Fargo on FX is Minnesota noir. Like True Detective, the series develops a single crime narrative across the course of the episodes broadcast. Each season features a different story and, therefore, a completely different cast of characters. The show is unified by its insistence that the action takes place in Minnesota and allusions to themes and stylistic tics characteristic of films directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. As in the films directed by Coen brothers, the series boasts fantastically evocative sound-cues and is brilliantly acted and shot -- there's no sloppy handheld cinema verite camerawork in this program: all shots are carefully composed and lit, generally involving a fixed camera, although, when the camera moves, it swoops and tracks and ascends gracefully. The high resolution imagery, often depicting wintry landscapes, has something of the meticulous hyper-realism of Stanley Kubrick's films. Thematically, Fargo insists on the surreal contrast between the niceness of the Minnesota characters, their willingness to help, and their stolid rural virtues and the sheer depravity of the villains who seek to exploit the good people's apparent naivety. Another feature characterizing these programs is their aura of unresolved mystery -- embedded in all of the episodes are minor elements that don't exactly make sense within the story. These riddles or punctum are sometimes resolved but, on other occasions, left mysterious. A notable example is the opening scene of the third series: the sequence is shot in German and involves the interrogation of a hapless suspect by a indifferent and sarcastic STASI officer in East Berlin. The suspect is accused of murdering a woman and the officer ignores all of his alibis -- in the distance, we can hear people faintly screaming in the Secret Police torture chambers. As the Kafkaesque interview continues, the camera loses interest, wanders to the side and slowly tracks toward a picture on the wall. The picture is a photograph of a cool, snowy woods and the camera enters that image to reveal that the grove of trees is adjacent to a large manor in Minnesota where a party is taking place in 2010. The titles appear and the narrative of Fargo proper then begins. In the first three episodes, nothing has been shown connecting the opening ten minutes in the STASI torture chamber in 1970 to the events comprising the plot in Minnesota -- it remains to be seen whether this element of indirection will be resolved.
The plot in the third season of Fargo amplifies the story of Cain and Abel -- in productions associated with the Coen brothers the book of Genesis is never remote and, indeed, often central to the action. Ewan McGregor plays two brothers, the Stussy's. One of the brothers is a sleazy probation officer in St. Cloud -- he's sleeping with one of his wards and connives a crime with her. The other brother is the so-called "Parking Lot King of Minnesota", a wealthy businessman who lives in an Eden Prairie manor -- my loyal readers will recall that Eden Prairie is my hometown. As in the Bible, the probation officer feels that his successful brother has cheated him of his patrimony. Accordingly, the probation officer blackmails a thug that he is supervising (the man has failed a "piss test" for drugs) into committing a home invasion of his brother's mansion. An ubiquitous theme in Coen brothers' productions is the stupidity of criminals and the criminal enterprise in general -- the Coen brothers often show crime as an outcome of ignorance, laziness, and, general, dim-wittedness and this show is no exception. The thug confuses Eden Prairie with Eden Valley, goes to the wrong place, and burglarizes the home of an elderly alcoholic, also named Stussy. In the course of burglary, the criminal glues shut the nose and mouth of the old man and, of course, he perishes. This is doubly ironic because the old man, although hiding under the pseudonym of Dennis Stussy, in fact, doesn't really have that name -- indeed, we discover that the old man is actually someone called Thaddeus Mobley. The abusive old man was briefly married to the mother of the town's police chief, the heroine in the series. The police chief is played by Carrie Coons and she is a woman of unremitting kindness and unassuming virtue, the moral fulcrum of the story. The police chief investigates the killing, which seems to be wholly senseless, and this leads her in the direction, ultimately, of the successful Stussy brother and his shabby sibling. As it happens, the Parking Lot King has borrowed a million dollars during a down-turn in his business from some shady investors. The investors have now materialized and claim a business stake in the Parking Lot King's enterprises. It's clear that these investors are profoundly evil -- they are represented by a lugubrious and sinister goon played by David Thewelis who seems the embodiment of a kind of ugly cruelty. Thewelis and his henchmen want to use the Stussy parking lot empire for money-laundering. It's clear that female police chief's investigation will suture together the murder plot involving the old man's death in Eden Valley and the plight of the Parking Lot King in Eden Prairie. How this will all work out remains to be seen. Last year's Fargo devolved into a series of idiotic, if brilliantly staged, shootouts and massacres. After one group of sleazy characters were slaughtered, the show would regenerate a whole new cast and, then, butcher them as well. And the whole thing was unduly repetitious, therefore, too long and implausible. So far the third series has remained within reasonable bounds of plausibility and, although many details are grotesque, the plot is interesting and driven by fascinating characters.
