This was supposed to be a no rough stuff type deal

Fargo (1996)

Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, and ten-year career check-up.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. As we covered last time, Joel and Ethan were in a slump. After their critically and commercially promising first two films, they had produced three in a row that lost money, culminating in the disastrous performance of The Hudsucker Proxy, which earned less than $3 million in North America against its $25 million budget. Audiences were staying away while critics refused to crack a smile at their elaborate genre homages and verbal pyrotechnics.

The brothers are too withholding in interviews to be able to say these commercial failures brought on deep soul-searching but they seem to have recognized that something needed to change. “What was interesting to us in the first place about doing [Fargo],” Joel told David Bennun in 1996, “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.” After testing the limits of self-consciously stylized filmmaking and scriptwriting, with Fargo they would now test how much they could strip away and what new possibilities that might make available.

That quotation of Joel’s above continues: “Unembellished sets, real locations. If they’re told up front that it’s true, the audience gives you permission to do things that they might not if they’re essentially coming in expecting to watch a fictive thriller.” With their trademark intricate, galloping dialogue proscribed by the necessities of naturalism and the story’s Minnesota setting, Joel and Ethan were forced to consider alternate modes of expression and other ways dialogue could function. The result is a work of unprecedented psychological acuity, in which nearly every utterance simultaneously generates misunderstanding while betraying thoughts and feelings our characters would prefer to keep hidden.

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Fargo begins with a miscommunication. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) has driven from Minneapolis to Fargo to meet with Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to set in motion his ill-considered scheme to kidnap his own wife in order to collect the ransom from his wealthy father-in-law Wade (Harve Presnell). When he arrives at 8:30 the crooks are pissed off. As far as they knew the meeting was for 7:30. They don’t appreciate being made to wait for an hour. Jerry walks up to them trying to look tough but Carl’s displeasure instantly disarms him and he reverts to his wheedling, apologetic self as he tries to excuse the mix-up. By the time Carl scolds him that he’s not going to debate who’s at fault it’s clear the power dynamic has shifted. Jerry’s authority as their “employer” is worth anything only as much as they respect him, and they do not.

It’s also worth noting here how the scene ends. Carl can’t wrap his head around Jerry’s logic for the kidnapping and tries to express how harebrained he finds the whole thing but he gets tripped up on his words. He can’t match his language to his thought; he stutters, starts and stops, gives up. “Aw fuck it,” he says, “let’s go take a look at that Ciera.” Perhaps Jean’s (Kristin Rudrud) poor fate could have been averted right then if Carl had found the words he was reaching for.

It’s hard to say if Jerry’s at fault for the mix-up—Shep Proudfoot (Steven Reevis), Jerry’s ex-con mechanic who set up the meeting, is the absolute opposite of loquacious—but the thing about Jerry is that his whole business is miscommunication. He’s a car salesman who earns his living through obfuscation, misdirection, and disorientation. The scene where he bilks a customer out of an extra $400 for the bogus TrueCoat sealant on his undercarriage tells us everything we need to know about how Jerry conducts himself and relates to others.

Jerry knows how to get his way. It’s only a matter of absorbing the abuse the world throws at him. Call him a liar, call him a fucking liar, he can lower his head and wait you out. It’s not that he’s immune to these recriminations, no, every jab stings, every insult hits its target. But Jerry knows no other way to influence other people except to let them exhaust their fury until they give up.

Jerry has a curious relationship to language and power. He he can only assert himself by debasing himself. He does not know how to command, only to plead. In a foreshadowing of how spectacularly this approach might fail when dealing with pitiless killers, the Coens show us Jerry’s meeting with Wade and his associate Stan (Larry Brandenburg). Jerry has brought them an investment deal—$750,000 to build a parking lot—but there’s been a mix-up. Jerry wants the money to do it himself, Wade says the best he can do is a finder’s fee. As Jerry circumlocutes toward his demand, Wade and Stan look at him dumbfounded. “You’re saying… what are you saying?” they ask. Once they understand they stop him short. “If I wanted bank interest I’d go to Midwest Federal,” Wade scoffs. “We’re not a bank, Jerry,” Stan repeats, foreclosing argument. Jerry looks pathetic in the face of this sort of straightforward confidence, always weaseling backward into what he wants to say. All he can do is leave and hack impotently at the ice on his windshield, throwing a fit but ultimately having to start again in earnest.

