Fargo (Third Season)

I have previously reviewed a stand-alone episode in this 2017 television crime drama.  The series, produced by the Coen brothers and, in its third season, is now complete and so I can provide an assessment of the program as a whole.  I continue to highly admire this show and, indeed, believe that it achieves something very rare in this genre -- from beginning to end, Fargo (3) was competently plotted, effectively paced, and managed to fill the time allotted without unnecessary repetition or pointless digressions; in other words, the narrative arc was clear and, even, elegant.  Furthermore, the events in the show were not so hyperbolic, until, perhaps, the last episode, as to strain credulity -- a viewer could imagine that most of the things shown in the show could, in fact, happen.  This is important because of Fargo's signature opening, a title protesting that the story is true and that the events depicted occurred in Minnesota in 2011 -- the notion being that Minnesota is such an outlandish place such things might, indeed, have happened but escaped the knowledge of the general public in the rest of country.  For this convention to have any traction at all, the show must tell a story that is reasonably plausible and, in fact, the third series (unlike the seriously flawed second season) accomplishes this feat. 

The best way to understand the success of Fargo's third season is to grasp the pitfalls, or failings, that it avoids.  First, a TV show committed to a long narrative requires a plot designed to fill ten or 13 episodes -- most crime shows of this sort (the best example is True Detective) start with a lurid teaser and, in fact, establish interesting characters in the first two or three episodes.  Then, the show typically devolves in one of several possible ways -- the narration can get bogged down in inconsequential subplots for six or so episodes before returning to main plot:  this was the failure in Westworld, a show that kept spinning-out subplots while dawdling with respect to its principal narrative.  (Both seasons of True Detective shared this vice.)  Another mistake is to simply reprise the same action over and over again -- in the second season of Fargo, the director staged about three massive gun battles with dozens of casualties.  The first two gun battles, with the firepower of the Somme, didn't really advance the plot and were merely place-holders.  Although these action scenes were brilliantly staged, they seemed gratuitous and unnecessary -- the only gun battle that really mattered was the big shootout in the end of the show that exterminated most, if not all, of the surviving characters.  Along the way, series two featured great minor roles, impressively menacing villains and a fine performance by Kirsten Dunst -- but the plot, involving a gang war between a North Dakota crime family and pretty much all of the rest of the world, deteriorated into implausible and pointless violence.  Indeed, my major criticism of the second series was that it was too ridiculously violent to be even remotely believable.  It's as if the show's writer and producer, Noah Hawley, read my commentary and acted on it.  In the third season, the violence is extremely muted -- and, almost entirely, takes place off-screen.  There are a couple of horrific exceptions but they stand out as hyper-realistic and terrifying since the show is not mired in pointless machine-gun battles.  By suppressing the representation of violence, the show makes the bloodshed shown much more effective and frightening and, further, promotes the sense that the things that we are seeing might, indeed, have happened.

