Fargo (Fifth Season)

 Fargo's fifth season is a well-written and suspenseful fantasia on Western themes.  Featuring men on horseback, lonesome windmills on the lonesome prairie, and a villainous sheriff, the show is handsomely mounted with some big stars and picturesque wintry landscapes.  In this iteration of the FX series, the show takes place largely on the barren plains of North Dakota, of course, a reversal of the original Coen brothers' film in which the action was primarily set in Minnesota notwithstanding the movie's misleading title.  Fargo (fifth series) looks like an expensive Hollywood movie with a funky, atmospheric soundtrack, carefully composed images many of the redolent of classic John Ford or Sam Peckinpah(there are low angle shots of figures with long guns statuesquely displayed against roiling fog and fields of snow).  But the TV show, mimicking the quirky dialogue and dead-pan humor of the original Coen brothers' film also ventures into some very strange territory -- the show references horror movies and many scenes are clearly influenced by the nightmarish imagery in David Lynch's most recent TV series, his spectacular 2017 re-boot of Twin Peaks.  Less a fully imagined independent work of film art, Fargo is more of a compilation of impressive sequences alluding to other movies -- but the film is so well-acted, has such compelling villains, together with an outstanding heroine who is unexpectedly and memorably ferocious, that the series is compulsively entertaining and, even, from time to time profound.  It's about as good as long form TV gets and so highly recommended.  

Fargo, as a TV series, is a pastiche of elements that were integral to the original film.  The TV show begins with a dire, faux-serious assertion that everything that you see is true, that the events took place in Minnesota during a certain year, and that the names have been changed to protect the innocent; everything else is said to be shown exactly as it occurred out of respect for the dead.  (This was the prologue to 1996 film as well.)  FX's fifth season features an embattled female cop, a kidnapping, several rival gangs of villains, bickering family members, and snowy Midwestern locations; everyone speaks with a Scandinavian lilt, a dialect that parodies some Minnesota accents, although, in truth, in a grotesquely exaggerated manner.  (The singsong Scandinavian prosody is applied with a trowel and, sometimes, used in ways that don't ring true -- in the show, the female cop seems to be either an American Indian or, perhaps, of ethnic origin in the India located in Asia; the joke is that you can't tell whether she's an American or Asian Indian; a person of this kind would not speak in the dialect used in the movie, particularly if she were Lakota or Ojibway.)   People pretend to be "Minnesota Nice" but harbor all sorts of dark and vicious motives.  There are repeated contrasts to the way people want to seem and the exorbitantly violent or vicious way in which they behave.  A rural/suburban standard for normal conduct is assumed and forms the contrast to the barbaric events that the show depicts.  The morality of Coen brothers original film was that behaving decently is a default position that is easy to accomplish; it  takes real energy, wit, and cruelty to behave badly.  Therefore, characters should be ashamed from departing from the easy path of virtue (which is, more or less, doing things like everyone else) and behaving badly.  Both the original movie and the Fifth Series features a memorable scene in which a good character denounces someone who has behaved badly by saying:  "You should ashamed of yourself."  The program has excellent acting, forceful direction, and, unlike many long form TV shows, doesn't flag after its third episode -- there are some scenes that feel like they are just killing time in order to devise ten hour-long episodes, but they are relatively few and far between and in the Fifth Series, an episode that turns out to be an extended, and very strange, dream sequence initially feels superfluous, but, in fact, later develops into a pivot point on which the plot turns and, also, is a tactful solution to an esthetic problem -- the driving theme in the Fifth Season is extreme domestic abuse and, yet, the movie wants to preserve a quirky, entertaining tone and, so, it can't get so dark as to be unwatchable or seriously disturbing; the dream episode casts the horrifying elements of the story into a puppet play within a play (it's a kind of dream inside a dream) and, therefore, makes those aspects of the plot bearable.  The show is exceptionally violent in the conventional sense that audiences are now desensitized to accept:  people get beaten to pulp, brains are sprayed all over walls and ceilings, corpses covered in quick-lime rot in a cistern in which the heroine hides, holding a gruesome-looking femur as a weapon; in one scene, a gruesome distinction is made between the blood-splatter blasted off a living victim and the darker, less fulsome spray caused by a shot to the head of the corpse of a person who has been dead for ten hours.  This sort of imagery is expected on crime shows on cable TV and FX has to deploy this sort of imagery in order to compete with other programming, including its own prior episodes.  The shows are calibrated to contemporary concerns -- there is a strong and obvious anti-Trump aspect to the Fifth Series.  Generally, the programs feature female characters who are more savage and relentless than their male counterparts.  Kirsten Dunst in the second series plays a casserole (hot dish)- toting character who makes Lady Macbeth seem like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.  The Fifth Series is the story of Dot, aka Nadine, a community-spirited church lady who is tiny, speaks in a cheerful chirpy voice, and weighs about 80 pounds; she turns out to a be a murder-machine with the skills of a member of a Navy Seal team.  Posed against the show's villain, Sheriff Roy Tillman, Dot is about one-third of his size (Tillman is played by a beefy, corpulent Jon Hamm -- embodying the principle expressed in Once upon a Time in Hollywood that when handsome leading men are cast as villains their downward trajectory in the  industry is assured.)  Nonetheless, Dot proves to be a worthy antagonist to the criminal Tillman and her machinations, once he makes the mistake of kidnapping her, lead to his ruin. 

