FARGO 4.10 - "HAPPY"

 

“Happy” finally brings Ethelrida back to the fore, after she was set up as the heart of the season early on and then seemingly forgot about entirely for about two-thirds of the runtime.  The episode is stronger for this added focus on a character that is herself one of the show’s strongest, but it also may be too late in the game for this season to draw itself together as something greater than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps those parts could have been sewn together more elegantly if it weren’t for the coronavirus disrupting production of the season when it was ¾ of the way complete.  But so it goes.  In any case, those individual parts are still largely great, even if I think there was a more ideal way to feature Ethelrida and Oraetta more in the middle section instead of watching Odis twitch his way through one hour after another, or Gaetano be a panting psychopath one more time.

What’s odd about this episode is that it dispatches both these characters, whose excess of screentime has been my single biggest issue with the season, in ways where I suddenly feel like we need more with them.  Most notably, Odis’s decision to go out as a real cop makes sense in theory, but is dramatized in a really odd, oblique way that I'm not even sure is intentional coming from this odd, oblique show. We ended episode 8 with his most extreme crime yet, committing multiple premeditated murders at the behest of a crime boss. Then he was entirely absent from episode 9, then 10 opens with him deciding to take this huge step back toward the light…except it’s depicted via a montage that is only partially focused on him, and his big move is to arrest the Italian gangsters, which initially seems like it would just be a continuation of doing Loy’s bidding.  The way it only gradually comes into focus that this actually represents a total renunciation of all his former corruption gives a limpness to the culmination of this character’s story that the snazzy camerawork and Jack Huston’s valiant efforts can’t entirely overcome.

Things are a bit different with Gaetano, who got a whole lot of attention early on when he was a one-dimensional beast awkwardly playing at Machiavellian schemes that he was not very good at.  But he was also, crucially, not so bad as to give it a real comical bent, or the type of livewire charge of unpredictability I think they were going for.  Strangely enough, the character started working better since he embraced a more simplistic role as his brother’s bulldog.  I feel like there was an angle of interesting characterization there, where part of Gaetano’s anger in the early season was heightened by knowing that he was a bad fit to be the schemer of the family, but feeling forced by Josto’s perceived weakness and stupidity to take on that role anyway, if only to expose said weakness.  And then when Josto proved to be more worthy than he realized, there is immense relief to return to being a blunt instrument.  All of which is there in the show if you squint, but could have been articulated more specifically, in my own opinion. 

But Gaetano’s exit also highlights another figure that may have gotten too much play this year: the role of happenstance and coincidence in shaping the fate of characters. That has always been an element of Fargo; for example Season 2, generally considered the apex of the series, opened with a wild congruence of unrelated factors (an obstinate judge, a hapless criminal, a UFO and a desperate hairdresser walk into a Waffle Hut…) that kicked off a cascade of increasingly depraved violence.  But there is a fundamental difference when this sort of randomness is part of the set up, rather than the resolution.  My general principle with this stuff is that contrivances, whether they be wild coincidences or whatever form of supernatural nonsense a particular genre traffics in, are good storytelling elements when their effect is to complicate things, and bad when they simplify things. 

Which creates a difficult position for a story like Fargo, which endeavors to bring some semblance of the random and confusing nature of real life to the realm of fiction.  There is a quixotic bent to this effort even at the best of times, as the reason why humans tell each other stories in the first place is to impose a sense of order on the formless chaos that makes up the day-to-day experience of being alive. Even elements included specifically to evoke a sense of meaningless randomness are still created with an intention, to represent the concept of purposelessness as part of some grander, conscious design.

But all such galaxy-brain profundity aside, this season and episode in particular seem to be pushing the envelope when it comes to the “random” plot elements.  There is only so much happenstance that can be included before it crosses some invisible line between a compelling approximation of the messiness of real life, and the frustrating nonsense of a story badly told.  And in this season it feels like the arbitrary elements are factoring in more heavily in the resolutions than ever before.  When the opening piled coincidence on top of coincidence – Don Fadda catching a random shot from a child’s pellet gun in the jugular, which happened to put him in the care of a nurse that happened to be a serial killer that happened to target patients like him and also happened to force herself into the orbit of his son and a neighbor that would happen to be entwined with the son’s main criminal rival, all more or less at once – that is one thing. Okay, the point is that it’s several things at once, but when Gaetano slips on a banana peel and falls all the way out of the show, that’s something different because it is removing a complication instead of creating one.  And it’s still another thing when, after Rabbi manages to arrive at a remote gas station at the precise moment when the man hunting him and the man hunting that hunter are in the middle of happening on each other there, a freak winter cyclone happens to drop directly on top of them all.  Or when the ghost that has haunted Ethelrida’s family for generations pops up just in time to save her life. 

None of these things, on their own merits, offend my delicate narrative sensibilities overly much.  And somehow I'm finding that the more overtly supernatural elements probably bother me the least of all.  They fit in the mold of paranormal happenings of seasons past, where the actual plot repercussions of these wild swerves from reality are surprisingly minimal. Or at least, they arise in situations that so clearly does not require a supernatural “fix” to resolve themselves that I don’t get worked up about it being a deus ex machina to escape a corner the author can't find any real way out of.  In the big shootout that ends S2, you could concoct any number of earthbound things to momentarily distract the criminal choking out the hero long enough for that hero to reach a gun and blow him away, so why not make it anactual UFO descending from the ether?  In the big mindfuck scene of S3, the heroine could just stumble out of the woods and steal a car from the parking lot of a bowling alley to escape the wounded killer lumbering after her, without any particular need for that bowling alley to manifest as a purgatorial waypoint where judgment is explicitly passed on wayward souls.  Similarly, whether or not the twister touches down right on top of that gas station, the gunplay we saw was enough to suggest none of those men were walking away from it alive anyway.  And there were any number of ways to foil Oraetta’s attempt on Ethelrida’s life without spectral intrusion; Lemuel could have woken up, or her mother could have, or the nurse could even have run afoul of some crude cans-on-a-string type alarm system mom had set up against the young suitor attempting to sneak into the room after hours. 

