In Which The Lady Sprawls On A Loveseat Of Her Choosing

Lady Luck

by ETHAN PETERSON

Fargo
creator Noah Hawley
FX

The Lady rides a chariot towed by two cats. She is lovely, lovelier than any mortal thing, and when Ray Stussy (Ewan McGregor) finds her, he is bowled over completely. Her name, on this mortal plane, is Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and she meets Ray because he is her parole officer. Ray cannot believe his luck. The purest sort of divinity can be found in the unlikeliest of possible places, which in the case of this season of FX's finest show, Fargo, is a Minnesota that looks curiously like Alberta, Canada.

Winstead is an actress of rare force and beauty. Nothing, not even a hacking of her iCloud account, dampens her considerable appeal. Her clothing is extremely basic, and her fondness for bridge resembles a passion shared by my late grandmother, but this is no matter. She is the Lady, a beacon of equanimity. You would do absolutely anything to be invited into a bathtub with this creature, even if she makes you face forward. Her voice is the wind.

Hot on her trail is Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon), a police officer in Eden Valley, MN. Coon has made a career of playing women so comfortable in their own skin you almost want to touch them to make sure they are alive. Watching her slip out of this chasm of self-reliance is the pleasure of watching Ms. Coon, whose name is very racist. Burgle despises computers and is so polarized against technology that she is not even recognized by electronic doors. Her only relation besides an ineffectual son is the father of her ex-husband. (He is murdered at the end of the first episode, and Gloria wants to find out why.)

Let's get back to the Lady, however. She has this magical apartment (it is not her real name on the lease) that covers almost an entire floor. Housing is dirt fucking cheap in the Midwest. Her boyfriend Ray comes to her with a problem one night. He has blackmailed another one of his parolees into robbing his twin brother Emmet (a clean shaven Ewan McGregor) of an extremely valuable stamp. Instead of accomplishing this theft, the parolee (Scoot McNairy) murdered a similarly named senior citizen living at another address. He returns and demands money from Ray for his trouble.

The Lady tells Ray not to worry too much about this murder, since it is natural that police do not spend as much time investigating the murder of seniors, given how close to death they already are. He knows that it probably will not work this way, but he wants to believe. The remaining loose end is the actual perpetrator of said murder, who can figure the Lady's boyfriend in this conspiracy. The Lady ties it up nicely by pushing her air conditioning unit, several stories, onto his tiny drunk head.

Ray has been an accessory to a few crimes, but he cannot be said to have had foreknowledge of any of them. As such, he is an innocent, and the Lady recognizes this. There is one famous story about the Lady, who is sometimes called Freyja. It was the custom of all the men who came to Valhalla to fall on their knees before her, so amazed were they by her primordial beauty. She could have any of them; none would refuse her. "Rise," she would tell them, and any who could not, she would take to her bed.

Ray's twin brother Emmet Stussy (still Ewan McGregor) has a wife Stella (Linda Kash) and a couple of kids, so by all indications of his massive mansion, his parking lot business is helping him to live a much happier life than his brother. In reality, Emmet has borrowed money from V.M. Varga (David Thewlis), an intensely disturbed crook. Should any of this sound the slightest bit confusing, don't worry. All you need to remember is that by the end, if the most disturbing thing you have seen is the tampon of the Lady, found as her calling card in a drawer located in Emmet Stussy's house, you can count yourself lucky.

Even though it seems like this season of Fargo has a lot of characters, last season topped it for sheer numbers and was also possibly the best thing ever made on broadcast television. Exceeding it with this 2010 edition is no easy feat, and Noah Hawley does not seem to be attempting something of the exact same scope. Instead, he embraces a common trick of adapters: he returns to an original source for inspiration, for this version of Fargo is more like the original movie than any other.

What made the cinematic original of Fargo so different from other noirs was the way it made a human desperation so completely palpable, and thus a believable, sympathetic driver of events. Older films in the same milieu had characters who went essentially mad for a woman, or for some money. In this world, a woman is a gift bestoyed upon a man by a merciful God, and money is the luck of the Irish. It is being deprived of what the Lady has already seen fit to give us which disturbs our ch'i considerably more than wanting it in the first place.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Consider Moving To The Midwest

Epilogue

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Fargo
creator Noah Hawley

It was difficult to think how Noah Hawley was going to top his first season of Fargo. After watching the second season, which is the best thing since Breaking Bad and maybe even better than that much celebrated serial, it is hard not to look at the first season with the eye to it being merely a prologue for the real thing.

