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Dec. 17th, 2015 12:45 amFargo 2.10
Title reference: No idea. A couple of the other episode titles are allusions to literary or visual works rather than repurposed titles, so maybe just something a palindrome appears in or is connected to? Not that I've memorized all titles in the surrealist, existentialist and theater-of-the-absurd traditions. A text where the second half exactly reverses the first ... are they claiming the first season has some such relationship to the second? Beats me.
Ending: The final shot is pretty much the film's, but I think the island of moonlight in the sea of dark is supposed to suggest a world more full of evil and suffering than the film's. The "all the ships at sea" line confirms this, and connects with the picture of a weather- threatened boat behind the couch in the scene with Danson just previous, where he speaks of war, crime etc. as a sort of omnipresent distortion. Evil not in us but between us.
His language: Is this supposed to be Hawley delivering his show's credo at a remove? Danson speaks of starting simple then learning to make things more complex, etc., so it would also be a bit of an apology for the first season if so. But Julie points out that the example he uses is innocent and childlike, because he is, which could mean he's missing that malice can exist as something other than misunderstanding (Thornton in S1 as a possible example - but perhaps that's part of what's being left behind as too simple). His point about miscommunication does seem to be the key to several of the scenes in the episode:
1. Wilson's wife vs Noreen. As parents we were on her side against silly old Camus till that Lord line brought us to a screeching halt. And I think Noreen's cheerful ability to combine volunteer caretaking with finding life absurd means she's not really against the altruist position - perhaps finds the two entirely consonant. If the next person's life is absurd she could probably use your help; and since yours is absurd what better thing do you have to do? That sounds like me riffing, but I think it catches the exact tone of her being there. There's something more than blood relationships and judgemental Lords behind being good.
2. Wilson vs Dunst. The great Fargo-movie police car scene between McDormand and Stormare gets adapted here, and I think really well, excepting a reservation I explain in 3. For Wilson life is given its ultimately meaningless meaning by protection of one's family, especially women and children - and presumably, given his job, behavior, and his role in the Vietnam anecdote, the human family. He genders it in a smug way at the close, probably helping to provoke her response, which is that a woman can't both live for her family and for herself, given time constraints. We realize we've been seeing her go crazy trying, across the series, vacillations that get almost comical in the later episodes since she keeps saving Plemons then almost getting him killed again etc. This one is the clearest case of misunderstanding, I think - Dunst pretty much shakes her head and gives up on further articulation, at the end. After Wilson has pointed out that people have died, which is of course true. Except he said what he said about men only, and that wasn't right. Among other things it neglected how his wife has a religious version of the same protection philosophy, just applied to kids. She has her rock too. And her police-y genes can't get fully expressed, but are by their daughter in S1. By which point he gets it, but back here he's unwittingly part of the problem, like how the show stresses his saying of "the Indian" (consignment of an individual by ethnicity, which he wouldn't do with blacks or whites, and of course it's the wrong damn ethnicity). People have died, but people have also had their lives warped. I assume his wife (can't remember if its Milioti or Milotti or what, though I do see the irony of my identifying her that way) inadvertantly testifies to this when she speaks of following one's appointed work, motherhood, out of fear of judgment after death by the "Lord," that most patriarchal of common God terms. Wilson's comfortable borrowing the Camus imagery he'd been dismissive of when Noreen mentioned it. But the absurdity of life is less fun when you can't choose how you defy it, one assumes, or are expected to push two rocks at once - hence the appeal of a religious basis. And in a sense the helicopter story is Dunst's own, no? She just barely made it through a war, nearly crushed between two very large opposing boulders. No one would have expected her to. And of course the Americans were not precisely the saviors of the South Vietnamese, even if they represented themselves that way, so maybe Wilson's an aspect of one of those boulders. At the very least he's presenting a very politically contingent story as a sort of universal. And while Dunst's sense of the 37 hours worth of person she's supposed to be each day is in part created by the Mad Men type corporate world that's just taken over regional organized crime, I don't think we're to understand that that's an entirely manufactured pressure. More like the opportunistic filling of a massive void.
