Reviews

Fargo: A Walkthrough & Discussion

by ELIZABETH MUTTER

panel


(Attention: Spoilers Ahead!)

In Fargo, an unpredictable and manipulative out-of-towner named Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) incites a string of murders in small-town Minnesota. Though thematically, tonally, and aesthetically based on the critically acclaimed 1996 Coen brothers’ film of the same name – fear not, the series preserves the film’s beloved dark humor and “you betcha”s – the Emmy-nominated FX mini-series introduces entirely new characters and plot. Many of these characters are unexpectedly layered, defying tropes of the idiot detective and the ruthless killer, while some minor characters fit comfortably in well-known molds. It is a credit to the expert writing and acting that even these characters – including Glenn Howerton’s artificially bronzed and tragically naïve personal trainer – are vibrant.

In the first episode, we meet life insurance salesman Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) – a doormat tread on by everyone, especially his wife. A chance encounter with his high school bully, Sam Hess (Kevin O’Grady), sends Lester to the hospital with a broken nose. There, he meets Malvo, a hitman with a severe haircut and black eyes, who chides Lester for quietly enduring emasculation and offers to kill Hess. Lester doesn’t say yes to the offer but doesn’t say no either, and the two part ways. Malvo stabs Hess at a strip club that evening. A few days later, a newly confident Lester strikes his wife dead with a hammer when she criticizes him. In a state of panic, Lester calls Malvo to help him deal with the body. First to arrive at Lester’s door, however, is Chief Vern Thurman (Shawn Doyle), there to question Lester about the Hess murder. When Malvo appears, he kills the chief with a shotgun. To avoid suspicion, Lester runs headfirst into a wall to knock himself out as if he too were a victim of whomever committed the other two murders.

Throughout the series, Lester must shed layers of scruples in order to evade capture and preserve his new alpha male persona. This transformation, guided by Malvo’s powerful influence, is the series’ thematic backbone, spawning ethical questions that haunt characters and viewers alike. From the beginning, Lester’s crimes are suspected by the pensive Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), and she butts heads against the newly appointed chief. Luckily for Molly, she has Duluth Deputy Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks) on her side – eventually romantically, as well as in the line of duty. Thrown into the mix are the surly, bearded Mr. Numbers (Adam Goldberg) and the hulking, deaf Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard), who have been hired by Minnesota’s Fargo-based organized crime organization – referred to as “Fargo” – to identify and kill the murderer of Sam Hess. This makes for a complicated game of cat-and-mouse where everyone takes turns as predator and prey.

The show is notable for its skilled acting, striking cinematography, and sharp dialogue that amuse and unsettle viewers. Fargo isn’t perfect – there’s an entire subplot that disappears without resolution or explanation – but the show is confident in a way that lends it a cinematic quality. Even though writer and creator Noah Hawley has described Fargo as a ten-hour movie, there are still ten distinct episodes – each named after a riddle or paradox – which allows for ten beginnings and ten endings. Knowing that our memories give preferential treatment to endings – whether it’s the last thing you read before bed or the final moment of an important relationship – the creators of Fargo have imbued the final scene of each episode with vivid thematic commentary on who comes out on top when some humans behave like beasts.

The last scene of the first episode – “The Crocodile’s Dilemma,” in which Malvo brings corruption to Bemidji – is of Molly and her father Lou, a former policeman, as they prepare to go ice fishing. Lou asks Molly to work as a hostess at his diner, since “people in this world are less inclined to shoot a hostess than, say, an officer of the law.” He’s not surprised, though, when Molly concedes that hers is a risky profession but she’s going to continue on with it anyway. The pair exchange “I love you”s, and Molly walks away, back to work. This scene is a warm blanket that comforts the viewer after an otherwise chilling first episode, providing hope that goodness will be restored and establishing Molly as true north on Fargo’s moral compass.

However, the next two endings, the final scenes of “The Rooster Prince” and “A Muddy Road,” provide no such comfort. Episode 2 ends with Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench dragging an innocent man across a frozen lake and lowering him head-first through a hole in the ice. While they ignore the man’s protests, the following lines from Eden Ahbez’s “Full Moon” are spoken in the background:

And in the evening
When the sky is on fire
Heaven and earth become my great open cathedral
Where all men are brother
Where all things are bound by law
And crowned with love

The scene is at once playful and eerie, presenting an auditory representation of utopia simultaneously with visuals representing extraordinary brutality.

