Big Love, Big Hate

Just a few days ago in a post entitled Love (American Style), Big, Bigamy, Bigamist I wrote about the HBO series Big Love, about how the Mormon religion is central to the program, and about the polygamist lifestyle that the fictional series depicts. So today, I see a movie review in the paper, written by the dean of popular movie criticism, Roger Ebert. You can read the review at Ebert's Chicago Sun-Times site, or just stick around here and I'll get it for you.

The name of the movie is September Dawn, and it's about Mormons, natch. But it's a far cry from the sympathetic portrayal that Big Love provides. But let me let Roger tell you all about it:

September Dawn
You can't get 'em up in the mornin'

Release Date: 2007

Ebert Rating: Zero stars

// / Aug 24, 2007

By Roger Ebert

Just to interject here, you read it right, Ebert is giving this movie no stars whatsoever. So, the point here isn't that this is a movie worth the effort of shlepping to the theater and shelling out 20, 30 bucks on (assuming a companion and a trip to the snack bar), and it may not even be worth a couple of hours of your time catching it on cable, although I must admit that I am intrigued. But the point here is Ebert's review. So, let's get on with it:

On Sept. 11, 1857, at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a group of fanatic Mormons attacked and slaughtered a wagon train of about 120 settlers passing through Utah on their way to California. Can we all agree that the date has no significance? No, we cannot, because "September Dawn" is at pains to point out that on another Sept. 11, another massacre took place, again spawned by religion.

But hold on. Where did I get that word "fanatic"? In my opinion, when anybody believes their religion gives them the right to kill other people, they are fanatics. Aren't there enough secular reasons for war? But there is no shortage of such religions, or such people. The innocent, open-faced Christians on the wagon train were able to consider settling California, after all, because some of their co-religionists participated in or benefitted from the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans.

Were there fanatics among those who ran the Salem Witch Trials or the Inquisition or the Crusades? Or the Holocaust? No shortage of them. Organized religion has been used to justify most of the organized killing in our human history. It's an inescapable fact, especially if you consider the Nazis and communists as cults led by secular gods. When your god inspires you to murder someone who worships god in a different way or under another name, you're barking up the wrong god.

The vast majority of the members of all religions, I believe and would argue, don't want to kill anybody. They want to love and care for their families, find decent work that sustains life and comfort, live in peace and get along with their neighbors. It is a deviant streak in some humans, I suspect, that drives them toward self-righteous violence, and uses religion as a convenient alibi.

That is true, wouldn't you agree, about Mormons, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and so on? No, not all of you would agree, because every time I let slip the opinion that most Muslims are peaceful and nonviolent, for example, I receive the most extraordinary hate mail from those assuring me they are not. And in a Muslim land, let a newspaper express the opinion that most Christians and Jews are peaceful and nonviolent, and that newspaper office is likely to be burned down. The worst among us speak for the best.

Which brings us back to Sept. 11, 1857, when a crazy Mormon zealot named Bishop John Samuelson (Jon Voight) ordered the massacre of the visiting wagon train, after first sending his spokesman to lie that if they disarmed, they would be granted safe passage. Whether the leader of his church, Brigham Young (Terence Stamp), approved of this action is a matter of much controversy, denied by the church, claimed by "September Dawn."

What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is. Two theories have clustered around it: (1) It is anti-Mormon propaganda to muddy the waters around the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, or (2) it is not about Mormons at all, but an allegory about the 9/11/01 terrorists. Take your choice. The problem with allegories is that you can plug them in anywhere. No doubt the film would have great impact in Darfur.

Let me interject here that, holding aside the intentions of the filmmakers, whatever they may be, the important point is that this film obviously plays on and reflects post-9/11 America, but also reflects our increasing interest in the Mormon religion. This is true whether the portrayal is positive, as in Big Love, or negative, as it is here. Either way, the attention being paid to Mormonism parallels the rise of the first major Mormon candidate for the presidency. Now, back to you, Roger:

There isn't anything to be gained in telling this story in this way. It generates bad feelings on all sides, and at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain they are Christians, underlines the way that these Mormons consider all Christians to be "gentiles." The Mormons are presented in no better light than Nazis and Japanese were in Hollywood's World War II films. Wasn't there a more thoughtful and insightful way to consider this historical event? Or how about a different event altogether? What about the Donner Party? They may have been cannibals, but at least they were nondenominational.

