Fargo Season 2 and the thrill of storytelling

The Binge
Jessica Zafra

EVERYONE thinks they’re the hero of their own story. History is made up of all their stories bumping up against each other. How do you make sense of this chaos? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything? (No, says Albert Camus, from a paperback that a teenage clerk is reading, existence is absurd. “I don’t know who that is, but I’m guessing he doesn’t have a six-year-old girl,” retorts Betsy the cancer-stricken housewife.) At best we can tease out a pattern of actions and consequences, then impose a beginning and an end to create narrative cohesion. But you need time and distance in order to do this. What if you’re inside the story as it’s happening?

In the amazing second season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, the characters can be too engrossed with composing their own stories to see the bigger story of America, or the even bigger story of the universe. There are UFOs in this season, because in 1979 they were all over the place, and because they fit in this series. Fargo 2 is so enthralling that after the initial “Holy crap, UFOs!” you just accept that they’re there, turning up at odd moments like cinematography aids. Aliens could be trying to make contact, but we’re too fascinated with the people to care. There’s an oil crisis, the nation is dealing with the fallout from the Vietnam War, women are asserting themselves, Native Americans are struggling against racism, and Ronald Reagan the supreme storyteller is running for president. This is the backdrop of Fargo 2; now we zero in on its many protagonists.

There’s Floyd Gerhardt (Jean Smart), matriarch of the Gerhardt crime syndicate of Fargo, North Dakota, who takes over when her husband Otto (Michael Hogan) suffers a stroke. She exerts a precarious control over her three sons, Dodd (Jeffrey Donovan), Bear (Angus Sampson), and Rye (Kieran Culkin), who all want to be the boss. Rye commits three murders in Luverne, Minnesota, and as he leaves the scene of carnage he is run over by a passing car. The car is driven by beautician Peggy Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst), whose mind is so addled by self-help nonsense that she drives all the way home with an unconscious man on her windshield. She convinces her husband, the butcher Ed (Jesse Plemons), to keep the incident secret — we believe them because the actors on this show are so committed, we never question their baffling decisions.

State trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson as the younger version of Keith Carradine from Season 1) and his father-in-law, Sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson) arrive to investigate the murders. As the Gerhardts search for the missing Rye, the Kansas City crime syndicate sends its emissaries Joe Bulo (Brad Garrett), Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) and the silent, hulking Kitchen brothers (Brad and Todd Mann) to make an offer for the family business.

The situation spins rapidly out of control, in large part because each character is telling themselves a different story. This multiplicity of narratives is acknowledged with split screens — or maybe the directors just thought it was a cool retro-’70s device, but that’s how I see it. Peggy, who devours women’s magazines exhorting her to “Be the best me I can be,” actually perceives the hit-and-run, then being pursued by killers, as a positive. It is her opportunity to escape to the exciting new life the magazines have promised, preferably in California. Sweet, bovine Ed just wants to buy the butcher shop and start a family. Floyd wants to protect her husband’s legacy and keep her sons from killing each other. Lou and Hank, decent men who have served in foreign wars and seen unspeakable things, must deal with death at home: Betsy (Cristina Milioti), Lou’s wife and Hank’s daughter, has cancer.

Their stories are rooted in other stories. Floyd reminds her sons how their crime empire was founded on a shoeshine box. When Rye threatens the judge at gunpoint, she responds by telling the biblical story of Job. The drunken attorney Karl Weathers (Nick Offerman) rants about the military-industrial complex. The Gerhardt’s ward, Native American Ohanzee (Zach McClarnon), carries his people’s history of oppression. Mike Milligan, the articulate enforcer from the Kansas City mob, likes to quote from literature. When the rebellious Simone Gerhardt (Rachel Keller) lashes out at him, he quotes the Duc de la Rochefocauld’s words to Louis XVI: “Non, sire, c’est une révolution.” Anywhere else this would sound pretentious, but in the literature-soaked universe of Fargo, it’s no stranger than Milligan reciting “Jabberwocky” on his way to a massacre. Episodes are named after classics of absurdism by Camus, Ionesco, Kafka. As the action hurtles towards the Sioux Falls Massacre we’ve been hearing about since Season 1, a narrator (Martin Freeman, who played Lester Nygaard) reads from The History of True Crime in the Mid-West, helpfully summarizing the bizarre chain of events and placing Fargo squarely in the literary universe.

But you do not need to have taken a single Comp Lit subject to enjoy Fargo. You don’t need to have seen the first season, or the Coen Brothers movie that inspired the show, although familiarity with the material would enhance your enjoyment. Season 2 is crammed with references to the film, such as the casting of Michael Hogan who had played William H. Macy’s father-in-law, and the body disposal system that was not unlike a wood-chipper. There are references to other Coen Brothers movies from Miller’s Crossing to The Man Who Wasn’t There.

Geekiness aside, Fargo 2 is such a pleasure to watch that as soon as I had devoured the 10 episodes, I had to watch them all over again to make sure I hadn’t been in an unnaturally good mood. The show rewards repeat viewing: the jokes are still bleakly funny, the shocks shocking, and the action scenes tense and scary. Details I had missed the first time leapt out at me, such as the fact that a character will turn up a quarter-century later wearing a different face.

The cinematography is breathtaking, moving from snow-clad woods to interiors so unmistakably 1970s that the polyester seat covers make your eyes itch. A long, empty highway dissolves into veins on a slab of meat. The camera pulls away from a killing to hover high above the skinny treetops like the eye of an indifferent universe. Fine, I was a comp lit major. The soundtrack, an eccentric mix of obscure yet oddly familiar tracks, demands a review of its own. Never have I been so glad to hear Black Sabbath — “War Pigs” was one of the few tracks I could identify.

Absurdist, humanist, bleak and yet hopeful, Fargo has evolved from an adaptation of a great movie into a show that hurls a challenge at the current cinema. What have you got?

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