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.

KILL BILL 2 PODCAST

 

Our podcast for KILL BILL VOL 2 is live over at Trouble.City.  We have a guest on this one, and you'll just have to listen to find out all the things he and John are wrong about.

KILL BILL VOL. 1 PODCAST

 

Part One of Tarantino's magnum opus of style over substance is live over at Trouble.City:

https://trouble.city/articles/2020/9/10/the-qt-question-kill-bill-vol-1

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY STRUGGLES AGAINST THE OPPRESSIVE FORCES OF RACISM AND METATEXTUAL SPOILERS

 

HBO’s new prestige series, LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, is only three episodes into its run, but it is already garnering fairly rapturous reviews.  But as I was watching the second episode of this sumptuously presented, well-acted show with a killer sci-fi premise and thematic undergirding that could not be more timely, I felt something wasn’t fully clicking.  And then the third episode fell almost completely flat for me.   I think there are several factors contributing to my disconnect, the most glaring of which being that I’m a middle-class whitebread type, and the show is very much centered on the experiences of black Americans enduring violent racism largely perpetrated by people that look and sound more like me.  So it’s possible that this is just a thing that is by design Not For Me, but even if that is the single biggest factor in why I don’t fully vibe with it, it’s also one about which I don’t have a ton more to say beyond a shrug of “okay, then.”  But I do have a lot more thoughts on how the show is managing all the other metanarrative hats it wears as a prestige HBO series, a televised horror anthology, a black uplift story, and a deeply nerdy fantasy epic, so let’s get into some of that stuff. 

I suppose one other potentially big, surface-level thing I should mention that might be keeping me from fully connecting with the show is that I feel like the main character is miscast.  Not that Jonathan Majors is giving a bad performance, but just that his appearance clashes with who Atticus is made out to be on the page.  He is one of those actors like Tommy Lee Jones or Gene Hackman that just seems to have a face that was born middle-aged, that makes it feel like they should be playing 48 year-olds even when they are actually 29.  Atticus the character has a tour or two in Korea under his belt, but assuming he joined up around age 18 that would still put him in his early twenties, which gibes with how the character interacts with others onscreen, but not really with how he looks (to me).  Compounding that is that he has a physique that is clearly sculpted by a team of professionals to be ready when Marvel officially gets around to recasting Black Panther, which, hey, kudos.  It's legitimately, distractingly, impressive. But even if the character is supposed to be this bookworm that filled out and got hot while in the army, I just don’t really buy that this sort of Hollywood Bod even existed in the 1955 era that the show spends so much effort lavishly recreating, to the point where the sight of the hero shirtless feels as otherworldly as the rampaging, many-eyed monstrosities or the ancient warlock cults that control them.  These are shallow issues, but they create a subtle aura of dissonance around the main character that is not intended (as opposed to how the superlatively pasty look of the villainous Malfoys Braithwaites is intentionally off-putting, for example).    

yup, just a nerd that did a couple push-ups

But now let’s zoom out and talk about the baseline difficulty of doing horror in a serialized TV format.  TV is, overall, my preferred storytelling medium because the longform dramatic possibilities it creates can’t be duplicated by traditional length plays or movies (as much as the Cinematic Universe phenomenon that picked up steam on the heels of the 00’s Golden Age of cable TV has tried).  Horror as a genre, however, seems more suited for the one-shot storytelling of a film, novel or EC comic than an open-ended TV series.  Which is why most horror series tend toward an anthology format, be it episodic a la THE TWILIGHT ZONE, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE OUTER LIMITS, BLACK  MIRROR, or by the season as more recent offerings like AMERICAN HORROR STORY, PENNY DREADFUL, or THE TERROR have begun doing.  The reason for this is so basic that it almost seems to get overlooked in critical conversations: horror depends on the credible threat of the worst possible outcomes coming to pass for the heroes.  Even if you aren’t versed in the behind-the-scenes minutia of the process of producing big budget TV series (which even casual audience increasingly are, as the internet has made such info easier and easier to access) that dictate that stars of a certain stature aren’t going to be killed off before a season finale, everyone has an intuitive understanding of the narrative economy that will prevent a show with a core cast of 3-4 characters from killing one of them every week of a 10+ episode season.