Confession time. When I wrote the post about Big Love, I was going to write that there is some question as to whether or not Mormons are Christians, but I chickened out. I remember reading that this is the case, but I felt that I wasn't entirely sure that I really knew what I was talking about in this instance, so instead I wrote that there was some question as to whether they are Protestants or not. I find it all more than a little strange, to be honest, and as far as I'm concerned, if your focus is Christ, you're a Christian, whether you're Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Anglican, Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, or Christian Scientist. The Mormons Church (and using the term "church" is another strong indicator, Scientology excepted, from where I stand) is the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, so that seems pretty clear cut to me. That one Christian sect considers itself to be the exclusive holder of the truth and discounts all other Christian sects along with non-Christians is an old story, after all. And from my perspective, Christians are indeed gentiles, but again that includes these LDS folks as well. Not that there's anything wrong with being a gentile, mind you, some of my best friends are, we certainly don't have a problem with that. Well, okay, now that I've thoroughly embarrassed myself fumfering around about religion and offending the vast majority of my countrymen, and countrywomen too, let me turn the mike back over to Ebert:

If there is a concealed blessing, it is that the film is so bad. Jon Voight, that gifted and versatile actor, is here given the most ludicrous and unplayable role of his career, and a goofy beard to boot. Stamp, as Brigham Young, comes across as the kind of man you'd find at the back of a cave in a Cormac McCarthy novel. The Christians are so scrubbed and sunny, they could have been teleported in time from the Lawrence Welk program.

And isn't it sickening that the plot stirs in some sugar by giving us what can only be described as a horse whisperer? This movie needs human whisperers. And giving us a romance between the bishop's son and a pretty gentile girl? And another son of the bishop who dresses up like an Indian and goes batty at the scent of blood? And real Native Americans who assist the Mormons in their killing, no doubt thinking, well, we can get around to the Mormons later? I am trying as hard as I can to imagine the audience for this movie. Every time I make any progress, it scares me.

Right on, Rog, we don't want no haters round here! OK, time now for a still image from the film:

I'm think, Amish, how about you? Oh yeah, the gun. Well, as I said, I find it hard to tell the gentiles apart, they all kind of look alike to me. Oops, just kidding friends. Actually, the caption under this picture says:

Bishop John Samuelson, a crazy Mormon zealot (played by Jon Voight), orders the massacre of a visiting wagon train of Christians in "September Dawn."

Okay, now I know you're asking, what about the credits? Well, maybe not, but here they are anyway:

Cast & Credits

Bishop Samuelson: Jon Voight
Brigham Young: Terence Stamp
Joseph Smith: Dean Cain
John Lee: Jon Gries
Nancy Dunlap: Lolita Davidovich

Black Diamond Pictures and Slow Hand Releasing present a film directed by Christopher Cain. Written by Cain and Carole Whang Schutter. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for violence). Opening today at local theaters.

And of course, you're asking, what about the movie's official website, doesn't this movie have an official website, doesn't every movie have an official website? And yes, there is one, so if you want it, click here. And guess what, they don't mention Ebert's review--shocking! There's a trailer you can watch, which looks pretty cool (don't all trailers?), you can click on "Learn More" and there's over a dozen links to websites that provide documentation about the actual historical events depicted--the movie trailer says "Inspired by Actual Events" which is an interesting choice of words, especially since they are taking great pains to provide those other links to demonstrate the legitimacy of the events that the film depicts, er, is based on, I mean, is inspired by. And they make it sound like they are revealing one of the great cover-ups of all time. Watergate by the Salt Lake, it seems.

There's also a link where you can download a PDF of a New York Times article dated January 22, 2006, which is not and could not be a review of the film, but talks about the fact that the film is being made, and its significance. Odd, odd, very odd indeed. Well, as an academic with access to databases, I was able to track this article down in a form that I could add into my personal ConBlogRessional Record here, for the benefit of YOU, my faithful reader (singular used intentionally). So, here's the basic info first:

With Only God Left as a Witness

John Anderson. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 22, 2006. pg. 2.13

And now, the article, in its entirety, without commercial interruption:

AS the new year dawned, Jon Krakauer's ''Under the Banner of Heaven'' -- about a ''divinely ordered'' double murder in 1984 by two members of a breakaway Mormon sect -- was fresh off the best-seller list. Warren Jeffs, the polygamist prophet of this splinter group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was on F.B.I. wanted lists. And the world's first-ever ''Mormonsploitation Retrospective'' (''Passion! Polygamy! Pamphlets!'') of vintage fear-mongering anti-Mormon movies had just finished at the fringy Pioneer Theater in the East Village in Manhattan.

