Fargo - "What's with You People?!"

Fargo is the second in a Coen trilogy that I don’t have much to say about, at first glance. With Hudsucker, the problem was I never fully connected with it but grew to appreciate it. With Fargo, I was at first a little disappointed (the Oscars and critical hype got to my twelve-year-old brain) but quickly came around to understanding it was one of their masterpieces. When dealing with such a film, I sometimes find it hard to come up with much to say beyond just gushing over shit I like in the movie, but with three viewings in the past week, I’ll roll the dice and see what happens.

As it turns out, the podcast that inspired this series provided my inspiration. In the Check Book newsletter for the Blank Check episode covering Fargo, they mention an interview the Coens did with Terry Gross for Fresh Air back in 2000. In it, Ethan commented on how he found Steve Buscemi’s character to be a protagonist of sorts as he was the only sane man in an insane world. Well, that’s all I needed to get a few paragraphs.

Steve Buscemi’s Carl is pretty much the only character lacking a unique accent. Stormare isn’t doing the Minnesota nice thing, but he’s not American, and he doesn’t talk much, anyway. In fact, Scotty probably talks the most normal out of all the locals, but I chalk that up to a child actor not being able to pull off some William H. Macy shit. This is why you can consider Carl the only “normal” character in the story. 

To be clear, Carl is a piece of shit, and aside from Jerry initiating the kidnapping, it could be argued that Carl is to blame for most of the tragedy. If he had simply put the temporary tags on, they wouldn’t have been stopped by the cop leading to the triple homicide, and if he wasn’t so insistent on getting laid, there wouldn’t be witnesses to tell the police about the “funny lookin’ fella.” Now, Gaear is still a stone cold psycho who was probably always going to kill Jean and Carl no matter what. But Carl’s bullshit caused a lot of unnecessary problems. 

That written, Carl (and even Gaear) does try to talk Jerry out of his plan because it makes no sense to them, and they think Jerry should just ask his father-in-law for me rather than go to all this trouble. It’s honestly one of the strangest scenes in the movie, but it gets forgotten since it’s the opener. The kidnappers try to talk themselves out of a job. But it’s probably more about them trying to understand the job.

But this isn’t about Carl being the hero or anything. It’s about him being a flummoxed outsider in the upper Midwest. As a Midwesterner (southern Indiana, to be specific), the “nice” reputation is a bit annoying. Sure, we don’t go around yelling all the time, and some of us hold doors open and say shit is fine even when it sucks, but trust me, there is no shortage of total pieces of shit in the Midwest, no matter how nice their manners are. Carl is annoyed by the folksiness he keeps encountering, and I get it. 

We all know deep down that the Midwest “niceness” is all an act, for the most part. You might think it would be pleasant to be around nice people, but after a while, you just feel like everyone is lying to you by being nice. Or maybe I’m just paranoid. Anyway, I can see why Carl, clearly not a Midwesterner, reacts to the niceness with animosity. 

Carl openly despises Jerry from the start, not just because of his cowardly kidnapping plot, but because of how he talks. This is most evident when Carl mockingly repeats Jerry’s “What do you mean?” later in the movie. Then there’s the parking attendant, aka “king clip-on tie,” that Carl eviscerates simply for following the $4 minimum policy of the parking lot. Yeah, the charge is annoying, but I think it’s the attendant’s smile that truly sets Carl off. 

It’s not just the Midwestern culture bothering Carl; he’s also teamed up with a near mute murderer in Gaear, a man who will partake of the local talent, but seems much more interested in pancakes and soap operas…and unguent. This psycho is an enigma that must’ve been a nightmare to share a car with. We only get little humorous glimpses culminating in Carl laughingly vowing “two can play at that game,” but imagine an hours-long drive with Gaear. 

Because of all these annoying indignities, Carl is already on edge, but his interaction with Shep sends him into a frenzy. So when Wade shows up instead of Jerry, he finally verbalizes what’s been bothering him: “What’s with you people?! You fucking imbeciles!” Carl just wanted to do a job and maybe enjoy himself a bit, but every element conspires against him. It’s not just the locals, but their seemingly insane behavior was definitely a factor in his final breakdown. Nice Midwesterners didn’t kill Carl, but their politeness didn’t do him any favors, either.

Random Thoughts

You can tell when Stan asks how Scotty is doing it's the first time Jerry has even considered how this whole scheme would affect his son. What a piece of shit.

Checking IMDb, I can't believe I'm just finding out that Scotty also played Track Suit Kid in Go.

“I'm not going to debate you, Jerry.”

Jerry is short for Jerome (based on the phone call with the loan dude who needs the VINs). As the son of a Jerry short for Gerald, that surprised me. 

The parking lot attendant scene might be my favorite Buscemi moment. “Big fuckin’ man, huh?”

I can think of no better actor than Buscemi to play a guy who is “funny lookin’ in a general kind of way.”

First time I'm picking up on the No Country similarities. Marge is basically Ed Tom at the end, not understanding the world, though she handles it better. And Ed Tom pretty much describes the entire set up of Fargo as a “true story” when Carla Jean asks if a story he told her was true: “[I]t's certainly true that it is a story.”

This is one of those DVDs with a “trivia track,” which is essentially Pop Up Video for movies. It's funny because it gives specific trivia for the movie but also general nuggets like, “In 1987, 74 police officers were murdered in the United States.”

And Arby's trivia, dispelling the rumor that Arby's stands for RB as in roast beef, when it actually stands for Raffel Brothers, the founders.

And this meta trivia question: “Frances McDormand is married to what famous director of quirky independent films?”

In the Charlie Rose interview included in the DVD, he asks McDormand if she was a fan of their work before she married Joel. She points out she was in their first fucking movie. Charlie Rose was such a fuckhead.

Deakins drops a Barton Fink nugget during his commentary about an unused scene in which John Goodman kills the elevator operator and we see the severed head roll out into the corridor. Where the fuck was that in the deleted scenes on the DVD?

“Ya got Arby's all over me!”

Stormare shows more of a reaction to the pregnancy reveal on the Bruce Campbell soap opera he's watching than the sight of Buscemi with a facial gunshot wound.