stage left.
In season four, Bill's new "family-friendly" casino opens in partnerhip with an Indian tribe. He implicates his best friend in a financial scandal while his wife and daughter get mixed up with a Meth-addict on the Indian Reservation. Bill then goes to war with a lobbyist in the midst of trying to earn an endorsement for state senate. His son and his parents are endangered in Mexico trying to illegally transport exotic birds for sale in the U.S. All the while Nicki grows increasingly frustrated with pee sticks revealing no pregnancy. More maddening still, Nicki's 50-something mother announces she's with child on the fundamentalist compound -- though Adaleen doesn't realize until later that she's been duped with a donor egg extracted from her granddaughter.
Who else shows up with a bun in the oven? Anna! (Speaking from experience, when you are infertile, the whole looks pregnant, but I digress...) The very pregnant ex-sister wife realizes that her baby with Bill has huge value so Anna begins to negotiate access and terms while his infertile wives, Barb and Nicki, stand by with their best pissed-off faces. Margene meanwhile finds herself turned on by Anna's new boyfriend.
One can only imagine where the fertile power plays will take us in season five.
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Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found.
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Comments
I tried to watch this show, on reccommendation from friends I trust who liked it and after reading online reviews... but I literally could not stomach it. After 3 episodes, and 3 uncanny bouts of anxiety and nausea I couldn't explain, I put 2+2 together. There's something about it that's so... real... but... so... creepy... I'm a very open-minded person, but this show affected me in a bad, bad way. I'm very shocked that I couldn't handle it, but I don't deny it.
Have you ever wondered why LDS families (like the Osmonds) have 7, 8, 9 or more children?
Because it is the duty of the LDS to procreate so as to create bodies for the spirits who inhabit other planets to come to earth to occupy.
No kidding.
Read "The Godmakers" by Ed Decker and Dave Hunt. They cover this pretty thoroughly.
Joe Smith invented the whole plural marriage stuff because he was a hound of Tiger Woods-sized sexual appetites.
The Mormons would still be practicing it if LDS President Wilford Woodruff hadn't caved to pressure from the U.S. government to discontinue polygamy.
Truth is stranger than fiction......and "Big Love" isn't really fiction, folks.
The belief is as follows:
God the Father has multiple wives. God was once a man like men today and through a series of test and progressions became a God. Mormonism teaches that faithful Mormon men can become Gods and occupy their own planet with their own worshippers. How is this done.
The first step is each of God's spirit children must occupy a body to begin on the road to eternal progression. Therefor faithful Mormons are called to produce the bodies for God's spirit children. The second step is to be faithful to the Mormon church, tithe, attend service and have a personal testimony (they all have the same testimony) that Joseph Smith was a true prophet and the Mormon church is the true and only church. When a Mormon is in good standing they may receive a temple pass. This pass allows them to practice proxy baptism for the dead and more importantly have their earthly marriage sealed for eternity.
This is very important because without the Celestial marriage there is no progression to Godhood. Mormonism teaches that their off spring and the off springs of their off springs will worship them as God as they worship God the Father. Now the original definition of celestial marriage was plural marriage. This was change because of political pressure when Utah became a state and the Mormon Church abandoned polygamy. But, they did not abandoned the idea of sealed for eternity as one of the first step of becoming a God.
Today there are hundreds of Mormon Sects who did not abandon plural marriage and still hold to the original definition of Celestial Marriage. The three major Mormon groups LDS, RLDS, and Temple Lot Mormons abandoned polygamy, and consider polygamist Mormons to be apostate. Of course each Mormon group considers the others to be apostate.
The Mormon church is very adaptable and pragmatic and holds that the current day prophet is the oracle and seeing eye of the church. If they find a past teaching is holding them back the prophet can change it to prevent problems. In this respect the portrait of Bill Hendricks in Big Love is very accurate in his constant changing and lying to keep his agenda moving forward in the name of God.
Maybe fertility ins not necessarily of a healing nature matter.
Guido
www.healtone.com
But you did a fine recap of all 4 seasons with eloquence and economy.
more on polyamory in my blog
They stated that their motivation in creating the show was to point out that families come in all types of incarnations. But from your plot summaries, it almost seems like they're trying to point out that "straight" people can outdo gays in perversity.