In public relations terms, this is not the easiest time to have the words ''Latter,'' ''Day'' and ''Saints'' anywhere close together in your name. And the going may get rougher after the filmmaker Christopher Cain finishes his new movie about one of the darkest moments in Mormon history, the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, in which 137 pioneers from Arkansas were killed in Utah by a raiding party whose ties to the Mormon church are still in dispute.

The film, ''September Dawn,'' stars Jon Voight, Lolita Davidovich and Terence Stamp (Dean Cain, the director's son, makes a cameo appearance). Two newcomers, Trent Ford and Tamara Hope, play a frontier Romeo and Juliet in a romance played out against a drama of a mass murder that continues to engender controversy almost 150 years after the fact. Financed independently by September Dawn and Voice Pictures, it is currently being screened for distributors.

An early look at parts of the picture -- viewed in a West Los Angeles editing room with Mr. Cain and his longtime editor, Jack Hofstra -- suggests that there will be fresh debate when it finally reaches the public.

As the story unfolds, a company of pioneers arrives from Arkansas. A couple of young lovers-to-be -- one a Mormon, the other part of the ill-fated wagon train -- meet amid a toxic atmosphere of suspicion and rancor. A Mormon raid ends with a castration, an enemy's testicles neatly nailed to a door. All the while, the territorial governor and president of the church, Brigham Young, played by Mr. Stamp, is heard in voice-over, encouraging vengeance, violence, ''blood atonement'' and divine justice.

''And by the way,'' Mr. Cain said, ''I didn't write any of his dialogue,'' explaining that it was all in the depositions that Young gave after the massacre. ''I sat here watching this a couple of weeks ago and I was thinking: 'Maybe I made that up. I don't think he would have said that.' And I went back and pulled it up and, man, he did.''

In a statement, Michael Purdy, a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, disputed historical claims that Young ordered the killings in a drive to keep non-Mormons out of Utah. Mr. Cain, whose movies have included ''The Principal,'' ''Young Guns,'' ''The Next Karate Kid'' and ''Gone Fishin,' '' had left filmmaking and retired to his home in Aspen. But he was lured back when a friend, Carole Whang Schutter, who now shares a writing credit on ''September Dawn,'' pitched him the idea of a film about the infamous attack.

That the 1857 massacre occurred on a Sept. 11 only added to the significance Mr. Cain found in the event: at a time when fundamentalist extremism seems to dominate political dialogue around the world, revisiting murders that occurred for religious reasons, he thought, seemed timely. ''You start asking yourself the question,'' said Mr. Cain, a soft-spoken and often dryly funny filmmaker of 62. ''What makes a young kid -- of any faith, in any part of the world -- strap a bomb on his back and walk into a school, or a mosque, or get on a bus full of innocent people, and blow himself and them all up? You ask yourself that question, and as you do, you start looking around and all of a sudden, it's what religious fanaticism can turn into.''

While Mr. Stamp plays the church leader in the film, Mr. Voight plays a fictional Mormon elder whose two sons fall on different sides of an age-old question that is hardly exclusive to pioneer-era Utah: Does one follow one's faith wherever its elders say it leads or does one exercise the free will and judgment presumably bequeathed by God?

Asked to comment on the making of Mr. Cain's film, Mr. Purdy, the church representative, responded: ''While no one knows fully what happened at Mountain Meadows nearly 150 years ago, we do recognize that it was a terrible tragedy for all involved. The church has done much to remember those who lost their lives there. We want to honor, respect and recognize them.''

''During the 1999 dedication of the Mountain Meadows memorial,'' Mr. Purdy wrote, ''Gordon B. Hinckley, current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said: 'I sit in the chair that Brigham Young occupied as president of the church at the time of the tragedy. I have read very much of the history of what occurred here. There is no question in my mind that he was opposed to what happened. Had there been a faster means of communication, it never would have happened and history would have been different.' ''

Asked to elaborate, Mr. Purdy said, ''Regarding the reference to a 'faster means of communication,' Brigham Young sent a messenger by horseback to tell those at Mountain Meadows to not interfere with the wagon train. The messenger did not arrive in time to prevent the tragedy.''

