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.