Scattered thoughts on Under the Banner of Heaven
The new Hulu series on Mormon fundamentalism and the Lafferty murders is just ok (so far)
Mormon and exMormon Twitter has been buzzing lately over the new Hulu show, Under the Banner of Heaven. For those who don’t know me, I was raised Mormon, no longer believe or practice, but still have an affection for the people and culture and identify with it in a heritage/ethnic way. And I’ve still got that classically Mormon trait of being too interested in how the general public perceives Mormonism, so despite having zero interest in “true crime” I had to watch this thing. What follows are some unstructured thoughts on the first two episodes:
Much of the dialogue is ham-fisted and corny, which Twitter has made no shortage of jokes about, but the negative reaction I’ve seen here is driven by the fact that Mormons/exMormons are a little embarrassed to admit that Mormons are big cornballs! It’s true! We didn’t grow up irony-pilled like our East Coast friends, we’re uncool, earnest, mountain folk.
The show loves to do that annoying thing where the characters explain things to each other that obviously both of them would expect the other to already know. Mormons are not nearly so explicit with each other, and instead rely on subtle and unspoken ways of signaling faithfulness or deviance without needing to spoil the plausible deniability granted by ambiguous social signals. Of course this “unwritten order of things”, as a prominent Mormon leader once called it, would be completely illegible to a general audience because the unwritten order exists to distinguish the insider from the outsider. It’s illegible by design!
A Mormon crime film that captures the unwritten order quite well is Richard Dutcher’s Brigham City. But unfortunately, as I wrote in my brief Letterboxd review, “the most interesting moments are unintelligible to those without a prior knowledge of Mormon theology and cultural symbols, despite its best effort to explain itself to non-Mormons. It's too gritty and spiritually ambiguous for the the only audience who could understand it.”
The flashbacks to Mormonism’s founding are played in a uniformly sinister tone. While this show is about the (very real!) dark side of Mormonism, depicting every single element as ominous leaves the viewer wondering what about Mormonism was ever appealing to anyone and thereby misses a massive part of why this story is so fascinating and horrifying in the first place.
More generally, I find the show’s perspective on religion to be reductive and flattering to the secular, urban, progressive who thinks that religion is at best the source of regressive politics for backwards rubes, and at worst a murderous oppressive system of control. But that attitude leaves one incapable of asking more interesting questions like: how does a vital source of community, meaning, and transcendence drive people to do evil things? What are the dangers of a belief in one’s own righteousness? What violence and cruelty might my own beliefs justify?
Brenda is easily the most interesting character, and Daisy Edgar-Jones absolutely nails the vibe of the young Mormon women I grew up with. Unfortunately the way some of the men treat her is also more accurate than I would like to admit. It’s a repressive religion, even today.