Fargo (1996) presents itself as a true crime story based on incidents that occurred in Minnesota in 1987. As such, the narrative recounts events set in motion by car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), whose staged kidnapping of his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrud) has unintended and ultimately horrific results. To carry out the fake kidnapping Jerry hires two low-life criminals, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), who grab Jean and hold her captive in a backwoods cabin while Jerry negotiates with his wealthy father-in-law, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), for a $1 million ransom. As always in the Coens’ fictional universe, something can and does go very wrong. En route to their hide-out, the kidnappers are stopped by a state trooper, whom Carl attempts to bribe. When the policeman refuses the bribe and demands to inspect their vehicle, Gaear murders him in cold blood and then pursues and shoots down two passers-by who had witnessed his crime. Now, instead of a fake kidnapping where no one would come to harm, Jerry is suddenly, absurdly an accomplice to a triple homicide. The local police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is called in to investigate. As the body count increases to include the senseless deaths of Jean and her father, Marge’s investigations begin to reveal a horror beyond her comprehension. How could such things happen in the quiet little town of Brainerd, Minnesota, in the heart of the heartland?
For the most part, the Coen brothers’ earlier films had garnered considerable critical acclaim, but were largely box-office disappointments. Then came Fargo, the break-out film that catapulted the Coen brothers into the industry mainstream, grossing more than $25 million in the US alone and establishing them as prominent American filmmakers. The brothers were somewhat mystified by its box-office success. According to Joel, ‘Fargo was the final straw in trying to figure out why certain things are popular and others aren’t. Its success was a complete surprise to us’ (Mottram 2000: 115). The Coens’ dark comedy had apparently struck a chord with reviewers; nearly everyone had something good to say about Fargo. Roger Ebert, not always an ardent admirer, called Fargo ‘one of the best films I’ve ever seen’. Many thought that despite its grim story, the film was, as Leonard Klady wrote in Variety, ‘strikingly mature’. Geoff Brown of the Times praised it for its warmth and humanity, writing: ‘No previous film from the Coen brothers has contained such human characters.’ Philip French observed that Fargo ‘essentially reworks their film noir Blood Simple, but with greater depth of character and a new respect for human decency’. Tom Shone of the Sunday Times wrote: ‘Far from being their coldest film, it’s Blood Simple with snow on top but with a few warm gusts of genuine feeling down below.’ Even Christopher Tookey, who had disliked the Coens’ previous movies, was pleasantly surprised by what he took to be the film’s ‘morality’, writing: ‘This is the Coens’ most generous-spirited effort yet.’ Comparing Fargo with similar contemporary crime dramas, Tookey lamented that the film is, regrettably, ‘out of tune with our times’ by virtue of its ‘civilised detachment and unpretentious moral rectitude’ – words, one imagines, the Coen brothers never expected to hear as a description of their movies.
In addition to its generous reception by critical commentators, Fargo received more nominations and awards than any previous Coen brothers movie, including seven Academy Award nominations, for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress (Frances McDormand), Best Supporting Actor (William H. Macy), Best Cinematography and Best Editing; and winning Academy Awards for Best Actress (McDormand) and Best Original Screenplay. At the Cannes Film Festival Joel Coen was named Best Director, and the New York Film Critics’ Circle also honoured him with Best Director, as well as Best Film. Not surprisingly, Fargo also swept the Independent Spirit Awards that year, walking away with top honours for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Macy), Best Actress (McDormand) and Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins).
True Crime Fiction
The claim that Fargo is based on a ‘true story’ bears some examination. The title card tells the audience that the story is based on real events that took place in Minnesota in 1987, but as the Coens subsequently admitted, this was a ploy misleading viewers to believe that the story is based on historical fact. ‘If they’re told up front that it’s true,’ says Joel, ‘the audience gives you permission to do things that they might not if they’re essentially coming in expecting to watch a fictive thriller’ (Allen 2006: 81). ‘Generally speaking,’ says Joel, ‘the movie is based on a real event, but the details of the story and the characters are invented. It didn’t interest us to make a documentary film, and we undertook no research on the nature or details of the murders. But, by telling the public that we took our inspiration from reality, we knew they wouldn’t see the movie as just an ordinary thriller’ (Allen 2006: 72). As it turns out, the Coens were playing a con game with their audience. When first released, the brothers avoided answering direct questions about the story’s veracity. Asked, for example where, exactly, the crimes took place, Ethan would only say: ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’ (Robson 2003: 163). When the questioning persisted, the Coens eventually came clean and confessed that the events depicted in the movie were mostly based on hear-say: ‘We heard about it through a friend who lived near to where the drama took place in Minnesota,’ says Ethan (Allen 2006: 72). Finally, the whole truth about the ‘true story’ was disclosed: ‘Not being acquainted with any true crimes that seemed sufficiently compelling,’ Ethan admits, ‘we made up our own “true crime” story’ (Mitchell 2000).
