Mythbusters:Nearly 20 Years Later, Fargo Still Chills

There's something about the Coen Brothers' critically deified 1996 crime thriller Fargo that lends itself to myth. Maybe it's the punctuative images of the larger-than-life Paul Bunyan statue welcoming visitors to Brainerd, Minnesota, the site of the film's first grizzly slaying. Or perhaps it has more to do with the American midwest and its idyllic position in the cultural imaginary, rendered here against an indifferent frozen landscape that consumes the screen. At any rate, Fargo proved conclusively in that march to the 21st century that art still has a great deal to say about how we narrate our American mythologies, and why those stories might be important. In this respect, the Coen Brothers' dazzling and varied repertoire brings to mind the work of a novelist like Don DeLillo (Libra, Underworld), who demonstrates both a reverie for and a deep suspicion of the core tenants of American life. As perhaps the most defining piece of that remarkable canon, Fargo concretizes the Coens' status as our country's most accessible and lucid moralists.

This tension between reverie and suspicion finds its purest expression here in the story of Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the pregnant police chief at the center of the film's "true" (read: not true) events. The impetus of her disillusionment is a late-night triple homicide which spins out to reveal the sickening human capacity for greed and violence. In a scene typifying the film's tightly-controlled black humor, as well as its pitch-perfect ear and sense of place, Marge reconstructs the events for her clueless partner:

Okay, so we got a trooper pulls someone over, we got a shooting. These folks drive by, there's a high-speed pursuit, ends here, and then this execution-type deal. I'd be very surprised if our suspect was from Brainerd. 

The disparity between the horrors the audience has just seen and the "execution-type deal" described by our endlessly pleasant protagonist is what draw's the humor into its sharpest relief, and it's a technique that drives much of the film's point of view. It leaves us, at The Atlantic described the work of Kurt Vonnegut, "laugh[ing] in self-defense." But as Marge closes the gap between these national narratives—the one where innocent people are viciously exterminated "for a little bit of money," and the one where neighbors are still figures of support and respect—it becomes harder to defend oneself against the crushing sadness at the core of this deeply upsetting film. 

Fargo is an essential piece of American culture because it interrogates the mechanisms of American myth-making while demonstrating the need for such a project in the first place. We know we live in the world of Jerry Lundegaard, a world crushed by capital, where desperate men commit random violence just to secure a piece of it for themselves. We need Marge Gunderson in order to demonstrate our connection to each other, and the Coens' acknowledgement of this fact feels both completely obvious and profoundly moving. While it remains to be seen if FX's small-screen adaptation can capture the power and deliciousness of this perfect film, its production demonstrates that nearly 20 years after its release, Fargo still tells us a valuable story about ourselves.

Texas Forever: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012)

From the opening moments of Ben Fountain's masterful novel about the Iraq War, it's clear that the author has a firmly dialed-in sense for the cadence, language and absurdities of our post-9/11 era. The word soup of "terrR," "nina leven," and "ire Christian values" washes over the eight young soldiers of the Bravo Unit, in the midst of a whirlwind Victory Tour celebrating the heroism of their deadly firefight in the Al-Ansakar Canal. Footage of the battle has gone viral, thanks in part to dutiful promotion by Fox News, and the unit returns stateside as unwitting celebrities in an alien culture of spectacle. Billy Lynn, the pensive and literate nineteen-year-old private at the center of the narrative, is our outsider's guide to this world over the course of one fateful Thanksgiving day at Texas Stadium where Billy and his squad find themselves center stage in a troubling national fantasy.

It's more than just linguistic prowess that lends Billy Lynn its authority as a powerful cultural document. Fountain, a longtime Dallas resident, has conjured the spirit of that moneyed metroplex as an entry point for a discussion about American excess and the contradictions between the glitz of our popular culture and "life as it is." In an interview with Walton Muyumba, he speaks at length about the importance of place in the novel: 

I think you can make the argument that Dallas is the most American of all American cities . . . certain aspects of mainstream American culture find their purest expression in Dallas. Capitalism, to give one example; this is a city that loves its free markets, at least in theory. You can add to that conspicuous consumption, the luxury lifestyle, fundamentalist Christian religion, and hard-core devotion to that other American religion, football. If a person is interested in seeing how all these currents play out, Dallas is a pretty good place to start.