3. Dunst vs Plemons. Traditional, self sacrificed for family mindset vs new, family sacrificed for self one. With the complex (and - seriously, show - awfully risky) overlay of the one being sexist, stifling females while giving purpose to males, and the other being more or less what we accept as right now, within its bounds. Hairstyles and style in general seems part of it: she's a stylist and obsessed with style magazines, Hanzee asks for that cut from her when tired of his own (and gets a new name in the finale and plans on getting a new face), Mike is told by Adam Arkin to ditch his "Western" look, which I guess his hair is a prominent part of though I too it as more blaxploitative. He does start to grasp her language, but only enough to pretty much tell her they have nothing more to say to each other. Then dies.
4. Milligan vs Arkin. Milligan wanted power, misunderstanding that the only power on offer was the money-driven corporate pyramidal sort.
The Western thing presumably means he's a victim of the movies like Dunst is. The recap of that supposed Reagan film reminds us of the ensuing Loplop scenes - Hanzee kills the fascistic Dodd, and later the rest of his family, who were indeed trying to smoke out Dunst and Plemons (can't remember if they ever used the phrase). But instead of being their rescuing good buddy he killed one of them and wishes to kill both. Can he be standing in for the corporate future? Or anyway the reality behind corporate promises? Not sure if that quite works. Connecting an unleashed, Bob-of-Twin-Peaks-y, Chigurhesque evil with revenge-seeking by an oppressed minority member is another curiously risky move on the show's part. So risky that it's risk-free, is I guess the logic? Our liberal sympathy with women, blacks, "Indians" is assumed to be a given, so when they're identified with evil we're led to question the very concept? Mmmmaybe. I guess there's not a lot of people watching the show. Still, the high body count must be attracting some high body count fans. I dunno how to analyze costs and benefits in this area or anything. Just wondering if the writers do.
But corporate rule does lead to, for some, abundance - those stores that sell everything in that Raising Arizona dream. Middle class incomes have stagnated while wealth has become increasingly concentrated among the 10, 1, 0.1, 0.01 percent since the carefully chosen year 1979, but it's true there's all this cheap stuff everywhere. The phrase shocks us into seeing the change in the "nice" way after 9 episodes of being primed to see it the other way, I think. Aspects of this crap around us would indeed seem like paradise (as well as chaos) to a visitor from that time. Maybe especially a stifled housewife whose sense that she's stifled has even been stifled. Maybe something about the capitalist turn's making consumers of all of us really has freed us from the fasces, violent both in confining and in dividing, in a way we should marvel at, whatever else it's fucked up. What was up with that G for Gerhardt flag, btw? Looked fascist as hell, though I guess the American Eagle was there - with stuff in its claws? Didn't get a good look. The minority members working for the Kansas City Co. blew the guts of the last standing fascist all over it too soon.
And we do pretty much end with the misunderstanding note, so the placement of what Danson's saying is the firmest proof it's being endorsed.
Was there a bit of shadow in between Wilson and wife, in the last shot?