Characteristic of Fargo is the strong contrast drawn between the three types of people that inhabit the world of the Coen brothers -- there are nebbish losers angling for one big score, crooked businessmen whose greed drives them to crime, and virtuous representatives of law and order, unassuming local cops forced to clean up the mess left by the avaricious losers and their more savage counterparts from the world of business.  In this case, the plot proceeds by three interrelated strands -- twin brothers, Emmet Stussy, a successful parking lot magnate and the other a failure, Ray Stussy, a loser working as a probation officer, are locked in deadly conflict:  the symbol of their feud, and the show's MacGuffin, is a 2 cent postage stamp showing Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill.  (In the last episode, this stamp adheres to the forehead of the parking lot mogul, Emmet Stussy, like the Mark of Cain -- he has inadvertently killed his brother Ray -- and, when he detects the stamp on his skin, he simply peels it off and throws it aside.)  The probation officer, Ray Stussy, is sleeping with an attractive female ex-convict (beautifully played Mary Ellen Winsted); she and Ray are planning to enter a Bridge tournament and hope to make a killing on prize money -- their ideas of what constitute wealth are as limited as their other horizons.  Finally, a sinister Englishman, played with monstrous aplomb by David Thewelis, has come to collect on the debt owed his company by the parking lot enterprise -- his plan is to secure millions and millions of dollars of loans in the name of the parking lot tycoon's business, steal the money, and, then, force Emmet Stussy's firm into bankruptcy.  This bad guy, who embodies pure and nauseating evil, comes with a pack of multi-ethnic henchmen and manages his operations from a command center in a semi-trailer rig.  In the course of the show, these plots coalesce.  In large part, our interpretation of the action is shaped by the opinions of the lady deputy sheriff, the incandescent Carrie Coons, who is also equipped with a comic sidekick, another female cop who is assiduously attempting to have a child.  (They are an odd couple -- a bit like Joe Lewis and Fred Gwynne in Car 54 Where are you?)  These two women are the symbolic figures for pure, and disinterested good -- they represent the forces that hold society together, that is, empathy, lawfulness, integrity.  But the cynical plot shows them always arriving at the crime scene about a half-hour too late -- the agents of the law are no match for the ingenious and terrifying evil of the bad guys and they can't intervene successfully to stop the criminals from implementing their wickedness.   The Coen brothers have always represented evil as self-limiting -- that is, bad people become entangled in their web of evil and end up destroying themselves or being destroyed by others who are equally evil and, therefore, equally self-destructive.  In essence, the theme of the show is that evil can't prevail because bad impulses are intrinsically self-destructive -- as we learned many years ago, murderers always fail because the act of killing makes them "blood simple" -- that is, stupid.  A similar mechanism for retribution is shown in this show.  This metaphysics makes the police witnesses but not agents -- they can't alter the course of events.  In fact, the virtuous deputy Sheriff, Office Burgle (Coons) wonders whether she even exists -- automatic doors don't open for her and rest-room towel dispensers don't issue paper towels to her.  She has read a story written by her stepfather about a hapless robot who wanders through many star systems naively chirping "I can help" but who has no capacity at all to assist any one in any meaningful way -- "am I that robot", she asks?  The implicitly self-destructive characteristic of evil is dramatized by an object:  a little box that does one thing -- a hand emerges from the box, switches it off, thus causing the hand to retract into its casket.   At the very end of the series, the evil Englishman has reappeared in America after an absence of five years.  The former Meeker County sheriff's deputy, Officer Burgle is now an agent with Homeland Security.  She confronts the evil multi-national criminal in an allegorical underground vault.  He tells her that she is powerless to stop him.  The film irradiates her humble features with light and she seems to shine like a secular saint.  She says that she will send him to Riker's Island to lock-up and that she intends to go to the State Fair and enjoy a deep-fried Snickers bar -- "it's prison and eating potatos out of a box for you," she said, "and I'll be eating a deep-fried Snickers bar at the Fair"  The villain says that within five minutes his representatives will appear and that "it will be as if you never existed...I will walk right out that door."  The villain's face is bathed in shadow.  The camera leisurely turns away from the protagonists and focuses on a clock on the wall -- the villain says he will be free in five minutes -- we hear a few bars of a Beethoven piano sonata and, then, the screen goes black:  we don't know who prevails in this encounter.  As always with Coen brother's enterprises, the show has a supernatural aspect -- the evil that the characters encounter in Meeker County, Minnesota is related to the same evil that exterminated the Jews and that motivated torture in the offices of the Stasi in East Berlin.  This evil is opposed by figures that have angelic characteristics and that recite scripture -- the show's other heroine, the wily ex-convict seeks revenge for the death of her boyfriend, the crooked probation officer.  In the final shootout, she recites a passage from the Bible apparently conveyed to her by an angel or supernatural figure in an isolated bowling alley, a place where the characters have sought refuge.  The angel is similar to figures in other Coen brothers' films, particularly the cowboy who appears at the bar in the bowling alley in The Big Lebowski.  In Fargo (3), someone mentions that they are in a bowling alley, and the angelic figure, appearing in the guise of the weary businessman, says "so that's what it looks like to you", signifying that the place is some kind heavenly palace or purgatorial prison.  But the plucky heroine ends up aiming her gun at the wrong person and, when the gun discharges, she shoots someone else by accident -- it's all wholly accidental and we see her lying dead on the road against a vista of absolutely flat fields (the show was shot in Alberta), a perfectly round bullet-hole in her head.  Deputy Burgle understands what has happened:  "he killed her man," she says, "and she is going to get him back."  But, as always, human motives generally diverge from the effects of those motives when people try to put their schemes into action -- things go wrong:  it's part of "the crooked timber of humanity."  Everyone is a kind of success until they fail.  And failure is inevitable.