Fountain's ability to facilitate this "playing out" without condescension or the crutch of ham-fisted moralizing makes his debut novel the decade's most human and incisive book about modern life during wartime. It is a jumbotron-sized novel about "the nonstop sales job of American life" as much as it is a controlled meditation on its inherent deliciousness and possibility. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk introduces us to ourselves in a way that few other recent novels have, which—considering the deeply-entrenched echo chamber that is our national media—may well be the the modern fiction writer's most constructive power. Like the impossibility of the hulking Dallas skyline in a yawning wash of prairie, Billy Lynn's pyrotechnic prose and vicious cultural accuracy will thrill and perplex you as a feat of imagination and ingenuity. But make no mistake: it will also break your heart.

Reconstruction Site: Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011)

"The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place.

They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before."

Despite waning critical enthusiasm, the fourth-season premiere of AMC’s massively popular zombie drama The Walking Dead drew a record 16.1 million viewers last October. That number bested the series finale of critical darling Breaking Bad by six million, and even managed to outperform all individual NFL broadcasts of the season. The astronomical success of The Walking Dead is in many ways the culmination of a decade-long resurgence of zombie culture which brought a rash of profitable films and books, and new expressions of enthusiasm such as zombie-themed 5K races. Our cultural obsession with the living dead has become so widespread that Fox News opinion writer Manny Alvarez sounded the conservative alarm in a widely-ridiculed column which claimed that America’s infatuation with zombie violence is symptomatic of an encroaching “socialized system of government” seeking to turn the populace into mindless automatons. While Alvarez’s conclusions are laughable, they are built around a relevant premise: What is it about our current moment that draws us so intensely, and in such large numbers, toward the flesh-starved undead?

Enter Colson Whitehead, author of The Intuitionist (1999) and Sag Harbor (2009). His 2011 novel Zone One points its antennae toward this alluring stripe of disaster culture and repurposes its conventions as a means to discuss commerce, community and modern American life. Whitehead’s novel tells the story of a three-day period in the life of Mark Spitz and his team of civilian sweepers, designated by a provisional American government to clear abandoned, once-prime real estate of the "stragglers" infected by the world-ending virus. These stragglers are the benign counterpoint to the more aggressive "skels," unresponsive and forever trapped in some moment of their old, domestic routine. (A straggler might be found in an otherwise empty office building, sitting quietly at a desk, forever organizing a left drawer, while skels behave more like the traditional zombies of popular culture.) Both forms of the undead must be destroyed—often in truly spectacular displays of gore—as part of a coordinated attempt to restart society in the abandoned wasteland of lower Manhattan, known in this new netherworld by its more ominous moniker, Zone One. We follow Mark Spitz and his Omega Unit over the course of what we fortunate souls would call a "weekend," as they secure the area, block by block, in an effort to make it habitable for repopulation. The narrative flashes back regularly, to Mark Spitz's memories of a time "before the world broke," (28) which draws the horror of the plague into relief while skillfully "demonstrat[ing] the resemblance between the world before and the world after" (Hoberek 410). The resemblances and departures between these two worlds are what make Zone One such a fiercely smart piece of writing, and its protagonist is carefully drawn by Whitehead to help us navigate them both.