On these frozen Minnesota plains, there is comfort in silence. A full thirty-three minutes into the film we meet our heroine, pregnant cop Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). Where Jerry’s endless patter betrays his bottomless insecurities, Marge and her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) hardly need to speak at all. Once again the Coens work with remarkable efficiency to establish their dynamic: Norm’s matter-of-fact insistence that she needs to eat before going to work—he’ll cook the eggs—speaks to a level of understanding between them like nothing we’ve seen in the film up to that point. “He totally personifies how undemonstrative people are in that place,” Ethan told Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, their stalwart interviewers at Positif, in 1996. “The relationship with his wife is based on the unsaid, but they succeed in communicating somehow.”

Marge’s thick Minnesota accent has been held up as an example of the Coens laughing at their characters but I argue they’re doing something thoughtful with it. Marge’s accent is an unmissable signpost directing our attention to the most important influence on how these characters interact: the dreaded “Minnesota nice.” Here’s how Ethan characterized it to Positif: “All the exoticism and strangeness of that region comes from the Nordic character, from the 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.”

In general then, Minnesota nice is a handicap on direct and effective communication. But Marge, despite sporting the thickest accent, is the exception. Don’t get me wrong, she absolutely participates in Minnesota nice, but she has learned to work within it to say exactly what she wants to. One of her most famous lines is a case in point: after investigating the scene of the state trooper’s killing, her partner Lou notes the trooper logged the plates of the last car he pulled over as DLR and infers he was killed before he could finish writing. Marge responds, “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.” It is admittedly a bit convoluted—there are quicker ways to say you’re wrong—but her phrasing allows her to correct her (male) colleague without making him feel stupid or like she feels superior. In this way she makes a counterpoint to Jerry—where he relies on Minnesota nice to cloud the issue and mislead, Marge uses it to smuggle bluntness and investigative questioning into her interactions unnoticed.

These opposing modes of being collide when Marge questions Jerry at the car dealership. Jerry attempts to filibuster in the face of Marge’s direct yes-or-no questions and finally does something we haven’t seen from him before: he shuts up. He freezes, panicking as he finds himself caught in the headlights of an interaction he can’t circle around and turn to his own advantage. I am not exaggerating when I say that every single scene of Fargo is like this in its perfect consonance between character and action. The Coens understand and define the nature of each of their principle players so well that there is no way for them to act other than exactly as they do.

Like Marge and Jerry, Carl and Grimsrud are another linguistically mismatched pair. Carl spills his words carelessly, hardly listening to himself in his endless need to fill the silence. There’s a lot of silence to fill with Grimsrud. He broods, and smokes in the car with the windows up, and demands another stop at IHOP. When Carl objects he levels his eyes on him in a stare of unparalleled menace. Carl relents quickly. When they’re pulled over by the state trooper, Carl makes a clumsy attempt to talk his way out of it. From the moment the lights flash and the siren whoops, Grimsrud knows it can only end in blood.

Grimsrud’s demeanor never wavers throughout the film (though his evident emotional response to the soap opera is an interesting wrinkle) but Carl’s changes significantly. He, quite understandably, becomes more and more high-strung until finally he snaps. We can see his evolution quite clearly in four interactions. The first is the opening scene meeting Jerry in the bar discussed up top. There he’s collected, in control, almost as laconic as Grimsrud. Later, after the kidnapping and the murders, he calls Jerry at his office; he’s agitated, dictating terms in order to assert control over a situation that’s going wrong but still salvageable. The third is the handoff at the parking garage; as he fumes at Wade that it’s supposed to be Jerry making the deal, in fact he’s raging against a situation that has now fully come undone. Until this moment Carl also believed the violence could be held in check but he is forced to concede to forces larger than him and acts in service of a logic now impossible to stop from reaching its conclusion. But even as he sides with the vortex of pain he, Grimsrud, and Jerry have unleashed, he still doesn’t see himself as threatened by it. Returning to the cabin, bloodied and exhausted, he lets loose all his frustration and pain and resentment, still thinking he can walk away.

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Perhaps it seems strange that in a movie about kidnapping and murder I am focused on the uses and misuses of language. Well, first of all the other side of the coin is the violence, and violence leaves little room for interpretation. As David Graeber put it in Debt, the nature of violence is precisely a way of influencing other people without the need to establish mutual understanding. Secondly, I believe this reading finds its vindication in its power to make sense of Mike Yanagita.