The curious aspect of this iteration of Fargo is the director's refusal to show actual violence.  We hear gunshots and the sounds of people screaming, but we don't see anyone actually firing a gun onscreen.  Indeed, in the final episode, a gunman comes to kill the parking lot mogul -- he has left his Christmas dinner and is looking for a jello salad forgotten in his refrigerator.  As he squats to remove the jello salad from a lower shelf in the fridge, the camera tracks to the left and we see a gun with silencer on its muzzle.  The camera keeps tracking to the left to reveal the identity of the figure holding the gun and, then, we hear the pistol fired.  But we don't see parking lot king collapse -- he dies off-screen.  In the final shootout on the highway, the director stages the exchange of gunshots at such a distance that we can't tell what happens -- we just see tiny figures crumple, dropping onto the pavement against a huge landscape of barren and completely flat fields.  When the  female ex-con gets severely beaten, the camera registers the attack through the reactions of those watching the assault -- we are not actually shown the woman being beaten, although we hear the blows and her cries.  The big massacre in the last episode occurs entirely off-screen -- it's an ambush in a strange-looking storage building among similarly desolate grain elevators and results in 10 or more casualties, but we don't really see any of this happen.  The show's strategy is resolute -- keep the carnage off-screen.  But there is one episode where this rule is violated, and this episode is, more or less, central to the entire series.  (It bears some resemblance to the famous Pine Barrens episode in The Sopranos).  The probation officer's girlfriend is framed for his killing -- in fact, the man was inadvertently killed by his twin brother in an absurd fracas over the Sisyphus stamp.  The young woman shows no emotion, but we know that, against all odds, she loved her loser boyfriend -- her response when someone suggests an autopsy on the dead man is "Don't cut up my Ray." En route to prison, her bus is hijacked and the ex-con has to flee into the woods, shackled to a deaf-mute inmate, a man who later turns out to be a terrifying avenging angel. The fugitives encounter some bow-hunters but those people are murdered by the Englishman's henchmen -- this sets up a gory set-piece involving an ax on a stump, arrows piercing people like pin-cushions, and a beheading.  All of this is filmed from a God's eye view, directly overhead the stump which sits in a snowfield that gets progressively more and more black with blood  -- the sequence is the gross-out equivalent of the woodchipper scene in the original Fargo. After this sequence, the ex-con and the deaf-mute flee to an improbably located bowling alley and there encounter what seems to be a supernatural figure.  This figure stands for God's dispassionate wrath.  We learn that one of the henchmen pursuing the dead probation officer's girlfriend and the deaf mute is an ethnic Cossack -- his grandfather was responsible for the liquidation of a Jewish village.  The supernatural figure, who looks like a weary businessman (we saw him once before in an earlier episode in the same avatar), argues for the notion of inherited guilt -- something like original sin.  As the Cossack bleeds to death, (he's lost his ear and part of his cheek to an ax), the businessman curses him and, in a startling shot, we see a huge crowd of martyrs, apparently Eastern European Jews, filmed in black and white and glowering at the camera.  A little before this sequence, we have learned that hapless Ray Stussy has been reincarnated as a kitten -- his girlfriend says:  "Put him near the TV when the Gophers play and pour a little beer in his bowl."  The net effect of this sequence, taken in the context of the harrowing bloodbath in the forest, is to suggest that the world is, indeed, a just place and that, somehow, righteousness will prevail.  But human beings, it seems, are so fatally defective that they can't act intentionally to will the good -- their actions, it seems, always go awry.  This idea is a variant on an idea that Kafka wrote to one of his girlfriends -- "Yes, there is hope.  Infinite hope.  But just not for us..."  So, similarly, the world is just -- there is justice, infinite justice, but beyond human intentionality. 

Fargo (3) with its three converging plots lucidly ties up almost all loose ends -- the exception is the peculiar opening scene set in East Berlin in the 70's that seems to have nothing to do with anything else in this season's narrative.  Thus Fargo (3) stands in opposition to David Lynch's equally brilliant and unsettling Twin Peaks (2017).  Lynch's original series is a source for much of what the Coen brothers accomplished in their original film, particular with respect to the contrast between complete and horrific evil and strangely naïve and ingenuous virtue -- in the original Twin Peaks and Fargo, the good folks simply can't imagine how the bad people think:  the films posit two almost completely different moral species, two types of human beings who are so different in values and outlook that they can barely communicate.  Fargo (3) is centripetal -- it seems to coalesce, drawing disparate plot elements together.  By contrast Twin Peaks (2017) seems completely centrifugal -- each episode seems to spawn another two or three subplots; this tendency is reflected in the series dividing Agent Cooper up into at least three (or four) competing characters all played by Kyle McLaughlin.  Fargo (3) is centered; Twin Peaks (2017) seems radically de-centered.