When a novel puts a character like Mark Spitz, the self-described "utterly unremarkable" (69) New Jersey native at the center of its extraordinary events, it is typically a move designed to ingratiate its audience toward a protagonist in whom, despite his impossible situation, readers see some version of themselves. It makes his survival all the more compelling. Few of us, I imagine, manage to live without some feeling that much of life is governed by an accumulation of accidents, happy or tragic, like those which propel Mark Spitz among the few lucky—or unlucky, depending—survivors. What Whitehead does so convincingly here is illustrate the rootedness of self identity and its ability to maintain a world in which everything else has been gored, flayed, and brutalized beyond recognition. "I was always like this," Mark Spitz often reminds himself. "Now I am more me" (183). Zone One is extremely deliberate in its refusal to lionize its protagonist, which allows space for delicate and decidedly literary characterization in lieu of the genre-prodded hero worship which often colors most disaster narratives.

Of course, we know this isn't exactly true. Mark Spitz is our hero—and, in significant ways, a decidedly Romantic one—despite the novel's protestations, and the form here requires occasional reminders by virtue of his stubborn survival in the post-plague era. He is tasked here not with saving the world, but with saving himself, a heroic act in a world whose population seems to be undergoing a gradual but thorough extinguishing. "He had a knack for apocalypse," (245) the narrator tells us, imbuing Mark Spitz with a savant's raw talent while wondering aloud if such a "knack" is a thing to be proud of. He has managed to make it to a reconstruction camp in New York City, through a series of terrifying close calls, by virtue of his unexceptional-ness which, in turn, renders him exceptional. "Now the world was mediocre," the narrator remarks, "rendering him perfect" (182). This tension between Mark Spitz as unremarkable specimen and Mark Spitz as survivor—a remarkable feat on its face, considering the scale of destruction described here—propels much of the novel's action, built largely around Joe Strummer's quotable dilemma of whether to stay or go. It also works neatly into Whitehead's stab at what we might loosely call genre writing, in that it follows a post-apocalyptic speculation suggesting that the dissolution of society will bring a new set of human virtues and accoutrement which establish one's value and prospects for survival. 

For Whitehead, the zombie narrative provides a means to facilitate a conversation about the culture of commerce. He marks his dystopian landscape in terms of branding and market psychology—which, like the contours of our inner lives, stubbornly persist in moments of national trauma—and it’s part of what lends his apocalyptic vision its unsettling plausibility. Whitehead sees no reason for America's escalating consumerist arc to dull in this brave new world.  “The culture was picking up where it left off,” the narrator tells us, as the powers-that-be in Buffalo seek to sell the traumatized populace of the “American Phoenix” on the prospects of its own survival, which has become another commodity to be branded and sold:  

Early in the reboot, Buffalo agreed on the wisdom of rebranding survival. They maintained a freakish menagerie of specialists up there, superior brains yanked from the camps, and what did these folks do all day but try and think up better ways to hone the future . . . . Some of them were hard at work crafting the new language, and they came up with more than a few winners; the enemy they faced would not succumb to psychological warfare, but that didn’t mean that the principles needed to remain unutilized (99).

The rebuilding effort is being underwritten by an ever-growing list of corporations, and units like Omega are prohibited from scavenging materials not produced by the official list of sponsors. Additionally, coordinated attempts at "pheenie" boosterism abound, despite the grisly reality on the ground, employed with comic effect by the anthem, "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction)" while notably goofy slogans like "We Make Tomorrow!" (251) dot the post-apocalyptic vernacular. Zone One mobilizes this interplay between consumerism and national identity in order to demonstrate the degree to which corporate entities govern national consciousness, in peace and war. This stripe of the novel decidedly skewers Bush-era political climate, during which New York City was center stage for an all-too-real grisly moment of national tragedy.

The September 11th attacks are only mentioned peripherally in Whitehead's novel—"That was a long time ago, but he remembered" (264)—but its shadow still looms over the wasteland of a Manhattan crawling with skels, stragglers, and its sober patch of desperate but determined survivors. Zone One might well be an early indicator that no American disaster novel can be written for some time without also being, by proxy, a novel about 9/11. The game-changing aspect of these sorts of disaster narratives are essential to the  genre, which Jean Baudrillard provocatively identifies as the unsung impetus of political violence toward the U.S. in his 2001 book The Spirit of Terrorism. "In this disaster movie of Manhattan," he writes, "the two elements which fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of movies and the black magic of terrorism" (21). Baudrillard's reading, which can help us think through the psychological underpinnings of Zone One, interprets the terrorist event as a sort of unspoken wish fulfillment. Perhaps our collective fascination with apocalypse, and with zombie narratives writ large, stems from our own "happily universal" desire to thump the first domino in the elaborately-ordered scheme of power. 

