Fargo's Money Shot

To kick this thing off, I’m going to discuss what I often call my favorite movie – Fargo. Choosing my one favorite movie is hardly a set-in-stone sort of thing (it usually fluctuates between 15-20 or so different films), but I’d venture to guess that the Coens’ film is my favorite on 4 out of the 7 days of any given week. That’s over 50% of the time! Point being, it’s really, really good and worthy of a much more in-depth discussion than I’m about to put forth here as soon as I quit long-windedly stalling. Ok. Done stalling. Here we go:



The scene is basically the Coens in a nutshell – a microcosm of their artistic perspective. I see the brothers as being almost obsessed with the ugliness of how people treat one another, and how that leads to the majority of our problems. It's an idea I see in almost all of their films (hell, they even have a movie that’s titled Intolerable Cruelty and is explicitly about people treating each other shittily), and it’s the driving force behind Fargo. They use this idea to address a variety of thematic interests from film to film. This individual scene really gets to the heart of Fargo’s message - it’s the people in your life that give it meaning, and you should treat them accordingly. To quote Francis McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, “There’s more to life than a little money, you know…don’tcha know that?”

This being my first entry and all, I’d appreciate it if you allowed me to go off on a tangent for a moment here. Film is a visual medium. The best movies are ones that know and embrace that. Movies should always show, not tell, whenever possible. It’s why things like shot selection and camera movements are so important – that’s when the filmmaker can really show. That isn’t to say writing is of lesser importance, but a great film should accentuate the strengths of its script by conveying some of the writer’s ideas visually. Something like Fargo could have some nicely placed speeches about the greed of people and folks who miss the point of life, and it would be a fine film. Instead, the closest we ever get is the previously quoted, albeit truncated version of, Marge Gunderson’s speech toward the end of the film. This “speech” is roughly a minute long and is only about 5-6 lines. However, since the film has conveyed so much of its meaning visually (and also because of McDormand’s amazing performance), the scene is one of the best in the film and is emotionally affecting. Ok, tangent over. Thanks for the indulgence, time to get back on track. Show, don’t tell.

If you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you’ve already watched the Youtube clip after my first paragraph. If you haven’t, go ahead and do so. I’ll wait. Ready? Cool. Me too. As I’ve already said, Fargo is a movie about the importance of the people in your life. The clip I’ve linked to is an example of the Coens showing their audience that thought. We start outside of the cabin with a simple establishing shot to give the audience a sense of where the action is taking place. In this case, it’s where Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) are holding Jean Lundegaard (Kristin Rudrüd) captive. We then cut to Gaear sitting in a chair staring at something…or possibly nothing. We can hear Carl yelling at something angrily. The next shot is of Carl beating on a TV set, trying to get reception. This is followed by a shot a Jean tied to a chair with a blindfold over her face. Each shot is slowly zooming in on each character, and the series of shots is repeated as each one gets closer and closer to the character until finally settling on the snowy television set. As we zoom into the set, we hear Carl growing audibly more frustrated with the lack of reception until, finally, the picture changes to a nature program where we’re told a bark beetle will carry a worm to its nest and feed its young for 6 weeks as the camera slowly zooms out from the screen. We then cut to a shot of Marge Gunderson (McDormand) and Norm Gunderson (John Carroll Lynch) lying in bed. Norm is asleep and Marge is clearly about to doze off. She tells Norm she’s turning in, he mumbles something, and the scene ends.

You can tell so much about the characters from what is shown and how it is filmed in this scene. In the cabin where Jean is being held, all three characters are framed in separate, individual shots. This is done to convey how isolated and distant they are from their roommates, despite their physical proximity. We see cold breath coming from their mouths. Gaear is just sitting there staring blankly at nothing, uninterested in everything around him. Jean has a hood over her head, blind to everything going on around her. Carl is beating on the TV, trying to get some kind of reception, oblivious to everything going on around him. Then we begin the slow zoom-in on the TV itself. Carl's room has no reception – its inhabitants clearly aren't “getting” whatever they're supposed to be “getting”. When the TV switches to the image and voiceover of the bark beetle, we’re made aware that the inhabitants of this new room are “getting” whatever it is they’re supposed to be “getting”. We're then shown Marge and Norm in complete contrast with what we saw in the other room. They're framed together in one shot cuddling in bed and warm under the covers.

Everything about these two rooms and the characters in them is in contrast. The whole scene does a perfect job of showing its audience an idea. In the context of the film, the Gundersons are a caring bunch - the film’s moral center. Carl and Gaear are the low-lifes with no compassion or care for others - the morally corrupt portions of the movie. This one scene is packed with a ton of information and combines how a filmmaker can use the camera to his/her advantage (shot selection in this case, both in framing and editing) and the use of visual metaphor (the TV set/lack of reception idea being a metaphor for missing the point or not understanding something) to cram it all in to 75 seconds.

This is my favorite example of how a film can visually convey information to its audience from Fargo (and probably any other movie, too), but there are countless more scenes in the film that do something similar. That, combined with its humanitarian, hopeful message, are why it’s a personal favorite of mine. If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it immediately. If you have, watch it again. It only gets better. That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the first entry in a series I hope to continue for quite a while.