The hero/villain of the first season was Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), and the efforts of a police officer, Molly Solverson (Alison Tollman) to find out his connection with a drifter named Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton). All these performances seemed quite fresh, and Molly was a suitable, if overally polite, heroine.

Twenty years earlier, Molly's father Lou (Patrick Wilson) makes a much better one. This is a man of stunning intelligence and grit, made all the more sympathetic because we know what life had reduced him to by the first season: Keith Carradine. Molly is just an eight year old girl in 1979, and her mother has brain cancer. Her parents rarely touch, out of a possible sense of not wanting to make their coming parting any more difficult than than it has to be.

While the first season of Fargo was extremely depressing and jaded in all of its macabre aspects, this phenomenal second attempt at a midwestern crime story is a lot less dark, albeit a lot more bloody. The sheer number of corpses is absolutely staggering, and under normal circumstances it would numb us to the impact of guns on our lives.

Almost everyone holds or shoots a gun in Fargo. It is not terribly surprising that people who live in the country would want such weapons for protection. In cities, firearms are far more dangerous, and Fargo makes a point of expressing a familiar refrain: there is no hiding place.

The story is a relatively simple one that becomes more complex in the details. A Jewish crime syndicate headed by Alan Arkin sends out Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) to buy the territory of a German family operation, the Gerhardts, after Otto Gerhardt suffers a massive stroke at the dinner table, rendering him mute and expressionless. The German-Jew angle is never directly brought up — like all slightly impolite things in this part of the country, it is glossed over.

As the only African-American member of his group, the insanely charismatic Woodbine has an opposite number in a Sioux gangster who was adopted by the patriarch of the Gerhardt family to serve as a bodyguard for his son. Zahn McClarnon plays Hamzee Dent as a pent-up loner, quick to anger and vulnerable as all hell. It is something of a one-note character, but the fact that Zahn is able to make us sympathize with a mass murderer is a feat in itself.

Hamzee says only a few paragraphs over the course of Fargo, whatever will get him what he wants. At first that appears to be in line with what the Gerhardts desire, especially when he cuts off Brad Garrett's head. What makes him change his mind is a more subtle thing.

In contrast, Woodbine has a million monologues to explain his own personal ethos. Unlike Hamzee, he does not enjoy killing or use his propensity for violence as a method of revenge or self-expression. He is constantly apologizing for the violence he commits, rationalizing it with the words of men who meted out punishment for the right reasons. Woodbine's body looks like a national monument, and the cheap suits he drapes over it are insufficient to his real purpose. He knows and has always known regret.

We are even more emotionally supportive of the men who opposite these monsters. Molly Solverson was a good cop who investigated smartly: she was a proper detective. Finding out who did it in 1979 is not terribly difficult; it is more a matter of opposing the people that do not care about the answer. Lou's father-in-law Hank (Ted Danson) thinks of himself as a modern day John Wayne. He is that, but he knows that he has lost a step.

Back from Vietnam, Lou is protective of the men and women who did not have to go to war. Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) accidentally hits the youngest Gerhardt son Rye (Kieran Culkin) with her car after he murders a judge and a short order cook at a Waffle Hut. She drove with Rye in her windshield all the way home, and her butcher husband Ed (Jesse Plemons) finished the crazed Rye off in his garage.

Ed disposes of the body at work, in a meat grinder he never bothers to clean out. He thinks he is free of the crime until the Gerhardts and the police get wind of what he has done. Peggy and Ed become unwilling pawns in the organized crime war after that, and they are a lot less afraid than they should be.

Dunst is a natural performer anyway. In her career in film, she imbued even the most stereotypically blonde roles with a permanent darkness you sense she carries around with her in her off-time as well. She is the perfect Minnesota beautician because she can pack so much pathos into so little time. Hawley's scripting smartly gives her little to no guidance, so her entire emotional journey is played out in a series of facial expressions. As sad as Peggy is, at some points Dunst's joy radiates through her, changing the entire mise-en-scène.

