What is the meaning behind the Coen brothers’ ‘Fargo’?
Fraternal writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen once remarked in an interview that they had no idea what the prologue to their film A Serious Man meant. They’d just made it up, almost for a laugh. This sentiment seems to run through the brothers’ brilliant filmography, including their masterpiece Fargo.
In the end, Fargo is just a movie about a weak, corrupt salesman who gets himself into a situation where he proves out of his depth, to tragicomic effect. The bad guys he gets involved with do bad things with serious consequences, while a heroic police officer gradually uncovers the shady deeds afoot before catching the anti-hero and one of his hatchetmen at the film’s conclusion.
It doesn’t even take place in Fargo, North Dakota – the town from which it gets its name. Various locations around the state of Minnesota, not least its major metropolis, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, appear throughout the movie. One of its defining motifs is the stereotypically cheery demeanour adopted by its Minnesotan characters (regardless of what grisly or sinister deeds they’re involved with), with most of the dialogue spoken with a “sunny Minnesota” twang.
The one scene that does take place in Fargo is a brief meeting in a bar between the desperate salesman Jerry and the criminals he is hiring to have his wife kidnapped. It’s a brief scene of under four minutes, which appears to be purely transactional. The two parties are simply confirming the deal they’re making.
Three men walk into a bar
In fact, what this scene does is set up the entire movie on two levels.
Firstly, it brings together the anti-hero and his antagonists, two criminal lowlives played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, for the first time. It shows both Jerry and the two hatchetmen to be equally incompetent in different ways and indicates to us that with these three people involved, the crime at the centre of the plot is bound to go awry.
The scene hints at the dark comedy the Coens will find in the situation, as Jerry and the kidnappers both manage to mix up the agreed meeting time. “He’s peed three times already,” Steve Buscemi’s character Carl says about his partner in crime’s inability to wait, demonstrating how comically unsuited the two men are to the crime they are tasked with.
Secondly, we see in a small piece of dialogue the farcical contradictions within Jerry’s character, played by William H. Macy. On the one hand, he answers the question, “You want your own wife kidnapped?” with a plain “Yeah” as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Moments later, he refuses to explain why he doesn’t just ask his wife or her father for the money he needs by protesting: “These are personal matters.”
His act of pure evil is perfectly fine to admit plainly, but any apparent affront to his manhood by suggesting he’s in an emasculating position within his marriage is too much to bear. This internal conflict within Jerry drives the plot.
The outward expression of Jerry’s inner demons through comic incompetence juxtaposed with severe, brutal crimes makes for an ingeniously twisted farce that only the Coens could pull off.
What’s the point of Fargo?
Is there a point to the film beyond the farce? Well, as Frances McDormand’s heroic police chief obliquely puts it at the movie’s conclusion, “And for what? For a little bit of money.” It’s as though all of these absurd, idiotic, violent, criminal actions had no meaning beyond someone just trying to break even or earn a buck.
And yet it’s Marge’s story that adds warmth and humanity to a film which might otherwise appear superbly executed, shocking and bleakly hilarious, but ultimately pointless.
Having a female police chief solve a horrific kidnap-murder case while heavily pregnant subverts the phallocentric police officer plotlines typical of Hollywood. And the way Marge cares for her husband, Norm, and gently lets down obsessive high-school classmate Mike Yanagita makes for a touching antidote to the crazed, moronic blunders of the film’s male protagonists.
So, why didn’t the Coen brothers call the film “Brainerd”, the hometown of Marge and her husband in Minnesota? They’d probably laugh and tell you, it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “Fargo”, now, does it?
