FARGO PONDERS ASSIMILATION AND MALFEASANCE IN ITS FOURTH OUTING

 

Everything about the FARGO TV series is unlikely.  That it exists at all, as a serialized spin-off of the Coen Brothers quirk-crime classic, for one.  That it is not the self-evident disaster that description would suggest, but one of the very best things to happen on television this century. That it followed up the triumphant audacity of the first season with a hard reset to a prequel timeline, and even stronger results, in its second.  That it came back for a third season at all, after creator Noah Hawley was given carte blanche to make his LEGION series as weird as he wanted it to be.  That said third season could somehow become widely underrated, even as it continues to stand as the first and still best fictional depiction of the special trauma of the Misinformation Age ushered in by Trump’s election.  That the fourth season would leave the titular South Dakota town and adjoining Minnesota environs that defined the film and earlier seasons behind entirely, for the comparably-warm environs of Kansas City, or that it is airing at all, after COVID-19 shutdown the entire industry in the middle of its production.  

Drilling down to more granular levels, it’s also unlikely that Hawley’s streak of impeccable casting would extend to making notable comedy-types Chris Rock and Jason Schwartzman serve as the leaders of the warring gang factions, and it working really well, as well as notable indie folk musician/non-actor Andrew Bird as the father of the young heroine, a role which requires a good deal of actual acting and somehow also works really well.  Or even that when the premiere makes no bones about diving directly into an all-out gang war scenario, this somehow feels like the show returning to its most comfortable wheelhouse.  But somehow FARGO the series has become, for all its discursiveness and generally unhurried manner and despite the original film’s small-stakes and decidedly disorganized take on crime, the best presenter of full-bore underworld violence on the big or small screen. 

Now, a gang war is one of the most sure-fire ways to make entertaining TV.  But doing it well involves more than just running up a big body count.  Not that Fargo lacks in that area, with the extended prologue featuring not one, but two full blown mob massacres, before it gets around to introducing the “present day” warring camps.  Total volume of blood shed is actually a relatively minor factor in what makes this sort of conflict compelling for an extended stretch of episodes. It’s the continual sense of back-and-forth, which requires a fairly deep bench of colorful characters on both sides, to create more uncertainty as to who is actually essential to the endgame and who are just redshirts there to soak up the early losses (you might recall that Hanzee was mostly a background figure for the first half of S2 before developing into the primary villain in the final stretch), and also give a sense that the gangs/families still have something cohesive to keep fighting for after a few key players have been taken out.  Fargo, of course, does not lack in the area of colorful supporting cast either, so much so that it helpfully labels the characters with their names in the big introduction scene where the Black and Italian mobs have their big face off/handshake.

It’s the already-feuding Fadda brothers on the one side and boss/consigliere combo of Loy and Doctor Senator on the other that pop the most in the opening episodes, but judging by Hawley's prior work we should get to know the various soldiers much better in the weeks to come.  We should also get more insight into Jessie Buckley’s murderous nurse Oraetta Mayflower, who looks like she may be shaping up to be the most purely malevolent force for the season, as well as the chaotic force of the escaped convicts, and the lawman played by Timothy Olyphant that ends the second season kicking down the door looking for them.

Seriously, if having Olyphant as a lawman is like the fifth biggest draw in your show, you're doing freaking great

Which still leaves us with that other FARGO staple to look for, the paragon of decency and good sense which has always taken the form of a white police officer, but in this outing notably shifts to a young black girl.  This might seem like a direct reaction to the current political climate, except the production was well underway before the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor ignited the most recent and sustained protest efforts advocating for police reform and general wave of anti-cop sentiment (see also: how Season 3 seemed to be a direct reaction to Trump even though it was largely written before he was elected).  It will be very interesting to see how these elements all play off each other, but I am holding off diving too deep into thematics for now, as Fargo especially tends to take a little while before it unspools the greater concerns that drive a season.  And I prefer to avoid staking out a position at the outset that I will then feel compelled to defend as the season goes on – I have begun to hatch a theory that the recap format is very ill-served by this phenomenon, actually, and it might be preferable not to begin weekly recaps until a show has a chance to turn out at least a few episodes, but that is a digression for another day. 