This, like many key claims about the massacre, has remained open to challenge. As the Mormon Utah historian Juanita Brooks wrote in her 1950 study, ''The Mountain Meadows Massacre,'' ''The complete -- the absolute -- truth of the affair can probably never be evaluated by any human being; attempts to understand the forces which culminated in it and those which were set into motion by it, are all very inadequate at best.''

What is known is that settlers en route from Arkansas were attacked over a number of days -- either by Paiute Indians, a mix of Paiutes and Mormons, or Mormons dressed as Paiutes. After being deceived by a flag of truce, they were ultimately slaughtered. Children under 10 were spared, and adopted by Mormon families, until federal forces returned them to Eastern relatives.

Mr. Cain has chosen to tell a version in which the Paiute tribe was enlisted to help fight the supposedly hostile forces impinging on their land, but then quit the fight when they realized they were being duped.

In writing the script, Mr. Cain said, he and Ms. Schutter were helped by a great-granddaughter of Brigham Young, who has left the church and become a born-again Christian.

''But the entire massacre itself,'' he said, ''and the stuff with the Indians leading up to it, is taken from John D. Lee's confession, which was 25 to 27 pages long.'' Lee, a high-ranking lieutenant of Young's, was the only man prosecuted for the massacre; he was executed by firing squad in 1877 and went to his grave claiming that he was being sacrificed for other people's sins, a view echoed in the title of a 1961 biography by Brooks, ''John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat.''

The year of the massacre was an especially tense one for the Mormons of Utah, whose history in many parts of the United States had, from the start, been one of persecution. In the spring of 1857, President Buchanan replaced Brigham Young with a non-Mormon as governor and sent soldiers to enforce his decision. Young declared martial law, and on Sept. 15, just four days after the massacre,issued an order forbidding federal troops from entering the territory.

In the scenes that Mr. Cain and Mr. Hofstra were still molding into final shape, the violence perpetrated against the settlers' wagon train leaves very little to the imagination. And the intonations of the bearded Young -- Mr. Stamp plays him as austere, remote and steely -- give the narrative a sense of Old Testament wrath: ''Will you love your brothers and sisters likewise, when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of their blood?'' he asks.

''I don't see any reason to soft-pedal anything,'' Mr. Cain explained of his movie's unblinking approach. ''This was a horrific act -- they murdered 140 men, women and children and they did it in a vicious, violent way, and if you're going to show that, I think you have to show what caused it. It's not like somebody got excited one day and shot somebody. They bashed their heads with rocks.''

Of his prospective Mormon viewers, Mr. Cain said he expected particular resistance to the film's treatment of Young. ''I mean, they don't like the fact that we're doing the Mountain Meadows massacre to begin with -- it's kind of a dark day in their history,'' he said. ''But I believe what we're doing is accurate. I believe that we're making a movie that has a certain power behind it.''

The picture's real power, Mr. Cain added, will most likely come not from history, but from its insistence on making the past personal. ''You can have all the rhetoric you want come out of your mouth,'' he said. ''But when you make it specific, a name, a beating heart, it becomes something else.''

Bottom line, this is certainly not good news for Mitt Romney's candidacy, but if Ebert is right, it will blow over without hardly making an impression. Me, I'm just looking forward to the next episode of Big Love.

Love (American Style), Big, Bigamy, Bigamist

So, I've been meaning to write a post about the HBO series Big Love for some time now, and no time like the present, I guess. Now well into its second season, the series is about a modern polygamist played by seasoned actor Bill Paxton,


with interesting supporting parts from Harry Dean Stanton,




Bruce Dern,


and Grace Zabriskie (from Twin Peaks).


I suppose they could have called the program My Three Wives, with the better halves (but that doesn't add up, does it?) played by Jeanne Tripplehorn,



Chloë Sevigny,



and Ginnifer Goodwin (in order of priority).




Oh, and in case you were wondering, the modern polygamist is not a Saudi sheik, it's a red, white, and blue Mormon living in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah. Big(amy) Love, American Style! It's not quite as freaky as the old sixties sitcoms with witches, genies, hillbillies, and even astronauts and cavemen (did you think Geico was all that original? look up It's About Time, which featured comedy great Imogene Coca in a secondary role).

But it's certainly more way out there than mobsters from New Jersey, which raises the inevitable question, how does this show compare to The Sopranos? The answer is, Big Love don't mean a thing, cause it ain't got that bada bing! But then again, what else does? It's an unfair comparison, really, and all I mean to say is that isn't great, but it is good, another example of quality television, courtesy of cable TV.

