In Which Big Love Takes A Gamble And Loses Itself In The Process

Don't Tell Your Dad

by JESSICA HOPPER

Big Love

Season 4

The new opening credits of HBO’s Mormon polygamist zonk out, Big Love, signaled a new tack with a terrible visual metaphor: the shows adult leads falling perilously into the dark infinite, unable to grasp hands. Swathed in a mess of blowing semi-formal wear they emoted hard at the viewer scrunching their brows. The previous three seasons opened with Beach Boys and pairs skating, the three wives switching off with their shared husband.

Gone are those days and the connection! The center will not hold! Said the metaphor. The credits, unfortunately didn’t give us any warning season four is quickly gaining momentum, with each episode, headed straight for overplotted hot mess, filled with yelling characters that don’t even relish hating, you just regular hate.

The dramatic tension of the show’s previous seasons revolved mostly around keeping their dozen-deep polygamist love hive in the burbs secret from the judging eyes straight world and/or fending off the persecuting creepiness of the gnarly compound sect Nicki and Bill both came from. Now that Nicki’s murderous prophet daddy done got killed, they’re bumping the tension up by making every character on the show, save for Margene’s newborn and Bills mom’s parrots have explosive secret problems that blow up at the rate of five a show.

These are kept from easy resolution or redress by Bill insisting “Not now!” anytime someone tries to speak to him, or misunderstand his motives, or demand an explanation of his out of control prophetic-maniacal bullshit. That person, invariably furrows their brow and stomps away, and/or moves out. Once the reveal comes out, there is the part where Bill squinches his face and says “Why didn’t you tell me?”, sometimes in a mad way, though sometimes in a empathetic good TV dad way. Once that happens, everyone starts yelling at each other to get over it.

The characters' problems are infinitely spinning out into quick resolutions, with most every twist hinging on “don’t tell Dad!”—very Brady Bunch of them. Don’t tell dad about the Native American meth head's baby you are harboring, or your weird feelings since yr unplanned preggo miscarriage or your secret non-Mormon wedding! Don’t tell your dad that his third wife has glanced upon your boner, Ben, though you only liked it when she wasn’t flirting back! Oh wait, too late, your religious zealot little sister, (that impossible to look at brace-faced pubescent ginger—a 2.0 new season replacement who is a ringer for Darla from Finding Nemo), Teeny, spilled the beans for ya!

This season’s had more use of “reveals” than a month of the Pitchfork news page: Barb has been secretly wishing to be regular Mormon, she ran over a meth head on the res, that she hates her job and her dramatic Mormon homelife is still on the burner.

Nicki revealed a secret teen daughter who was re-revealed to her by her creepy rapey-vibe fingernail-less first husband, JJ, she told Margene she might not love Bill, let it be know she still has sexy feelings for her old boss, that maybe she doesn’t believe in her faith, that she doesn’t believe her dad was the prophet, that third wife Margene is making $9,000 secret dollars a month on a then still-secret home shopping network. She may still secretly be on the pill and pretending to “try” to get preggo and that she too, loathes her dramatic Mormon homelife is in slow reveal. She also sometimes hides her secret teen daughter in birdseed box in the yard, but that not a real secret. 

Margene has revealed she meant to kiss her husband’s teen son, that she has feelings for him, that she lied about and let him lie about it (she cries in a plush mascot animal suit and runs off at this disclosure), that she has been making megabucks hawking bracelets on TV and not sharing them, the vastness of her sexual needs, and she also lies in a fake reveal to the viewers of her program about being a single mom. She did not disclose that she has seen Ben naked and also glanced at his boner when he was reaching the hot cocoa for her (needless TMI for any parent, surely).

Ben pretended to be in Idaho when he was hiding from his dad, and then told everyone his dad threw him out, even though all Bill suggested was that it was best he leave for a while, a while not being stipulated, and could have been a night or 45 minutes. During the course of the aftermath of that, Ben stomped angrily out of many rooms, including into a bathroom and out of an auditorium. Everyone yells WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME YOU SECRETLY CAST BEN OUT OF THE HOUSE?!, but not in unison. They take turns.

Bill, mainly, has only one and a half -–well, maybe two--secrets, aside from being a polygamist (as well as a now fake regular Mormon), and that’s that about 36 years ago, in his lost boy days, he beat a clerk for some Walkmans—which he revealed in a political debate and then walked off stage. His confession also sort of implied that did a bit of hustling in the park back in his day, which should be enough to keep him from being elected to Senate, but apparently, this batch of Republican voting Mormons were moved by his tenderoni display of humanity.