Mike Yanagita remains the enduring mystery of Fargo. In a film otherwise without an ounce of fat on it, Marge’s strange lunch with her high school classmate stands out as a glaring diversion. But if we understand Fargo as a study in the uses and misuses of language, of the perils inherent in even good-faith communication and the power of lying, and the myriad ways we betray ourselves and expose our true intentions, Mike Yanagita makes perfect sense. He is all of these ideas taken to their logical extreme.

Everything he says to Marge is a lie. His job, his marriage, his wife’s death, all lies, all attempts to project “normal.” But Mike is not what he seems. As we learn a little later he was stalking the woman he claimed was his wife (who is alive), has had “psychiatric problems,” and is living with his parents. His demeanor announces his strangeness immediately. He manages to hold it together for approximately eight seconds before he gets weird with it. The irony here is pretty evident—if Mike were honest with Marge about his struggles he would certainly be able to act more naturally. But because he’s hiding all of it, and because he has concocted a fantasy of seducing Marge that he clings to even after seeing she’s seven months pregnant, the falseness and desperation radiates out of him. It’s only when he breaks down crying and confesses, “I’ve been so lonely,” that he approaches honesty and ceases to be wholly repellent.

Joel explained to Bennun one of the goals of the film was “to bring both the villains and the hero down to a recognizable human scale… they’re banal in the evil sense, in terms of Jerry, and banal in a good way in terms of Marge. But without any sort of pejorative connotation, just ordinary.” Banality provides another framework to make sense of Mike Yanagita’s presence in the film. He is, again, banality pushed to its limit, in the sense that his interaction with Marge is bizarre and alarming but it remains within the realm of the everyday. If Marge and Norm’s life is the idyllic banal and Jerry’s actions are the result of a banal sort of foolishness and lack of forethought, then Mike is the banal danger of the world. He’s the guy you really could meet up with for lunch only to discover he’s unstable and fixated on you.

It is this expectation of banality that leads Jerry down the garden path to his crimes. When he hires two hardened killers to kidnap his wife, he cannot conceive of the extremity of the danger and cannot imagine the innumerable ways the situation could end in disaster. “What interested us from the start in [Jerry] was his absolute incapacity, even for one minute, to project himself into the future and evaluate the consequences of his decisions,” Joel said. “There’s something fascinating in that total absence of perspective.” It’s not until he sees the crowbar on his bathroom floor that it starts to dawn on him that he commissioned violent, traumatic things to be done to his wife, that she was taken by force. Jerry lives in a banal world of words. He does not understand violence. He does not understand that it follows a logic all its own, one that does not answer to mere pleading.

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Stray Notes

• The prostitutes are so fucking funny it’s crazy. Fun fact: the one who’s not the dad’s new wife on Reba was one of the accent coaches for the film.

• I love Buscemi at the toll booth so much.

And of course his second trip through has been burned into my memory as a defining cinematic image since my dad showed me Fargo when I was like twelve.

• Pop quiz: how does the investigation actually get solved? Every lead Marge chases down proves to be a dead end. Until, that is, Mr. Mohra calls in a tip about a guy at his bar claiming he’d killed people and that he was going stir crazy in his cabin by the lake. The scene where this information is conveyed is strange. Both Mr. Mohra and the nameless officer talk in the street wearing gigantic coats that obscure the officer’s face entirely and Mohra’s mostly. Insofar as we can see him, Mohra bears a striking resemblance to Joel Coen. This scene strikes me as a knowing bit of deus ex machina—Joel this universe’s god descends to resolve the plot when his characters fail to. This fascination with the idea of filmmaker as god will recur in later films.

• Fargo has to be one of the best edited films in history. I’ve watched it three times in as many months recently and it has been a pleasure every time. It moves from scened to scene with relentless efficiency but it never feels rushed. It is truly a marvel how much is packed into the first 32 minutes through the killings in the field. Fargo actually contains fewer iconic images and lines than it feels like because it’s all in the construction; it all works together and builds on itself so effectively that the cumulative experience is everything. The brothers edited most of their movies themselves under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes and this one is no exception. They have a whole backstory for Jaynes and wrote prefaces to books of the screenplays in his voice. Maybe we’ll cover that at some point.