Fargo’s false claim to truth finds its visual equivalent in the statue of legendary giant woodsman Paul Bunyan, which appears intermittently to remind us that the movie, like the legend, is actually a ‘tall tale’ and not the true story it pretends to be. Indeed, many of Fargo’s characters are tellers of tall tales. Jerry Lundegaard is the biggest liar, deceiving family and friends while spinning a string of falsehoods with fatal outcomes. Carl Showalter is also given to tall tales. He lies about the amount of the ransom money and pays for it under the blade of Gaear Grimsrud, an ‘axe man’ whom other characters refer to as a ‘big fella’. Even minor characters are prolific liars, like Mike Yanagita (Mike Parks), Marge’s pathetic suitor who claims to be married to an old high school friend but in reality (as we later find out) is unmarried and living at home with his parents.
The pretence of truth calls for realistic presentation. In this regard, Fargo is a significant departure from the Coens’ previous films, much criticized for their lack of ‘realism’. According to Joel, after the excessively stylised artificiality of The Hudsucker Proxy they ‘wanted to make a new start from a stylistic point of view, to make something radically different from our previous movies’ (Allen 2006: 75). Elaborating, Joel explains: ‘What was interesting to us in the first place about doing this movie was the fact that from every point of view, stylistically, the architecture of the narrative, the way the characters came across, it was an attempt to do something very far from what we’d done before. It’s more naturalistic generally in terms of everything: unembellished sets, real locations’ (Allen 2006: 81). It helped that the brothers grew up in Minnesota, near Minneapolis, and thus had the advantage of being familiar with the region and its inhabitants, though clearly they don’t identify culturally with Minnesotans and the culture of ‘Minnesota Nice’, characterised by a humble and unpretentious sincerity that could not be farther from the Coens’ hip irony.
Compared with their previous films, Fargo lacks the flashy visual style usually associated with the Coens. There are no complicated tracking shots (as in Blood Simple), no kinetic camera movements (as in Raising Arizona) and no elaborate, ostentatious visual effects (as in The Hudsucker Proxy). Instead, in keeping with the story, Fargo affects a streamlined semi-documentary visual style. ‘In Fargo,’ Joel explains, ‘we attempted a very different stylistic approach, tackling the subject in a very dry manner. We also wanted the camera to tell the story as an observer’ (Allen 2006: 73). Thus the Coens’ cinematographer Roger Deakins drew on his earlier work in documentary films to create a distanced, more objective visual approach. To emphasise the static bleakness of the landscape in this region, camera movements were kept to a minimum. Intentionally bland locations were for chosen for much of the action, a challenge for Deakins, who remarks on the difficulty of creating an image that treads a fine line between bland and boring. ‘In fact,’ Deakins reports, ‘we chose some of the locations because they were particularly bland. Both the designer [Rick Heinrichs] and I would say, “Well, that’s really nothing”’ (Probst 1996). Interiors were likewise selected for their bland appeal: Jerry’s middle-class suburban home, his workplace at the car dealership, the restaurants and coffee shops where characters meet – all were chosen to convey a sense of the ordinary. Here Joel recalls earlier experiences in Minnesota, while raising money for Blood Simple: ‘I remember having meetings with these hardened businessmen who would hang out in the local coffee shop and then put their parkas and galoshes on and slog out into this Siberian landscape’ (Fuller 1996). Ethan concurs, describing Minnesota in winter as a ‘bleak windswept tundra, resembling Siberia, except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee’s restaurants’ (Coen and Coen 1996: x).
In the vast empty expanses of the northern Mid-West they found what they most wanted: ‘a covered sky, no direct sunlight, no line on the horizon, and a light that was neutral, diffused […] These landscapes were really dramatic and oppressive. There were no mountains, no forests, only flat, desolate stretches of land. It’s just what we wanted to convey on the screen’ (Allen 2006: 79). But unexpectedly, the snow-covered setting, the low wintry ceiling with no horizon where the line between sky and land is blurred, creates an almost abstract visual impression. ‘Curiously,’ says Joel, ‘starting from real events, we’ve arrived at another form of “stylization”’ (Allen 2006: 75). The abstract quality of this indeterminate landscape is introduced in the opening credits sequence where, against the backdrop of an all-enveloping blizzard whiteout, Jerry drives toward the city of Fargo towing the Cutlass Ciera he will give to the hired thugs as a down payment for their services. The image of Jerry’s car pulling its load, slowly, laboriously, from distant horizon toward visible foreground, establishes the visual density of this incommensurable wilderness, devoid of life except for the isolated traveler, whose insignificant figure is engulfed in the vast expanses of white. This shot and many others like it throughout the movie create, as R. Barton Palmer words it, ‘the perfect visual correlative not only to the harsh monochrome environment, but also to the characters’ embodiment of those northern European Protestant values (especially the dislike of ostentation in all its forms) that define the culture of the American Middle West’ (2004: 104).