I do think that The Sopranos not only set the bar, but provided a model, so that many of the series that have followed have tried to incorporate some Sopranos-like elements (The Sopranos series itself suggesting that there were many other mafias out there, in politics, religion, higher education, the motion picture industry, etc.). For example, HBO's Deadwood was The Sopranos set in the old west. So, Big Love's Sopranos-like element is the fundamentalist if not fanatical Juniper Hill compound, run by Roman Grant (played by Stanton), who is considered "the prophet" of what is described on the website as a breakaway polygamy sect (broken away from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, as I understand it). He is the boss of this particular mafia, which is held together not by greed but by fervent religious belief, and in addition to being in charge of the corporation that represents the financial part of the cult, he also determines who gets to marry whom, and takes the most wives for himself, of course.




Bill Henrickson (played by Paxton) grew up in the compound, but was thrown out as a young teenage boy, forced to fend for himself on the streets. This is a common practice apparently, as younger males need to be sent away because they represent potential competition for the girls that the older men want to take on as second, third, fourth, etc., wives. So Bill had to make his way in mainstream society, pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, going to college, marrying his college sweetheart within the established, mainstream Mormon Church, and becoming a successful hardware store owner.



But somewhere along the line, things changed. His wife Barbara became ill, cancer I think it was, they needed help caring for her and her children and household, and she would no longer be able to bear children, to boot (this is one of those be fruitful and multiply religions). Bill turned to Juniper Hill for help, Roman sent one of his many daughters, Nicki, and the three of them over time decided to "live the principle," enter into plural marriage, making Barb and Nicki sister-wives, and Bill something of a priest or religious leader for his family (they became an independent unit, rather than following "the prophet" or the established Mormon Church). Nikki provided a stronger connection to the fundamentalist sect, and she herself is the least ambivalent about plural marriage in the family, and the most traditionalist, although she also developed an addiction to shopping and running up credit cards. Paralleling this, Bill also received financial backing to expand his retail operation from Roman Grant, so the links deepened despite his distaste for the compound. Nicki has had two kids with Bill, and later they were joined by a third wife, Margie, who is only 21, has added 2 more kids to the mix, with yet another on the way.



Oh, and they live in three houses, side by side, so from the outside everything seems normal, but on the inside it's all interconnected. And, Big Love takes us behind closed doors and picket fences, to spy on the lives of a polygamous family living an otherwise normal suburban American lifestyle. That's what's emphasized in many ways, the utter normalcy of their arrangement. The program makes it easy to identify with a way of life that might otherwise be considered deviant, abusive, and most certainly illegal. How do they do this?



For one, Barb is the first wife, which is significant in that the first wife is the one that's legal in the eyes of the government, but she also acts as the senior sister-wife--Nicki calls her "boss lady." And Barb is very much the classic wife and mother character, perhaps a bit less liberated than contemporary TV sitcom and family drama wives are, not all that career oriented, but she does work some of the time as a substitute teacher. And she does not come from a bigamist family, so she serves as a point of identification, having moved from an initial position of skepticism to one of acceptance, having made a difficult but deliberate decision to enter into the "principle" as they call it (albeit all of this occurred before the series began, and is revealed only in bit and pieces over time).


Second, the wives are depicted as basically liking, and loving one another. Yes, there are jealousies and squabbles, but they really do seem to be very sisterly. And there has been no coercion or pressure to marry here. Moreover, when it comes to taking care of their households, there seems to be a clear economy of scale, and sharing of different competencies, from Barb's intelligence and ability to deal with the outside world, to Nicki's pioneer-like self-sufficiency, work ethic, and basic skills such as appliance repair, to Margie's youthful energy and enthusiasm, and ability to relate to the children. And together, they are in charge of the domestic scene, and at times are able to gang up on Bill, so that he appears to be dealing with domestic pressures times three.



Third, there is no hint of any sexual abuse. There's no underage wife among the Henricksons (as opposed to the compound, where for example there is one that Roman wants to marry, who ends up running away). Margie is the youngest, but her relationship with Bill doesn't seem that different from a successful middle aged man's affair with a younger woman, or more to the point, his second or third marriage to one--it's been said that divorce and remarriage is serial polygamy, after all. There seems to be healthy sexual relations between Bill and his wives, with some touch of jealousy, but basically the wives work out a schedule for equitable distribution of their husband, each sleeping with him every third night. I think having two nights off might well seem appealing to a number of women, and as for Bill, his biggest problem is keeping up his performance level, and like a lot of men, he turns to Viagra for help. But sex does not dominate the program, and to the extent that it is a topic (and it definitely is one, and there are some racy scenes now and then), it's not reduced to lust, but appears within the context of their polygamous marriage.