And is Hanzee supposed to come back as Thornton? Their ages might not quite fit (can't remember just when S1 is set), though maybe they don't need to. And if there's a "purest evil" character in every season maybe he's Thornton even if he isn't - maybe backwards-inflects that Chigurh-wolf mashup of a character into a more subtle, misunderstanding-born phenomenon? [Ohhh - in attempting to look up the Hanzee actor's age I at once saw an article headline explaining who he was in S1: the head of the Fargo crime syndicate that I guess "Kansas City" becomes (?). Identifying him firmly with the corporate New, the way he never quite overtly was here in S2. Once again my horrible recall of character names fucked me up. I mean, it has been a year, but who could forget a name like Moses Tripoli? So maybe "Palindrome" means we see the end of him and what he represents in S1, but his beginning here, thus they reverse each other? Seems like the reference would need to be more thorough, though - connecting the other characters too. I guess the 2000s family is a lot like the 1970s one that becomes it; rather, the family Tolman gains at the end is a lot like the one she sprang from, but since that mostly gets knit together by the end of that season you'd think it would have fallen apart more back here to complete the point by point reversal a palindrome needs. I suppose her mother's and Danson's sooner-rather-than-later deaths are implied, but still. Maybe something, then, about Danson's picture-language? He's after "words" that can't be understood two different ways by two different people. Perhaps a palindrome is like that: either end you start reading it at the word ends up the same. Is that what Fargo's like? Hmm. How? If you assume people can be evil, the show leads you to question it, while if you assume they can't, you're led to question THAT? Well... again with the "How?" Probably the "home" example is the clue. Non ciswhiteabledmales for a very long time didn't have much of one here. The much-focused-on, and last episode only shown in the distance and benighted, Gerhardt house seems relevant. The suppression of Mike's style by Arkin, too: he thought he'd find a home (thought the G one was his, even), ended up in a Brazil-worthy cubicle complete with electric typewriter (palindromally ending us too where we begun?). Dunst goes from California Dreamin' to Alcatraz (or whichever) Dreamin', I guess - tries to work her dream home back into her likely future. Hanzee after three Vietnam tours still isn't recognized as American. So to speak the same language about home we need to see a picture of what one would really be, one thorough enough for all to notice who isn't yet in it? Maybe that's something this season really does do, in among its oddities and numbing, contractual-feeling, more Tarantino-ish than Coen-y over the top violence.]
[Makes Mike's regarding and then formal, almost gentle turning down of the coddled 1900ish baby picture - white baby, white background - rather moving.
And maybe vaguely justifies the curious and distracting Obama evocation one gets with the black person + Reaganesque mannerisms combo. At last a black king of America, but in a time when the presidency is an office job of cramped scope, occupying a sort of middle management role in between our CEO dictator class and us "drones" on the ground. Sigh.]
Title reference: No idea. A couple of the other episode titles are allusions to literary or visual works rather than repurposed titles, so maybe just something a palindrome appears in or is connected to? Not that I've memorized all titles in the surrealist, existentialist and theater-of-the-absurd traditions. A text where the second half exactly reverses the first ... are they claiming the first season has some such relationship to the second? Beats me.
Ending: The final shot is pretty much the film's, but I think the island of moonlight in the sea of dark is supposed to suggest a world more full of evil and suffering than the film's. The "all the ships at sea" line confirms this, and connects with the picture of a weather- threatened boat behind the couch in the scene with Danson just previous, where he speaks of war, crime etc. as a sort of omnipresent distortion. Evil not in us but between us.
His language: Is this supposed to be Hawley delivering his show's credo at a remove? Danson speaks of starting simple then learning to make things more complex, etc., so it would also be a bit of an apology for the first season if so. But Julie points out that the example he uses is innocent and childlike, because he is, which could mean he's missing that malice can exist as something other than misunderstanding (Thornton in S1 as a possible example - but perhaps that's part of what's being left behind as too simple). His point about miscommunication does seem to be the key to several of the scenes in the episode:
1. Wilson's wife vs Noreen. As parents we were on her side against silly old Camus till that Lord line brought us to a screeching halt. And I think Noreen's cheerful ability to combine volunteer caretaking with finding life absurd means she's not really against the altruist position - perhaps finds the two entirely consonant. If the next person's life is absurd she could probably use your help; and since yours is absurd what better thing do you have to do? That sounds like me riffing, but I think it catches the exact tone of her being there. There's something more than blood relationships and judgemental Lords behind being good.
