In Which It's A Metaphor You Potato With Eyes

Pied Piper

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Orange is the New Black
creator Jeniji Kohan 

Orange is the New Black's wildly popular first season saw Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for a crime she'd committed ten years previous: carrying a suitcase full of drug money for her ex-girlfriend, Alex Vause (Laura Prepon), a globetrotting drug smuggler. In Litchfield prison, Piper comes face-to-face with a colorful cast of characters whose personalities are as varied as their crimes. More importantly, she sees Alex again for the first time in a decade, and they revisit their romance, to the detriment of her "real life" relationship with Larry, her fiance. In the season finale, after a bad breakup with Larry, Piper's ongoing spat with a fellow inmate, Pennsatucky, turns violent and they exchange blows (and perhaps stabs) in the prison courtyard. Then, every bit as dreadful as its blue counterpart, an orange screen flashed, letting us know we'd have to wait another year for more.

Binge-watching is proof of television's addictive powers. Two weeks ago, I sat down to watch Orange's second season, and didn't really stand up again until I was finished. I've always been partial to this kind of media-consumption; I like being able to get to the resolution of something on my own time. With Kohan's show, binge-watching only heightens the enjoyment. You begin to think you can't escape your own home (just one more episode just one more), then the only tolerable space between you and the computer is the distance between your armchair and the fridge. It's a sad existence but damn it if Orange doesn't make it worth my time.

Season 2 opens with a disorienting trip to Chicago in the middle of the night: Piper's pulled from SHU, where she's been since the incident with Pennsatucky, and thrown onto a plane with a bunch of strangers. Nobody tells her what's going on, which makes Piper very upset, because Piper is used to people humoring her. She's tall and blonde! She lives in New York! She juices! 

As it turns out, Piper and Alex have been brought to the Windy City for the trial against Kubra Balik, Alex's former boss. Alex begs Piper to lie to the court, to tell them that she's never met Kubra, because if they tell different stories things won't go well for them. Piper balks at the dishonesty, but obeys in the end: then, in a horrible twist, finds out that Alex testified against Kubra and was given an early release.

Alex's betrayal was so satisfying that it took me a while to figure out that the smoky-voiced Vause is actually trying to protect Piper. Alex is now basically a sitting duck for Kubra's evil henchmen, stuck in an apartment in Queens getting more and more paranoid. 

Piper's perjury and potentially extended sentence are peanuts compared to being dead. Still, being dead can’t compete with her hurt feelings. It’s hard to put things into perspective when the reigning perspective has always been your own. I'm surprised she didn't yell, "I've never been a lesbian!" as Alex disappears around the bend and into freedom. 

Piper returns to a Litchfield that’s facing significant problems. Assistant warden Natalie Figueroa’s embezzling has been taking its toll: there’s human waste coming up through the shower drains, the generators in the basement have no fuel in them, and there’s a staff shortage.

Figueroa’s crimes aren’t the only ones that are beginning to show. After their dalliance last season, Daya’s pretty pregnant with Officer John Bennett’s baby, and the bigger she gets, the more she wants him to ‘fess up and face the consequences so that they can build their family on a foundation of truth. Lol. You can’t blame Bennett for being reluctant — sex between an inmate and CO is considered rape, even if it’s consensual — but it’s no wonder Daya, whose own family was a mess, wants stability for her kid.

There’s new blood on the cell block, too: a chatty political protester, Soso (Kimiko Glenn), whose wide-eyed wonder reminds us of Piper on her first day, and Yvonne “Vee” Parker (Lorraine Toussaint), who isn’t new blood as much as she is bad blood. She’s got some uneasy history with Red, leftover from a previous incarceration, but more importantly, she’s Taystee’s foster mother/former kingpin.

Orange has always relied on flashbacks to bust us out of Litchfield’s walls and give us insights into the lives of its main characters. We sympathize with each woman as her story unfolds, and little by little, her crimes disappear into the background. Their pasts not only explain, but also excuse their behavior.

 

Not so with Vee. In Taystee’s flashbacks, she’s a caring mother figure, who takes in a ragtag group of children, feeds them wholesome meals, and encourages them, but she’s also a cold, calculating businesswoman who gets the kids to deal for her and doesn’t hesitate to betray them when her own interests are at stake.