Although the merits of the series as a whole remains to be seen, I write in praise of the third episode, a generous interlude in the plot, a symbolic entr'acte and a lapidary, self-contained narrative gem, one of the best things ever broadcast on TV. In this episode, the Eden Valley police chief departs Minnesota and undertakes an investigation in Hollywood. She has discovered a secret trove of documents including novels apparently written by the old drunk under the name Thaddeus Mobley. Among those papers, the police chief has found a picture showing a young man with a Jewish film producer, a man named Bob Zimmerman (a nasty joke about a certain famous singer from Hibbing, Minnesota). The police chief flies to Hollywood and checks into a low-rent motel. By the sort of coincidence that often adorns Coen brothers' films, the police chief stays in Room 203, the same room where the young Thaddeus Mobley lived during the events that we are shown in this episode. The Hollywood sequence begins with a sweeping crane shot of congested freeways that seems to be extracted from LaLa Land and, then, Mobley's story is told in flashback as we follow the police chief's investigation. Thaddeus Mobley as a straight, clean-cut young man has won a prize for best science fiction novel in 1970. At a Scifi convention, he encounters the sleazy Zimmerman. Zimmerman is a fantastic villain, a vicious Jewish con-man played by Fred Melamed. (Melamed is the Coen brothers "go-to" character actor when they need to depict a duplicitous silver-tongued Jew and I never seen him in anything in which he is less than mesmerizing. In Fargo, Melamed is a suave seducer and he speaks in a repugnant dialect comprised of Hollywood argot, Yiddish, and Spanish. The man is deeply evil but also profoundly persuasive and oddly philosophical -- he is a moral nihilist but, at least, a self-conscious one. The way Melamed plays this role you can understand exactly how the young man falls under his spell.) Using the services of a harlot, also indelibly played by Francesca Eastwood, the youthful writer is persuaded to sign away his advances on his new novel and also the royalties on his previous books. He does this to finance a film project that Zimmerman has promoted, an attempt to adapt to the screen the writer's award-winning novel The Planet Wyh. Zimmerman uses both sex and cocaine to entangle the young man in his scheme and defraud him of his money. When the young man goes to his girlfriend's apartment to score some cocaine -- he is now addicted -- he finds Zimmerman present. It becomes obvious to him that Zimmerman and his erstwhile girlfriend have plotted to defraud him. The girl taunts the young writer and there is a fight. Zimmerman strangles the young man and, then, contemptuously hurls him onto the floor. But the youth is resilient. He gets up and beats Zimmerman half to death with the producer's own silver-handled cane. He is about to smash in the girls' face but stays his hand crying out "You are a bad person." Returning to Room 203 at the motel, the young man finds that he is covered in blood. He vomits and, while puking, sees the name "Dennis Stussy & Sons" stenciled into the porcelain rim of the toilet. Thus, we discover how Thaddeaus Mobley who is now packing his bags to escape to rural Minnesota, adopted the fatal name, Dennis Stussy.
The plot is simple enough and squalid, a nasty bit of verismo, but incidental aspects to the story open into a rich Coen brothers hall of mirrors, a system of strange allusions and exotic themes. On the plane to Hollywood, the police chief sits next to weary businessman. This man played by Ray Wise (he was Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) says that he is on his sixth flight of the week. "But it's only Tuesday," the police chief says. "Exactly," the man says. One of the themes central to the Coen brothers is that of the wanderer, the person who has no home -- this is a Jewish theme and most integrally expressed in the concept of the "wandering Jew." In Hollywood, a crook steals the chief's luggage. An LA detective takes a romantic interest in the heroine and, when he recovers her suitcase -- it's empty -- invites her to a bar. The cop turns out to be a smug Don Juan who bluntly propositions her. In the tavern, the heroine encounters the wandering businessman and he tells her a strange story about a woman who was both divorced and married at the same time. This tale implicates a Coen brothers obsession about unstable quantum states, most obviously dramatized in the reference to Schroedinger's Cat in A Serious Man -- the cat in the black box hypothesized by Schroedinger is both dead and alive at the same time. Quantum theory is also referenced in a speech delivered by the dying and feeble Zimmerman in the nursing home where he is now confined. Zimmerman has lost his larynx to cancer and speaks through a mechanical device that imparts to his words an eerie, prophetic timbre. Zimmerman says that all human encounters are merely collisions in which we suddenly become "real" but only for an instance. He remains an awful person and tells the police chief to "not let the door hit (her) as she leaves." Ultimately, the viewer perceives that the story is designed along three axes -- there is the indefatigable wanderer in the name of virtue, the police chief, the profound evil of Zimmerman and his girlfriend, and the hapless naïve virtue of a third strand to the narrative, the parable of the wandering