It feels increasingly
pointless to refer to Fargo the film as the source material that Fargo
the series is “based on”. The first
season or so may have had some more fun playing with bits from the movie, but as
it went on it drew much more broadly and loosely from the entire Coen
filmography. Particularly in this fourth
incarnation, the show has left even the basic climate and character types that defined the movie behind
to draw much more directly from Miller’s Crossing and Raising Arizona,
- and with “East/West”, The Wizard Of Oz - than Fargo
itself. We’ll get back around to the Oz
riffing in a bit, but this episode also brings to the fore the most significant
difference between the film and series, which is the overt stylistic flourishes
and flights of cinematographic fancy that the Coen’s original work never had
the time or inclination for. The film is rigorous about maintaining an absolutely straight-faced
presentation of the increasingly absurd and violent events it depicts, which is
something of a Coen trademark. Noah Hawley,
by contrast, is a much louder stylist, which might seem like it would clash with the restrained
nature of Fargo, but for my money creates an appealing odd-couple synergy. I imagine the deadpan nature of the film
would, if stretched uniformly over the course of several seasons of longform television,
begin to feel as flat and lifeless as cold porridge. Conversely, when Hawley was given free rein
to indulge his more gonzo instincts with Legion, the resulting porridge
was too hot; an overwhelming visual smorgasbord that quickly detached from any real
sense of narrative coherence or relatable characterization.
Which is to
say that Fargo, with its more earthbound plotting and centering around no-nonsense
protagonists, presents a more stubbornly grounded reality for Hawley’s more grandiloquent
proclivities to strain against, creating a marriage of artist and material that
is not too hot and not too cold. I won’t
call it a perfect blend, because perfection is an illusory concept, whether applied to art or porridge temperature. I’ll settle instead for the less
grandiloquent claim that it creates a heat level more ideal to my particular
tastes. Put in still plainer terms, “East/West”
and Fargo generally represents the upper level of stylistic indulgence that
I can fully vibe with, because even when it is going wild I can still tell, on a
basic level, what the fuck is going on. Despite
the fair degree of symbolic abstraction and artsy-fartsiness at play, but I can
certainly describe what actually happened in this episode. It does not cross over to that realm of conscious
unreality where more outre' shows like Legion or Twin Peaks often live, a
place where it starts to seem like the author regards the plot and characters
they created as burdens impeding the more esoteric, free-flowing jazz they
really want to play.
 |
| "No, seriously. That's David Bowie in the giant kettle. Why are you looking at me like that?" |
So perhaps I should, if only to prove the point, describe what actually happens in
the episode, outside all the artsy-fartsy abstractions.
Rabbi takes Satchel to the small town of Liberal, Kansas to lie low for
a couple days while he retrieves some money he has stashed in the walls of a
feed store. But that feed store has been
rebuilt as an appliance shop, and the owners of the new store have already
spent most of the cash windfall they found when they took down the wall. When Rabbi finds out it is the boy's birthday, he drives
up the road to a filling station to try to procure him a candy bar or something. There, he finds Fadda henchman Constant
Calamita, who had been hunting him across the state, and Cannon henchman Omie
Sparkman, who had been hunting Calamita in turn, already going at it. Gunfire ensues, and everyone takes bullets
which are ultimately irrelevant as a freak winter tornado sucks them all up
anyway and distributes them across three counties. Satchel, realizing that Rabbi is not
returning, hits the road with a dog he found in a cupboard.
Nothing
about these events is all that shocking in itself. Well, the tornado is certainly an unusual device,
but I’ve been predicting that one would come into play somehow since week two, I wasn’t (pardon the pun) blown away by that turn. In any case, there is little in these plot
turns that seems to demand that an entire episode be turned over to them exclusively, with
no glance back to what’s happening in Kansas City, much less that it be done almost
entirely in black and white and filled with oddly literary flourishes like the
bifurcated boarding house, brazenly symbolic billboard, and direct references
to fairy tales. I used the porridge
metaphor earlier because the episode is not content with just throwing Oz
allusions all over the place, but also has a character specifically talk about Goldilocks. The original story, not the Disney-fied
version where the witches were replaced by bears. He identifies Goldilocks as an “outsider
in search of yourself”, which pointedly applies to Satchel at the end of the
episode, but even more directly to Rabbi.
