Andrea Moore-Emmett, for nine years a writer at the Salt Lake City Weekly, is the author of 2004's God's Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Mormon and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18 Women Who Escaped (Pince-Nez Press, $16.95). In an e-mail exchange with the Las Vegas Weekly, she took on HBO's new series about contemporary polygamy, Big Love.
Your objection to Big Love?
I wrote my book to educate people as to what has been going on due to polygamy. So the fact that Big Love has caused people to look at the issue and want to know more is a good thing—and hopefully their wanting to know more will lead them to my book. I've seen so much abuse, and any depiction that makes it look warm and fuzzy irritates me, but it's difficult for me to tell how Big Love is actually coming across to people who know very little about polygamy. I'm too close to the subject to know if the show actually does come off warm and fuzzy or as sick and damaging as I know it to be.
Are there aspects of abuse—sexual, physical, emotional, other—the show is tiptoeing around?
Yes, the show is absolutely tiptoeing around the sexual, physical, emotional and all other abuses which are endemic in polygamy. The writers show familial conflict in a typical manner, except it's in triplicate, with some expected, occasional jealousy. In a true depiction, religious fanaticism is used by the male to rule and maintain control over the women and children, who have no rights. Women and children are property and must submit to the man, or any man, because men hold the priesthood. Violence is seen as a strength. There is no such thing as rape. If anyone complains, threats of eternal damnation hover over them. At worst, they can be threatened with blood atonement. At best, they are told any sign of unhappiness is a sign that Satan or evil spirits have entered them.
What else is Big Love leaving out?
They seem to take great pains to get many details factual. It has amazed me, really. Then in some other instances, they get things so incredibly wrong. The most glaring of all is that they leave out how much religion plays a part in why these characters are living polygamy and how they shut down the cognitive dissonance they live with on a day-to-day basis. That is a huge, gaping hole. And the writers get it wrong that mainstream Utah Mormons persecute polygamists. Nearly every Mormon in Utah is either related to a polygamist, has hired a polygamist, has them for neighbors or is a polygamist wanna-be. The polygamists are defended and left alone, for the most part. The only persecution is in their paranoid minds, which goes a long way for keeping groups/families very cohesive, in an "us against them" mentality.
Is it Big Love's responsibility, as a work of entertainment fiction, to truthfully depict polygamy? Or should it be allowed to use and portray only those elements that serve its narrative ends?
Obviously those involved with this show know the subject of polygamy has a very voyeuristic element to it. This is entertainment that translates into ratings, which is the bottom line for HBO. I never expected it to be socially responsible, and I don't advocate censorship, so when you say "should it be allowed," my reaction is "of course." And though I don't expect them to be socially responsible, I do hope the writers will not make this simply a made-for-male fantasy. I cringe that more harm could be done to any more women and children because even one guy out there decided he wants the Big Love life.
"Should it be allowed" was loose phrasing on my part; I meant it more in a creative-responsibility sense than a legal/censorship one.
Oh, okay. Do they have a creative responsibility? I don't know of any TV executives who take an oath to "do no harm," such as the Hippocratic oath that doctors take. From where I sit, if this show "normalizes" polygamy as far as Bill and his wives—independent polygamists—are concerned, then the show's creators have been an instrument in perpetrating more harm. So be it. A sitcom is not a public-service announcement. And, hopefully, viewers realize it's not a documentary.