Now, you’re talking my language
How Fargo found a new method for communication through a borrowed Coen brothers conceit
Fargo is simply too aware of itself not to luxuriate in the tapestry of threads Sheriff Hank Larson’s final speech weaves together. In what’s not quite the last moment of the show’s absolutely stellar second season, Hank explains to his daughter’s family that he was trying to create a new language, that the symbols and puzzle pieces strewn all over his study were his attempt to find a better way to communicate with people. He knows it sounds crazy, he explains, but when his granddaughter draws a heart, everyone knows that means love — why is the rest of it so complicated, the cause of so much trouble?
A fundamental inability to understand what’s going on was at the heart of Fargo’s second season, though it’s highly doubtful that even a language of perfect clarity would have fundamentally changed anything. People in this world don’t understand because they lack the necessary facilities, not the necessary language. In the same way that half-drunk conspiracy theorist/lawyer Karl Weathers could talk circles around his dull friend Sonny (forever running over the same ideas, slightly rephrased), the world sends its messages to the dreamers, schemers and detectives of Fargo, with them only picking up on the one that makes sense to them.
And so a fluke of a car crash, putting one scumbag younger brother of a crime family through a windshield, sends everyone down a path they were already looking for. Seizing it as an opportunity to make the war that runs in his veins, Dodd Gerhardt fudges just enough of it to make it look like the Kansas City mob drew first blood, convincing his family to fight. Shell- shocked at the surprise of it all, Peggy Blumquist uses the man on her hood as a reason to start thinking about getting away and starting over, a spur to selfactualization that carries over long enough that she considers it a blessing even as her and her husband are hiding in a cabin in the woods, trying to ransom their way out of being on the Gerhardt family hit list. Hank and his son- in- law, Lou Solverson, follow their cop noses far enough to turn a robbery-homicide into trying to break up a gang war: even they get close to the truest meaning of the event, and can’t make it mean anything to anyone else.
Perhaps t hat’s because t alk means so little in this world. Not the dialogue, of course, which is rich in the sort of folksy aphorisms and cultural allusions that are implied by a black comic Midwestern neo- noir, and delivered with obvious relish by both writers and performers. But people talking to each other, even in the rare instances when they’re trying to understand each other, can never quite get on the same wavelength, at least not until it’s far too late.
This is summed up pretty effectively in another pair of speeches in the final episode, as Lou drives Peggy back to Minnesota, her husband dead but some of her delusions of change, or at least personal glamour, still intact. He explains to her, by way of anecdote about a helicopter pilot escaping Saigon, that it’s not a man’s burden but his privilege to protect his family, an honour he bears even if it leads him to lying face down in his own blood (not that there are very many other ways to go in this particular world). She responds with her own discussion of burdens, the stress of womanhood in the late 1970s, asked to be everything from benevolent mother to driven career woman, burdened doubly by the fact there are no models for her to turn to, just a tomb of history she can’t escape.
It is in its way as plain a statement of their characters as we see — no small irony in a season that also repeatedly toyed with the existential idea that it’s what we do, not what we think or say, that defines us — and yet neither of them really let the others’ ideas sink in. The notion of a man’s burden, privilege or not, was almost laughable to Peggy, who lived so trapped by definitions she literally had to go crazy to feel okay with herself; but Lou shuts down any notion of her position’s validity with the curt “people are dead.” They are in their ways both right, but forever at an impasse, and the whole thing sounds like an echo of the conversations Peggy had with Ed before. It’s one of many conversations where they never managed to make themselves fully known, when even a little understanding might have saved their, and possibly dozens of other, lives. A clearer language might help, but you still have to be open- minded enough to listen to it.
And yet no wonder the idea of building a new language is close to the top of the show’s mind: now two seasons in, creator and show runner Noah Hawley is closing in on finding his own language from this borrowed Coen conceit. It’s true the name and title crawl and general penchant for both darkness and decency all remain; it’s also true that this season, with its notion of the Vietnam War being brought home, seems to share both a penchant for philosophy and some story beats with another Coen enterprise, No Country For Old Men. Like Hank, I don’t know that Hawley has got beyond the sketches of his own new way of speaking, or if the project is even possible. But he has at least found a hell of a lot of brutal beauty in the effort, and he’s welcome to keep trying for as long as he likes.
A clearer language might help, but you still have to be open-minded enough to listen to it