The election of Barack Obama was deemed by many media speculators as America's entry into a heralded "post-racial" future. The arc of current events since January 2009 have debunked this theory, but it finds purchase in Zone One, which imagines a world without the arbitrary social divisions that characterize American history. The fact that it has taken a global plague transforming most of the populace into horrifying monsters notwithstanding, Whitehead is interested here in depicting a world where those abstract barriers are eliminated by the "raised stakes" (106) of the plague years. This manifests itself as a sort of blankness among his characters, whose physical characteristics are only described, when they're described at all, with the lightest touch. (It's not until the back end of the novel, for example, that we learn the racialized origins of Mark Spitz's post-apocalyptic moniker: he is nicknamed after the Olympic swimmer, "because of the whole black-people-can't-swim thing") (12). In an interview with Terri Gross upon the novel's paperback release, Whitehead makes explicit what the Zone One quietly posits: "It seems when folks have the apocalypse on their plate . . . that racial differences, class differences, your funny accent, these things aren't as important as finding that last can of peas and maybe a bag of beef jerky that will get you through the next couple days" ("When Zombies Attack"). The elements of society which perish in this new age of duress, played against those that remain, provide the novel with most of its kinetic power as an undeniable piece of literary art.

Significantly, Zone One is more interested in society’s rebuilding than its breaking down. There’s enough of the latter to satisfy disaster purists hungry for gore and apocalyptic speculation, but it’s the broad stakes of the recovery which imbue the best moments of Whitehead's novel with their emotional force. Everyone has their personal story of "Last Night," that shorthand for the defining moment when the virus took hold, but they function in the novel as deeply painful markers of emotional trauma rather than adrenaline-soaked tales of peril and triumph. It's part of what makes Zone One such a deeply gloomy book, but it's also what makes it such an interesting take on the genre. Those who remain in Whitehead's eviscerated landscape harbor considerable nostalgia for that old, now-broken world, evincing considerable hope "in the impossible return to things before," but Whitehead doesn't let us rest comfortably in that false embrace of the past. This nostalgic bent recalls Keith Nudecker of Don DeLillo's Falling Man: "Even in New York," he says, "I long for New York" (  ). Is what Mark Spitz constructs through memory actually New York? Zone One encourages these sorts of questions as a means to interrogate our own relationship with the past, and a particularly American brand of historical revisionism. At the same time, it renders the question moot by yanking its protagonist back to the grim reality of the present.

All of the novel's moving parts ultimately work in tandem to reveal that Zone One isn't a disaster narrative at all. It's a survival narrative. What survives and what perishes in times of collective trauma might well be Whitehead's central concern here. "Why do these yokels build a house where they know it's a flood zone," Mark Spitz wonders in a remembered moment of danger, stranded on a Massachusetts rooftop overlooking a sea of writhing undead. Why, he wonders of these hypothetical homesteaders, do they continue to rebuild? The answer: "Because this disaster is our home. I was born here" (228). Moments like this one bring us close to the center of Whitehead's cultural investigation, and force readers to wrestle with some unsettling questions regarding the nature of our American capitalistic enterprise. To what machinations are we loyal  when all semblance of order has disintegrated? What is our responsibility to rebuild? Like any good monster story worth its salt, Zone One—a fine novel on its face, with enough tension and a finely-tuned sense of the horrific—prompts readers inward in the face of terror. It tells us more about the villagers than the monster, and it leaves us to decide which is more horrifying.