Fargo’s characters are modeled on the plain-spoken, emotionally reserved rural Minnesotans whose customs and values reflect a culture of modesty, politeness and honesty. In all of their films the Coens take a special interest in regional dialects, which they studiously replicate in the movie’s dialogue. In Fargo, the brothers say ‘that flat, Midwestern effect’ was what they found most interesting (Biskind in Woods 2000: 146). Although some viewers found the Scandinavian-influenced Minnesota idiom exaggerated or improbable, it was in fact intended to enhance the quotidian realism of the characters. Jerry and Marge were of particular interest to the Coens, who imagined them as ‘very ordinary people with ordinary sensibilities’ who get involved in circumstances that are ‘anything but ordinary’; ‘Marge and Jerry are both very banal, like the interiors and landscape’ (Robson 2003: 163). To heighten the sense of naturalism, the plot is episodic and digressive. Certain scenes seem not to serve any narrative function. According to Joel, ‘Our intention was to show the story had a relationship to life rather than to fiction, setting us free to create a scene that had no relationship to the plot’ (Allen 2006: 75). Thus we see Marge and Norm sharing lunch as they discuss worm bait; we accompany Carl and his hooker to a Jose Feliciano show where Carl struggles awkwardly to make small-talk; and, particularly notable for its irrelevance to the plot, we sit in on Marge’s lunch date with Mike Yanagita, which if anything suggests a divergent plotline the film fails to follow.
The humour of Fargo’s noir comedy, so pleasing to critics and audiences alike, owes much to the folksy mannerisms of the Minnesotans, especially their manner of speech. In the scene with Mike Yanagita the underlying humour results from the incongruity of a visibly Asian man speaking with a Minnesota accent. But the Coens are not just playing ethnic stereotypes for laughs. As the brothers have noted, for many Americans this regional dialect is unfamiliar and therefore might seem exotic. ‘In fact,’ Joel explains, ‘the Scandinavian influence on the culture of that region, the rhythm of the sentences, the accent, are not at all familiar to the rest of America; it might as well have happened on the moon!’ Ethan continues the thought: ‘All the exoticism and strangeness of that region comes from the Nordic character, from it politeness and reservation. There’s something Japanese in that refusal to show the least emotion, in that resistance to saying no! One of the comic wellsprings of the story comes from the conflict between that constant avoidance of all confrontation and the murders gradually piling up’ (Allen 2006: 74). As is generally true of the Coen brothers’ comedy, much of the humour is generated by such incongruities. By juxtaposing contrasting elements, in particular, the conflict between the Minnesota culture of denial and the intrusion of gangster violence, the Coens create an off-beat brand of noir comedy.
The filmstory’s most fundamental incongruity is, of course, the clash between the ‘abnormality’ of serial homicide committed by the criminals and the ‘normality’ of the law-abiding citizens of Brainerd, who are dumbfounded by the discovery of outrageous evil in their quiet provincial community. This bewilderment is on full display when Marge, already faced with a triple homicide, discovers Gaear feeding his partner into the wood chipper. The unlikely casting of Marge, a pregnant woman, as chief of police, representing the Law (in slang parlance ‘the Man’), is a particularly salient illustration of comic incongruity, further enhanced by its potential for thematic messaging. One of the funnier aspects of Marge’s character is the reversal of gender stereotypes. In many ways Marge represents the maternal (her name is the colloquial short form of Margaret, patron saint of expectant mothers), yet she acts more like a ‘man’ than the men around her. Palmer suggests that Marge uses logic and common sense (stereotypically considered masculine traits) to contain the emotional instability (a feminine attribute) of the men around her (2004: 81–82). Thus, when confronted with the bloody aftermath of Gaear’s highway rampage, she calmly investigates the crime scene, pausing only a moment to relieve her morning sickness, which we falsely assume is her reaction to the dead bodies, matter-of-factly applying the rule of rational analysis to determine the logistics of an irrational, and for Marge morally imponderable, act of violence.
Marge and her appropriately-named husband ‘Norm’ figure as the chief representatives of small-town normality. But in many ways the out-of-town thugs are just as normal and banal. Carl and Gaear engage in the same trivial routines as their ‘normal’ counterparts and, in a comic way, they often interact like a married couple. Making the long car trip from Fargo to Minneapolis, for instance, Carl gets bored and bickers with his morose partner about the lack of conversation, parodying the stereotypical marriage in which the wife talks too much and the husband too little. They argue about what to eat (Gaear demands that they eat at a ‘Pancakes Hause’); they stop to rest at a motel and after a romp with prostitutes they settle in bed like husband and wife to watch late-night TV. More than just off-plot interpolations enhancing the story’s reality effect, these digressions slyly comment on contemporary American culture. The import of such commentary is especially apparent in a scene at the kidnappers’ woodland hideout, where Carl struggles to get clear reception on an cheap portable TV. Gaear sits and watches impassively while Carl bangs on the television set in a futile attempt to eliminate the static or ‘snow’ that disrupts the screen images. Suddenly, the snowy blur of the TV screen resolves into a vivid close-up of a bark beetle. At first glance, we are meant to see the insect image as the successful outcome of Carl’s thumping. But, as a quick shift in point-of-view reveals, we are now viewing the television screen in the Gundersons’ bedroom, where Marge and Norm are snuggled up watching a nature show. Using an editing technique that has become a Coen brothers signature, the opposition between the law-abiding normalcy of Brainerd’s Middle Americans and the aberrant criminality of the outsiders is visually deconstructed by suturing together domestic scenes of the happily married Gundersons with shots of the oddlycoupled hit men. Not only does this editorial trickery materialise the movie’s implicit discourse on epistemological themes (how belief and perception can stabilise but also limit the parameters of human knowledge), it also makes a rather pointed statement on the blurred and porous boundary separating normality and abnormality, making sardonic commentary on the illusionary safety of ordinary citizens from extraordinary criminal threats. In contemporary America, even in the mostly unlikely places, there is a savage verminous underworld that can emerge suddenly and reach into the most distant provinces (a subtext, incidentally, that resonates with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet [1986], where a similar image projects a closely related symbolism).