And still, no one is doing any boning except for the teen daughter who went from being awesome and college bound to having a throbbing desire to get married and procreate at 19.  She is now moving to Idaho, which seems like a fitting punishment.

Half a season down, half to go! Will the show reclaim its watchability OR will it continue to descend into a show where no one is getting laid, everyone is yelling and you hate everyone, including the children that don’t have any lines?

Jessica Hopper is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago and the author of The Girls' Guide To Rocking. She last wrote for This Recording about Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. 

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In Which Nature Is Lars Von Trier's Satanic Church

Antichrist 

by JESSICA HOPPER

Akin to Andrea Dworkin, the legendary radical feminist, Lars Von Trier sees the world in full masochistic flower; he refuses to look away from the relentless blunt force trauma of patriarchy.

Antichrist is not the most direct route or noble ways of illustrating it, and his illustration of the nature of women’s suffering—which in this instance is unrestrained and gruesome—has been understood as perpetuating or endorsing that suffering (he was awarded a special, created just for him prize for misogyny at Cannes), rather than bearing witness.

Much has been made of Antichrist’s plotlessness, which has been called perverse and inexplicable, with bits of symbolism and plot from which it is difficult to extract meaning even days after viewing. LVT has called it a dream film, images that haunted him in the deep of his depression, and whether intentioned or not, it’s a film about male hubris. Which might be part of the reason a lot of male critics don’t get it, or call it a horror film.

Women (see Taylor Swift, witch trials etc.) are told throughout their lives, by men--familial, institutional, strangers—that they know better than her. They know what’s best for her body or mind. That she is doing it wrong.

Men grow up with that privilege, that the world values and is interested in their opinion, that however inexpert it might be it counts as (right) knowledge. Their place in the world has conferred them a right of governance.

In Antichrist, following the accidental death of their son while they fucked in the other room (opening sequence, not a spoiler) psychologist He (Willem Dafoe) takes on his depressed wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as patient. 

Operating at cool, composed remove from her grieving hysteria, he prods her with analysis. “I know you better than any doctor can,” he tells her as he embarks into treating her, which she reluctantly begins to cooperate with. He is clinical and flat, whereas she wails and heaves and bashes her head on the toilet bowl. His interventions set up the film's rationality-versus-nature subtext.

Her nature is portrayed as human wildness—while she cannot heal herself, she consoles herself with fucking—which could be read as an attempt to connect with her good doctor husband, reel him back into peerage, into empathy and not authority. Fucking seems the only pleasure she is capable of, her only circumstance of power.

In order to make her confront her fears, the couple—identified only as He and She—head to their cabin, Eden, which may or may not double as hell. Once they arrive, He begins to become haunted by his own fears, by the irrational, by all that he cannot control—his wife, an oak tree, a talking fox with a Black Metal voice.

Werner Herzog’s description of the jungle in Burden of Dreams, could serve as Von Trier’s thesis for Eden, which Herzog calls a “curse” and suggests the only harmony in it is “The harmony of overwhelming and collective murder…We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery, overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order.”

Once at Eden, once She tells her husband she is cured, which is when we get the major paradigm shift—where both she and the film itself come loose. What follows his refusal to accept her pronouncement of wellness is, true to LVT form, a fairly untidy everyone-gets-what’s-coming-to-them—He, She, a too-squawky blackbird all get revolting star turns of their own. Her vengeance is brutal, and it’s not particularly gratifying to watch—this isn’t Lady Vengeance or Ms. 45.  

Much has been made (rightfully) of the his n’ hers genital mutilation—though watching what she inflicts on him, I was instantly reminded of introduction to bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Mean, Masculinity and Love: “Women all over the world want men to die so they can live.” So cowed by the life-threatening power of men, they see it as the only way out of their suffering.

In her attempts to untangle from her suffering She does herself in, much the same way; by cutting off her own clit, her resource for pleasure being her only consolation, she is rendering herself inconsolable, unfixable, untamable.

In the final chapter of the film, Von Trier asks us to suppose something about nature, which in the film is suggested to be “Satan’s Church”—a kind of equation, where nature = evil, nature = woman’s nature, women = naturally evil. It’s not a particularly steady equation, but it’s an exaggerated response to the equation which we live with every day: men = rational, rational = good, men = good.

Jessica Hopper is a writer living in Chicago and author of The Girls Guide To Rocking and blogs at tinyluckygenius. This is her first appearance on This Recording.

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"Migration" - Arve Henriksen (mp3)