The Psychic Smear of Big Love - Page 2

Normal means normal. Excepting his three wives he’s Everyman.

We don’t fear Bill Henrikson (Bill Paxton, whose paterfamilias figure is played with such bumptious rigor that he consistently displays pure acting genius). Bill is often befuddled, often dangerous: a devout businessman and the often put upon center of HBO’s unnerving and ethically frenzied Big Love, quite possibly the most morally nuanced and righteously vexed show ever made for (pay) television. It’s more sinister than the pay show all others will be compared to, The Sopranos (although The Wire remains premium cable’s best work).

Big Love, set in sun-drenched suburban Utah (note: the banality of evil) is far more ethically off-kilter than the drab and dreary toll roads and wasted urban landscape Tony Soprano navigated. Tony, although at war with himself, was in the end a mobster. Lives had to be taken.

Henrikson owns a budding chain of home and garden stores — a polygamist’s vision of Lowe’s — in a burnished, shellacked Salt Lake City. Tony’s New Jersey suggests something perpetually sinister, while Bill’s home looks as though it just came out of the New Suburbanite catalog, all sun-splash and fences and backyard pools with rubber children’s toys afloat. The one common bond between Tony and Bill is the strongest imaginable — family. They do what they do for their families. And Bill’s is the more interesting by a long shot.

Watching Big Love leaves a psychic smear that simply doesn’t wash out, even with a shot of Jack Daniels and a good night’s sleep; viewing the show, you’re left with a kind of religio-intellectual hangover: who’s winning this war in the weeds, good or evil? Big Love and its subtle creepiness, its whittled-to-a-fine-point ambiguities, will vex you. It asks questions and drops multiple answers that are both complex and simple: good and evil and family and responsibility and their elaborate intersections have seldom been imbued with such directness on the one hand, and murkiness on the other.

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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