2. Wilson vs Dunst. The great Fargo-movie police car scene between McDormand and Stormare gets adapted here, and I think really well, excepting a reservation I explain in 3. For Wilson life is given its ultimately meaningless meaning by protection of one's family, especially women and children - and presumably, given his job, behavior, and his role in the Vietnam anecdote, the human family. He genders it in a smug way at the close, probably helping to provoke her response, which is that a woman can't both live for her family and for herself, given time constraints. We realize we've been seeing her go crazy trying, across the series, vacillations that get almost comical in the later episodes since she keeps saving Plemons then almost getting him killed again etc. This one is the clearest case of misunderstanding, I think - Dunst pretty much shakes her head and gives up on further articulation, at the end. After Wilson has pointed out that people have died, which is of course true. Except he said what he said about men only, and that wasn't right. Among other things it neglected how his wife has a religious version of the same protection philosophy, just applied to kids. She has her rock too. And her police-y genes can't get fully expressed, but are by their daughter in S1. By which point he gets it, but back here he's unwittingly part of the problem, like how the show stresses his saying of "the Indian" (consignment of an individual by ethnicity, which he wouldn't do with blacks or whites, and of course it's the wrong damn ethnicity). People have died, but people have also had their lives warped. I assume his wife (can't remember if its Milioti or Milotti or what, though I do see the irony of my identifying her that way) inadvertantly testifies to this when she speaks of following one's appointed work, motherhood, out of fear of judgment after death by the "Lord," that most patriarchal of common God terms. Wilson's comfortable borrowing the Camus imagery he'd been dismissive of when Noreen mentioned it. But the absurdity of life is less fun when you can't choose how you defy it, one assumes, or are expected to push two rocks at once - hence the appeal of a religious basis. And in a sense the helicopter story is Dunst's own, no? She just barely made it through a war, nearly crushed between two very large opposing boulders. No one would have expected her to. And of course the Americans were not precisely the saviors of the South Vietnamese, even if they represented themselves that way, so maybe Wilson's an aspect of one of those boulders. At the very least he's presenting a very politically contingent story as a sort of universal. And while Dunst's sense of the 37 hours worth of person she's supposed to be each day is in part created by the Mad Men type corporate world that's just taken over regional organized crime, I don't think we're to understand that that's an entirely manufactured pressure. More like the opportunistic filling of a massive void.
3. Dunst vs Plemons. Traditional, self sacrificed for family mindset vs new, family sacrificed for self one. With the complex (and - seriously, show - awfully risky) overlay of the one being sexist, stifling females while giving purpose to males, and the other being more or less what we accept as right now, within its bounds. Hairstyles and style in general seems part of it: she's a stylist and obsessed with style magazines, Hanzee asks for that cut from her when tired of his own (and gets a new name in the finale and plans on getting a new face), Mike is told by Adam Arkin to ditch his "Western" look, which I guess his hair is a prominent part of though I too it as more blaxploitative. He does start to grasp her language, but only enough to pretty much tell her they have nothing more to say to each other. Then dies.
4. Milligan vs Arkin. Milligan wanted power, misunderstanding that the only power on offer was the money-driven corporate pyramidal sort.
The Western thing presumably means he's a victim of the movies like Dunst is. The recap of that supposed Reagan film reminds us of the ensuing Loplop scenes - Hanzee kills the fascistic Dodd, and later the rest of his family, who were indeed trying to smoke out Dunst and Plemons (can't remember if they ever used the phrase). But instead of being their rescuing good buddy he killed one of them and wishes to kill both. Can he be standing in for the corporate future? Or anyway the reality behind corporate promises? Not sure if that quite works. Connecting an unleashed, Bob-of-Twin-Peaks-y, Chigurhesque evil with revenge-seeking by an oppressed minority member is another curiously risky move on the show's part. So risky that it's risk-free, is I guess the logic? Our liberal sympathy with women, blacks, "Indians" is assumed to be a given, so when they're identified with evil we're led to question the very concept? Mmmmaybe. I guess there's not a lot of people watching the show. Still, the high body count must be attracting some high body count fans. I dunno how to analyze costs and benefits in this area or anything. Just wondering if the writers do.