The ending of Episode 3 showcases one Malvo’s techniques for destroying his hits. A sweating, pill-crunching supermarket magnate named Stavros (Oliver Platt) steps into a shower, over which scene, Malvo narrates the story of Moses, starting with his rescue from the Nile. When he reads the part where Moses kills an Egyptian man for brutalizing a fellow Jew, blood gushes out of the showerhead onto a horrified Stavros. Then, Malvo appears onscreen, smirking as he walks away from Stavros’s house and pulls a blanket over jugs of pigs’ blood in the trunk of his car. Clearly, Malvo is not a cookie-cutter bounty hunter – he enjoys subjecting his victims to theatric emotional manipulation.

After these endings, the viewer understands the extent to which darkness has infiltrated the world of Fargo and is alarmed by its atrocities. With these elements in place, Episodes 4–10 center on whether Lester will be punished for his actions, by Fargo, the police, or Malvo.

The final scenes of Episodes 4 and 5 emphasize Lester’s trouble. “Eating the Blame” ends with a simple moment of tragic comedy. In his desperation to escape Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench, Lester has punched a cop and sits in a holding cell. He is then joined by his pursuers, who tower over him and smile. In the next episode, Lester is hospitalized for a pernicious infection from the shotgun pellet lodged in his hand when Malvo shot the police chief in Lester’s living room. The episode ends as Molly opens the door to his hospital room and glares at Lester’s body, curled up in the fetal position and feigning sleep. This scene depicts two types of hunters, set apart by what motivates them. The predator, Lester, is driven by self-preservation, but the evolved hunter, Molly, is driven by empathy – she’s consumed by the need to right the wrong of her beloved mentor’s murder. Perhaps, according to this scene, the evolved hunter’s motivation gives her a strategic advantage and Lester will finally get his comeuppance.

However, Lester goes on the offensive in the next episode, “Buridan’s Ass,” and plants evidence implicating his brother Chaz (Joshua Close) in the murders of Lester’s wife and the Chief. The ending of this and the next episode (“Who Shaves the Barber?”) depict Lester’s and Molly’s reactions to the success of Lester’s plan – delight and panic, respectively. Here, crime is not met with justice, and these endings are the lowest point of the series’ moral crisis.

In the middle of Episode 8, “The Heap,” Fargo flashes forward a year. Lester is married to the beautiful, adoring Linda (Susan Park), owns Nygaard insurance, and accepts a Salesman-of-the-Year award with marked swagger. But will Lester really get away with it? In the episode’s closing scene, Lester’s security unravels when he spots a lighter-haired but unmistakable Lorne Malvo laughing at a hotel bar in Kansas City.

In the penultimate episode, “A Fox, a Rabbit and a Cabbage,” we find out that Malvo has been posing as a dentist for his next bounty. When Lester insists he knows Malvo, threatening to blow his cover, Lester opens the door for violence to reenter his life. He crosses his former mentor and sacrifices his new wife’s life to escape Malvo’s retribution, and it’s left to Fargo’s final episode, “Morton’s Fork,” to settle who comes out on top. Malvo and Lester die like animals – Malvo at the hand of policeman Gus Grimly, and Lester by falling through thin ice in a desperate escape from the authorities. The show ends with Gus, his daughter Greta (Joey King), and a pregnant Molly cozying up on a couch and watching TV. The timid Gus, now a mailman, has earned a citation for bravery, and Molly gets to be the chief of police.

The endings of each Fargo episode are skillful boiling points: they reach a level of dramatic intensity powerful enough to make a thematic statement, but stylistically quiet enough to avoid being gratuitous. Like that of the first episode, the ending of the finale is a warm, reassuring blanket. Though some might complain that letting the good guys triumph so wholly is a sentimental cop-out, in fact this resolution manages to be both satisfying and unconventional. The threat of Malvo – and his disciple, Lester – are defended by a nervous mailman and his pregnant, milkshake-loving wife. These two, apparently meek but surprisingly strong, are the ultimate top dogs. Their self-sacrifice, empathy, bravery, and neighborliness are realistically and entertainingly under siege in the series’ ten episodes – sometimes finishing with humor, sometimes with horror, but always distinctively Fargo.

