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wallpaper-s5-bill-and-wives-1600I recently finished a full rewatch of HBO’s Big Love. I’d recommended it to my sister and so I watched a long with her, mostly for her reaction to the ending, which was totally worth it. I really love this show, especially what they did with the ending and the way it empowers 3 women in a very interesting way.

Spoilers for the entire show below.

I can never remember if I’ve actually seen this show from the pilot or if you really are just thrown into the action. Bill Henrickson is a self appointed Priest of his own church having returned to polygamy and being kicked out their LDS church and also have been kicked off the compound he grew up in, Juniper Creek, as a 16 year old boy. We don’t see a lot of the history and background that brings this family of 3 wives and 8 children together but can only glean it over the full four seasons. And that picture that we put together ourselves is a complex and complicated one. In many ways Bill is a good man, a well intentioned man. He was a “lost boy” – kicked out by his father at 16 and left to fend for himself in a world that he didn’t grow up in, with rules that he wasn’t schooled in. Presumably Bill (and his brother) was kicked out much like young male lions are from the pack by the dominant male – the threat to his power and virility. On Juniper Creek, women are possessions that can be traded for favours, the Prophet can reassign wives if it pleases him to reward and punish. It seems that most of those wives are not treated very well, most live in what looks like abject poverty, with little power, and the power they do have is through the hierarchy of their sister wives. Not only this but girls are placed in the Joy Book at 15 or 16 to be perused like shoes a catalogue and traded across borders and between other compounds. Not all women are of the age of consent when married off.

Bill is essentially a good man. But that doesn’t mean he’s without flaws or that he does not always do well even when with the best of intentions. He spend his life fighting for freedom for the women on the compound, by way of wanting more for his mother but also in pursuing through legal and governmental policy means, as well as developing a program, to assist women to leave abusive situations. And in trying to help prosecute paedophiles and the peddling of young women through the Joy Book.

As I watched the show this time round, I started to wonder if this show is feminist. Bill has 3 wives. He is the head of his house. He consults with the women and looks for family decisions *unless* they disagree with him. He often makes decisions on his own. Two of the four (one doesn’t work out) wives that he marries he sleeps with before marriage even though he is staunchly against sex before marriage. He absolutely cannot deal with Barb’s (his first wife) declaration that she holds the priesthood too – I loved that whole logic, she couldn’t possibly hold the priesthood because noone had laid hands on her and it was just impossible because its passed down from father to son. (That sounds more logical an argument, even if I disagree with it but in the show it was a lot more circular in that basically he was choosing not to allow her to feel it therefore she couldn’t feel it.). Only Bill’s testimonies from Gpd were real and funnily enough they always involved either him getting a new wife, setting up his own church, deciding to run for office – they always involved him getting more sex or power. I kinda decided in the end that even though he means well, he is a bit of an arsehole. A kinda well meaning arsehole, held back by his frame of reference but kinda sexist and self serving. Basically I found his biggest flaw to be hubris – he never ever took a moment to step back and look at his weaknesses as something to overcome. He never ever addressed ideas like, maybe if I continue to cheat on my wives, then have a testimony that I’m supposed to take a new wife, that maybe my current wives might feel – jealous, betrayed, angry, ignored etc. I feel like he really got in the end what was coming to him – in so many ways he really did try to resolve conflicts but he also conveniently ignored lots of ticking bombs and then was shocked when people reacted in human ways.

Really, I feel like the show is not about Bill at all but about his three wives and that’s what has always drawn me to this show. Bill takes his second wife – Nicky – when Barb is (I presume) sick with cancer. He had a testimony I guess, that he needed another wife to look after his first one but also to look after his kids should the first wife die. In this context, it’s kind of extreme that a woman who did not grow up in polygamy to accept this as the obvious solution but it *is* sort of understandable. If you squint. Barb follows Bill into polygamy I think firstly because she thought she was going to die (and her kids were little, you would want someone to love your kids the way you do so if you could groom that replacement? I dunno). But mainly she follows him because she loves him and accepts him as her head of house. What is interesting though, is how much of Barb’s character we see throughout the four season as a result of this. How much resentment, jealousy, anger and so on she swallows and how she makes the best of this situation.

Nicky is the least likeable woman you would ever want to share a family life with. She’s mean, jealous, spiteful and very prickly. She hates hugs. She will always point out the bad in the situation. She will always expect the worst and remind you of that when it happens. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to learn to love this woman as your sister wife. To share not just your husband but your house, your children, your life. Nicky grew up on Juniper Creek so for her polygamy is the natural way of things. Her jealousy is not about sharing Bill but in all kinds of other ways. We learn though that she was a child bride, her father, the Prophet, traded her via his Joy Book and married her to a man older than her. Bill must have rescued her from the situation of living on the compound – though he did not know of much of her personal history or that she had a child in that union, which must have happened well before she comes to care for Barb. (We learn her father relented and let her divorce her husband, as an indulgence … )

Margene is the third wife and the newest on the scene. She’s young and peppy and not a Morman. She was the babysitter – I guess Barb went back to work and Nicky needed help, this is never really explained much – and Bill had an affair with her. We learn in the final season that she was totally not of legal age when he married her. And so the whole story comes full circle. What’s so interesting about that is even though it’s Bill who is responsible, Barb and Nicky are implicated because they consented (though Nicky did vote No – Of course she did!) to the marriage. And Barb of course was in the house the whole time so she becomes an accessory to statutory rape. And the women feel just as betrayed by Margene as Bill is responsible for sleeping with a minor.

