By Dan Peterson in DanPeterson.Blog — Jun 22, 2022

Maybe it improved after this?

Neuschwanstein Castle was designed and built on a romantic pseudo-medieval Wagnerian theme by the “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria. And, somehow, a fairy tale castle seems a perfect illustration for this blog entry.

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Although I had his kind permission to share this here already a while ago, I’m not sure whether I’ve done already done so or not. (I have just a few minutes to spare, and no time to check.) So here is Jim Bennett’s response to the first episode of the FX/Hulu miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven — which, I understand, has now concluded its run. I have two more of his entries to share, and will do so fairly soon:

Sorry, folks. “Under the Banner of Heaven” is unwatchably bad.

Right from the outset, we have problems. The first thing we see are Garfield’s daughters wearing Little House on the Prairie dresses, suggesting a level of familial fundamentalism that is foreign to mainstream Mormons. Immediately, it’s clear that we’re going to see a lot of lazy stereotypes that don’t match the lived experience of those on the inside. Yes, there is a throwaway line that these are “costumes,” but it’s hard to believe that the obvious association with modern polygamist couture is unintentional. When we see the Laffertys at a picnic later in the episode, the young girls and even adult women are similarly attired, reinforcing the deliberate choice to paint Mormons as weirder than we actually are.

In fact, all the Mormon cultural references are weird and jarring, even the small ones. When Garfield says that he’s going to take the lead on the investigation and speak to the suspect “Mormon to Mormon,” he says it with the confidence of someone who assumes this is a normal thing for a Mormon to say. As an active Mormon for 53+ years, I can confidently say that it really isn’t, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. Yes, Garfield speaks his tin-eared dialogue with grace and conviction, but when he’s forced to deliver clunkers like “the Church vigorously discourages beards,” it’s not really his fault that none of it rings true. And when he bursts into the interrogation room quoting the Doctrine and Covenants from memory and barking questions about covenants and altars and temple recommends, it finally shifts from awkward to laughable.

Then we get a flashback where Brenda Lafferty talks about how much our Savior hates Democrats and how she can’t go to the ungodly cities of New York and Chicago and how Jesus wants her at BYU in Salt Lake City, despite the fact that BYU isn’t in Salt Lake City. At this point, the Simpsons episode where Bart gets married in Utah got more things right than this show does. There’s absolutely no way Church members are going to see themselves in this increasingly ludicrous narrative.

And it just doesn’t let up. “Heavenly Father knows you can’t turn an upside down cake to save your life,” Garfield tells his wife. Who talks like that? In or out of the Church? The Attack of the Clones monologue about the evils of sand sounds almost Shakespearean in comparison. In the next flashback, Brenda meets her future in-laws [who] immediately tell her that “gossip is the devil’s playground” and she responds by saying “President Kimball said ‘stand ye in holy places,’ and BYU is a far better fit for those who want to live gospel standards.” It’s as if they lifted all the dialogue from New Era MormonAds.

The problems here, then, have little or nothing to do with the Church. It isn’t just that these characters aren’t authentic Mormons; they’re not authentic human beings. It’s impossible to care about what happens to these stilted cardboard cutouts. No human being has ever asked another human being “Do you all abide by the Word of Wisdom at BYU?” In fact, no human being has used the word “abide” in casual conversation since 1896. Given that Brenda Lafferty was a very real person, it’s sad that her death is being used as agitprop in a weirdly disturbing melodrama that is entirely disconnected from reality.

We get a bizarre lemonade party Book of Mormon reading, and then Brenda causes a scandal for leaving the womenfolk at the lemonade stand to do unwomanly manual labor. Did someone decide that the best way to research Mormon social gatherings was to watch an Amish barn raising? And why couldn’t they be bothered to get simple details right? When Ammon Lafferty announces that he’s going to serve a senior mission for two years, every member of the Church who served a mission in the 1980s knows that senior missions back then were only 18 months long. Not that it matters in terms of the plot, but it matters if they’re trying to convince me that my church is inherently violent and terrible. Why should I take them seriously when they couldn’t be bothered to do even the most casual research to figure out how my church actually works?

The first Joseph Smith flashback makes no sense at all. It shows a prepubescent Joseph wooing a prepubescent Emma with tales of his vision of God, strongly implying that he’s making it up to impress her. But Joseph didn’t meet Emma until he was 19, five years after the first vision was supposed to have taken place. That’s not a meaningless detail like the length of a senior mission. It’s a significant misrepresentation that demonstrates how fast and loose they’re willing to play with the historical record. This series has exhausted all claims to credibility in its first episode.