The most direct way of counteracting this effect is also rather difficult, from both a financial and creative standpoint.  That is to create such a sprawling cast of characters  that it becomes plausible to take out any one of them at any time, without damaging the basic architecture of the show so severely that it can’t continue.  This is how the most successful longform horror series operate, such as THE WALKING DEAD or GAME OF THRONES (a series that presented as fantasy, but largely operated on horror logic).  Another tactic is to throw a big punch early on by killing off a seemingly-major character in the opening episode or two, which LOVECRAFT COUNTRY attempts with the death of Uncle George in episode 2.  This is intended to destabilize our sense of narrative priority, and make it feel like “anything can happen!”  But it didn’t work for me this time, partly because the angst around his death was weirdly muddled by a general confusion as to how Lety suffered pretty much the same wound in the same episode, but she turned out to only be mostly dead, and then when George turns out to be all the way dead at the end I still wasn’t entirely sure how seriously to take it.  But mostly, it was because there just wasn’t a deep enough bench built up after 2 episodes for me to worry about Lety when the next episode puts her in a fairly standard haunted house set up.  There is a bit of a supporting cast with the central trio’s family, but it only goes four people deep, and it certainly doesn’t feel like Ruby or aunt Hippolyta are ready to carry the show if Ruby’s sister were to abruptly fall down the haunted elevator shaft.   Because of this, George’s death actually has the opposite effect of convincing me that anyone can die; it cements Atticus and Lety are the leads of the show, that can’t be going anywhere any time soon.

Some of this is par for the course of the “episode 2 blues” that afflict most ongoing series.  It’s a phenomenon that reflects how the two most fussed over episodes of a TV series are going to be the pilot and the finale, in that order.  The first episode is going to be something the creator has probably been working on for years, and fine-tuned to be as splashy and attention-grabbing as possible to hook both networks and audiences.  But the bulk of any season that follows is going to fall into a more procedural format, with each episode conceived and produced under much tighter deadlines, crowdsourced to a writers room, and still holding back the biggest punches the creators have cooked up for the finale.  Limited series such as LOVECRAFT COUNTRY shouldn’t feel this effect as acutely, as they do not have the same need to pad out the longer 20some episode season of a traditional network show, or even the 13 that Netflix originals normally require.  But the show seemed to steer directly into the traditional pattern anyway, with a 2-part premiere that featured an epic struggle to foil an apocalyptic cult of omnipotent warlocks commanding an army of eldritch hellbeasts.  Only for the following episode to shift down multiple gears for a rather basic haunted house one-off that felt like it could have been a script for any number of midseason episodes of SUPERNATURAL or CHARMED or ANGEL, repurposed for this show by adding extra racism.

"Wait, what did I do?"

Okay, that’s a bit harsh, but it definitely felt like a sideshow from the main Braithwaite cult storyline, and extremely unlikely to have any  lasting effects on the main storyline.  I hope subsequent weeks prove me wrong on that, and Lety owning the house does become significant to the main plot in at least some way, but it doesn't stop the central tension of this episode falling flat because every metatextual indicator made it obvious that the danger being built up around her was phony.  And there is one more of those indicators that ties back to the unique racial component of the show, and made it, for me at least, impossible to ignore:  there was just no way, no how, at any point that the mutilated ghosts of black people that seem to be menacing Lety were going to be the actual villains here.  Not in this show, with racial justice issues so at the forefront of its mind.  From the first (awesomely grotesque) appearance of the old lady at the foot of the bed, these are clearly going to be what I think of as “Guillermo Del Toro ghosts", despite how much better and more obvious THE SIXTH SENSE would be as a touchstone for most people. In any case, this is the thing where the third act twist is that the horrifying-looking apparitions plaguing the hero are revealed to be fellow victims of and ally against the real bad guy.  Which of course they are, leading to a hilarious moment where Lety exhorts the ghosts that they “can still FIGHT!!!”, including one that is just a baby’s head surgically attached to the body of a full-grown basketball player.

