The Psychic Smear of Big Love

The Devil is in the details, we all know that, but so too is God: it’s their pact and proposition that their battle be waged in the weeds or muck, as it were. Yet, most of us live wandering among shifting and nearly-opaque clouds of illusion or unknowing or, worse, of uncaring. We can’t see the trees for the forest. That is often our undoing. But it is also what makes us, more or less, civilized. For most of us, heaven and hell are largely abstract; that is our salvation.

Certitude is frightening. Those who truly believe that good and evil fight a nuanced and an inconspicuous battle are the very ones we need to be wary of. Belief and non-belief, if they are held with conviction, are dangerous to the rest of us: to those of us who are trying to maneuver through life the best we can, aiming for equilibrium among love and hate; responsibility and selfishness — hoping for a kind of ethical “break-even.” We hurt each other, we help each other. We hope somehow we’ll break slightly better than even and call it a life.

Enter Bill Henrikson, our protagonist, a man certain and unrelenting in his belief in the Celestial Kingdom awaiting him and his wives, all three of them, and especially his growing brood. But he’s also just as certain he must live in his grown-up desegregated world and not the Juniper Creek polygamist compound of his youth, where plural marriage insists, if it chooses, that, say, a fourteen-year old girl wed a 60-or 70-year-old man.

For Bill, the knowledge and hatred of his past and his hopes for the future essentially cancel each other out. He’s like the rest of us, albeit with a unique burden; he’s trying to make ends meet. And he’s trying to prosper, all while hiding the polygamist secret of his life and his past.

Bill can be frightening at times, and ruthless, but just as often he’s the everyman husband/father: confused, clueless, and fearlessly uncertain. He’s amiable, goofy, and yet not to be trifled with. Bill, a practical ideologue, understands the terms of the almighty struggle between saints and sinners. Both or either would destroy his abiding goal. Without any trace of irony, here is what Bill wants: a normal life with his three wives and their multiple children, with all the trappings of normalcy — nothing more, nothing less. (Note: this past season Bill actually took a fourth wife, but that was momentary, although who knows if the lusty Ana won’t return next season?)

Article Author: Stephen Foster

Stephen Foster (no relation to the composer) works in the investment business to pay the bills, but writes about the arts and popular culture because that's what he loves. He is the publisher and managing editor of www.culturecrank.com.

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