robot MNSKY. MNSKY is a figure in Mobley's award-winning novel, a small, frail robot contrived for the purpose of being helpful. In simply, but effectively animated sequences, we see he robot's space ship crash land on earth where the little machine spends the next 2.7 million years wandering around trying to help people: "I can help!" the little robot chirps to everyone it meets. Of course, human life on earth is pretty much a terrible experiment -- there are ceaseless cruelties and massacres. At one point, some sadists tear off one of the robot's arms. "I can help!' the robot squeaks and, then, continues on his way. Later, space invaders destroy almost all life on earth -- the little robot tries to affix a corpse's hand to his mutilated shoulder. At last, some kindly scientists take possession of the battered robot -- they say that he is the oldest sentient being in the universe, over 2.7 million years, but, of course, it is unclear what the robot knows or can tell anyone. And we have never seen the robot help anyone. The scientists tell the robot to shut himself off and he obligingly opens his cranium where there is green light flashing. The light flashes on a switch that he shuts off, triggering another flash, this time red. It seems that throughout his entire travail, the robot had the power of shutting himself off but didn't exercise this faculty. In her motel room, the police chief has discovered a pair of abandoned men's shoes and an enigmatic box. This box comprises the central metaphor in the episode. The box has a switch on its top. When the switch is flipped, the box opens and a green light flashes. As the green light is flashing, a mechanical hand emerges from the box, reaches over to the switch, and flips it -- this causes the box's interior to momentarily flash red before the box shuts itself. Obviously, this weird self-canceling mechanism, correlates to the suicide feature in the robot -- the switch under his cranium -- and symbolizes the entire "self-canceling" project that has animated Mobley's wretched life: the man has canceled himself out because of his fear that he will be detained for the attack on Zimmerman. The box also seems to symbolize the helplessness of the robot, and the apparent hopelessness of the police chief's quest. MNSKY is both the wandering Jew but also "Minnesota Sky", a reference to the land of sky-blue waters as Minnesota is called, and, therefore, another correlate to the police chief who wants to help others, but is deterred from that objective. Further MNSKY and the police chief are also versions of the wandering and exhausted businessman encountered on the plane. Finally, elements of the plot harken back to the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink. In that movie, Fink is confined in a hellish hotel where he strives, unsuccessfully, to complete a screenplay. Some of the imagery in the episode is redolent of the movie -- particularly shots of long, empty and grim corridors or images of superannuated clerks approaching with enigmatic documents. The self-canceling aspect of the automaton, the box that exist only to shut itself off, also correlates, I think, to the notion of a writer's block, an inability to progress on a text that must be completed according to a certain deadline. These factors are all bound together in a kind of Borgesian meta-narrative -- the story of how Thaddeus Mobley became Dennis Stussy, something that the police chief discovers in the bewitched Room 203, opens into a system of references that encompasses a whole fictional world, indeed, a system of worlds. But, in the end, the episode cancels itself out -- the solution to the mystery, that is, how Mobley became Stussy, isn't significant in itself. It's another fact that has now been disclosed but it's a fact that seems capricious, arbitrary, one that has no real meaning -- the solution to the mystery doesn't lead anywhere at all. This is shown, I think by a brief shot depicting Mobley/Stussy in the box of his casket -- the corpse is lit to seem vaguely greenish like the ray emerging from the head of the robot and the automaton's box.
Near the end of the show, there is an ineffably sad scene. (The elegiac aspect in this episode relates to the sheer destructive passage of time.) The police officer sits in an deserted café interviewing an old waitress, all that remains of the glamor girl who betrayed the young and hopeful Thaddeus Mobley. Here the show's casting is brilliant and moving: the waitress is played by Frances Fisher and the seductress in 1970 is acted by Fisher's daughter, Francesca Eastwood. Of course, the women resemble one another closely and it is a profound image of how people age -- the old woman is recognizably the young vamp. (Francesca Eastwood plays her part with some of the cutting menace of her father, Clint Eastwood -- she has mean whispery gunslinger's voice.) The old waitress says: "He was right -- I'm not a good person." She pauses. "But he wasn't good either." The heroine has nothing to say to this remark and somberly gets up to leave the café. Earlier, the chief's deputy calls her and asks: "What are you doing in Hollywood?" The police chief says she is investigating the homicide. The dull-witted deputy (he keeps forgetting his gun and likes to go to Arby's for "curly fries) says: "That old guy wasn't anyone." The police chief admonishes him gently: "Everyone is somebody to someone."
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