Toussaint plays both with elegance; her Vee is a lethal, quiet tigress. Still, despite her overall evil aura, it doesn't take long for Taystee and the other young black women to drink the Kool-Aid (or in this case, take a slice of Funfetti cake) and get pulled into her business, which involves taking power by force and intimidation, deepening the lines between the races, between those who help and those who won’t.

Power is a funny thing. There’s not much of it up for grabs in prison, but for the high price of a stick of gum or a book of stamps, you’d be surprised at how much you can acquire. The women take control of their controlled lives by bartering, bribing, and trading goods and information. On the one hand, Red and her girls smuggle in goods that help the inmates feel good about themselves: candy, pantyhose, make-up, and hair color. On the other, Vee and her posse sell cigarettes and smack, throwing Litchfield’s women into a state of barely-contained violence, the threat of which increases with every episode.

Still, the second season isn’t without the mix of cutting humor and gruff warmth that endeared Orange to us in the first place. There are a few great one-liners (“It’s a metaphor, you potato with eyes!” and “You decide to tell me that with your flaccid dick in my mouth?” are my particular favorites) and even some tearjerking moments, like when we find out Morello’s adored boyfriend is actually a man she was stalking, or at the very end, when Rosa happily escapes in one of Litchfield’s vans, fragrant cash tucked into her bra. If anything, we care more for these women, as their relationships and the glimpses into their “before” lives show us that life at Litchfield just might be the best thing that happened to many of them.

I was particularly fond of Gloria Mendoza this season, played by the unfaltering Selenis Levya. She's the one character whose crusty behavior became more and more acceptable to us as time went on; hers is the saddest flashback, filled with an abusive boyfriend and two little boys who watch her get handcuffed and taken away for trading food stamps for money. The Golden Girls, three elderly women with whom Red starts associating, take Orange into territory few shows wish to explore: old age, and what happens to people when society no longer deems them relevant. With each new insight, my compassion for the women grew.

Vee is the antagonist because she doesn’t get a past. Maybe if we’d seen snippets of her childhood — how she was abandoned by a junkie mom, or how she had to fight her way through high school because the other kids bullied her — we wouldn’t be so fully invested in hating her. We’d find somebody else to hate, like Piper, or Soso the activist and her motley crew of followers who are hunger striking for “better prison conditions.” Do you think it’s a coincidence that all of them are white?

Piper and Soso are the anti-Vee. They’re the comic relief, because they take themselves and their problems so seriously. When Piper’s grandmother falls ill, she requests a furlough and, uncharacteristically, Healy grants her one. Everyone hates her, of course, which Piper can’t wrap her head around — doesn’t she have as much a right to suffer as anybody else? Isn’t her grandmother also a person? She doesn’t realize that being able to bust out of prison for three days, to determine her own narrative instead of society determining it for her, is a slap in the face to the women around her who only get a few flashbacks — not a future.

That makes her pain incredibly funny. Not to mention maddening, which is why it’s hard to blame Crazy-Eyes Suzanne for throwing a piece of chocolate cake at the back of her head, or Alex’s ex-girlfriend for leaving a bag of flaming poop on her doorstep. Do you know anyone whose first reaction to getting punched by the person they were cuckolding is to say, “Ouch, my face”? Who cares about your face, Piper? You just ruined some girl’s life.

People like to protect Piper. It's sort of like a media bias: unless a young white woman disappears, the news doesn't care. Without her to arrest our attention and take us into Litchfield with her, we would have never gone willingly. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. This season, we would not have understood how privilege works in an environment where there are no privileges, supposedly, and who has power when everyone is supposedly powerless.

Power is a funny thing. When you don’t have it, you think the world would be better if you did, and you do everything — including things those in power did to oppress you — to get it. What most of us fail to understand is that the balance of power is more important than finding the right people to put in power: any human left alone with their own narrow perspective and a lot of influence will end up oppressing someone. It’s just the way the world works. If people were better at balancing power, things like sexism, racism, slavery, and a lot of wars probably wouldn’t have happened.

To her credit, Soso understands this (she’s a political protester, after all) and she’s not a slacktivist (she’s in prison, not angrily tweeting about the word “bossy”). What makes her comical is the belief that by changing the system, you can eradicate problems. Captain Joe Caputo shares this belief. He thinks that he can wrangle Litchfield into some sort of order if he can just get Figueroa sacked.

This works out great for him.

