The Reel Diaries: Fargo
Or: How the Coen Brothers Taught Me Storytelling
I never knew what I wanted to do with my life. In many ways, I still don’t. I envied my passionate friends who wanted to be doctors, filmmakers, actors, and professors. When I started my freshman year of high school, I met a girl who had published a novel and was working on her second. At that point, all I had accomplished was teaching myself how to code an entire website dedicated to Jimmy Fallon. The feeling I have had my whole life is of being behind, but not knowing that a race had started yet. My sole constant, however, has been writing. Though I’ve felt differently about it throughout the years, the desire to write remains. Sometimes, it is just a hobby. Other times, it has been my reason for being. It’s a complex relationship.
From the late to the early 2000s, my desire to tell stories was channeled through my love of film. (A love that I would lose once dating various film majors in college who told me I had bad taste.) I started a film review newsletter with my first email address. Gone now, to time, this newsletter I wrote when I was 13 was the inspiration for The 90-Minute Movie. And I made short films on a camcorder with my little brother, Jonathan. I was obsessed with the idea of us becoming the next Coen Brothers. The Kusek Siblings, if you will. I thought we could have made a real go at it with his humor and my work ethic. But I soon left for college and became obsessed with other things.
That’s growing up, I guess.
I cannot pinpoint the exact day I saw Fargo (1996) for the first time. I could have been 13, I could have been 18. Because for me, Fargo has always been on my mind. I cannot remember a time B.F. (Before Fargo). Now that’s an impact. I admired the mix of dark themes and humor, perhaps the first true black comedy I had ever seen, and wondered how a writer gets talented enough to pull that off in 98 minutes. The cast delighted me with their chemistry, and Joel Cohen managed to create beautiful visual interest in a vast and snowy landscape. I fell in love with the protagonist, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), a calm, wise, brilliant police chief.
A calm, wise, brilliant pregnant person. I was so blown away by a pregnant hero that I am not even sure I was aware that my brain was being rewired so significantly. Here was a woman who had not only risen to the top of her profession but was starting a family. Her husband, Norm (John Carroll Lynch), is sweet and doting and often preoccupied with a painting he is doing for the postage stamp contest. Marge is a fully formed character, a woman. She is kind, she is thoughtful, she is whip-smart, she is serious, she is a cop, she is going to be a mother, she is a friend, she is loved, she is tenacious… Marge is the everywoman (all of us), filling a seemingly endless number of roles as they develop and filling each one with enthusiasm and care. Marge solves a murder, but she then goes home to Norm and listens to his stamp troubles. I have always appreciated Marge as a beacon of womanhood. Marge told me I could be soft and strong. Kind, but not a doormat. I think this careful balance of character is what won McDormand the Best Actress Oscar in 1996.
Fargo won the Best Original Screenplay that year as well. And 5 or 10 years later, it taught me about storytelling. I don’t think it matters much when I watched it for the first time because I have returned to it - and other Coen Brothers movies - time and time again to educate myself on story structure. Fargo threads together two narratives of hero and anti-hero. While we watch Marge work to solve her case, getting closer and closer to a resolution, we simultaneously watch Jerry Lundegaard’s plan unravel. It’s like going to the eye doctor and being shown ‘A’ and ‘B’. Things are the same, but they look different. What the Coens do impeccably here (and in most of their movies) is use foreshadowing to its greatest effect.
The tension beneath the surface of two major relationships is shared early on. That of Jerry and his father-in-law, and that of the two crooks (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) that Jerry ultimately hires to kidnap his wife. What we don’t know right away is how swirling and dangerous these undercurrents are. With each (bad) decision, these relationships unravel a bit at a time, and ultimately, they end with murder. And, famously, a body in a woodchipper. That’s the thing about this movie. It balances the over-the-top aspects (see: woodchipper) with just good, solid storytelling. It doesn’t get carried away from the basics, and that’s a lesson I’m still learning.
Each time I watch Fargo, I’m reminded that I want and have wanted to be a writer. I am reminded of how badly I wanted to be just as brilliant, just as dedicated as the Coen Brothers. Maybe there is hope for me yet if I just remember that even though I am often lost, I have always wanted to be a writer. It never really goes away. Sure, it gets masked by the doldrums and horrors of living and simply being a human being, but it doesn’t go away. Like a birthmark or a scar. There is no behind. But there is giving up.
And so, when I want to give up on those big dreams, I’ll turn to Fargo, and I’ll be reminded of powerful storytelling and the dreams I store away, deep down.
This is such a lovely essay. Have you ever seen KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER, which is about a lonely Japanese woman who comes to Minnesota looking for the money Steve Buscemi buried? There's something about its sense of yearning that connects to what you're writing about here.
Amanda, this is absolutely fantastic.
The way you've captured that feeling, no doubt, so many of us have had, at one point or another (well, I know I have), of being caught between contentment and aspiration, it is delivered so well.
It is never too late to learn, to grow, to reach. And sometimes? There is no better reminder of that than a particularly good movie.