1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 11: Fargo
I’ve lain or sat still the last three days. What little movement I’ve performed with the crutches has left my torso, arms, and legs feeling quite sore.
But on Friday I was able to work at IUSB, and this morning I attended church – thanks to Karin.
Soon, I’ll have a few more days off. Wednesday’s windchill will be in the negative thirties (Fahrenheit). I doubt the town will stay open; it closed down for similar weather five years ago.
I figured this would be a good time to review Fargo.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
As David once put it, it isn’t just that each scene in Fargo is good; it’s that each scene is great.
Each scene functions as a self-contained parable or proverb, a miniature reflection upon a great swath of human life.
Many scenes are quotable; one finds oneself applying them to real-life situations:
“Where is pancakes house.”
“Prowler needs a jump.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”
“We’re not a bank, Jerry.”
And my personal favorite, a sensible response to one character’s angry query, How do you split a car? With a f---ing chainsaw?:
“One of us pays the other for half.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Like the biblical parables, Fargo’s are played out against a particular folk background – in this case, that of wholesome, hardworking Minnesotans. It’s only the movie’s opening scene, a negotiation between criminals, that takes place in Fargo, North Dakota. My theory about the title is that it’s meant to suggest how perilously near the North Star State is to being infected with Dakotan lawlessness. (Think of a movie called Sodom but set in Jerusalem.)
Fargo is a noir in blinding white. Much of it takes place out of doors, along highways or in parking lots perpetually covered in snow. Many of the characters have smiles frozen upon their faces.
One of them, a car salesman, is trying to mask his inner desperation. He has committed fraud and covered it with more fraud. Now, he’s trying to avoid financial ruin by hiring two freakish lowlifes to kidnap his own wife.
After a few bullying words from the lowlifes, he knows it’s a mistake. But he’s too timid – and too desperate – to cancel the deal. (Later, when he tries to, it’s too late.)
A more conventional noir would have told the story just from the salesman’s perspective. Fargo delights in following the two hired kidnappers – an odd couple if there ever was one. They don’t just fail to trust each other; it’s as if they’ve been mismatched by the universe. (Much bleak humor comes of this.) Nor do the kidnappers collaborate well with the dismally cheery salesman who’s hired them.
What all three of these very different villains have in common is their utter ruthlessness, their disregard for others when their own skins are in the slightest peril. Also, their greed.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Each of the villains is vivid, even iconic. But the movie’s chief interest lies elsewhere.
The villains are important because they represent a magnetic pole of depravity. What the movie really wants to determine is whether ordinary, law-abiding people – the ones who aren’t yet thoroughly rotten – can resist the magnetism of that pole.
The question is like the one that troubles Abraham: how can Lot, or any man who lives so near to Sodom, remain righteous?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
One man who fails the righteousness test is an unnamed witness to the kidnappers’ malfeasance.
In a terrifying night-time scene, this witness is pursued down a country road. He drives his car into a ditch. He climbs out; he flees, stumbling, out into a dark, freezing field.
But he doesn’t get far. His pursuer shoots him dead.
Then, with horror, we realize that this victim has left behind a passenger in the car, trapped and defenseless. The man has abandoned her to save his own skin.
It’s all the worse because we don’t know these victims’ names. They could have been any driver, any passenger. Their anonymity makes them representative of the entire human race.
The driver’s selfishness and cowardice belong to every man.
In miniature, this scene retells the story of the car salesman, who has given little thought to sacrificing his own wife.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Two other characters are tested who are not initially beyond the pale.
The first is the car salesman’s father-in-law: a self-made rich man. It’s his money that the car salesman wishes to obtain through the kidnapping of his wife.
This rich old cuss has long kept his daughter’s husband under his thumb. Unlike the car salesman, he isn’t a coward. He’s stately: he expects lesser beings to submit to him.
Nor are his demands unreasonable: he’s the sort of man who relies upon and invokes the law.
But when the time comes to ransom his daughter, will he be willing to part with his money?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The second character is the law. Played by Frances McDormand, she is Marge Gunderson, small-town police chief, pregnant wife of Norm Gunderson (John Carroll Lynch). Marge is capable and good. But, I believe, this movie is the story of her temptation, though it is not highlighted as such.
