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Nov. 29th, 2015 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionSooo. Fargo 2.8:
The title Fargo was chosen because of far-going - leaving the safe and ordinary moral locale you're from, instead getting in too deep. In the film it's where Macy finds the kidnappers who end up killing his wife. That it's just past the state line, and that the state it's in is the nowhere-est state, these are also relevant. Your condition is no longer in condition if your state's in that state, basically. Both tv seasons keep Fargo as where the criminals come from, though both also suggest even worse ones come from farther afield. The devil you know gets replaced by a stranger and worse, is the idea? Something justifying a sequel. Thornton is malice, Woodbine is greed - or thereabouts. Freeman, Dunst and Plemons are the Macys, whose doubling down on their small sins makes everything go to hell; Freeman's selfishness is vindictive, Dunst's is omitting to help others when it would involve sacrificing personal comfort. Both slip downslope fast, asymptotically approaching the devils sponsoring them. Woodbine's relation to Dunst is unclear - Kansas City people never even hear about her, do they? Till the end of this last episode, anyway. She and her husband instead repeatedly tangle with non-hypocritical, family business selfishness. Corporate capitalist evil doesn't have to be racist, patriarchal, nationalist, nepotistic/traditionalist, even recognizably conservative, is I assume what they're going for with the Reagan association and having a black male and white female be its purest representatives. Representatives at the production and consumer ends, one assumes? Though if they sell Woodbine Dodd that may end up going the other way, but you can see how that metaphor would fly: by buying this crap Americans sold their country to corporations (or rather what they were instrumental in unleashing - complicity in crimes spread thin enough to be deniable, leading to much worse sorts of crimes, direct or via fraying social fabric). Kansas City seems like an odd choice, but I guess the choice is about its being a) a bit further out from Minnesota, to fit itd worseness, b) a bigger city, to fit its late capitalismicity, c) made of lies, since it claims it's Kansas but is in fact in Missouri. Maybe even d) playing on the "Not in Kansas anymore, Toto" Oz line, since rural traditional America is being replaced by something offering trwnsformed versions of the people one thought one knew, and e) the "misery" that is the true state Reagan's America finds itself in/as?
Not a big fan of the reups of the trueness of the story, but I guess the point there is that the principle holds - the crimes in the movie were damn near any major crimes, the phenomenon sketched out in season 2 is the one that happened and continues to. Names have been changed, as it were. I guess the highlighting of "true" is to both make us consider this and also how the corporate-media tack of finding ways to couch lies in plausible deniability is being used against it BY what's technically a corporate media product, and a Fox product at that. I can't remember if "truthiness" was originally aimed at Fox, but it soon was if not, and of course Colbert himself was aimed squarely at Fox.
Even less of a fan of gratuitous reminders of Coen films. I guess the Mikler's Crossing steal fits the theme, since family feeling is exploited by and pretended to by the New Selfy-ness but not really shared by it. Bear et al. are about bloodlines, dynasties, history, so can't destroy the enemy when it crops up in their ranks. Can the forces of good? They're a little too good, so far. Is there a mistake they too have made? Patrick Wilson doesn't see Reagan for what he is, and seems slow to recognize the Fargo cop is shitty. Taking people at face value until forced not to, maybe? But that vice is all virtue.
The deceit thing is big: Reagan was not a soldier, hero, sacrificer, but played one.
Dodd/Dad is an example of that lack of family feeling. A vowel shift. The handling of feminism is curious - women's newfound right to choose is at once swallowed by consumer choice? So Bear's niece repeatedly speaks of getting weed as busting a nut, the term for male opportunistic, consequnce-evading pleasure. Yet she's also been beaten and molested by her father, and Dunst speaks bitterly of how her house is like a museum to her husband's family - i.e. she feels pressured to be a traditional wife because Plemons' mother was. The grievances are real, the offered solutions spurious and narcotizing.
The space aliens fit because they're stereotypically seen by rural whites, who trend conservative, or now that we're all talking about fascism again, homegrown fascist. Traditional America gets that something is the matter, but it comes from too far away for them to put their finger on what before it runs them down like Dunst Culkin. Trumps are Romneys dressed as Huckabees, after all.
