Fargo
I saw the movie Fargo again over the weekend. It was on tv. Sometimes I try to use the movie Fargo to make a point. I often underestimate what it takes to make a point. Fargo has always stuck me as being a deliberate microcosm. One that illustrates a few things about rules, different kinds of people, and the way we live. One way to look at a society, is to conceive it as a flock of sheep. Sheep to be sure, but happy sheep. Among us are dogs. I would call them sheepdogs, except that might imply a shepherd that put them there, which may be true, but they don't know that. They may not even be dogs only other sheep, and only believe themselves dogs. We will humor them for know and call them Bigdog (as in Ken-bigdog-Lay). The sheep live, play and work the grass under the eye of the dogs who have rules, a normative warp and woof (if you will) of statues, regulations , and contracts.
Jerry Lundegaard, the William Macy character, is a sheep. He may harbor some notions about joining the ranks of the dogs, but would satisfied to be thought of as a sheep with his feet planted in an enviable patch of sweet green grass. He has his scheme, a scheme and a half really. The legitimate scheme his parking lot 'deal', which is tantalizingly outside his grasp because he cannot finance it. And there is his other scheme, where he takes two steps out side the rules - the laws - to finance the first. A pathetic swindle to create an off-the-books car, which he uses as a down payment to get two hoodlums to kidnap his wife. In both aspirations he runs up against the town's Big dogs, His father-in-law, Wade Gustafson, and his business partner. These are men who do very well for themselves, because they control the money in their town and make the rules. The father in law is full of judgment and opinion They convert everything to their control and ownership using the rules and others belief in them. They slice his first deal from him as he presents it to them and dismiss him with the vague promise of a "finders fee' . They similarly appropriate the second from him as well when Wade insists on taking the money to the kidnappers himself. Big dogs; though, do not really believe in stray dogs - in wolves. Who, if they exist must certainly be small or skinny things. Their attention is, will always be, absorbed by their perception of their own superiority, being in a world where everyone follows the rules. Rules that they think themselves uniquely smart enough to see as only tools.
When Wade attempts to bluster Carl Showalter (Buscemi) he is dealing with a type he doesn't understand at all. Carl shoots him fatally almost immediately. In Wades world everyone is governed by a certain predictable will toward normalcy, or by a rational acquisitiveness, like his own self satisfied greed. He is blind to everything outside this, he never grasps Jerry's duplicity, though he sees he is a fool.. He is completely unprepared to deal with untempered transgression that operates Carl.
Carl and his partner Gaear Grimsrud (the quiet one) are not governed by rationality. The story shows them at a number of turns doing things and ending up in places driven by their appetites and aversions alone. This links them and separates them from the other people in the story. A detail I missed in earlier viewings is that the partner that Shep Proudfoot (the indian mechanic) vouches for earlier in the movie is not the Steve Buscemi character, but is Grimsrud. Of the two Grimsrud is more in control of his appetites and more apt to move directly to appease them. The majority of deaths in the movie are set in motion by Showalter's lack of control. As the events in general are set off by Jerry Lundegaard's incompetent attempts fraud and extortion
From one angle Fargo is about the dogs; this particular kind of person and the world they would create.
Those who believe in a certain narrow calculating rationality as the the human genuis, and live exploiting others embedded in a system of rules. Believing themselves to be the hardest thing in their world and seeing disorder in the flock as the only danger. Who are catastrophically unable to comprehend or effectively deal with the true chaos outside this.
11:45:42 PM  ;;
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