It’s hinted that Marge is becoming a bit of a celebrity. Suddenly, she’s on TV discussing the aforementioned murders. People in the Twin Cities notice her. One of them, Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), an old schoolmate, calls her up in the middle of the night. Rather than dismiss him, she is flattered.
She travels to the Twin Cities – ostensibly on police business, but also to have a date with Mike.
Viewers have complained about this subplot. None of the parties comes out of it looking especially good. And what has it to do with the crime?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Roger Ebert suggests that when Marge catches Mike in a lie, she’s able to see that the car salesman also has been lying to her, which allows her to solve the case. I don’t disagree, but the more important question is why Marge, normally so shrewd, has agreed to meet Mike at all. Is she merely nostalgic for her schooldays? Is she romantically interested in her old friend? Is she dissatisfied with her unglamorous husband, who stays at home and paints ducks for postage stamps?
For that matter, as far as the movie is concerned, why is Marge married? Is it just to flesh out her character a bit, in the grand tradition of movie cops with pathetic spouses? Or is there a more interesting reason?
I believe that like Abraham, the movie is surveying the land for one righteous person. And so Marge, the likeliest candidate, is measured against the car salesman, the paradigm of depravity.
And what was that salesman’s most grievous sin? He betrayed his spouse.
(Lot also abandoned his wife, not even looking back when she was turned into a pillar of salt.)
To remain righteous, Marge must refrain from betraying her husband; but for this to count in her favor, she must be tested.
This choice of Marge’s is what gives the movie its thematic tension and unity. The other major characters, more or less predictably, get pulled toward destruction. Marge has the capability to resist; but she, too, must go through her temptation episode.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’ve long thought that the Mike Yanagita scenes are at the movie’s heart, but I haven’t been able to articulate why; plot-wise, they’re tangential. On this latest viewing, I think I’ve figured out the right connection. What matters isn’t what Marge comes to realize about the car salesman through her interaction with Mike Yanagita. What matters is what she realizes about herself.
Why, then, has she been tested with such a sorry carrot as Mike Yanagita? He’d seem easy to resist.
The answer is that this is in the nature of temptation: the sorry prize only seems sorry after depravity is recognized for what it is.
But on Friday I was able to work at IUSB, and this morning I attended church – thanks to Karin.
Soon, I’ll have a few more days off. Wednesday’s windchill will be in the negative thirties (Fahrenheit). I doubt the town will stay open; it closed down for similar weather five years ago.
I figured this would be a good time to review Fargo.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
As David once put it, it isn’t just that each scene in Fargo is good; it’s that each scene is great.
Each scene functions as a self-contained parable or proverb, a miniature reflection upon a great swath of human life.
Many scenes are quotable; one finds oneself applying them to real-life situations:
“Where is pancakes house.”
“Prowler needs a jump.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”
“We’re not a bank, Jerry.”
And my personal favorite, a sensible response to one character’s angry query, How do you split a car? With a f---ing chainsaw?:
“One of us pays the other for half.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Like the biblical parables, Fargo’s are played out against a particular folk background – in this case, that of wholesome, hardworking Minnesotans. It’s only the movie’s opening scene, a negotiation between criminals, that takes place in Fargo, North Dakota. My theory about the title is that it’s meant to suggest how perilously near the North Star State is to being infected with Dakotan lawlessness. (Think of a movie called Sodom but set in Jerusalem.)
Fargo is a noir in blinding white. Much of it takes place out of doors, along highways or in parking lots perpetually covered in snow. Many of the characters have smiles frozen upon their faces.
One of them, a car salesman, is trying to mask his inner desperation. He has committed fraud and covered it with more fraud. Now, he’s trying to avoid financial ruin by hiring two freakish lowlifes to kidnap his own wife.
After a few bullying words from the lowlifes, he knows it’s a mistake. But he’s too timid – and too desperate – to cancel the deal. (Later, when he tries to, it’s too late.)
A more conventional noir would have told the story just from the salesman’s perspective. Fargo delights in following the two hired kidnappers – an odd couple if there ever was one. They don’t just fail to trust each other; it’s as if they’ve been mismatched by the universe. (Much bleak humor comes of this.) Nor do the kidnappers collaborate well with the dismally cheery salesman who’s hired them.