Which brings me to the fourth point, that the Henricksons are depicted as religious, but not fanatics. They say grace before meals, are decent, respectful, God-fearing folk, but they don't try to proselytize in any way, or interject religion into everything they do. They don't drink alcohol or coffee, or smoke (Margie has been known to cheat, though), but you rarely notice the absence of these behaviors in the program (an exception being the last episode, number 22, "The Happiest Girl," where deliberate reference was made in an interaction with non-Mormons). Their religion lends a spiritual quality to their marriage and family life that is downright enviable, and all they seem to want is the freedom to practice their religion without fear of persecution, the problem being that plural marriage is central to that practice.



And while the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints is not entirely absent from the series, it is very much in the background, and typically only functions as one of several threatening forces hostile to this family (since it has long ago outlawed polygamy), along with various forms of governmental authority, and advocates and activists seeking to rescue women victimized by plural marriage and the children brought up in such families. Typically, these agencies are depicted in a relatively negative light, and as insiders in the Henrickson's household, we see them as hostile forces. The point here is that the LDS is not used to provide a contrast between mainstream Mormonism and the Henrickson's secretive practice of their religion. Instead, the Henrickson's normalcy is contrasted to the extreme fundamentalism and cult-like situation of the Juniper Hill compound--a compound that it is gated and guarded, with its own police force answering to Roman Grant. This is the fifth way that the show gets us to identify with Bill, Barb, Nicki, and Margie.




Of course, having established the differences between the two groups, things become more complex over time. For example, this season we are introduced to other groups even more extreme than Grant's. We also have been seeing over time that Bill either gets pulled back into compound affairs, or deliberately interjects himself into them, most dramatically by buying a seat on the corporation's board. And there was a brief mention in one episode of the fact that the former "prophet" that Roman Grant had displaced, through some kind of hostile takeover of the compound, was Bill's grandfather. It was mentioned once, and not brought up again, but in my mind this suggests that Bill might potentially vie for the role of "prophet" in the future, even though that seems highly unlikely at this point in the series. But the stage is set for some kind of move in this direction, with Roman being shot in a recent episode, and his frustrated son Alby taking over the leadership of the compound, and appearing intent on euthanizing his father. This should make for very interesting plot possibilities for the remainder of this and for next season. But so far, the emphasis has been on the distinction between the fundamentalists at the compound, and our modern, typical family with one dad and three mommies.



Now, getting the audience to identify with the main characters is typically the goal of a narrative (not necessarily, I should add, as the show could have just said, in effect, look at these freaks, how strange and bizarre they are, how much better off we are than them, or alternately, look at these beautiful people living a life we can only dream about). But in this particular case, I think there is some added significance that connects to the larger political and cultural environment of contemporary America.

First, there's the whole Mormon thing. I brought up Big Love in my popular culture summer class, and one of the students said that in her theology class at Fordham University, the Mormons were identified as a cult rather than a bona fide religion. Now, I'm not sure that the student was reporting this correctly, and I actually was surprised to hear that, as I tend to associate Mormons with certain other Protestant sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and Christian Scientists. I guess there's some question of whether Mormons are even considered Protestants, but who am I to say? And, figuring they mostly resided out west, I was surprised to find Mormons ringing doorbells and trying to talk to people and give them literature, much like Jehovah's Witnesses, here in Northern New Jersey--I could only imagine Tony Soprano's response! I actually asked them for a copy of the Book of Mormon many years ago, which they gave me, and I think they were a little disappointed with their follow-up visits when I explained that I hadn't read it yet--hey, I'm a busy guy, but I will get to it one of these days.



Whether Mormons are categorized as a cult or not, the fact that the question can be raised is itself significant. And while the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City was good for the image of their Church, the South Park episode "All About Mormons" was devastating in its deconstruction of the origins of this religion, albeit while taking a few liberties. Of course, we might also ask what religion could stand up to such scrutiny? The bottom line is that it is easier to accept a mythic or legendary account from antiquity, and view it as a metaphor or at least subject to interpretation because the conditions of life have changed so dramatically since then, not to mention the language the account was written in, than it is to accept the same sort of thing coming from contemporaries or the recent past. I'm reminded of a Firesign Theatre routine where a preacher is saying something like, I'm not talking about a book that was written by a bunch of babbling barbarians thousands of years ago, I'm talking about a book some of which was written as recently as last night! Newer is better, after all, right?