Fargo (Fifth Series) is replete with amusing and colorful supporting players.  There is a suave nastily efficient family lawyer, Danish Graves who wears pale suits and an eyepatch -- he's a representative of the various skillful and conniving lawyers that populate Coen Brothers movies; referring to his picturesque name, Tillman asks whether he's a man "or a really serious breakfast."  Dot's mother-in-law is a billionaire who runs a predatory debt consolidation business.  This part is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh who channels Katherine Hepburn in her diction, albeit a wholly monstrous Katherine Hepburn; with her mouth an ear-to-ear scowl slashed across her face, Leigh gives a very stylized performance -- her drawl contrasts with the Scandinavian lilt in the voices of the other characters and, although she plays a villain, she has a feudal loyalty to her servants and retainers that is heroic in its own right.  (At one point, she calls in a debt from that "orange idiot" to whom she has given campaign money -- obviously referring to Donald Trump.) There are sleazy bankers, weird-looking FBI agents (they are variants on the sinister men-in-black), assorted henchmen and a courageous, if ineffectual, Black cop, a North Dakota state trooper.  In keeping with some of the Coen brothers less well-known pictures, there are supernatural events that are rather casually incorporated into otherwise realistic plots -- in the Fifth Series, an immortal Welsh sin-eater stalks around, speaking in a bizarre way that is either an idiolect and the ravings of a madman.  (The Sin-Eater seems a misstep to me, an arbitrary invasion of the uncanny into a show that is already filled with a lot of strange, and bizarre, content; but the figure is very frightening -- he's conceived as a combination of Boris Karloff, to whom he has a physical resemblance, with a terrible haircut similar to the coiffure sported by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, an implacable force of ancient, undying malice that the various parties to the conflict in the show try to harness to their own ends.  Roy Tillman, as played by Jon Hamm, gets a number of spectacular speeches -- "This is our Masada" and "I'll show you how a patriot dies a-singin'."  He's surrounded by a posse of Western movie grotesques, including his feckless and sadistic son (who Tillman despises), a rancher-wife pretty much always disfigured by bruises that Tillman has given her, a Black compadre who looks like Woody Strode, and Odin, Tillman's grimacing gargoyle of a father-in-law who cites Hitler from time-to-time:  "What I wanna know," he asks Tillman, "is whether you are Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?"  All of these supporting figures are richly imagined and they all have their own way of talking.  Some of this is over-rich:  at one point, an National Guard commander reproaches one of his men by saying:  "Don't interrupt me when I'm bantering."  But, by and large, the audience is willing to suspend disbelief with respect to this picturesque cast of goons and villains and eccentric minor characters.  The show even manages to make pure and unadulterated virtue seem faintly interesting, something unusual in shows like this -- Dot's husband, the son of the tyrannical debt consolidator, runs a car dealership, also a nod to the original movie; he's a figure of saint-like if idiotic virtue and, in one scene, in which he trades a brand new car for a rustbucket ("Give a car, get a car," he babbles), his kindness is genuinely moving.  All of these figures act against an intensely realistic milieu of snowy small-town streets, empty prairie, and decaying farmsteads -- arrow-straight roads run across endless snowy steppes interrupted here and there by a bleak truckstops.  (Noah Hawley, the show's producer and, with others, script writer, doesn't know the actual geography of Minnesota -- he seems to think that rural North Dakota is only a couple of hours from Scandia, the St. Paul suburb in which the Minnesota characters live -- the distance is more like six hours at least and, probably, eight to ten hours to the areas in western North Dakota where Roy Tillman and his far-Right militia rule.  Again, you have to accept this with a grain of salt, just the way you react to the obviously false claim of documentary truth with which the show always begins.