Orange is the New Black continues to be one of the best things on the world wide webscreen, shocking enough to ward off your grandmother and possibly your mother (it might be the only thing on the internet that really belongs to you) and heartwarming enough to make you feel like you’re improving your life or the world by watching it. Even though things resolve a little bit too neatly in the end, at least to me, it’s a wild ride from start to finish. We’re left wondering if Piper’s scheme to get Alex back in jail will actually work. Basically, we end up right back where we started — worrying about Piper.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about learning how to drive. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Even My Dad Does Sometimes" - Ed Sheeran (mp3)

"Thinking Out Loud" - Ed Sheeran (mp3)

In Which This Was Before We Knew We Should Hate Kerouac

Three Times a Permit

by KARA VANDERBIJL

I have two party tricks: the first is that after two glasses of wine I fall asleep in the middle of the floor or on the couch during a conversation. The second is that I admit to not having a driver’s license at the ripe old age of twenty-six.

While the first trick paints me as an endearing lightweight, the second makes me look pathetic, something I did not realize until I became the butt of others’ jokes instead of the punchline in my own. It was winter, the worst in anyone’s memory. I couldn’t imagine executing the tire-squealing left turns that are necessary in Chicago on streets slick with black ice and pockmarked with potholes. By March 5th, winter hadn’t subsided, but I had been twenty-six for a full twenty-four hours. I had already missed a full decade of road trips, so I took two buses and tramped a mile through the snow to the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles, certain that this meant I wouldn’t live to see twenty-seven.

At the counter in front of me, a Middle Eastern gentleman and his wife smiled at a blonde who looked like she had turned away more hopefuls than the immigration officers at Ellis Island. She thumbed through their three pieces of mail and yawned, “Does your wife speak English?” The gentleman shook his head. I wondered how his wife — a small, veiled woman — planned to take the test since translators, like cell phones, were certainly prohibited, but the blonde handed them a number and they took a seat in the waiting area, where at least half of Chicago’s population sat scratching their chins or swiping screens or screaming at toddlers. A lone teenager, white male, flipped through the driver’s handbook with a nonchalant look. He was wearing board shorts and didn’t seem appropriately nervous at the prospect that he was about to be handed the keys to a compact bomb with great gas mileage.

It has never made sense to me why you’re allowed to learn how to drive before you’re allowed to go to war or to start drinking. There you are, sixteen years old, and you are legally permitted to strap yourself to an explosive from which only your underdeveloped motor skills and questionable common sense can protect you. One wrong turn and it could be the end of you. It occurred to me, as Board Shorts pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and let the driver’s handbook drop to the floor, that youth is the only reason anybody would ever start driving in the first place. You believe yourself to be physically invincible, something that a few fender-benders and later, tequila, take away from you all too quickly. A belief that I’d never had in the first place. I slumped further into my seat and tried to determine which of the desk attendants was least likely to laugh in my face.

“Hi Kara, how can I help you today?” they’d say. “Or should I call you ‘Grandma’?”

I ended up with a young man who, with his long black ponytail and wispy mustache, looked like he was barely legal to drive himself. He smiled — dawn breaking over braced teeth.

“So, Miss VanderBijl,” he said slowly, looking at my forms, “this will be your third time taking the written test?”

“Yes,” I mumbled, ducking my head.

“And you’re sure you don’t have a driver’s license?” He stamped a form. He smelled like the sidewalk just outside a suburban Abercrombie & Fitch.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that on my first try, I didn’t even make it to the learner’s permit. It was Valentine’s Day, freshman year of college, the sort of warm February day that makes you glad to live in Southern California. Cole, the boy I liked, had offered to take me to the DMV. He was from Texas and drove an old Buick, and we had met in the haphazard way you do when you go to a small liberal-arts school and you’re both English majors: over a chance three-hour discussion about books. One night, early on in our friendship, I was walking back to the dorm from the science building at dusk when he drove up. Pavarotti spilled out of his window as he rolled it down. The streetlights glinted off his glasses.

“I like your trench coat,” he said. “Want a ride?”

He’d been drinking Dr. Pepper (there was a half-empty can in the cupholder) and I had to move a dog-eared copy of Kerouac’s On the Road before I could slide into the passenger seat. He grinned when I held onto it for a moment before throwing it in the backseat.

“I haven’t finished it yet,” he said, “but I already know it’s going to be one of my favorites. There’s this part that reminds me of you.”

