Fargo

[Craig Clark]

Wayne A Loftus wrote:

   > The Coen brothers are ... from Minneapolis (incidentally, so is Terry Gilliam).  
Ye Gods, they sure breed good film-makers there in Minneapolis... 
NYC produced both Kubrick and Scorsese, but anyone know where Tim 
Burton first saw the light of day?

   >... {snip some speculations about language, diction and accent in 
   > the film}...
The film's use of diction and language is of immense importance, I 
think. The Coen Brothers have never yet written bad dialogue but I think 
their dialogue in this film is right up there, on irony alone, with 
petit-bourgeois Barton Fink's patronising conversations with his 
proletarian friend Charlie about the need for a Theatre Of The People,
For The People And By The People. Many of the reviews I have read in
SA have focused on the film's treatment of what the politically-correct 
might label "Norwegian-Americans", and on what I gather is some 
controversy about whether the Coens are ridiculing the good burghers 
of Minnesota or not. I think this misses the point of the Coen's 
comic dialogue entirely. The banality and inanity of the film's conversations 
reminded me, not of Rose (in _The Golden Girls_) and her tales about
her fellow idiots in the fictional Minnesota town of St Olaf, but 
rather of the conversations in Kubrick's _2001: A Space Odyssey_. 
Here too were people able to talk and not communicate, and it's a 
chilling point to note that the closest thing in the film to a 
conversation about real human emotions turns out to really be about 
the delusions of a madman (the Japanese "old flame" of  the film's 
enigmatic heroine).
 
Nowhere is this paucity of language (and thus of ideas and concepts 
about the world) better illustrated than in the William Macey 
character. Sam Lundegaard uses exactly the same vocabulary of stock 
phrases and cliches, whether he is negotiating with his father-in-law 
for a loan to set up a used-car lot, trying to persuade a reluctant 
customer to buy a Wondercoated car, or arranging for thugs to kidnap 
his wife. Sam's real crime is not that his venality leads to the 
death of seven people, including four innocent bystanders, nor even 
that he runs out on his son when the heat finally gets turned onto 
him. These are merely symptomatic of something else. For Sam, there 
is no Social Contract, only a Slick Deal; and I think the Coens intend 
us to believe that this applies well outside the narrow confines of 
Minnesota. Small wonder then that when our heroine reprimands 
the one surviving kidnapper for thinking only of money, she sounds 
less like she's delivering a moral to the audience than like she's 
trying to reassure herself that her values still have any meaning in 
the world she inhabits.

   > ??? You don't think Kafka is funny?  Am I the only one?
Nope, you're not the only one. Kafka is very funny, and in fact max 
Brod described Kafka reading bits of the _The Trial_ aloud to his 
friends and being unable to read any further because he was laughing 
so much...

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"