Marge investigates the crime scene.
Blood Simpletons
Along with the pervasive humour of incongruity, the Coens include the usual grab-bag of in-jokes. There is, for instance, an off-colour reference to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) in Carl’s tasteless witticism in answer to his escort’s query about why he is in Brainerd: ‘Just here on business, in and out, you know, “the old in-out”’ (in A Clockwork Orange, a euphemism for sexual intercourse). There is also an oblique nod to the Coens’ actor friend Bruce Campbell, famous for his roles in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. Campbell had appeared previously in Crimewave, the Coens’ early collaboration with Raimi, after which he took a bit part in The Hudsucker Proxy. The soap opera Gaear watches at the cabin hideout is a clip taken from the actual lowbudget TV show called Generations which aired on a Detroit channel in the 1980s and featured Campbell. An equally obscure tribute to a friend and collaborator is found in the end credits, which identify the unfortunate motorist Gaear shoots in the back with the symbol for ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’, a native of Minneapolis, but actually played in the film by J. Todd Anderson, the Coens’ storyboard artist. Another obscure but perhaps more meaningful insider’s joke concerns Marge’s longlost admirer, Mike Yanagita, whose name has been interpreted by some as a reference to the Japanese cultural anthropologist Yanagita Kunio, whose research focuses on folk tales and legends narrated in regional dialects (Rowell 2007: 193).
Entertaining as such in-jokes might be, a fundamental and certainly less subtle source of humour in Fargo is based on the astonishing stupidity of the criminals. Indeed, much of the comedy in the film results from the absurd simple-mindedness of its hapless bad guys. ‘One of the reasons for making [the criminals] simple-minded,’ Ethan explains, ‘was our desire to go against the Hollywood cliché of the bad guy as a super-professional who controls everything he does. In fact, in most cases criminals belong to the strata of society least equipped to face life, and that’s the reason they’re caught so often. In this sense too, our movie is closer to life than the conventions of cinema and genre movies’ (Allen 2006: 80). Joel elaborates: ‘We were trying to bring both the villains and the hero down to a recognizable, ordinary scale. The hero isn’t a super-cop; she’s a very real ordinary person with ordinary and mundane concerns’ (Allen 2006: 82). Two years after Fargo’s release, Sam Raimi made A Simple Plan (1998), a noir blanc set in Minnesota featuring Billy Bob Thornton in a Coenesque story of ill-fated criminal scheming by backcountry dim-wits. Like Raimi’s bunglers, none of the players in the Coens’ crime farce can carry out a simple plan. Jerry’s plot is initially undermined by Carl’s absent-minded inattention to the Ciera’s license plate. His failure to handle the problem by bribing a state trooper results in Gaear’s impulsive violence and the deaths of three innocent people. Wade’s obsessive need to control compels him to change Jerry’s game, resulting in his own death at the hands of Carl who, after murdering Wade on the parking deck, recklessly calls attention to himself by killing the parking attendant for overcharging. Likewise, Carl’s mindless greed compels him to cheat Gaear out of most of the ransom, just as his uncontrolled anger and wounded pride push him to insist on taking the Ciera, resulting in his own gruesome death. As Joel sums it up, ‘People who do these kinds of crimes generally, in reality, are not rocket scientists. There’s a tendency in movies to make criminals much smarter than they are in real life. If you read about how these things usually happen it’s incredible stupidity that usually trips these people up’ (ibid.).
A Lighter Shade of Noir
The American Film Institute lists Fargo among the hundred greatest American movie comedies, yet it is also recognisable as a variant of film noir. Like Blood Simple, which many critics considered a dark comedy, Fargo blends noir’s realistic crime drama with comedic stylisations to produce a lighter shade of noir. Some would say that ‘noir comedy’ is a contradiction in terms, that film noir and comedy are generically incompatible, if not mutually exclusive. Historically, that may have been true, at least until Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, perhaps the first postclassical film noir to take an explicitly self-parodic approach which, despite its humorous tone, does not devolve entirely into burlesque. In the wake of Altman’s film, the noir/comedy hybrid enjoyed increasing popularity, spawning quirky neonoirs like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as Oliver Stone’s U-Turn (1997). In the classic period of film noir the idea of noir comedy might have seemed oxymoronic, but in the post-classical cycle of noir the comedic element has become a predictable consequence of a postmodern aesthetic privileging parody and satiric wit. Christopher Sharrett argues that the general ‘tone’ in Fargo ‘is not Expressionist grimness, but sitcom joviality’ (2004: 61).
