by Dan Scully, Staff Writer

It’s 2021 and you know what that means: Fargo is now 25 years old! Holy shit! One of my favorite movies ever is now old enough to rent a car. Huzzah! Time flies and entropy is real and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Welcome to the Almost Thirty Club, I say from the Almost Forty Club, where we have better food, comfier clothes, and gnarlier hangovers. That’s right, the Coen Brothers’ most iconic film is now a quarter of a century old, and in the years since its release it has only gotten better. And if my most recent read on it is correct, even more resonant. We’ll get into it in a second, but first, let’s talk about what unites pretty much all of the Coens’ work.

I’ve always said that most of the Coens’ output could switch genres with very little rework, just a shift in tone. Burn After Reading, an outright comedy, could easily be an intense drama similar to No Country for Old Men. All you’d have to do is tell the actors not to be goofy. The reverse is true as well. No Country for Old Men could very easily become a comedy all the same. You wouldn’t even have to re-cast it since Josh Brolin is very capable of being comic (as evidenced in Hail, Caesar!). Really, one need look no further than Javier Bardem’s haircut in the role of Anton Chigurh. It’s a patently ridiculous style, but as is, plays as a terrifying idiosyncrasy worn by an emotionless merchant of death. A single Carl Bernstein-esque hair flip could turn it into pure comedy.

For my money, the best films of the Coens are those which walk the middle ground, delivering raucous comedy amidst a very serious story, and as this mixture goes, they’ve never done it better than with Fargo.

Since the release of the film way back in 1996 when Jurassic Park was still a good thing, the Coens have put out countless films, and Fargo itself has turned into a long-form anthology television series (and a really flippin’ good one at that!). I’ve seen pretty much all of it, and if I could describe the bulk of their brand in general plot terms it would be as follows:

A machine is chugging along, and one or more pieces fall out of place. In the fight to return the machine to its status quo, one or more of these pieces gets a look at the machine in full, and what they see is what we see. In A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik learns that his community has secrets, and that the God he worships is indifferent to his plight. In Inside Llewyn Davis, the titular folk singer learns that his vocation of choice is one he may not be capable of navigating alone. In Intolerable Cruelty (which is criminally underrated, if I may say so), a cynical lawyer learns that he, too, can be coaxed by Cupid’s Arrow into behaving illogically.

In the case of Fargo, a film that leans heavily on the notion of Midwestern politeness, we find Marge Gunderson, a small town cop, currently with child, tasked with investigating a sudden influx of dead bodies painting the snow-white landscape blood red. Marge is a fascinating character, and in this narrative, she’s the piece of the metaphorical machine that gets knocked loose, and it happens through no fault of her own. The arc she undergoes in recognizing the machine and attempting to re-establish the status quo is slight, as she’s a pretty contented character to begin with, but it’s a transformation with lasting impact. Namely, Marge learns how important it is to think for herself. At a time when our culture rewards the blind following of established narratives at the expense of logic, revisiting Fargo really drove this point home.

Currently, free thought often comes at the cost of ostracism, and to the detriment of larger progress. “No such thing as a stupid question” has been replaced with “that is an evil question and you’re evil for asking it” while extremely powerful people (the machine) get away with true evil at our expense (and often with our blind support). In the real world, if a piece falls out of the machine, said piece is highly incentivized to get back in before anyone notices it, potentially casting it out forever. And God forbid the piece gets a good look at the machine and thinks “I wonder if there’s a better way to do this.” Curiosity has become a truly dangerous mistress to court.

Marge, polite as a button (I don’t know of a good comparative for polite—fox maybe?), has every reason to believe Jerry Lundegaard when he brushes off her inquiries about some evidence that could potentially tie him to the central crime. And until much later in the film, she does exactly that. As far as she can see, there’s no reason why a small town car salesman would lie about such things. Bad people just don’t exist in Fargo, North Dakota. It’s why the police force seems to be comprised of just a few people, one of whom should probably be on maternity leave.