And actually, even if Hawley’s shows tend to take a more elliptical route to their thematic destinations, this season begins with a very direct voiceover mechanic that announces the central theme as Assimilation.  The main conceit of the rival gangs fostering their youngest sons with the other is a delightfully Shakespearean set up that, on a purely plot level, complicates the gang war scenario in some fairly unique ways. But in the context of immigration and criminality that Ethelrida’s essay lays out, it also presents the sort of assimilation that first generation immigrants frequently push on their children as a form of hostage-taking, a kind of sacrifice meant to ensure a measure of peace with the dominant culture.  Of course, this type of offering is also presented as having a record of success that is, at best, mixed.  I suppose that somewhat depends how one counts the years of peace between the mass murders, though;  one could certainly make a case that any and all peace measures yet devised by humans have only proven out to be temporary stop-gaps separating one ethnic cleansing from the next world war. 

Half-Assed Quasi-Profundities are, as always on Schwartzblog, brought to you by Papa Johns

You could also make the case that the system’s catastrophic failures are all directly traceable to a single individual, Ben Wishaw’s “Rabbi” Milligan.   As a boy, he facilitated his family’s massacre of the Moskowitz Syndicate to end the first Pax Missourica, and then helped the Fadda family take out his own father in turn after he was packed off to live with the Italians as a teen.  But that is another character we will have to wait at least another week to get to know more intimately.  In the meantime, I guess I just want to say how bloody excited I am to have this cheerfully twisty, bizarrely ambitious show back to close out a year that has been…at best, mixed.

So let’s do Coen Bingo and Other Random Stuff

 

COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF

• Loy pocketing a handful of nuts out of Don Fadda's bag when talking about continuing to grow his business with or without permission is a nice, definitely pointed but subtly presented touch.

• As far as Coen references go, this seasons seems to be all Miller's Crossing and Raising Arizona so far, with Amber Midthunder (Kelsey Absille)’s convict parroting William Forsythe’s line from the latter about “releasing ourselves on our own recognizance”, after she and her partners' escape and cleaning up in a bathroom recall the Snoat brothers breakout in that movie.  And the entire set up seems to owe a loose but significant debt to Crossing's Italian/Irish gang war in its unnamed Midwestern city which I always kind of assumed to be KC. 

• The dialogue in this show still sings like no other.  The whole bit at the park where Schwartzman tries to ruffle the Cannons’ feathers but only succeeds in flustering himself is great, and I'm also partial to Loy rebutting that "dog eats dog" is the way of the world with "that's how dogs work, men are more complicated."  But the line of the night goes to Doctor Senator noting that while his people might be playing the role of new kids on the criminal block, the Italians don’t actually have seniority as far as immigration status – “You just got here.  But we are a part of this land, like the wind, or the dirt.”

• Also, I’m pretty sure someone told Schwartzman at one point to “go fuck a state park.”  If I have that wrong, I don’t care, it’s now my favorite insult in anything ever.

• Loy’s invention of the credit card is an interesting bit of historical revisionism, but more interesting is his reasoning for cutting in the white banks instead of hoarding the profits of his innovation for himself.  When he worries about the black side of town getting burnt down if they start to pave the streets with self-made gold, he is no doubt thinking of the Tulsa “Black Wall Street” massacre which occurred a couple hours south and decades prior in 1921, and which the internet writ large became aware of last year when it was dramatized in HBO’s WATCHMEN series.

• One thing that stood out to me about the setting is that while the majority of KC proper lies on the Missouri side of the state line, it is very much a border town.  I wonder how deliberate a choice it was to place a story that is so much about the invisible barriers of cultural acceptance in a city literally divided between two, frequently opposing, state governments.  It would also allow, if the show were so inclined, for tracing the origins of the son-swapping tradition all the way back to an attempt to stamp out the feuding between Jayhawkers and Bushwackers during the Bleeding Kansas period of the 1850s.  But it’s probably more of a coincidence, a way to tie in references to some of mob factions we saw in the 1970s-set second season and ground these thematic ideas in a city with a more decidedly multiethnic crime history than, say, Minneapolis or Omaha.