None of these changes, in any case, would prevent the rest of the story from playing out in the same fashion. And while I’d expect the lack of necessity of the supernatural elements for resolving any particular plot points to make them especially intolerable to my tastes, somehow that very gratuitousness makes them more palatable. The existence of the supernatural changes everything (in these moments), and nothing (in the grand scheme).  Which is a very Coen Brothers theme to be playing with, despite how scrupulous the brothers are about not explicitly confirming a higher power at work in their own films. Their thing is to heavily imply a supernatural dimension to characters and events while making sure everything – the odd moment from their goofier comedies notwithstanding – stays just within the realm of what can be justified in purely materialist terms.  The unified Coen oeuvre seems to be consistent about saying that whether there is a higher power or pure pointless chaos shaping the state of the world is not something we ever get to know for sure, while also suggesting that maybe the difference between sheer senseless chance and a divine but genuinely inscrutable plan doesn’t really amount to all that much, for all it affects our day-to-day conduct.

But even if the fantastical elements don’t change how the plot proceeds, they do change how we in the audience perceive things.  I have puzzled over the inclusion of such elements for a few seasons now, without coming up with a definitive take on why Hawley deemed such flights of fancy necessary to the stories being told.  And I still may not be able to break down for you in plain terms exactly why it needed to be a UFO for one season, or a bowling alley in this case and a tornado over here (unless the answers are The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Big Lebowski, and A Serious Man, respectively).  Or why aliens fit particularly in the one story while Jewish spirits are more appropriate for another.  But after multiple iterations, I can pull back and see a different purpose served by inserting these phenomena while keeping their exact nature obscure. 

Which is to fuck with us, essentially.  These eerie phenomena are certainly seen and interacted with by the characters in a diegetic sense, but they aren’t really there for the character’s sake.  They are there for us, in the audience. To put us on more equal footing with the characters that don’t get to share our gods-eye view of the broader context of the plot and their actions within it, and spend so much of their time frightened and terribly, terribly confused.  It is the inexorable nature of a sprawling, longform television series is to keep showing us more, and more, and thus our perspective becomes increasingly omniscient as time goes on.  This can create a disconnect over time on serialized shows with a large cast and/or centralized mystery that it wants to explore slowly.  LOST, for example, increasingly struggled in the later seasons to balance how many more disparate pieces of the lore obsessive fanbase had catalogued over the years of accumulated flashbacks and teases and perspective shifts than any one character on the island could possibly have pieced together themselves.  This made it easier to become frustrated with characters who could not conceivably know half as much about what is happening to them as we do at home.  Game Of Thrones faced a more subtle version of the same issue, I think, as it became harder over time to empathize with the naturally blinkered perspectives of the characters that don’t get to partake in the globe-trotting tour of all the far-flung storylines that we took for granted as our entire experience of that world.  I think this had an effect to sharpen the frustration with certain “stupid” characters, while also helping us to perhaps over-empathize with at least one characteras their loyalties became almost as divided as the audience’s.

This issue is especially relevant to Fargo, where the confusion and frustration at not seeing the full picture are essential to the thematic thrust of the series, as well as the Coen filmography from which it offshoots.  And so there is particular value in underlining for the audience that there are forces and designs directing these wild events that even we are not privy to understanding any more than the characters.  It might have seemed at first blush that making the supernatural underpinnings of the Coen filmography so overt would fly in the face of how deliberately they work to keep them unspoken. But I am coming around to this idea that it may be the series’s masterstroke.  Because eschewing literal recreation in favor of translating the spirit of the work to the contours of a new medium is where the true art of adaptation lies.

      COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF

• “Stay Inside, Stay Alive” is one of the headlines in the opening montage, which I wonder if it was added after the coronavirus shut down production.

• The body count in crime/action movies always tend to be a bit ridiculous when you take a step back and compare it to even the most notorious true crimes in history.  Fargo seems to be having a special bit of fun with this, as the gang war dropping 27 bodies on just one side outstrips just about any criminal conflict in recorded history.  And that isn't even factoring in the train station shootout that left literally dozens of citizens and police slaughtered, years before mass shootings were a nightmarishly commonplace occurrence.  The president would have declared all of Kansas City a war zone long before this point in any "real" world sense.

• Re: Zombie Captain Roach, is there any indication that he has actually been trying to harm the Pearl women?  It seems possible that we could still get a reveal that he is cursed to try to help them by appearing to warn them of imminent danger/death.  His appearance when Swanee was on the verge of death, for instance, prompted Zelmaire to prod her to roll over before she vomited. And obviously he foils Oraetta's attempt on Ethelrida's life.

• One of the more overt effects of the COVID-induced break in production is that Satchel appears to have walked all the way from Christmas to late Spring since the last episode.  But it has a nice subtle side-effect of the boy looking and sounding like he's grown up considerably in his day or two alone on the road.

• I guess Gaetano’s death was foreshadowed by his big pratfall on the ice earlier in the season, but I dunno.  It still feels a little half-baked.

• I felt like it was non-Coen movies that were getting more overt shout-outs this week. Gaetano's stupid death apes White Boy Bob's in (the excellent) Out Of Sight, the swooping POV effect as Oraetta sneaks into the Smutny house at night evokes the Coen's best bud Sam Raim's signature camera moves from (the excellent) Evil Dead series, and I even got a whiff of (the excellent) Rushmore's big payback sequence during the opening montage that saw Jason Schwartzman waltzing out of doorways in slow motion.