I guess a lot of the Reagan Democrats came from the (vast numbers) of the historically aggrieved. Goes against the grain of the usual stereotype: ex-radical yuppies. But maybe more accurate?
Bear withdrawing from attacking the police station was relevant hecause it showed the previous evil was self-limiting because of that family feeling - the stake in the country and its laws, at last through connection to progeny and ancestors. Whereas living only for new personal thrills or empowerments means there are no ties on you at all. Is Bear named that because he's an animal, not a monster?
Th special deal on the new typewriter, the killing of the principled judge. The stuff that started this must fit it. Culkin was acting against his family's interests by pardoning the debt the typewriter guy owed them (if extortion constituts owing) in exchange for the investment opp. And we're told his niece associated with him. What was on his belt? I kept ignoring it.
Not sure quite what the murdered judge could suggest, more specific than a principled understanding of the legal system, as compared to lobbying and whatever Roberts is and whatnot. The cook who's killed attacking Culkin puts himself in danger for the good of others - I forget whether the waitress did. Is it meaningful that old style evil starts the process, or are we to understand by Dunst's hitting him that she's replacing the old way of being horrible with a new one involving hypocrisy and diffusion of responsibility (isn't auite a murderer, nor is her husband).
The title Fargo was chosen because of far-going - leaving the safe and ordinary moral locale you're from, instead getting in too deep. In the film it's where Macy finds the kidnappers who end up killing his wife. That it's just past the state line, and that the state it's in is the nowhere-est state, these are also relevant. Your condition is no longer in condition if your state's in that state, basically. Both tv seasons keep Fargo as where the criminals come from, though both also suggest even worse ones come from farther afield. The devil you know gets replaced by a stranger and worse, is the idea? Something justifying a sequel. Thornton is malice, Woodbine is greed - or thereabouts. Freeman, Dunst and Plemons are the Macys, whose doubling down on their small sins makes everything go to hell; Freeman's selfishness is vindictive, Dunst's is omitting to help others when it would involve sacrificing personal comfort. Both slip downslope fast, asymptotically approaching the devils sponsoring them. Woodbine's relation to Dunst is unclear - Kansas City people never even hear about her, do they? Till the end of this last episode, anyway. She and her husband instead repeatedly tangle with non-hypocritical, family business selfishness. Corporate capitalist evil doesn't have to be racist, patriarchal, nationalist, nepotistic/traditionalist, even recognizably conservative, is I assume what they're going for with the Reagan association and having a black male and white female be its purest representatives. Representatives at the production and consumer ends, one assumes? Though if they sell Woodbine Dodd that may end up going the other way, but you can see how that metaphor would fly: by buying this crap Americans sold their country to corporations (or rather what they were instrumental in unleashing - complicity in crimes spread thin enough to be deniable, leading to much worse sorts of crimes, direct or via fraying social fabric). Kansas City seems like an odd choice, but I guess the choice is about its being a) a bit further out from Minnesota, to fit itd worseness, b) a bigger city, to fit its late capitalismicity, c) made of lies, since it claims it's Kansas but is in fact in Missouri. Maybe even d) playing on the "Not in Kansas anymore, Toto" Oz line, since rural traditional America is being replaced by something offering trwnsformed versions of the people one thought one knew, and e) the "misery" that is the true state Reagan's America finds itself in/as?
Not a big fan of the reups of the trueness of the story, but I guess the point there is that the principle holds - the crimes in the movie were damn near any major crimes, the phenomenon sketched out in season 2 is the one that happened and continues to. Names have been changed, as it were. I guess the highlighting of "true" is to both make us consider this and also how the corporate-media tack of finding ways to couch lies in plausible deniability is being used against it BY what's technically a corporate media product, and a Fox product at that. I can't remember if "truthiness" was originally aimed at Fox, but it soon was if not, and of course Colbert himself was aimed squarely at Fox.