Gary Wilson - "Mary Had Brown Hair" (2005)

According to Internet lore, a young Gary Wilson once received the following advice from John Cage: “If you aren’t irritating people, then you’re doing something wrong.” Gary apparently took these words to heart and, having since occupied his rightful throne as the dark prince of creep-funk anxiety, has accrued a reputation among those in the know as being one of the strangest and most rewarding players in the obtuse arena of outsider art.

Given that Wilson’s father, an IBM technician by trade, spent nights playing stand-up bass in a local lounge band, and that Gary himself was a proficient multi-instrumentalist by the time he entered primary school, the “outsider” label might seem a bit of a stretch. But a cursory listen to 2005’s Mary Had Brown Hair, Gary’s return from self-imposed obscurity and his first record in over 25 years—a deeply strange, obsessive and oftentimes troubling album filled with nasty hooks and pitched-up schizoid robot voices—reveals that there isn’t much about Gary Wilson’s paranoid brand of basement electro-funk that you might call “traditional.”

This album tends to garner the kind of criticism often hurled at similar weirdo bastions of the avant-garde: it’s alienating, obnoxious, and occasionally unlistenable. I’ll concede that this album isn’t for everybody, but supporting the record’s veneer of abstraction and repulsion is a bedrock of unstoppable groovescapes and sticky pop perfection. In the face of these foiled impulses, Mary Had Brown Hair prompts listeners to ask a very basic question of themselves: “Am I the kind of person this album is meant for?”

And the deduction process is surprisingly simple: If you’ve ever had the desire to move into your mom’s basement, make a dedicated commitment to spurn the daylight and its constant threat of humiliation, pour a bag of flour over your head and aggressively stalk an unresponsive lover while making everyone with whom you come in contact intensely uncomfortable – and, really, who hasn’t? – then, congratulations, this might just be meant for you.

: : : Originally published in BIGGER SPLASHES : : : 

"The Landlord" (1970)

Nearly 30 years after its release, Hal Ashby's 1970 black comedy of manners The Landlord remains a strange and visceral interrogation of race and gentrification. The film is gleefully problematic, and performs with grace and intelligence the sort of high-art "social autopsy" sought by its peers in the New Journalism. 

"Unconscious Collective" (2012)

Unconcious Collective brings a heightened level of dexterity to the obtuse arena of "heaviness," drawing into bold relief primitivism's relationship to a nuanced network of jazz fusion, classic punk,  beat music, and across a spectra of heavy metal(s) -- from highly technical death to the blast-beaten grind and crust stylings for which the brothers Gonzalez have largely built their reputation. Moods change swiftly on the Dallas-based trio's self-titled LP, and crescendos have stakes: when guitarist Gregg Prickett glides from polite pentatonic riffing into a fuzzed-out sonic assault, or when Stefan Gonzalez's hyperactive rhythmic inclinations throw the track into a frenzied bloodlust, one is left with the undeniable sense that a significant movement has occurred.  What Unconscious Collective (2012) does with enviable mastery is create a context in which these movements not only make sense, but seem completely necessary. 

: : : Unconscious Collective @ Bandcamp : : : 

: : : Tofu Carnage Records : : : 

Neda Ulaby: "Who's Gay on TV?"

From the crushing success of American programming like Modern Family and Glee, to the 'cross-the-pond soapy melodrama of Downton Abbey, NPR's Neda Ulaby identifies a sort of representational renaissance in queer imaging. Gay dads, teens and villains are occupying a larger chunk of our visual landscape but, while the cultural distance travelled since the "shyness" of Tony Randall in Love, Sidney is staggering, Ulaby interrogates the gaps:

"Equality is not exactly television's strength when it comes to LGBT representation. Last fall, Gallup released findings about its largest poll ever about gay Americans. Slightly more women identified as gay than men, and more African-Americans, Asians and Latinos said they were LGBT than whites. So where's that on TV?"

: : : More at NPR.org : : :