Now, I love that bit to death, for entirely the wrong reasons.  Is she telling the baby it can fight?  Or the…torso?  Who is in charge of this ghost’s decisions here?  Why did the mad scientist perform this obviously fatal and pointlessly ludicrous surgery while the victim was still in his uniform?  I have so many questions.  But I digress.  The point is that this type of twist works a treat on the purely thematic level, where the subjects of gaslighting or otherwise abusive treatment wake up to how those they have been led to fear are actually victims as well, and find strength in solidarity to target their actual oppressors.  That’s great as subtext, but unfortunately it has become enough of a trope that it can undermine the text, which is a big problem for a genre that operates as viscerally as horror does.  When it is played as a twist, the first two acts of such a story become a slog, while I await reveal of why the ghosts that haven’t actually done anything to the hero besides look spooky in mirrors and photographs for the last hour are good guys after all. 

And I do think there are ways around this.  The recent season of THE TERROR: INFAMY, about a vengeful revenant haunting a Japanese internment camp in World War II California, was flawed in many ways, but it threaded a lot of the same needles “Holy Ghost” was going for more effectively.  The horrors of racist state violence were ultimately scarier than the ghost, imo, which imparts the same feeling LOVECRAFT is angling at with making the bigot cops and neighbors the real malevolent force.  But by making that ghost a genuinely vicious and destructive spirit, INFAMY succeeds in making the two types of terror amplify each other, with the supernatural element making the nightmare historical circumstances that much worse, rather than ultimately serving an escape hatch from that historical atrocity.  It could be the Japanese influence on that show that made the difference, as J-Horror seems to have a pretty good grip on how to fill in the backstory and motivation “ghost girl” archetype from THE RING or THE GRUDGE or what have you in a way that you understand what they are so pissed off about, while keeping them as figures of genuinely homicidal menace. 

But seriously, that design is fantastic

I am realizing as I go here that I am actually circling a lot of the same issues as I did in my post on the HALLOWEEN reboot.  Which I think come down to having a skepticism about the viability of the horror genre as a vessel for pure empowerment.  This is also on my mind due to a comment my podcasting partner made in our last recording session about horror being a genre with a strange relationship to feminism.  Which was that women were often cast in the lead roles for distinctly non-feminist reasons, to heighten the sense of vulnerability and the revel in the various exploitative and skeevy implications of that.  But over time, just by virtue of centering women within the narrative, the genre became the source of better-rounded female roles than many others had to offer, and started to take on a sneaky feminist bent by accident.  HALLOWEEN '18 was trying to tap into that directly, and reclaim some greater power and agency for the terrorized Final Girl archetype, just as I think the post-GET OUT breed of horror-as-black-uplift-narrative is trying to do by upending the "black guy always dies first" trope.  But I'm starting to question whether this stuff works the same when you do it on purpose.  Because horror is, fundamentally, meant to upset people.  When it sets out with the explicit goal of empowering them, something in the primal power that centers the genre’s appeal gets sapped.  And that is to say nothing of how odd a fit horror meant to uplift makes for an updating of the works of HP Lovecraft, whose signature theme was the utter powerlessness of human beings in the face of primeval forces beyond their comprehension. 

In any case, LOVECRAFT COUNTRY has a whole lot going for it in terms of performance and production values, so my hope is that my issues with episode three turn out to be an unfortunate confluence of these various metatextual factors conspiring to undermine the central conceit.   I don’t expect the rest of the season to be radically different that what we’ve seen so far, but I hope it evinces a greater awareness that racism is scarier than ghosts. So far, nothing the show has done with the supernatural has been half as scary as when the heroes had to race the sunset to the county line or found themselves at the mercy of racist cops.  Ideally, future episodes will find a way to use the supernatural horrors to complement and heighten the real-world ones, rather than undercutting them.

                                                                                                                                                                

JACKIE BROWN PODCAST

 

We tuned up some of our audio issues for the installment on the most forgotten of the proper Tarantino films, JACKIE BROWN.  We discuss the effects of aging, heists, adaptation Sam Jackson (of course), and proper etiquette for prank calling Robert De Niro.

JACKIE BROWN is a great crime movie, and even if you don't like the podcast or Tarantino generally you should check it out.