Satire and parody aside, Fargo qualifies in several important ways as bona fide film noir. To be sure, the setting in wintry rural Minnesota is a significant departure from the typically urban milieu of classic noir. Here, as in Blood Simple, the Coens give the genre a new spin, moving the narrative to an ordinary rural setting far from the ominous ‘dark city’ of classic film noir. The nocturnal labyrinth of narrow alleyways, dead-end streets and shadowy street corners shaping the cityscape of classic noir give way in Fargo to open highways winding through limitless expanses of snowy tundra, where under leaden skies the horizon vanishes into a landscape that, for all its openness, is as opaque and existentially oppressive as the claustrophobic urban spaces of its classic noir forerunners. The drifting fog and steam rising from rain-slick streets in classic noir serve as metaphors for psychological disorientation and moral malaise. These are replaced in Fargo with the blinding haze of blizzard whiteout. The claustrophobic hotel rooms, shadowy, atmospheric bar rooms, and all-night diners that constitute the urban interiors of classic noir become in Fargo the bland, florescent-lighted dining rooms of chain restaurants and car dealership showrooms. One surviving vestige of classic noir is the ‘lost highway’ trope, featured in Fargo as a recurring establishing shot and as the site of Gaear’s multiple homicides, reminiscent of the dark highway in Blood Simple where Marty’s perversely comical burial takes place. Both films exhibit a macabre fascination with the disposal of dead bodies, as Gaear’s wood-chipper disposal of Carl’s corpse grimly demonstrates, exploiting the grotesquery of low-budget horror to forge Hitchcockian black humour.
Wood chipper burial.
Casting Marge, a woman, as the story’s chief detective gives the noir genre another humorous spin. Without exception, the principal investigators of crime in classic film noir, whether private eye or public law officer, are gendered masculine. The fact that this female sheriff is also noticeably pregnant heightens the incongruity, while her unshakable self-confidence and down-to-earth lack of pretension mock the myth of the neurotic and emotionally vulnerable men propagated in classic film noir. The story, however, and its putative protagonist Jerry, are definitively noir. Jerry’s lapse into crime is driven less by malicious intent than by garden-variety psychological weaknesses – lack of self-confidence and willful self-deception – and by a desire to realise by any means the American dream of economic success. His weakness makes him a liar; he deceives everyone, including himself, and his self-delusion prevents him from seeing beyond present circumstances to anticipate what might go wrong with his simpleminded plan. Jerry’s pressing need for money may have to do with an ill-conceived accounting fraud, but beyond that, he sees his ransom plot as a clever nostrum for achieving a higher economic status with which he can reclaim his social standing as husband and father, a status constantly challenged and thwarted by his antagonistic father-in-law. This, too, is a commonplace of classic noir: the oedipal son’s conflict with patriarchal authority over possession of the maternal object of desire.
Unlike previous Coen brothers movies, Fargo does not appear to rely heavily on intertextual sources, nor is it a re-composition of any discernible precursor text. There are, however, certain elements in Fargo that indicate a return to the Cain-influenced narrative of Blood Simple. Taking narrative cues from the Cainian ur-text, both Blood Simple and Fargo presuppose a fatal misfortune, summed up in Loren Visser’s pessimistic axiom: ‘Something can always go wrong.’ Also essential in Cain’s fiction is the idea of ‘tabloid murder’, the sensationalised newspaper stories said to be the pulp novelist’s favourite real-life source. Like Cain’s tabloid stories, Fargo purports to be the ‘true’ story of ordinary people who become the perpetrators and victims of bizarre and inexplicable violence. But while Cain accorded the everyday crimes of the common people the pathos of tragedy, the Coens exploit the stupidity of these crimes and their perpetrators for dark comedy, reducing Cain’s pathos to pathetic bathos.
The plots of Blood Simple and Fargo are similarly driven by the frustrations of impotent men who scheme against their wives. Jealousy is a motive in both cases. But while Marty is jealously possessive of Abby, Jerry’s jealousy is directed at Wade, the domineering father-in-law. Indeed, both Jerry and Marty are trying to re-possess their masculinity, but to do so these emasculated weaklings must hire shady hit men to act out their repressed desires. In this way, both Marty and Jerry become hommes fatal, or ‘fatal men’, the masculine counterpart of film noir’s femme fatale. Driven by jealousy and pathological rage, Marty coldly plots fatal revenge on his adulterous wife and her lover. Jerry is fatal in a different way. His animus is aimed more at Wade, his castrating father-in-law who seizes every opportunity to undermine Jerry’s self-esteem and claims to paternal authority. Trapped in a job he performs at the discretion of his wife’s father, hobbled by his own weakness and inability to assert himself, Jerry hatches a plan he thinks will provide both the economic means to achieve autonomy and self-respect, plus the satisfaction of revenge on the tyrannical patriarch. In the absurd farce that ensues, Jerry ends up playing the sad clown. As several characters say, Jerry is already ‘kinda funny-lookin’’. His round, mostly expressionless face, his big eyes and protruding ears enhance his oddly comical appearance. He rarely smiles, and when he does, it reveals more than disguises his underlying anxiety and defeatist attitude. Jerry is a mundane car salesman and boring husband; in just about every sense, a fool. Nobody takes him seriously. In the eyes of everyone who knows him (including his son), Jerry is a joke. Like Carl, his evil twin (also ‘kinda funny-lookin’’), Jerry is a little man who wants respect and never gets it. In this way too, his character has more in common with Cain’s small-time proletarian characters than with the slick private eyes and criminal masterminds glamorised in Hollywood noir.
