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Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation . .. or is it, that as an essence whiteness is not so much a color as the absence of color.. is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows-a colorless ... atheism from which we shrink?
-Melville
I am going north looking for the source of the chill in my bones.
-Jack Spicer
Where is everybody?
Well--it's cold. Margie.
--Fargo
I
Fargo was filmed in color, and yet it's the absence of color-the bone-chilling whiteness of a Minnesota winter-that sets the movie's quirky tone from beginning to end. Fargo's central subject is disparity:
Jean Lundegaard: Do you know what a disparity is?
Scotty Lundegaard (testily): Yeah!2
So should Fargo's audience, by film's end. For everything in Fargo is out of sync: its title (all but the brief opening sequence takes place in Minnesota, not North Dakota); its off-beat names (Mike Yanagita, Reilly Diefenbach, Gaear Grimsrud, Shep Proudfoot); its weather ("It's a beautiful day," Police Chief Marge Gunderson declares, as "[outside it is snowing. The sky, the earth, the road-all white.]"); its appointments ("Shep said you'd be here at 7:30"; "Shep said 8:30"); its musical score (strains of a traditional Norwegian folk tune interspersed with automobile door chimes and white noise from television sets); its opening text:
This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
Flare to white...
In his introduction to the filmscript of Fargo, Ethan Coen declares, "[Fargo] aims to be both homey and exotic, and pretends to be true.',3 In fact the killings in Fargo didn't take place in Minnesota in 1987 or at any other time (wouldn't Minnesotans remember hearing about a notorious murderer putting his partner, an equally notorious murderer, into a wood chipper?). More to the point, no one in the film has an iota of respect for the dead. To be sure, the...