There is something about the Fargo television series… it hits on something important about the original Coen brothers film: place. I think that we don’t spend enough time thinking about how people live, in different parts of the country. The US is so vast that it’s easy to lose sight of this, or to get caught up in one’s own region. You can spend most of your life in one region, and never venture out. Thankfully, there are books and movies and television to help transport you.
It’s interesting to think about the training that these actors had to undergo to get the accents right. The attention to detail is worthwhile. I mean, even the explanation of Minnesota nice, possibly to help the viewer understand an aspect of the culture, is a fascinating addition.
The story has certain characters that seem to have become a staple in crime dramas. There’s a scary somewhat-off hitman. There’s a fixer, for the shady ultra-wealthy character. However, aside from that the characters are new/fresh, and the antagonists are terrifying in a way that we are not used to seeing portrayed.
Just as the original Fargo had an unusual protagonist- a pregnant female police officer- this season of the TV series centers around an unusual protagonist: a midwestern married woman whose survival skills, as she avoids being kidnapped in crazy dangerous scenarios, slowly reveal that she must have had to undergo something extreme in the past. I am always interested in a greater depiction of female characters, and centering on them is even better.
The antagonist is a sheriff, played by Jon Hamm, who takes the law into his own hands, lives by some kind of biblical interpretation that conveniently serves his own power, and is a narcissist, murderer (when you are the law, there is no accountability for what you do), and abuser.
Seeing the militia that this sheriff forms, all the stockpiled weapons, and the violent purported loyalty to the constitution is chilling, given the storming of the capital that we witnessed as a nation. It also kind of reminds us what might be at stake, if we let people who blindly follow a dangerous figure take control/lead.
In the weird sovereign area that the sheriff has a hold over, that means very little rights for women, for one. That may be one of the main concepts here. Honestly, I was impressed with how domestic violence was portrayed here. I think that often, in our society, we relegate certain issues because they relate mostly to women. Here, we are forced to look at domestic violence, because it is at the heart of the crazy crime events that unfold.
We see a woman fight back against trained killers, in situations that left a male police officer and the protagonist’s husband severely injured, and a man of authority who tried to protect her murdered. She is doing all of this so that she does not have to go back to being trapped and abused. This highlights the severity of what she had to undergo before, that she is running away from. It highlights how dangerous that abuse is. It is, in fact, life threatening. If seeing and hearing the severity of abuse isn’t enough when the backstory comes to light, it becomes even clearer that the sheriff/her abuser sees women as disposable after he can no longer control them when he orders her to be buried by one of his henchman, a fate which his first wife also suffered.
It’s sick, the sheriff’s idea that a woman is his property once he marries her. In his eyes, this contract cannot be broken by anything he does (breaking bones, other abuse). He will follow the women to the ends of the earth if they try to escape him. In effect, the only way that is acceptable for the bonds of the marriage to cease effect is death, by his hand. You can see the one-sided nature of this.
This idea is somewhat familiar to me, in work on asylum cases centering on gender issues. I find it interesting that we now have a depiction of some of these concepts as they can play out on our own soil.
