Big Love and the Suburbs
Susan Sontag once described three cultural sensibilities: high culture (the aesthetic of modernism, defined most of all by its seriousness and moralism); avant-gardism (including modernism but of the dystopian type; relishing unresolvable matters; preoccupied not with harmonies but with contradictions; attentive to the tension between morality and aesthetics; think Kafka); and finally camp.
Historically the scourge of the traditional Left, camp cultures emerge when radical alternatives languish. According to Sontag, camp embraces artifice, exaggeration, androgyny, things being what they are not, and life as theater. Camp is detached and disengaged. It relishes everything aesthetic and everything as aesthetic; style over content; aesthetics over morality; irony over tragedy.
Camp, she went on to say, is dandyism for mass culture, and while it is very unlike high culture seriousness, it is nevertheless ‘part of the history of snob taste’, indebted to what she called a certain bourgeois psychopathology. It is paradoxically serious but cannot be taken, nor can it take itself, too seriously; it is, in other words, not kidding and not meaning to be funny (only the worst camp is deliberately so) but is naively, in spite of itself, sort of joking.
Camp explains a lot. From almost everything about the ‘seventies to almost everything from That Seventies Show; from New Wave to Old Navy; from Ugly Betty to Hello Kitty; from The Riches to Stitch-n Bitch to tattooed Martha Stewart fans bitching and stitching.
I’m interested in the way so much ironic domesticity and hipsterized banality has become, not so long after Sontag’s passing, one of the most prolific idioms of popular culture, so much so that the sense of divergence that ‘camp’ once suggested no longer applies.
But that doesn’t mean that camp has not become an important and effective vehicle for cultural self-reflection. I believe it has. And as part of my series on dwelling I’d like to explore the campy sensibilities of an HBO television show that has for a few years now exposed the undersides of suburban life.
Big Love features the Henricksons, a charming, modern polygamist family living in suburban Salt Lake City. Bill Henrickson was raised on a rural polygamist compound (Juniper Creek), but has moved with his three wives – Barb, Nicki, and Margene – to an all-American neighborhood, purchasing three adjacent homes that share a common backyard.
The predicament for the Henrickson’s is not primarily intra-familial (they are a relatively well-adjusted family whose internal problems are not so different from anyone else’s). It is instead the difficulties that arise for them as they fake it in the suburbs.
The show’s audacious attempt to garner empathy for something otherwise reprehensible relies firstly on its ability to familiarize what is strange by revealing similarities between the difficulties the Henricksons face and those that monogamous families face. More importantly, the show also implies that polygamy needs to be seen as a particular reaction to American decadence, moral hypocrisy, infidelity, and obsession with private life.
Maybe this effort at cultural translation is too tenuous. But what the standard critique of polygamy (as excessively patriarchal) ignores is the way plural marriage systems also preserve, in a distorted way, fantasies of community life. Could we not regard this brand of religious fundamentalism as the return of repressed communalism within the heart of consumer/individualist society, where, after all (as Engels showed), monogamy has more to do with private property than with women’s rights?
Communal life strives after an elusive ideal on the compound in Big Love, and, since that striving (predictably) produces excesses of power and authority, communal life in Big Love gets campy and makes a go of it in the suburbs.
The Henrickson’s discomfort in the tidy domesticity of the suburb, and their commitment to a principle that is no longer viable in its own setting, produces a kind of internal distance or split within their enactment of Americana. This distance is, in the first place, the source of all camp. And secondly it subtly taps into the underlying unease of modern American dwelling cultures.
The stark similarity of Big Love’s set (with its artificial-looking suburban street) to those of shows like Desperate Housewives and The Riches testifies to the similarities of their situations. These are stories about the contradictions of private life, about how hard it is to pull it off, about faking it.
The Riches shares nearly the same premise with Big Love: travelers (gypsies) leave a once-idyllic compound wrought with problems of authority and power and, in search of autonomy and to preserve their family bond, concoct a plan to fake it among the lattes and lattice-work of a wealthy gated tract development.
However, unlike Desperate Housewives and other shows, The Riches and Big Love introduce a much more interesting and paradoxical twist: both feature families grounded in principles defined above all by some form of value placed on community, and both families are trying to feign it in a world where individualism is, as Robert Bellah used to say, the ‘first language’ of Americans.
Look, sure, one has to question polygamy as a perverted and patriarchal brand of community. The merit of Big Love is its refusal to suppress entirely the problematic aspects of polygamy even for a family like the Henrickson’s with so many (unrealistically) common characteristics of status quo family life.
But the great irony of the show is that while viewers can be expected to regard polygamy as the transgression of a basic injunction that has to do with fidelity, the Henrickson’s are driven most of all by their all-encompassing sense of loyalty. They epitomize commitment, and they have opted to persevere in a world fundamentally opposed to their piety.
They are going to fake it, but at least in the suburbs they can retain the semblance of autonomy. The trick of course (and this is what both Big Love and The Riches have built their series on) will be for them not to become too at home in their home, to maintain a critical distance between the world they now inhabit and the values they espouse.
Big Love and The Riches work, I think, not because they depict bad families trying to get by in a good world, but because they depict families whose commitments to something other than phony individualism necessitates in them various contradictions, distortions, and perversions.
These are not families that can be at home in the institutions that claim to make their values substantial, nor can they be at home in the society that is hostile to them. Their inabilities to live seamlessly in compounds and suburbs alike is a welcome self-critique of the narrow options for dwelling that dominate the American landscape today.
Don’t just scratch the surface: Big Love – The Complete First Two Seasons
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