There is a lengthy vignette where Lou Solverson accompanies Ronald Reagan (Bruce Campbell) as he gives his "shining city on a hill" speech. The sermon — as it was in Winthrop's time as well as Reagan's — is a moving rejoinder, an encouraging message of optimism in a ruined world. Standing next to him at a urinal, Lou Solverson praises the Governor's speech, but wonders how this will be accomplished. Hawley's joke is that Reagan did not know the answer, but the truth is that Reagan had the only suitable answer: hope and prayer, faith in God.

That is great for some of us, but others have forsaken Him. Abandoning the highest power, they put their trust in the permanence of impermanence, and the comfort of smaller things. Fargo argues that the devil is not in the details. No amount of mythologizing and retelling can make a criminal a hero, or vice versa. Some morons made Al Capone a sympathetic figure, or a glamorous one. He was anything but.

Satire is not appropriate for such moral rigidity. The first season of Fargo had a laugh at the demented nature of mankind, but there is only so far one can take things in that direction. Eventually we come to a relatively standard conclusion — evil is much as Reagan said it was. The reason he said America was a great nation was aspirational, and we needed someone to make us feel better.

Fargo accomplishes that, too. There are brutally sad things in it: the deaths of mother and daughters, some deserved and some completely innocent. A suspicion of procreation, the chance of a placebo or a cure. There is a cold, chaotic world out there. People yearn to control the way the impossible intrudes on what we expect from our lives. We can never completely remove violence from our country and our world, Fargo explains, and we are foolish to think we can. It made us what we are.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. 

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In Which We Feel Sympathetic Towards Kieran Culkin And His Friends

Old Is New

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Fargo
creator Noah Hawley

Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) is not a true detective. He shows up at the Waffle Hut way past midnight, one body outside, one on the floor, and one on a table next to the breakfast. His father-in-law (an unrecognizable Ted Danson) clomps in and offers to take over the case. Lou agrees, and they joke about Lou’s wife’s cooking and how she has cancer, and then Lou goes home. There is no intimacy with his wife (Cristin Miloti).

Noah Hawley is genius at what the Coen Brothers had also mastered before they lost interest in it: the overwhelming premonition that something life-changing is about to happen out of total normalcy. After a brilliant first effort, he has reset the second season of Fargo in 1979, a time that feels a great deal less cynical than the first season's 2006.

It is a relief, since the story of insurance salesman Lester Nygaard was extremely depressing, especially the part where he murdered his wife and you kind of felt sympathetic towards him for doing that because she was not the best.

Wilson always does a fairly good job of playing the same general character: a mild-mannered fellow who goes along, gets along until the moment you make him very mad: then he becomes more powerful than you can possibly imagine. His hair is receding at a glacial pace, and he could almost pass for any age.

The tone here is very different from the morass of Hawley’s previous effort: this is not a diegesis to be taken seriously in the least — noir instead of a jaunty seriousness/unseriousness is the modality here. Even if this Fargo is a bit sillier, Hawley's writing is the best on television by far.

Adam Arkin portrays a maleficent Jewish overlord looking to take over a power vacuum in the greater Minnesota area. The casting is generally perfect: from Kirsten Dunst as a hoarding housewife who runs over Kieran Culkin after he murders a federal judge, Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons looking about forty pounds heavier as her husband, and Bokeem Woodbine and Brad Garrett as gangsters, Nick Offerman as a conspiracy theorist.

Usually Hawley gets his kicks out of casting well-known character actors against type, and he does find joy in that in the second season of Fargo. Jean Smart is a disturbingly hardened wife to the local boss, and Kieran Culkin as her sulking son ("the comic in the bubblegum") fits the bill of characters entertaining simply because they are not what we conventionally expect from these performers. At times the casting is distracting, but it works better this season, because you are not expected to take anything that happens in this Fargo seriously at all.

With Dunst, Hawley really hits the mark. This is the role Kirsten probably should have been playing all along. Hawley really knows how to write for her: she is perfect at the staccato silences, how she exudes sensations without ever having to say a word. The role of Peggy Blomquist is a lot more than merely a costume she inhabits.

Hawley's themes are very subtle, and you often don't know what he is getting at until the very end of a thread. Adding to the obfuscation is the mild-mannered politeness of every resident of Minnesota. Whether it is authentic or not, we feel immersed in an environment that could not ever have existed, but did. The American Midwest before Ronald Reagan took office was a very special time and place to be a part of.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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