He bounced from a crime family that was too soft (the Jews that seemed
to treat him well even as he helped plot their massacre) to one that was too
hard (his own father, quoting the “someone has been sleeping in my bed” line
from Goldilocks while forcing him to execute another child) to one that was…well,
still not quite right.
That this background would create an identity crisis of sorts is obvious, and it may contribute to his outsized reaction to the incomplete billboard. He gets angrier insisting that leaving people in uncertainty "ain't right" than he does confronting the shopkeepers that appropriated his secret stash. Not that killing them would have done him any good at that point, and in fact would have delayed him from foiling Satchel’s near-arrest for Sitting Quietly Alone While Black. Which…may have actually worked out better for them both, if it had put Rabbi off the cupcake hunt, or even just delayed his start by like two more minutes.
But despite the direct Goldilocks references, the Wizard Of Oz riffing is somehow even more prominent, and also frankly confusing in its particulars. For example, while Rabbi is carried off by the twister, it’s Satchel that wakes up to a colorized world after that storm separated him from his parental figure. The boy finds himself a Toto-sized dog to accompany him on the road in the end, so I guess he is the Dorothy analogue? And the strange lands he finds himself in is explicitly Kansas, instead of “not Kansas anymore”. The hotel is, like Oz, presided over by feuding sister “witches” of the East and West, with one more overtly racist/wicked, while the other only makes a vague, spiteful pretense of tolerance - which fits with the Wicked-esque interpretation that Glinda the Good Witch only presents as kindly when she' s really using Dorothy to kill her enemies instead of actually helping her.
Or I could be remembering this wrong. It's been awhile.
But if the
other oddball residents of the hotel are supposed to approximate the
Scarecrow/Tin Man/Cowardly Lion, those parallels were too subtle for me to
trace. I was more struck by how everyone
in the house seemed to have confused, if not suspicious, relationships with
their companions. Obviously our duo is hiding
their true identities, on account of the whole “hunted by a murderous fiend” thing
so many Fargo characters go through at some point. But it’s also unclear if the Reverend is
traveling with his actual mother, or wife that goes by “mother” a la the Pence
family. The officer is traveling with a
young “niece” that he speaks to like a spouse. And the man with the mysterious
ailment (leprosy?) next door has some sort of weird teenage attendant/doctor/mad
scientist seeing to his treatment.
What exactly
to make of all this quasi-literary oddity, I’m sure I don’t know. But if I’m left in tortuous uncertainty, it
hardly compares to where Satchel is left at episode’s end – a boy standing alone
on a remote road in winter. Which I’d
guess is the last we will see of him here, leaving us fill in the blanks of how
that road will lead him to, presumably, become the criminal enforcer named
Milligan we met in season two. And I’m
fine with that, as there is still plenty of business left to complete back in
Kansas City.
COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF
- Okay, the way that Calamita does not register a gigantic cyclone forming a few yards behind him is not especially believable.
- The radio in the car mentions a shootout at the slaughterhouse back in KC, so I guess that will be is to be a part of the climax.
- I wish we had gotten more time with Omie Sparkman, which is a mark of a successful characterization. Corey Hendrix made him into a great, distinctive get-shit-done-er type with a relaxed confidence and not much time.
- The Barton Arms has to be an oblique reference to Barton Fink, who also spent his time holed up in an creaky old hotel filled with off-putting types.
- The leper recalls the Coen trope of the decrepit old man that a protagonist has to pay pilgrimage to on their journeys (see: A Serious Man, The Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, No Country For Old Men), which is also sort of a Wizard Of Oz thing, as it usually involves the hero learning that this man-behind-the-curtain they thought had the answers. Which I'd say is a stretch, but I tried to google a quote I recall from them saying all their movies turned out to be remake of Oz, and came across a diffierent interview where they make that connection in exactly as many words.
- This episode acts as a partial corrective to my griping about the sidelining of Rabbi, Ethelrida and Oraetta in the prior 4-5 weeks. But it’s hard to see, with only 2 episodes left, how those women could play a similarly central role in the finale as they did in the premiere, and not have their inactivity throughout the rest of the season still feel conspicuous.
- “The History Of True Crime In The Midwest” book first appeared in Season 2.
- I love the camera effect that pulls into Rabbi’s face and then goes all sideways as he is pulled up by the tornado.
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