This was long before I knew I was supposed to hate Kerouac. I was hooked. Over the next week, I waited impatiently for him to finish the book, wondering if he’d reread the lines about me until the page was soft and creased. He found me shelving books during one of my shifts in the campus library, and held Kerouac in front of him at 10 and 2 with a grin.

“I can’t wait,” I whispered.

“No return date on this one,” he said. “Tell me what you think.”

I thought it was pretty lucky of Kerouac that endless roads unspooled before him as he chased meaning or women or whatever it was that he wanted across the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. I also thought it was pretty lucky of me to have found a cute Texan who found me enchanting, even though my idea of fun was sitting on his kitchen floor reading French poetry out loud and drinking tea. Those were my college party tricks.

Cole could have had his pick of any girl, that was certain; he was charming, and his eyes had a way of crinkling behind his glasses while he smiled that made you feel like you’d just performed serious magic. I considered myself magical only to the extent that I no longer wore braces, and had lived in France. These were good hooks, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him once I reeled him in. Surely this was something we could figure out as the carpool lane unspooled before us on the 405.

I snuck a few glances at him as we waited in the tiny Santa Clarita Department of Motor Vehicles. He’d brought a book, and was quietly reading while I thought about what I weighed (it had been several months since I’d even seen a scale) and the color of my eyes. I wondered what he thought of me, and for the first time I allowed myself to believe that he liked me back. I was about to start driving, after all, and the only thing more perilous than seatbelting yourself to a bomb is tying yourself to another person. It was a day for embracing danger.

“Have you ever committed a felony in California or any other state?” asked the woman behind the desk. Her glasses hung from a gold chain around her neck. “Step up to the line for your eye exam, please, and read the third line.”

The lights flickered momentarily, and then with an electronic sigh, all the computers in the DMV went blank.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Our computer system is down,” she said. “It’s too bad. You can wait, but it might be better to come back and finish the process another time.”

“What if this is some sort of sign?” I asked Cole as we left the building. Relief washed over me in waves. “Maybe I’m not supposed to drive.”

He laughed and slid his arm through mine. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

That night, he took me on a walk down a deserted road and asked me to be his girlfriend. Maybe I wasn’t ready to drive, but this, whatever this was, I could figure out. Cole took me back to the DMV two weeks later and, when I passed with flying colors, we left the city limits for brushy back hills, where the roads curved around old cattle ranches and classic Western movie sets. On the shoulder, we switched places. The car felt soft under me — all rubber and leather, wide. It was a car for the elderly. I took my foot off the brake. We rolled forward, slowly, then gaining momentum. Cole touched my arm.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“I’m not thinking about anything important,” I said, hands gripping onto the steering wheel like a lifeline.

It felt unnatural to be driving, after sitting in the backseat for so long. I hadn’t chosen a passive life (it had been given to me) and I was just starting to understand the ways in which I was allowed to take control. But this frightened me, watching the speedometer creep up past 20, then past 30, to hover at a limit that someone had once decided was safe for such a road. Sitting here with Cole felt strange, wanting to be with him felt strange, when I knew better than anyone else that it is never long before life takes you down different roads. I had wanted to be ready for this, and would readily pretend to be ready, if it meant finding some sort of meaning, even a meaning to work off of, like a wrong turn that brings you back within the confines of a map.

“What are you doing?” Cole cried.

I’d turned sharply into the brush on the side of the road, and braked. The front of the Buick crushed desert-dry shrubs and I said, “I think you need to drive now.”

As it turns out, I’d driven over a big rusty nail, and his car went to the shop. After they replaced his tire, they told him that gasoline had been leaking into his engine, effectively transforming his car into a bomb. One wrong turn could have caused it to explode.

After that, we didn’t do much driving. We moved at different rhythms when we weren’t on the road. Even after he’d kindly and firmly broken up with me, I found it hard to move forward at the required speed. By the time I’d gotten over him, Cole had already moved back to Texas and my learner’s permit had expired. I found myself sitting in the backseat of my friend Paula’s little car, singing along to moody playlists at the top of my lungs.