But corporate rule does lead to, for some, abundance - those stores that sell everything in that Raising Arizona dream. Middle class incomes have stagnated while wealth has become increasingly concentrated among the 10, 1, 0.1, 0.01 percent since the carefully chosen year 1979, but it's true there's all this cheap stuff everywhere. The phrase shocks us into seeing the change in the "nice" way after 9 episodes of being primed to see it the other way, I think. Aspects of this crap around us would indeed seem like paradise (as well as chaos) to a visitor from that time. Maybe especially a stifled housewife whose sense that she's stifled has even been stifled. Maybe something about the capitalist turn's making consumers of all of us really has freed us from the fasces, violent both in confining and in dividing, in a way we should marvel at, whatever else it's fucked up. What was up with that G for Gerhardt flag, btw? Looked fascist as hell, though I guess the American Eagle was there - with stuff in its claws? Didn't get a good look. The minority members working for the Kansas City Co. blew the guts of the last standing fascist all over it too soon.
And we do pretty much end with the misunderstanding note, so the placement of what Danson's saying is the firmest proof it's being endorsed.
Was there a bit of shadow in between Wilson and wife, in the last shot?
And is Hanzee supposed to come back as Thornton? Their ages might not quite fit (can't remember just when S1 is set), though maybe they don't need to. And if there's a "purest evil" character in every season maybe he's Thornton even if he isn't - maybe backwards-inflects that Chigurh-wolf mashup of a character into a more subtle, misunderstanding-born phenomenon? [Ohhh - in attempting to look up the Hanzee actor's age I at once saw an article headline explaining who he was in S1: the head of the Fargo crime syndicate that I guess "Kansas City" becomes (?). Identifying him firmly with the corporate New, the way he never quite overtly was here in S2. Once again my horrible recall of character names fucked me up. I mean, it has been a year, but who could forget a name like Moses Tripoli? So maybe "Palindrome" means we see the end of him and what he represents in S1, but his beginning here, thus they reverse each other? Seems like the reference would need to be more thorough, though - connecting the other characters too. I guess the 2000s family is a lot like the 1970s one that becomes it; rather, the family Tolman gains at the end is a lot like the one she sprang from, but since that mostly gets knit together by the end of that season you'd think it would have fallen apart more back here to complete the point by point reversal a palindrome needs. I suppose her mother's and Danson's sooner-rather-than-later deaths are implied, but still. Maybe something, then, about Danson's picture-language? He's after "words" that can't be understood two different ways by two different people. Perhaps a palindrome is like that: either end you start reading it at the word ends up the same. Is that what Fargo's like? Hmm. How? If you assume people can be evil, the show leads you to question it, while if you assume they can't, you're led to question THAT? Well... again with the "How?" Probably the "home" example is the clue. Non ciswhiteabledmales for a very long time didn't have much of one here. The much-focused-on, and last episode only shown in the distance and benighted, Gerhardt house seems relevant. The suppression of Mike's style by Arkin, too: he thought he'd find a home (thought the G one was his, even), ended up in a Brazil-worthy cubicle complete with electric typewriter (palindromally ending us too where we begun?). Dunst goes from California Dreamin' to Alcatraz (or whichever) Dreamin', I guess - tries to work her dream home back into her likely future. Hanzee after three Vietnam tours still isn't recognized as American. So to speak the same language about home we need to see a picture of what one would really be, one thorough enough for all to notice who isn't yet in it? Maybe that's something this season really does do, in among its oddities and numbing, contractual-feeling, more Tarantino-ish than Coen-y over the top violence.]
[Makes Mike's regarding and then formal, almost gentle turning down of the coddled 1900ish baby picture - white baby, white background - rather moving.
And maybe vaguely justifies the curious and distracting Obama evocation one gets with the black person + Reaganesque mannerisms combo. At last a black king of America, but in a time when the presidency is an office job of cramped scope, occupying a sort of middle management role in between our CEO dictator class and us "drones" on the ground. Sigh.]
