‘Flare to White’: Fargo and the Postmodern Turn(n1)
1999; Salisbury University; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoIs it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth heartless voids and immensities of universe, and thus stabs us from behind with thought of annihilation . .. or is it, that as an essence whiteness is not so much a color as absence of color.. is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows-a colorless ... atheism from which we shrink? -Melville am going north looking for source of chill in my bones. -Jack Spicer is everybody? Well--it's cold. --Fargo Fargo was filmed in color, and yet it's absence of color-the bone-chilling whiteness of a Minnesota winter-that sets movie's quirky tone from beginning to end. Fargo's central subject is disparity: Jean Lundegaard: Do you know what a disparity is? Scotty Lundegaard (testily): Yeah!2 So should Fargo's audience, by film's end. For everything in Fargo is out of sync: its title (all but brief opening sequence takes place in Minnesota, not North Dakota); its off-beat names (Mike Yanagita, Reilly Diefenbach, Gaear Grimsrud, Proudfoot); its weather (It's a beautiful day, Police Chief Marge Gunderson declares, as [outside it is snowing. The sky, earth, road-all white.]); its appointments (Shep said you'd be here at 7:30; Shep said 8:30); its musical score (strains of a traditional Norwegian folk tune interspersed with automobile door chimes and white noise from television sets); its opening text: This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At request of survivors, names have been changed. Out of respect for dead, rest has been told exactly as it occurred. Flare to white... In his introduction to filmscript of Fargo, Ethan Coen declares, [Fargo] aims to be both homey and exotic, and pretends to be true.',3 In fact killings in Fargo didn't take place in Minnesota in 1987 or at any other time (wouldn't Minnesotans remember hearing about a notorious murderer putting his partner, an equally notorious murderer, into a wood chipper?). More to point, no one in film has an iota of respect for dead. To be sure, psychopath Gaear Grimsrud is indifferent to plight of his victims, but so is Chief Marge Gunderson--Gunderson, who was described by one naive early reviewer as the film's moral center.,4 With dead body of an unlucky eyewitness to one of Grimsrud's crimes in background, very pregnant Marge feels need to puke, not from moral or physical revulsion but from morning sickness. Well, that passed, she says cheerfully, rising. Now I'm hungry again. Fargo isn't a crime film, nor, strictly speaking, is it about crime. The brilliance of film, rather, lies in its ability to critique a certain contemporary, or postmodern, response to crime of murder. Consider following parallel between reactions of both good guys and bad guys to freezing cold of a Minnesota February. When she arrives on scene of triple homicide, Chief Marge asks her deputy, Where is everybody?, meaning other deputies. The redoubtable Lou replies, Well-it's cold, Margie. A few moments later, Marge concludes: I guess little guy sat in there [the highway patrolman's prowler] waitin' for his buddy V come back. Lou replies, Yah, would a been cold out here. In Fargo, both heroes and villains are willing to sacrifice better angels of their nature in order to seek out a bit of warmth. As for highway patrolman shot in head by Grimsrud, all Marge Gunderson can manage is, Well, he's got his gun on his hip there, and he looked like a nice enough fella. Ethan Coen's skillful use of grammatical parataxis in this line recalls Ernest Hemingway's short story After Storm: said Who killed him? and he said don't know who killed him but he's dead all right, and it was dark and there was water standing in street and no lights and windows broke and boats all up in town and trees blown down. …
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