Elizabeth Mutter lives in Amherst, MA.

Fargo: A Walkthrough & Discussion
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Review: Motherland

Book by MARIA HUMMEL
Reviewed by SUE REPKO

motherland

The epigraph to Maria Hummel’s latest novel Motherland is a short poem of the same title by the German poet Rose Ausländer (in German “Mutterland”).

My Fatherland is dead
They buried it
In fire

I live
in my Motherland—
Word

—translation by Eavan Boland

The poem encapsulates the novel, set in Germany in the last year of World War II, in which a young German wife and stepmother repeatedly risks her own life to keep her new family intact. Motherhood—stepmotherhood in this case—becomes her reason for being.

Review: Motherland
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Review: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

Book by FRANCINE PROSE
Reviewed by ELISA MAI

 Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
Reading Francine Prose’s new novel is a little like coming across a box of papers in a dusty attic that have been packed up together because they all, somehow, are connected to a certain person, and sifting through them one by one. Prose’s person of interest in Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is Louisianne (“Lou”) Villars, an athlete and a lesbian, a cabaret club dancer and a racecar driver, a trailblazer for women and a spy, a woman who both aids the Nazis’ invasion of France and tortures members of the Resistance on their behalf. Because of this extraordinary set of exploits, and because Lou has been captured in a very famous photograph, someone is writing a biography of her, and the chapters of this biography form the heart of the novel. Interspersed with these chapters are writings of those whose lives cross hers, including the photographer of the famous photo and those in his inner circle. Many of the documents are contemporary with the action, which takes place between 1921, when Lou is ten years old, and 1944, when Lou is killed by the Resistance, though the most significant source, the biography of Lou, written by a woman named Nathalie, has been written more than half a century later.  
Review: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
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Review: Eye to Eye

Book by MARIA TERRONE
Reviewed by SARAH WETZEL

Eye to Eye

“Once / a single cell / found that it was full of light / and for the first time there was seeing.” With these words from W.S. Merwin, Maria Terrone opens her third full-length collection of poetry, Eye to Eye. If the unifying theme of Terrone’s book is seeing, as this quote and the book’s title imply, then Terrone sees the world in all its blemished and brutal multiplicities. She sets the stage with the collection’s first poem, “Spaccanapoli.”

Review: Eye to Eye
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Review: The Weight of a Human Heart

Book by RYAN O’NEILL
Reviewed by KAREN UHLMANN

The Weight of a Human Heart

The Weight of the Human Heart, a short story collection by Ryan O’Neill, plays with language, cultural understandings, and misunderstandings. O’Neill, who was born in Glasgow and now lives in Australia, has traveled extensively, and this is reflected in the stories’ settings and in the characters, who seem to dwell on language as much as their author.

Language connects and disconnects in this collection. Married couples of different ethnicities struggle to translate their feelings; a woman paints phone messages on her naked body because her husband ignores her notes; even t-shirts with words are loaded. Two of the stories, “Understood, Understood, Understood,” and “The Chinese Lesson,” are about men, both language teachers, who use language to skirt their romantic relations. In “The Genocide,” one of the most poignant stories, a Rwandan woman, who had been severely injured during the massacres, will only speak in the present tense, “as if the past was too dangerous to touch, even with words.”

Review: The Weight of a Human Heart
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Review: The Splendid Things We Planned

Book by BLAKE BAILEY
Reviewed by REBECCA CHACE

The Splendid Things We Planned

Reading Blake Bailey’s memoir of his deranged brother, The Splendid Things We Planned, I kept thinking of a line from the epigraph Bailey quotes from Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell’s portrait of another troubled soul: “You can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.” Bailey is the author of acclaimed literary biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, all of whom wrote about the desperation behind mid-century American prosperity. This memoir shows that Bailey knows that terrain from personal experience. He opens with a heart-stopping scene of his young parents standing on the roof of a building at New York University in the early 1960s, holding their colicky, howling infant and trying to decide whether to jump together or toss the baby. This turns out to be one of those half-true jokes parents tell on themselves, normally, once their children are thriving. This child never thrived, and Bailey’s family would spend the rest of this child’s life pushed to the edge by his behavior.