Existentialism in the Snow
Pursuing themes prefigured in Cain, Fargo depicts the greed, deceit and sudden brute savagery that can erupt even in what are thought to be the safest recesses of provincial America. In its Cain-inspired narrative, Fargo explores one of the novelist’s central themes: the loss of meaning and certainty in the modern world and the increasing sense of personal alienation in a society quickly losing its traditional collective values. As often noted, Cain’s fiction has marked affinities with the writings of the existentialists, in particular, with Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre who, like Cain, took as their primary concern the meaninglessness of human existence or what Camus calls ‘the absurd’. Like Cain, whose novel The Postman Always Rings Twice inspired Camus’ The Stranger (1942), the existentialists explored in their philosophical fiction the anxiety, alienation and pessimism resulting from the awareness that life is no longer given meaning by transcendent beliefs. In his foundational essay, ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir’, Robert Porfirio offers a concise definition of their thematic preoccupations:
Existentialism is an outlook which begins with a disoriented individual facing a confusing world that he cannot accept. It places its emphasis on man’s contingency in a world where there are no transcendental values or moral absolutes, a world devoid of any meaning but the one man himself creates. (1996: 81)
The dark vision of human experience projected by film noir is shaped precisely by this profound loss of meaning and certainty, in consequence of which, everything in the noir universe is contingent, everything happens by chance. This vision of the world engenders in film noir a mood of fatalism, the pessimistic belief that all human effort is doomed to failure and all one can reasonably do is postpone an inevitable and possibly brutal end. Without the hope for salvation in an eternal afterlife, the continual striving of which life consists becomes senseless and futile; without a divine authority to legislate and adjudicate moral values, the formerly clear distinction between good and evil becomes subjective, contingent. In such a world, unable to give meaning to his experiences, the noir protagonist’s actions are pointless. He loses his moral compass; indeed, he no longer qualifies as moral or heroic because, as Porfirio explains, ‘his world is devoid of the moral framework necessary to produce the traditional hero’ (1996: 83). Lacking meaningful purpose, moral or otherwise, film noir’s un-heroic protagonists are paralysed, trapped in circumstances beyond their comprehension and control. When the film noir protagonist does take action, it is the result of desperation rather than reasoned decision, his action merely a reaction to a capricious and intractable reality ruled by chance.
Such are the characteristics of Jerry Lundegaard. In his desperate pursuit of money and power, Jerry rejects the traditional values of family and community, which (in his thinking) limit him and keep him weak and insignificant. He approaches his stingy father-in-law Wade and his yes-man Stan Grossman (Larry Brandenburg) with what he thinks is a solid investment plan; but when rejected, he is driven to take desperate action, lying to family and friends and recklessly putting his wife’s safety at risk for a phony kidnapping scheme which only results in further, increasingly bloody complications he could not foresee and cannot control. His attempts to resolve these complications are futile.
Throughout the film Jerry is typically framed in doorways, car windows, or in his cubicle at work behind slatted blinds, which visually telegraph his feeling of confinement and the futility of his attempts to break free from the entrapments of job and family, which in his case are practically one and the same. Jerry’s sense of futility comes to lucid expression just after the unsuccessful business meeting with Wade and Stan in which Jerry tries and fails to sell them his investment deal. Disheartened, Jerry returns to his car. Shot from extreme high angle, the camera looks down first at his car parked in an otherwise empty, snow-covered lot, then down on Jerry as he treads wearily over the deserted parking lot, a tiny cipher. Like everything in the Minnesota winter, his car is blanketed in snow and ice, which, as he tries to scrape it from the windshield, gives hostile resistance. In an act of sheer frustration expressing his resentment and anger at Wade, he suddenly attacks the icy windshield in a frenzied rage. The tantrum passes; Jerry stands panting, staring at nothing in particular; then he goes back to work on the windshield, a defeated little man crushed by a world indifferent to his puny existence.
In contrast to film noir protagonists like Philip Marlowe, whom Raymond Chandler could still call a hero and who was still thought to have dignity and a code of ethics, Lundegaard lacks redeeming qualities, including ‘strength’ of any kind.
Above all, he lacks the tragic pathos of his film noir precursors. We feel little sympathy for him; he is just a buffoon – foolish, but fatally so. The mood of fatalism that haunts film noir hangs heavy over Jerry. His honest efforts to make something of himself have led him to a dead end; as a way out, he resorts to dishonest means, and these too are inevitably doomed.
