Fargo: What Is Familiar Is Most Unfamiliar

One of film noir’s dominant characteristics is the transmutation of the familiar and comfortable into the wrenching and vulgar.  In Shadow of a Doubt Alfred Hitchcock transforms the lofty “Merry Widow Waltz” into a whirling psychosis.  So too in Blue Velvet David Lynch morphs simple pop songs into odes to insanity.  In this tradition, the Cohen Brothers challenge our accepted notions of normality with their film Fargo.  The audience watches a police officer in her third trimester unravel the grim reality of a debt-ridden, cowardly husband who commissioned the kidnapping of his wife, of which said plan goes horribly wrong and results in multiple murders.  Yet, even though this is such a disturbing plot, the audience can hardly keep from laughing throughout the film.  By making the audience cackle at this morbid depiction of a “true story” (which is as suspect as one of Jerry Lundegaard’s lines) the Cohen Brother’s achieve the task of contorting not just the film’s character’s sanity, but the audience’s emotional stability as well.

The first way in which the Cohen Brother’s invite the audience to laugh is through the setting, specifically Minneapolis, Brainerd, and Fargo, but more generally the American Midwest.  By highlighting the characters’ “Minnesota Nice” accents almost every line of the movie sounds perky and genuine.  However, in a way similar to Alan Pakula’s Klute, the audience is confronted with a disparity in the visual and aural.  Fargo’s visual experience is one where we see a man’s face mutilated by a shot from a revolver, a man jamming axed human body parts into a wood chipper, a police officer shot through the top of the head which sprays blood all over another character, and sever other gory and gruesome deaths, all of which are made even more dismal by the isolating whiteness surrounding them.  Still, at the same time we hear chipper voices remark that Steve Bushemi’s character is “funny looking in a general sort of way” and that “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day” – the quintessential quaint moral of the story.

Secondly, the Cohen Brother’s also depart from our expectations of a film noir by playing with our understanding of character roles.  Instead of a weak-male protagonist, we have a weak-male antagonist, who is surrounded by an abundance of other inadequate and inept male characters.  Conversely, the film’s protagonist is the lone investigator, rogue-copesque Marge Gunderson.  Marge’s difference from traditional film noir character types is amplified by the fact that she is pregnant (females are never motherly in film noir) and also by the subservient and impotent males who make up the rest of the film.  Marge is profoundly likeable as she is a sweet, brilliant detective who always handles sensitive situations with the right amount of touch and handles serious situations with a heavy hand.  Again, this is the Cohen Brother’s way of removing the audience from their anticipated comfort even in a film genre this is inherently uncomfortable.

Ultimately, Fargo is so effective in its endeavor to corrupt its audience because it not only allows the audience to laugh at such a disturbing story, but it invites them to laugh.  At first glance, Fargo seems to be a comedic depiction of a tragic story which is artful in itself.  However, it is the second glance where one realizes what he or she was just convinced of laughing at for an hour and thirty-eight minutes that is truly unsettling.