Review: The Splendid Things We Planned
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Review: All Our Names

Book by DINAW MENGESTU
Reviewed by NICOLE TRESKA

All Our Names
In All Our Names, the Ethiopian-born novelist Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of two Isaacs and a Helen living, loving, and leaving each other—apparently in the 1970s. The story, which takes place in both Uganda, and a generic Midwestern U.S. town called Laurel, is narrated partly by Isaac, whose real name isn’t really Isaac (he is also called Langston, Professor, and Dickens at different times and by different people), and partly by Helen, the American social worker assigned to him after he comes to the U.S. to study at university.

The novel begins with the faux Isaac, almost twenty-five, leaving his village in Ethiopia for the Ugandan capital of Kampala, to “claim his share,” i.e. to become a famous writer, surrounded by like-minded men. There, he meets the other Isaac (whom we’ll call Isaac [2] for clarity) at the university, though neither Isaac is a student, and it is unclear whether the two men are like-minded. Their relationship and involvement with the revolution against Idi Amin makes up Isaac’s share of the narrative.

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Review: In the Low Houses

Book by HEATHER DOBBINS
Reviewed by SARAH WETZEL

In the Low Houses

Most of us have been damaged or done damage to someone we love. Perhaps we fell into an affair, abused alcohol or drugs, or turned our backs on commitment. Who has not awakened at three a.m. to find the grinning demon of shame at the foot of the bed? If we are honest, we acknowledge our fears and dependencies, discern our selfishness and jealousies.If we are lucky, we forgive and find some sort of redemption, hopefully without spending too many nights with our mouths to a half-empty bottle of bourbon. In Memphis poet Heather Dobbins’ first full-length collection of poetry, In the Low Houses, published this year by Aldrich Press, there is a bottle of bourbon. Also marriage, infidelity, and death. There are graves, literal and metaphorical, and if, as T.S. Eliot suggested, our only superiority to the past is that we can contain it and be enlarged by it, there is something good growing in Tennessee.

Review: In the Low Houses
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Review: Bark

Book by LORRIE MOORE
Reviewed by KAREN UHLMANN

BarkBark is Lorrie Moore’s first collection of stories in sixteen years, and it is a work to devour. While most of the eight stories have appeared elsewhere, including three in The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (2008), they feel fresh here. We see what Moore has been up to all these years. Moore’s humor and sensibility have evolved now that she and her characters have reached middle age.She still dazzles with word plays and turns meaning on end, but she makes fewer wisecracks, and the stories are sadder. In the past her awkward characters faced plenty of tragedy, but had a youth on their side. In this collection, she examines loss brought on by her familiar themes of divorce and death, but her characters are older, and struggle in a darker way.

That said, Moore knows how to have a good time, starting with her playful title. Three epigraphs from poets Caroline Squire, Louise Glück, and Amy Gerstler refer to bark. Squires writes about an apple tree, Glück and Gerstler about dogs. Moore works bark into the collection in joking and devastating ways, and not only for the reader. The characters are more devastated by their experiences in these stories than in her previous stories.

Review: Bark
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Review: The Marlowe Papers

Book by ROS BARBER
Reviewed by JAMES DICKSON

The Marlowe PapersI’ll be honest: when The Common asked me to review Ros Barber’s new book, The Marlowe Papers, I was leery. Novels-in-verse aren’t really my thing. Reading the back cover blurbs, I became even more skeptical: a novel in iambic pentameter (rhymed and blank verse) from the point of view of the English poet, playwright, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whom conspiracy theorists claim was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays? The book claims Marlowe’s death, in a bar-fight before the Church of England could charge him with heresy, was staged to let him escape England. And while in hiding, he ghost-wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.

What the hell? I expected an overwrought, creepy fan-fiction piece in archaic diction and clumsy meter. After reading a few pages, I realized I owed Ms Barber an apology. This is a damn fine book.

Review: The Marlowe Papers
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