Paula drove with her left foot propped up by the window, a silver ring on each bare toe. She liked to drive, so it never took much convincing for her to take Hailey and I on late-night jaunts to Denny’s (the only thing that stayed open past 9 p.m.) and into the hills behind Santa Clarita. I stretched out in the back, head against one door and feet against the other and looked back at where we had come from, at the distant glow of Los Angeles.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. We all have a fantasy self, an image we conjure when we’re feeling insufficient. Mine is a witty girl who brings down the house at any party and never gets a ride from anyone. She’s in charge of her own destination and isn’t willingly relegated to the backseat. Paula and Hailey were the sort of friends who gave me license to believe these things, just as I gave them license to believe in their own fantasies. Within the next couple of years Hailey would be dead, Paula would move back to Arizona and I’d be in Chicago. But during those long drives our futures, and our beliefs about ourselves, were suspended. Nothing mattered but the next line of a song or the neon sign of an approaching fast food restaurant. We had come to college to make something of ourselves, but we did the real work in that car. On the road, we made our peace with what was possible.

Within weeks of moving to Chicago, I applied for a driver’s license. My aunt and uncle let me drive their red PT Cruiser to the grocery store for ice cream after their kids had gone to bed. The hills of Los Angeles couldn’t compare to the six-cornered intersection at Fullerton/Elston/Damen, where I regularly drove over the curb trying to make sharp, timely right turns with a legion of cars honking behind me. Soon I found a full-time job and moved out of my aunt and uncle’s place. My first Chicago winter was beginning. Even though both of my new roommates had cars, I let my permit expire once again.

As far as cities go, Chicago is relatively friendly to both drivers and non-drivers. It became second nature to me to add ridiculous cushions of time to the front and back end of events, calculating how much time and how many trains it would take me to get somewhere. I’ve been commuting long distances my whole life, so nothing made more sense than the steady rhythm of the train rocking down the elevated tracks toward my job downtown. I made friends with fellow non-drivers, and we laughed at the people we knew whose lives revolved around their cars, and where they were going to park them, and how much traffic they’d get caught in at rush hour. I felt like a true Chicagoan blundering around outside in subzero temperatures, instead of complaining about the weather from the heated interior of a car. The city was good to me, giving me trains that came on time and buses that stopped for me and friends who rode their bikes with me to Montrose Beach in the summer. Each time, it felt like a friendly nudge in the shoulder telling me I’d made the right choice.

In Illinois you’re allowed to get seven answers wrong on the written driver’s test. I’ve always had trouble identifying signs — last time I didn’t even recognize the universal sign for railroad crossings — so I spent a lot of time thinking about each one, their color and shape. It’s easy to get comfortable with a thought, until it comes time to put it into practice. I have never been nervous about the written test, just what it means — that the road is open to me, now, and I have to take it. On March 5th, I got five answers wrong, four of them signs. My new party trick is that I can’t identify upcoming railroads.

I’ve been driving outside the city in my boyfriend Jens’s Mazda, making too-wide turns and nearly crashing into other cars in the Home Depot parking lot. I am always terribly nervous when Jens turns to me and asks, “Do you want to drive?”, but he has a wonderful way of making me want to be brave. We stop at a gas station. He goes inside to buy a cup of coffee and I slip behind the wheel.

I move the seat up and adjust my mirrors. I put on my glasses so that I can read the signs. I am good at braking — sometimes I think stopping is the only thing I know how to do well — but I am getting better at moving forward, too. Sometimes I’m sure that I am following closely on the wheels of that fantasy girl who’s been my chauffeur for so long. Maybe this time I’ll overtake her.

“There’s no reason for you to drive so closely behind that car.” I catch Jens smiling as I turn to look at him for a split second before gluing my eyes to the road ahead.

Next time, then.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about FX's Fargo. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"Would You Fight For My Love?" -Jack White (mp3)

"Alone In My Home" - Jack White (mp3)

In Which This All Seems Vaguely Familiar

Minnesota Mean

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Fargo
creator Noah Hawley

This is a true story.

So claim the opening credits of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, a television spin-off of the Coen brothers’ 1996 film of the same name. The original Fargo made a similar claim, and we wonder now, as we did then, how true what we are about to see will be. More importantly, we wonder how true this 10-episode miniseries will be to its predecessor, and we (rightly) begin to fear the worst.

It is tempting for any artist to mimic a master. You get the heady sense of power that’s inherent to any artistic endeavor, without doing any of the hard work. Essentially, it’s creative suicide. Or creative murder, if you take into consideration how your interpretation of a beloved work will reflect on the original. All too often, a remake turns a good story into something that looks like it’s been through the wood chipper.

Not so with Hawley’s show — it is more like the original story simply went in another direction, as if it turned onto a different dark, snowy road in the middle of the night and ended up in one of many other sleepy Minnesotan towns.