In the film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s the aura of fatalistic doom was typically mediated by a visual design wrought with chiaroscuro lighting and post-expressionist mise-en-scène. Another, less common technique of capturing the mood of oppressed entrapment is deep focus which, with the use of a special lens, permits the cinematographer to approximate natural human optics, presenting to the viewer a unified space in which all planes of vision are equally in focus, thus simulating the object-density of physical reality. In the classic film noir, set design, mise-en-scène and lighting are constructed and photographed to render the cluttered, claustrophobic density of a reality devoid of meaning from which there is ‘no exit’. The fatalistic mood projected by such techniques finds its philosophical analogue in the writings of the existentialists, whose emphasis on the meaningless absurdity of life is reflected in the brooding pessimism of film noir. The density of the real simulated by deep focus thus becomes the cinematic articulation of a basic existentialist premise: the separation of the human mind from the physical universe.
Both Camus and Sartre postulate that the objects of the material world are independent and indifferent of human consciousness; that is, they have no inherent meaning or natural connection to the human mind. Camus defines the absurd as the awareness that the human mind and the world beyond it are fundamentally disconnected. In consequence of this awareness, the objects of the external world become distant, alien, inimical in their indifference to man. The resulting incomprehensibility endows even ordinary objects with an excessive, oppressive presence, in Sartre’s terms, a ‘density’ or ‘viscosity’. A stone, a beer glass, a tree – the presence of any of these can cause the protagonist of his novel Nausea to sicken, oppressed by the estrangement of matter from mind. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus observes that this alienation from material reality is compelled by the loss of transcendent meaning, knowledge of which produces a heightened perception of the ‘strangeness’ of the physical world forcing us to acknowledge, in Camus’ words, ‘to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us’ (1991: 14).
Returning to the opening sequence of Fargo, we can observe an interesting variation on classic noir’s deep-focus rendering of nature’s oppressive viscosity. Instead of deep focus, however, cinematographer Roger Deakins utilises a foreshortening focal lens to protract and distort the long travelling shot that tracks Jerry’s path through the snowstorm. In this lengthy establishing shot, the intractable density of reality, its viscosity, is mediated by the opaque haze of a blizzard: an optical void where there is light but nothing to see, where vision is occluded just as effectively (and symbolically) as in the dark night of classic film noir. Emerging from the frozen void, Jerry’s car breaks through the wind-blown curtain of snow, gradually approaching the foreground. Finally we discern a tiny figure hunched over the steering wheel, a vague shadow, surmised as human only by vague estimation, struggling toward a safe destination in a coldly indifferent universe.
In such an inhospitable world, humans are isolated, cut off from the real and from each other, reduced to ‘anxious stutterers’ who, like actors in a drama with no meaning, are ‘unscripted’, pathetically staging the universal failure of communication afflicting modernity. Such is the reading of Jerold J. Abrams, who borrows the notion of ‘unscripted stutters’ from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s study After Virtue. As we have seen, the failure to communicate is a major theme in the Coens’ movies, given special emphasis in noir-inflected films like Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing. In Fargo Jerry is the most recognisable among the unscripted stutterers. Often at a loss for words, he barely manages to formulate a single meaningful utterance throughout the entire movie. Not only does he have trouble expressing himself, he also has trouble getting anyone to listen and take him seriously. This becomes obvious in his first meeting with Carl and Gaear, a travesty of miscommunication that terminates with Carl’s frustrated statement: ‘You’re tasking us to perform a mission, but you, you won’t, uh, you won’t – aw, fuck it, let’s take a look at that Ciera.’ Later, at home Jerry tries uselessly to make conversation with Wade who, absorbed in watching a hockey game on TV, rudely ignores him and will only respond to Jerry with non-verbal grunts. Jerry suffers a further, more urgent breakdown in communication when he tries to cancel the fake kidnapping. Shep Proudfoot (Steven Reevis), the ex-con auto mechanic who first put Jerry in touch with Carl and Gaear, flatly refuses to give up their phone number, stifling Jerry’s attempt to abort the mission. Later, under the pressure of Marge’s interrogation, Jerry suffers a complete verbal breakdown. Her insisting on seeing an inventory of the cars at the dealership quickly reduces Jerry’s stonewalling to stutters and disjointed sentence fragments: ‘I’m not, uh, I’m not arguin’ here. I’m cooperatin’ … There’s no, uh – we’re doin’ all we can.’ Finally, Jerry can say no more. In a speechless panic, he flees the interview.
Carl has similar experiences, especially in his partnership with Gaear, whom Carl futilely tries to engage in conversation. As they drive to Minneapolis to kidnap Jean, for instance, Carl, a compulsive talker, gives a lengthy speech about Gaear’s obtuse refusal to talk. ‘Would it kill you to say something?’ he complains. Gaear replies with monosyllabic sarcasm: ‘No.’ Having said nothing in the last four hours, Gaear sits in morose silence, barely acknowledging Carl’s presence, except with an occasional baleful stare. Carl threatens to give Gaear the silent treatment but, comically, he just can’t shut up. Carl needs to communicate badly, but usually fails, as he does when he tries to make conversation with his ‘escort’ in the Carlton Celebrity Room. ‘Ya find the work interesting, do ya?’ Carl asks the prostitute. ‘What’re you talking about?’ she responds coldly. Obviously, she has misread his intention, thinking he is being condescending. Carl is just trying to make small talk, to make a connection, the irony of which is underscored as they listen to Jose Feliciano sing ‘Let’s Get Together Tonight’. A similar scene plays out when the plot digresses to Mike Yanagita. A miserably alienated man, Mike pretends to lead a normal life, but desperately wants to connect with Marge, an old acquaintance who hardly remembers him. He too is a ‘stutterer’, barely able to carry on a simple conversation before breaking down and weeping lugubriously as he confesses: ‘I been so lonely.’