The Fifth Series takes place in 2019.  The show starts with a riot at a School Board meeting, shot in slow-motion with people throwing things and punching each other.  Dot, the heroine is at the meeting with her daughter and, when someone threatens the girl, she responds violently.  A cop tries to intervene and Dot blasts him in the face with some sort of pepper spray.  She gets arrested and this incident is shown on TV and results in a mug shot showing Dot broadcast to law enforcement nation-wide.  Dot turns out to be Roy Tillman's second wife (he beat the first wife to death).  Tillman still loves Dot, whom he calls Nadine, after his own grotesque manner, or, at least, regards her as chattel that has gone astray.  He dispatches his henchman, the eerie Ole Munch (a five-hundred year sin-eater) to kidnap her in Scandia, the Twin Cities suburb where she lives with her husband, a car dealer who is the son of an overbearing and cynical debt consolidation magnate, Lorraine Lyon.  When Nadine/Dot thwarts the first attempt at kidnaping her, kills one of Munch's henchmen, and grievously injures Munch himself. Tillman sends his ineffectual son, Gator with a couple of other thugs, to snatch the woman.  This effort succeeds, although only temporarily.  The resourceful Dot again escapes.  Her flight ends in a shoot-out in a remote North Dakota truck stop where a Black state patrol officer is wounded, but saved by Dot when the bad guys try to kill him.  The Black cop becomes central to the plot and is Dot's ally as the show  progresses.  Dot gets back to her adoring husband, who has been electrocuted inadvertently by one of Dot's home-defense traps (her house has been burnt down in the second kidnapping).  The electrocution has knocked Wayne, Dot's husband, into a strange state of grace.  Dot's mother-in-law who despises her has the young woman committed to a mental hospital, but, after politely apologizing for the mayhem she is about to commit, Dot escapes from that confinement as well.  On the run, Dot leaves her daughter, Scotty, with a helpful local police officer, an Indian woman who is married to a useless would-be golf pro and flees the State.  She ends up in North Dakota where she encounters Linda, Tillman's first wife, whom he has battered to death -- in an extended dream sequence, Dot finds herself at a "Camp Utopia" where the victims of domestic abuse support one another's healing by acting out Punch and Judy shows depicting the crimes committed against them.  Dot, who has fallen asleep, while driving, crashes her car, is hospitalized, and, then, checked-out of the hospital by Roy Tillman and his gang.  Dot is taken to the Tillman ranch where all the forces in the film converge for the final episodes.  (I have left out some torture scenes, a guy getting his eyes gouged-out, and various other encounters of that sort.)  

The show's final episode is unusual in all respects and quite audacious in its brazen disregard for audience expectations.  The battle at the Tillman Ranch is staged in discontinuous shots, each scene interrupted by a short black-out.  The effect is to create a strange staccato rhythm to the scenes showing the attack on the compound.  The black-outs punctuating this action scene prevent the viewer from becoming emotionally engaged in the combat; we see only glimpses of the fighting and, therefore, can't become emotionally engaged in the sequence and, certainly, would find it impossible to register the violence as somehow exciting or spectacular or suspenseful.  This is an alienation effect, designed to prevent an aspect of hypocrisy that always vexes anti-war or anti-violence scenes -- it's hard to decry mayhem that is filmed as charismatic, thrilling, and pictorially engaging.  This is the Apocalypse Now effect -- that is, an anti-war movie that proceeds through cinematically thrilling sequences of highly choreographed violence.  Thomas Bezucha (the director of the last couple episodes and a show-runner with Noah Hawley) interpolate brief glimpses of violence with empty, darkness so as to alienate the viewers from what is happening.  It's effective but off-putting exactly as intended.  We can't really see what is going on, but know that it is dire.  Toward the end of the fighting, the movie stages the action more conventionally so that we can see the fates of the major characters enacted on the screen.  (A criticism I have of this sequence is that it requires a long underground tunnel from a bunker to an exit manhole in a plowed fields.  This bunker and illuminated tunnel is introduced into the show in the penultimate sequence; this seems like violation of the audience's trust:  if this underground passageway was present all the time on the premises and is going to play a crucial role in the show's climax, I think, we should have been earlier introduced to this place and shown the lay-out of the tunnel which is vital to the impressive final scenes in the battle.  This is a minor cavil, but Fargo is so well-made and carefully engineered that this sort of defect in the show's planning is not only visible, but feels obtrusively significant.)