There’s a certain delicate science to this imitation, in which everything feels a little bit like déjà vu. To achieve it, Hawley got the Coen brothers to produce the series, then spends the pilot episode giving a slow wink to everything beloved about the movie. Fargo opens where the film hit one of its first, and finest, climaxes: with a car accident. One man escapes the wreck and begins running frantically across a frozen field. In the Coens’ world, this man gets shot in the back. In Hawley’s, he disappears into a fringe of forest, while his kidnapper, who was driving the car, watches him. From here, the show and film’s narratives split, mirror, and foil one another like Schrodinger’s cat.

So innstead of Jerry Lundegaard, the mediocre car salesman who really wants a piece of his father-in-law’s fortune, we meet a henpecked insurance salesman, Lester Nygaard, who is played by Martin Freeman of Sherlock and Hobbit fame. Lester is as blond and stammery as his forebear, except he doesn't plan to cause trouble; he sort of falls into it by ending up in the emergency room next to a psychopathic killer, Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton). Malvo offers to pick off the bully who landed Lester in the hospital, and when Lester doesn’t explicitly disagree, pandemonium strikes Bemidji, Minnesota.

Like other Coen villains — think Anton Chigurh — Malvo is a soft-spoken devil, a hired gun who seems to do plenty of pro bono work since he enjoys watching people destroy one another almost as much as he enjoys destroying them himself. Thornton thrives in this role with a weird priestly haircut, a fur collar on his coat and an only slightly suppressed Arkansan accent. Like every other Coen character, he isn’t spared moments of humor, however dark. 

Besides Lorne and Lester, there is a comedic pair of miscreants, “Mr. Numbers” and “Mr. Wrench” (Adam Goldberg and Russell Harvard). There’s a heavily pregnant woman. There’s a man who likes ducks and ice fishing. There are bland, hotdish-loving townspeople who exhibit surprisingly morbid penchants, disquieting hobbies, and scandalous secret lives. There is a group of well-worn cops, including a plucky deputy, Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) who, like Marge before her, is the story’s bulwark of sanity and decency.

Molly is like Marge in the same way that Hawley’s Fargo is like the Coens’ Fargo: the way a stranger can resemble a friend from afar. Unlike Marge, whose position as chief of police sets her apart from the very beginning, before we even see her prowess as a detective, Molly must prove her mettle — not only to the show’s motley crew of mostly oblivious males, but also to the audience, who will look at her and miss Frances McDormand. Molly is brilliant; she's a diamond in the rough, sweet and sharp and persistent as hell, but she can’t hold a candle to Marge. She tries her hardest, though, and we can’t help but root for her, mainly because it becomes very apparent as the show progresses that she holds her own, and that there’s really no need to compare the two. Minnesota is, after all, where all the women are strong.

Where this Fargo really surpasses the original is in exposing the dark underbelly of the legendary “Minnesota nice.” The Coen brothers hinted at it — often cheekily — but always deferred to a dichotomized world in which the bad guys engaged in bad things, and the good guys talked about the weather or dipped a spoon into Jell-O salad. But Hawley throws shadows even on the good folk; Duluth cop Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks) is a devoted father, but he can be a bit of a pushover… also, he wants to bang his married neighbor. Lester Nygaard’s brother is a successful salesman and family man… and owns illegal firearms.

In other words, nobody could have been more wrong than Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times, who claimed that “Fargo finds humor in the stunning ordinariness of Midwestern small towns, where people are uniformly even-tempered and mild, bringing Jell-O salads to potlucks and saying ‘aw jeez’ and ‘heck’ when bad things happen.” Instead, it finds humor where humor has lived all along: in the disconnect between what appears to be true in the living room and what is being hidden in the basement — a body, or a stolen car, or a psychopath. What we’ve grown to recognize as Minnesota nice is just the same as every other culture in this country and the world: an attempt to handle what can’t be controlled, like chaos, death, and unhappiness.

It’s possible that we need to tell ourselves the same stories over and over in order to deal with chaos. Didn’t we spend our childhood asking our parents to read us the same bedtime stories, so that for at least a few minutes after the light had been turned off and they had left the room, we’d forget about the monsters lying in wait under our beds? It’d be easier if we could just kill them, of course, but you can’t put chaos to sleep with more chaos. You have to tell it a better, truer story.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Jeff Buckley. She tumbls here and twitters here. 

"Bullet in the Brain" - The Black Keys (mp3)

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