Even less of a fan of gratuitous reminders of Coen films. I guess the Mikler's Crossing steal fits the theme, since family feeling is exploited by and pretended to by the New Selfy-ness but not really shared by it. Bear et al. are about bloodlines, dynasties, history, so can't destroy the enemy when it crops up in their ranks. Can the forces of good? They're a little too good, so far. Is there a mistake they too have made? Patrick Wilson doesn't see Reagan for what he is, and seems slow to recognize the Fargo cop is shitty. Taking people at face value until forced not to, maybe? But that vice is all virtue.
The deceit thing is big: Reagan was not a soldier, hero, sacrificer, but played one.
Dodd/Dad is an example of that lack of family feeling. A vowel shift. The handling of feminism is curious - women's newfound right to choose is at once swallowed by consumer choice? So Bear's niece repeatedly speaks of getting weed as busting a nut, the term for male opportunistic, consequnce-evading pleasure. Yet she's also been beaten and molested by her father, and Dunst speaks bitterly of how her house is like a museum to her husband's family - i.e. she feels pressured to be a traditional wife because Plemons' mother was. The grievances are real, the offered solutions spurious and narcotizing.
The space aliens fit because they're stereotypically seen by rural whites, who trend conservative, or now that we're all talking about fascism again, homegrown fascist. Traditional America gets that something is the matter, but it comes from too far away for them to put their finger on what before it runs them down like Dunst Culkin. Trumps are Romneys dressed as Huckabees, after all.
I guess a lot of the Reagan Democrats came from the (vast numbers) of the historically aggrieved. Goes against the grain of the usual stereotype: ex-radical yuppies. But maybe more accurate?
Bear withdrawing from attacking the police station was relevant hecause it showed the previous evil was self-limiting because of that family feeling - the stake in the country and its laws, at last through connection to progeny and ancestors. Whereas living only for new personal thrills or empowerments means there are no ties on you at all. Is Bear named that because he's an animal, not a monster?
Th special deal on the new typewriter, the killing of the principled judge. The stuff that started this must fit it. Culkin was acting against his family's interests by pardoning the debt the typewriter guy owed them (if extortion constituts owing) in exchange for the investment opp. And we're told his niece associated with him. What was on his belt? I kept ignoring it.
Not sure quite what the murdered judge could suggest, more specific than a principled understanding of the legal system, as compared to lobbying and whatever Roberts is and whatnot. The cook who's killed attacking Culkin puts himself in danger for the good of others - I forget whether the waitress did. Is it meaningful that old style evil starts the process, or are we to understand by Dunst's hitting him that she's replacing the old way of being horrible with a new one involving hypocrisy and diffusion of responsibility (isn't auite a murderer, nor is her husband).
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no subject
Date: 2015-12-02 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-02 04:56 pm (UTC)Julie pointed out it was taking a lot of actual shots from the Fargo cabin. And Hamzee's interactions with business owners had a Chigurh-esque feel.
Something curiously un-Coeny about the historico-political message, though. They base that kind of thing on universal human blindness. It's almost like for them there is no history. Even A Serious Man simplifies religion down to basics that would fit most brands of Hinduism and Buddhism, even. Not that they're not clearly left wing, but they're pretty much like Tom in Miller's Crossing - assuming that the only way you can help people is to realize how blind their (his, our) attachments tend to make them.
But I guess the show is positing that only one thing really happened in history - tyranny-by-bloodline being replaced by tyranny-by-corpcap. So a near-universal allegory. But they're relentlessly universal. Addicted to allegory proper. Unless maybe True Grit? Seemed to be about how crazy (but more interesting) everyone was back when heeding one's own language was a thing - kind of like the opposite of Bloom's take on Shakespeare, where self-overhearing screws you to the sticking place rather than inspiring change. Though that's at least a subtype in Shakespeare, too - Iago, in a sense. Or perhaps they think we still do that, but it's more clear in the sorts of stark, eccentric figures in semi-settled America, who spent their candle time writing letters and diaries, reading religious and heroic texts emphasizing personality-as-fate.
And of course it's an adaptation, like No Country - in which history is cyclical, so universal enough.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-02 07:00 pm (UTC)