These women have strength of mind and commitment to the vision of their family, both now and in the afterlife where they believe their family will be reunited, to want to work on making it work. It’s so interesting to watch their relationships and they evolve and interact – they must absorb the waves that Bill is constantly making. They must make it work and they work to move past jealousy and pettiness to do so. They raise each other’s children as their own. They have their own politics that are outside of their relationships with Bill. Some favourite moments are when one wife kicks him out of her bed on their scheduled night and he wanders next door to another wife who sends him back to the first. That doesn’t always hold true – later on things do break down. But when Barb leaves Bill, briefly, I love that Nicky and Marge feel like she has left them too, they feel that they are married to Barb as well and that they didn’t deserve to be punished for Bill’s mistakes. There very much are 4 people in this marriage.

What I love most is the evolution of each woman across the series. Barb struggles to find meaning in her life between losing her affiliation with the LDS church and in some ways having to move over and share her husband after I think it was 16 years of marriage. She wants to have her own spiritual path and hold the priesthood – give blessings and take a greater role in the church. I wonder a lot about what might have happened if Bill could have loosened the reins and felt he could share his church with his wife rather than pass it down to his son. He felt very threatened by her desire to have a greater role as though it was commentary on his ability to lead or the job he was doing. Sometimes, it’s not about you, dude, sometimes someone else is just walking their own journey. (Sorry, I did a lot of yelling at Bill this time).

Nicky becomes liberated. She goes from a very traditional woman, living in a suburb but with her head still on the compound. She’s the work horse, she can fix anything that’s broken, isn’t really very materialistic (though amassed a $20k debt before we begin following the story) and cares a lot about the insulation of family against the world. Through various circumstances she goes out to work to a day job, meets other people, falls for someone in her office (which does make her have to address the fact that she’s kinda married to someone she doesn’t actually love and what kind of choices did she have in getting to there), takes contraceptives because she doesn’t want more children (really interesting thread because it’s seen as a betrayal to the vision of the family if she’s not contributing more children yet Margene is allowed to not want more children eventually too with much less contention, though she does have to fight for that somewhat.), changes the way she dresses, eventually falls for Bill and then kinda doesn’t want to share him anymore (interesting …) and runs the underground train for helping women escape Juniper Creek. Really though, what hope did Nicky have given both her parents were amoral, self serving, manipulative, selfish people who kinda didn’t love their kids. Nicky probably does really well with what she has and there are some great moments when she is the parent of choice to go to with problems.

Margene grows up. Basically. She was a child going into a marriage with three adults who in some ways parented her but mostly just tolerated her. She had very little say in things in the beginning and was kind of a sex kitten come babysitter. It’s very hard for Barb to see and treat her as her equal. She was a child who got distracted by having children – three in a very short period of time. I think she was about 21 either at the beginning or the end of the show. In that time, she finds herself. She discovers she’s good at business, setting up her own, and then when that gets harpooned due to them coming out about being in a plural marriage, she gets involved in a pyramid scheme company. But through all this she finds her own voice and her abilities. She starts to earn her own money and see life goals she might want to pursue. That’s a bit difficult when you have kids at home and your husband thinks your family should be your life goal. She agitates a lot for pursuit, and Bill tolerates it where it doesn’t mean he has to give up anything. But clearly that is not going to be a sustainable situation long term. I very much love a conversation between the wives where Margene says that she didn’t get to have a life between being a child and a parent and Nicky points out her childhood was taken from her, thus Margene is better off!

There is much talk about love and family and the vision of their family in the after life. And in the final episode, Bill gets killed. There is this healing scene where he begs Barb to give him a blessing as he dies. Well, healing or infuriating cause he’s ever the hypocrite, anyhoo. And you think, well, did these women really share his vision of family? They are all young women with a long life to live. We get a flashforward to not quite a year ahead and we see that Barb has taken over Bill’s church. And Nicky and Barb are raising Margie’s kids whilst Margie is off on three month stints doing volunteer work in South America. She looks vibrant and energised and happy. And she looks older, more equal to the other two. And Nicky and Barb are at home, in a sisterwives marriage with each other. Living the life Bill envisioned.

I do wonder though. Will those women really live the rest of their lives like this? Surely they will want to meet other men and maybe have other romantic relationships? What will Bill think if they rock up in heaven as a marriage of 7 people! “It’s just not the way it is, Barb! It’s not *right* for a woman to have more than one husband!” But you know, they do like to seal people after they’re dead so … Bill better prepare himself for reality :)

 

 



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