At what point does a cult become a religion? Good question! My mentor, Neil Postman, was known to joke that if a religion is not at least a few thousand years old, it's just a cult. And perhaps religions need a certain amount of deep time to reach maturity. It does seem that after a period of time, a given religion's prophetic period comes to a close, and new claims to having a direct line to God are rejected. Thus, by the time Jesus and his apostles came around, many Jews could no longer find such claims credible, and by the time of Mohammad, most Jews and Christians could no longer accept a new prophet. Of course, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, was not the last of the modern prophets, he was followed by, among others, Siyyid `Alí-Muhammad later known as "the Báb," a prophet that most Muslims did not accept, who began an off-shoot of Islam known as Bahá'í (made famous in the U.S. by Seals and Crofts).

Ours is a pluralistic society, one that has grown increasingly more tolerant, but certain faiths are considered more or less mainstream and others not. And I do not mean to suggest that Big Love is responsible for moving Mormonism into the mainstream, no more so than I would attribute such a shift to Donnie and Marie Osmond (if you don't know who they are, don't ask). But Big Love does not hurt things at all for them, and more to the point, I take it as a reflection of changing attitudes towards this faith, a sign that this religion has come to be accepted as legitimate.

What fascinates me about all this is that it coincides with the appearance of the first serious contender for the presidency of the United States who is a practicing Mormon, Mitt Romney. Romney has a fairly decent shot at the Republican presidential nomination, although he is not the front runner, but I would not predict that he'd go all the way, at least not yet. I do find this an amazing coincidence, and it can't be deliberate because he was not a serious candidate at the time Big Love premiered, and anyway, if you wanted to launch a show to help a Mormon candidate, you wouldn't make the Mormon characters practicing polygamists since it goes against their church's present doctrine and potentially reinforces prejudices and stereotypes.



Time for a tangent, but a relevant one, something I share with my students whenever I teach about popular culture, and about how popular culture items are reflections of society in general, its myths, values, and beliefs, and how a given item is a reflection of the particular times it is created in. I begin with the common example that during the fifties, situation comedies featuring the nuclear family were popular, such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. This is understood as a reflection of that relatively conservative era, and a time when the basic family unit was still intact. I do make the point that the emphasis on the nuclear family also reflects the disintegration of the extended family, as postwar prosperity and mobility resulted in the middle class moving away from the old city neighborhoods, to the suburbs, while at the same time the need to stay close to extended family members for survival dissapeared. Anyway, things begin as we move into the sixties with the appearance of single family sitcoms like My Three Sons, The Andy Griffith Show, The Doris Day Show, Family Affair, etc. Again, the obvious connection is that this shift reflects the rising divorce rate in the American population. So far, so good.

The problem is that none of those single parent sitcoms that start to appear are actually about a divorced parent. They're always about widows, widowers, or even a single relative taking care of orphans. This is an example of how distorted popular culture reflections can actually become. While the divorce rate was going up, divorce itself remained a stigma, taken as a sign of moral failing, lack of character. So these sitcoms reflected both the new demographic and the old negative attitude towards divorce.

And I remember very clearly the 1968 presidential elections, which we followed in my elementary school class, fifth grade I believe. At that time, Ronald Reagan, governor of California, was for the first time a candidate for the Republican nomination (which Nixon eventually won). And our teacher said that he would never, ever be elected president of the United States. You might guess that she said that it was because an actor could never be president, which is certainly how many people felt at the time, but that wasn't it at all. It was the fact that he was divorced! She said that the American people would never accept a divorced man as president (even though he had remarried). And this made absolute sense from the point of view of 1968.



But attitudes were changing dramatically at that time, with the civil rights movement, women's liberation, the antiwar movement, and of course the sexual revolution. As we moved into the seventies, divorce has become more and more commonplace, and less and less of a stigma. In 1975, the first sitcom featuring a single parent who was divorced, One Day at a Time, premiered. The following year, Ronald Reagan almost snatched the Republican presidential nomination away from Gerald Ford, a sitting president (albeit an unelected one). The fact that he was divorced was not an issue. In 1980, he captured the nomination, and beat Jimmy Carter, and not only was his marital status never mentioned, but he ran as the candidate of family values!!! I only wish my old grade school teacher had been around to comment on that development.