The fight at the Tillman Ranch occupies the first half of the last episode.  The last half of the episode seems anti-climactic following the fortunes of the surviving characters in the year following the stand-off with Tillman and his militia.  To end the ten episode show with this sort of anti-climax is a bold strategy but one that pays off, I think, with regard to the larger significance of the Fifth Series' thematic concerns.  This season of Fargo has been designed around notions of debt, and the forgiveness of debt.  Debt is construed by the movie's script-writers as a kind of sin.  Ole Munch, the implacable 500-year old sin-eater, represents a sinister parody of the Christian doctrine that Christ redeemed mankind by taking upon himself humanity's sins and expiating them on the cross.  The sin-eater is engaged for "two coins" to eat food served on the casket of a wealthy man, thereby devouring and assimilating to himself the dead man's sins -- or his metaphysical debts within the show's framework.  (Recall that Dot's nightmarishly brutal and fierce mother-in-law is also a kind sin-eater for hire -- she acts to consolidate people's debts so as to better, and more aggressively, collect on those obligations.)  In the shows last twenty minutes, the concept of debt as interminable and ubiquitous (debt as original sin) and forgiveness of debt (sin) becomes central to the scenario.  Lorraine, who proudly asserts that she owns many judges because she is the foremost contributor to the radical right-wing Federalist Society (of course, a source for the jurists that Trump has placed on the judiciary) stands for the proposition that the collection of debts is integral to a Capitalist society and that such debt collection includes the notion of revenge that is just as unrelenting and interminable as original sin.  Lorraine uses the judicial system to devise a mechanism for repayment of debt, construed as revenge that is potentially unlimited.  In effect, she stands for the proposition that society can't function without debt (otherwise there would be no credit) and the powerful are entitled to their pound of flesh, that is, revenge, stretched out to infinity.  By contrast, the show's final scene reverses these propositions and argues, implicitly, that civilization is not possible unless claims for revenge, even if arguably just and valid, are relinquished.  Debt as sin must be forgiven if people are to live together in something approximating grace.  These are complex assertions and both claims -- that is, that debts must be ruthlessly collected and that debt should be forgiven -- must be accorded, perhaps, an equal standing in human affairs.  Increasingly, I have observed that TV shows in the long form often implicate issues involving revenge or comeuppance -- those who are the victims of oppression or extortionate threats of violence must get their revenge.  Justice, as it were, must be violently served.  This sort of structure of villainy, oppression, and, then, a reversal of fortune is satisfying to the audience because it offers the satisfaction of seeing evil revenged has always been a mainstay of narrative art.  (Odysseus' violent revenge on the suitors in Homer's Odyssey is the template on which plots of this sort are premised; Odysseus is insulted and injured and humilated for thousands of lines before he turns the tables and kills every one of his tormentors.) But this kind of narrative, although compelling, doesn't exactly appeal to "the better angels of our nature" (if, indeed, such exist).  Just about every long-form cable and streaming crime show features revenge as an important element in the plot -- for instance, shows like Succession, Billions, Beef and so on all involve baroque threats of violence made by the wealthy and powerful that, in the end, give rise to revenge served cold to the villains.  This is a satisfying plot line and always enchants viewers.  But, perhaps, there is another way and Fargo (Fifth Series) is willing to, at least, explore another paradigm -- maybe, we should consider, in our fractious politics and relationships, whether forgiveness might not be better than violent revenge.  Fargo has plenty of violent revenge luridly enacted on the wicked -- a good example is a particularly petulant and foul-mouthed patient in a hospital, awaiting cancer surgery, who bullies everyone that he encounters, gets accidentally snatched as a result of a misidentification, and is tortured to death as a result of this mistake.  We thoroughly dislike this minor character who is presented as completely loathsome (and who remains vile even during his torture) but it does seem a bit excessive for him to be punished so spectacularly for what was really just a nasty and vituperative tongue.  The show presents this inconsequential character's torture and murder as comical -- the guy is getting his comeuppance and, then, some and he is shown to be so despicable that we can't really sympathize with him.  In a way, it's an unfair "stacking of the deck" against the character.  To Fargo's credit, the last hour of the show is far more profound as to the subject of revenge -- we are allowed a sneaking sympathy with some of the most vicious characters and, at the end, the show argues that forgiveness is better than revenge.