Near the end of the film, after she has taken Gaear into custody, Marge tries vainly to establish meaningful communication. When she tries to reason with the taciturn thug, however, she is met with the same menacing silent treatment given to Carl. Sitting in the police prowler, Gaear caged in the back seat, Marge holds forth on the dire moral implications of his crimes: ‘So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there? And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper … And those three people in Brainard. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. … Don’t you know that?’ Gaear’s response is nothing more than a chilling stare, then he resumes staring out the window at the winter gloom. But his eyes are far from vacant. He greets her pious homily with silent indifference, yet his eyes signal a perverse sense of superiority, suggesting that he, at least, can see and comprehend the existence of the human evil Marge deplores in him and he accepts it, in himself and in others, without judgement or moral condemnation. Perhaps, as Jerold Abrams (2009) suggests, Gaear is a reincarnation of Alex Delarge, the incurably psychopathic ‘droog’ of A Clockwork Orange. Both Gaear (the ‘big fella’) and De-large are violent psychopaths of mythic dimensions, both immune to societal mechanisms of repression, their psychopathology too ‘large’ to be deterred by conventional moral or legal constraints, indeed beyond any appeal to human decency. The existence of such human wickedness is a reality Marge simply refuses to acknowledge: ‘I just don’t understand it.’
Sartre would call Marge’s disavowal of Gaear an instance of ‘bad faith’, manifest not only in the moment she contemplates the absurdity of Gaear’s crimes, but equally in her unreflective acceptance of a provincial life, itself a form of denial that sanctions a retreat into empty routines and prescribed modes of behaviour, humorously parodied in the folksy dialect of the locals where vacuous clichés are substituted for meaningful dialogue: ‘Yah, you betcha, okey dokey, you’re darn tootin’!’ In his essay on the existentialist themes in neo-noir, Richard Gilmore references Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’, defining it as ‘a refusal to see that becomes an unconscious blind spot, a blind spot that haunts us with feelings of hypocrisy and alienation’ (2009: 123). For all her apparent virtues, Marge is willfully oblivious to the darkness of the human psyche, blinded to the reality of events she has witnessed with her own eyes, recalling Camus’ existential paradox of ‘the mind’s retreat before what the mind itself has brought to light’ (1991: 50). Her denial of reality is made humorously literal in her comments on the weather. Even though, as she preaches ethics to Gaear in the cruiser, it is just another miserable winter day in Minnesota, she is moved to exclaim: ‘And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day!’ Outside it is snowing. Road, earth and sky have merged once more in the blizzard whiteout, conjuring a visual metaphor for the haze of confusion and disbelief that clouds Marge’s perception. The snowstorm’s blinding opacity evokes Marge’s blind spot on a greater scale, blankly signifying her refusal to see the evils that exist even in the remote province of Brainerd, Minnesota.
Lying, deception, self-deception – all are equally acts of bad faith, the Coens seem to say, unless those lies are the fictions of a formative myth which, by acts of calculated deception, may lead the blind along the path to enlightenment. But what enlightenment does Fargo offer, itself a deception that purports truth? Perhaps Sartre can help. At the end of his lengthy treatise Being and Nothingness, Sartre concludes that to live an authentic life one must reject the ‘spirit of seriousness’ (‘l’esprit de serieux’) that assumes the existence of absolute values beyond human comprehension (1966: 766). If human existence lacks a divine purpose to give it meaning, the universe is ultimately absurd and every human project is doomed because it aims for an unobtainable goal. To counteract the pessimism that results from this worldview, personal freedom and choice become the central themes of Sartre’s writings. To lead an authentic life requires a rejection of the facile assurances of truth offered by orthodox systems of belief, but also demands the discovery of one’s own subjective values. As Sartre writes, ‘For human reality, to be is to choose oneself’ (1966: 538; emphasis added). As we have seen, much of the humour in Fargo arises from the juxtaposition of conflicting opposites. In existentialist terms, what could be said to produce the film’s pervasive tone of dark irony is the fundamental incongruity between a ‘serious’ attitude toward life which stipulates values that exist independent of or beyond human reality (exemplified by Marge), and the ‘absurd’ awareness that true knowledge is impossible and therefore that nothing is meaningful, rendering all human actions equal and indifferent to moral valuation (represented by Gaear).
Philosophers such as Thomas Nagel suggest that the only adequate response to the absurdity of life is its ironic acceptance. ‘If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation,’ Nagel argues, ‘then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? We can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair’ (1980: 163). If the Coens can be said to embrace any philosophical attitude in their films, the ironic celebration of the absurd in Fargo would certainly qualify.