So, anyway, if Mitt Romney gets the Republican nod in 2012, you'll know why.

That takes care of the Mormon part of the equation, but what about plural marriage? Well, of course we've been grappling in this country with a somewhat different problem concerning the definition of marriage, the question of gay marriage, which was a big issue during the last presidential election, although it now has somewhat subsided. On one side, we have the idea that the government should officially recognize marriage between two members of the same sex just as it recognizes marriages between two members of the opposite sex. On the other side, there is the counter-effort to establish an official definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Now, given that this post has been about Big Love, I think the point is obvious enough, if we are going to widen the definition of marriage in terms of gender, why not also widen it in terms of number of partners?

There certainly is ample precedent for plural marriage in the Bible, and there is no commandment about monogamy in either the Old or New Testaments. I find it ironic that the Reform Jewish movement, of which I am a part, changed our liturgy in order to modernize and balance the patriarchal bias of traditional Jewish prayers, adding the four matriarchs to the three patriarchs: after saying, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob" we add, "God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel, and God of Leah," but this implicitly recognizes that Jacob had two wives at the same time (Leah and Rachel). Now, there is nothing in the Jewish or Moslem religions prohibiting plural marriage, and just from doing a quick Google search for "origin of monogamy" it seems that there is nothing in the New Testament of early Christian Church either. Instead, it seems that this practice is a pagan residue, mostly coming from pre-Christian Rome, with some Hellenic influence, although it is also acknowledged that they did not take marriage as seriously as the Church did. I should also point out that polygamy is an accepted practice under contemporary Islamic law, and various experiments with all sorts of plural marriage has been associated with communal living back in the sixties and seventies, and presumably to this day--this also shows up in the science fiction of Robert Heinlein.

Now, before you think that I've become an advocate for plural marriage, let me just note that I am not trying to make an argument for it, I am just pointing out that in this respect too, Big Love may be a reflection of our times. In a distorted or disguised from, it reflects the issue of gay marriage, in a more general sense, it reflects the decline of marriage as an institution, the symptoms including divorce, premarital sex, people living together without making it official, the greatly reduced stigma attached to adultery, not to mention the concept of "open marriage" from the sixties (does anyone remember Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice?). As a culture, our respect for marriage as an institution, not to mention a sacrament, is pretty low in real terms, even if there is a powerful sentiment reacting to the latest efforts to open it all up.

But ultimately, given the secular nature of our system of government, the question of defining marriage is a legal issue. And there really is no logical reason for limiting the definition, aside from tradition. Since marital status is linked to various economic and legal benefits, on what basis are those benefits given to one class of people, and denied to another? Having opened this Pandora's box, and we pretty much have, there's no going back. If two people of the same sex can get married, why not, say, a brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son? Apart from the rather horrifying question of whether incest ought to be illegal, which I do not want to touch in any way, shape, or form here, what I mean to say is, why can't close relatives obtain the same legal and economic benefits from marriage that complete strangers receive? Marriage, after all, from the point of view of the government, is not a license to have sex, it's an official declaration of a particular legal status, one that entitles individuals to certain benefits from the government (e.g., tax breaks) and employers (e.g., health insurance). And again, why limit this status to only two partners? In the end, this is all simply a matter of contract law, and justice is, after all, blind.

So, where are we going? My guess is that the government will be forced to get out of the marriage business altogether, and marriage will no longer be a determinant for benefits, rights, and privileges. Perhaps an employer will simply make a certain amount of benefits available, the total of which can be spread among as many individuals as the employee designates, so that the more there are the less they get. Or maybe it's time for a new category to take the place of marriage, and family, or rather time for the retrieval of an old category which has been semi-retired, that of household to designate a marital or family unit of two or more individuals.

Bottom line, it's not really clear where we're headed exactly, but its pretty clear to me what we're leaving behind. And there is no question that cultures and social institutions change over time--marriage changed dramatically from the 19th to the 20th century. But there is also cause for concern here, because social theories all pretty much acknowledge that marriage, family, kinship relations, are foundational to every known society. They differ from one culture to another, sure, but the health of a society is dependent on the stability of these institutions, and if they break down, who knows what will happen? We are really heading into uncharted territory, and I don't know if love, however big, will be enough to get us through safely.