What all three of these very different villains have in common is their utter ruthlessness, their disregard for others when their own skins are in the slightest peril. Also, their greed.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Each of the villains is vivid, even iconic. But the movie’s chief interest lies elsewhere.
The villains are important because they represent a magnetic pole of depravity. What the movie really wants to determine is whether ordinary, law-abiding people – the ones who aren’t yet thoroughly rotten – can resist the magnetism of that pole.
The question is like the one that troubles Abraham: how can Lot, or any man who lives so near to Sodom, remain righteous?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
One man who fails the righteousness test is an unnamed witness to the kidnappers’ malfeasance.
In a terrifying night-time scene, this witness is pursued down a country road. He drives his car into a ditch. He climbs out; he flees, stumbling, out into a dark, freezing field.
But he doesn’t get far. His pursuer shoots him dead.
Then, with horror, we realize that this victim has left behind a passenger in the car, trapped and defenseless. The man has abandoned her to save his own skin.
It’s all the worse because we don’t know these victims’ names. They could have been any driver, any passenger. Their anonymity makes them representative of the entire human race.
The driver’s selfishness and cowardice belong to every man.
In miniature, this scene retells the story of the car salesman, who has given little thought to sacrificing his own wife.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Two other characters are tested who are not initially beyond the pale.
The first is the car salesman’s father-in-law: a self-made rich man. It’s his money that the car salesman wishes to obtain through the kidnapping of his wife.
This rich old cuss has long kept his daughter’s husband under his thumb. Unlike the car salesman, he isn’t a coward. He’s stately: he expects lesser beings to submit to him.
Nor are his demands unreasonable: he’s the sort of man who relies upon and invokes the law.
But when the time comes to ransom his daughter, will he be willing to part with his money?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The second character is the law. Played by Frances McDormand, she is Marge Gunderson, small-town police chief, pregnant wife of Norm Gunderson (John Carroll Lynch). Marge is capable and good. But, I believe, this movie is the story of her temptation, though it is not highlighted as such.
It’s hinted that Marge is becoming a bit of a celebrity. Suddenly, she’s on TV discussing the aforementioned murders. People in the Twin Cities notice her. One of them, Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), an old schoolmate, calls her up in the middle of the night. Rather than dismiss him, she is flattered.
She travels to the Twin Cities – ostensibly on police business, but also to have a date with Mike.
Viewers have complained about this subplot. None of the parties comes out of it looking especially good. And what has it to do with the crime?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Roger Ebert suggests that when Marge catches Mike in a lie, she’s able to see that the car salesman also has been lying to her, which allows her to solve the case. I don’t disagree, but the more important question is why Marge, normally so shrewd, has agreed to meet Mike at all. Is she merely nostalgic for her schooldays? Is she romantically interested in her old friend? Is she dissatisfied with her unglamorous husband, who stays at home and paints ducks for postage stamps?
For that matter, as far as the movie is concerned, why is Marge married? Is it just to flesh out her character a bit, in the grand tradition of movie cops with pathetic spouses? Or is there a more interesting reason?
I believe that like Abraham, the movie is surveying the land for one righteous person. And so Marge, the likeliest candidate, is measured against the car salesman, the paradigm of depravity.
And what was that salesman’s most grievous sin? He betrayed his spouse.
(Lot also abandoned his wife, not even looking back when she was turned into a pillar of salt.)
To remain righteous, Marge must refrain from betraying her husband; but for this to count in her favor, she must be tested.
This choice of Marge’s is what gives the movie its thematic tension and unity. The other major characters, more or less predictably, get pulled toward destruction. Marge has the capability to resist; but she, too, must go through her temptation episode.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’ve long thought that the Mike Yanagita scenes are at the movie’s heart, but I haven’t been able to articulate why; plot-wise, they’re tangential. On this latest viewing, I think I’ve figured out the right connection. What matters isn’t what Marge comes to realize about the car salesman through her interaction with Mike Yanagita. What matters is what she realizes about herself.
Why, then, has she been tested with such a sorry carrot as Mike Yanagita? He’d seem easy to resist.
The answer is that this is in the nature of temptation: the sorry prize only seems sorry after depravity is recognized for what it is.