As we approach the third act, Marge meets and old acquaintance for dinner. It’s a truly fantastic scene, and despite being quite loaded and uncomfortable, it encapsulates the moment that Marge’s curiosity is piqued—which is also the moment that Jerry’s dirty plot is assured to end badly both for him and his poor, poor wife, Jean (it should also be noted that a whole essay could be devoted to another strong theme in this movie: miscommunication). During this dinner, Marge’s old friend Mike Yanagita speaks of how he was married to a mutual friend of theirs who had recently passed. He makes a sloppy attempt at hitting on Marge, and due to his state of grief, she’s happy to brush it off as a social miscalculation on his part (she’s firm, but fair, the way cops should be—also another essay).

Dinner ends and Marge returns to her investigation with little to go on. It’s when she’s relating her awkward meal to another friend that she learns that Mike was completely full of shit. Not only was never married to the woman who he claims made him a widower, but she’s also very much alive. Mike, on the other hand, is quite mentally ill. Marge is shocked by this development. She was so easily inclined to take him at his word, and it turns out his word is no good.

This is Marge’s eureka moment. She looks back on her investigation and discovers that when she interviewed Jerry Lundegaard, she ignored her gut entirely—the same gut that placed her in his office in the first place. While it was, at the time, much easier to take Lundegaard at his word and move on to the next piece of the puzzle, she now sees that this was a mistake. Going with the flow and trying to reestablish the status quo was merely habit. Had she not opted for the path of least resistance, she’d potentially be further along in solving the crime.

Good cop that she is, Marge goes back and (politely) puts the burners under Jerry’s feet. And wouldn’t you know it, he squirms like the worm that he is. This moment of weakness on Jerry’s part, coupled with Marge’s sudden inclination to think for herself is what brings the case to a close.

As the credits rolled on my umpteenth viewing of Fargo, I found myself thinking about the real world analogs represented. Because everyone sees themselves as the hero in their narrative of choice, this often leads us to seeing anyone resistant to our narrative as a villain. And since villains aren’t to be trusted, it becomes too easy to ignore their input, go with the flow, and eschew the further collection of any information that may go against what we already choose to believe. But those who push back against these held narratives are often at fault too. Assertions of free thought often become a dogma of their own. Contrarianism grows into its own unassailable narrative. Once again, this gives the beholder an opportunity to create a villain out of everyone who doesn’t see the world the same way. What’s missing? Easy: a willingness to change. Free thought is nice, but it must come with a heaping helping of fluidity. Yes, be curious. Yes, resist authority. But always remember that any avenue of inquiry should be in service of gathering information, and not the denouement of a predetermined story arc.

Also, it’s important to try and be polite.

And that’s the key here. At the end of Fargo, the status quo has indeed been re-established, and it’s Marge’s politeness that lubricated her investigation. If the name of the game in the town of Fargo is to grin and bear it, Marge demonstrates that the application of a smile and a kind word can fool the machine into changing its function without breaking down entirely.

In the final moments of the film, we get the conclusion of a very minor story that, as I see it, acts as a microcosm of the theme of free thought. Marge lies in bed next to her husband Norm, who recently entered a painting of his into a contest for which the grand prize is having his work featured a stamp. Unfortunately, Norm didn’t win the grand prize, but as a runner up, his painting will be featured on the three-cent stamp. He sees this as a loss, especially since his competitor was a local painter to whom he has always felt inferior. Marge sees it another way and assures Norm that the three-cent stamp is perhaps the most useful stamp of all. She politely drives home the point that Norm’s goal should not have been to best his competitors, but to do the best damn painting he could do. He shouldn’t think of his successes and failures in the terms of the machine that surrounds him, but rather in terms of his own artistic growth, and the joy he finds in pursuing it. Norm, in this moment, despite being a relatively minor character, also learns to think for himself. Something tells me that the Gundersons are going to be great parents.

You know who doesn’t think for himself? Jerry Lundegaard. His race to obtain status ends in a jail stint, a deceased wife, a deceased father-in-law, and a functionally orphaned child. Carl Showalter pretty much only takes orders, and he ends up in a wood chipper.

One might then say “what about Peter Stormare’s Gaear? He’s most certainly a free thinker and he ends up in jail all the same.”

True, but he wasn’t very polite.