Fargo?
What is more ironic than a movie called Chinatown with only one scene taking any place near Chinatown? A movie called Fargo with only one scene taking place in Fargo and almost that entire scene being shot inside a bar that looks like every other bar in the world. And, Fargo isn’t even a metaphorical place, either, like Chinatown.
“I’d be very surprised if our suspect was from Brainerd.”
Irony has become a multi-headed weapon over the past few decades and is now extended even to situations where it does not apply: like when it rains on your wedding day. (Hint: that’s called a bummer, not irony.) The above observation from Chief of Police Marge Gunderson, on the other hand, actually is irony even though it may not seem like it some. The statement is sincere; Marge would be surprised to find out the suspect in the horrific triple murder on the road to Fargo was from her town. The irony is not in the statement, but the delivery. She says the words as if she intends them to be ironic, thus transforming what it is not irony into irony. Welcome to the world of the Coen Brothers where communication is absolutely, positively everything.
More to Life Than Money
Marge tries to make sense of everything that has happened by schooling the silent kidnapper in the reality that there is more to this world than money. Of course, the irony is that in the end, absolutely no one involve in the all the scheming and murdering and plotting and double-crossing gets the money because it’s been buried along the highway. (Where it eventually be discovered purely by accident by a character not in the movie later on during Season 1 of the FX spinoff series of the film.)
Jerry Lundegaard
Some point to an example of irony in Fargo being Jerry Lundegaard’s getting mixed up with such brutal sociopaths as two kidnappers he hires. Jerry, after all, seems like a typical husband, father and Midwestern nice guy. The real irony is not that Jerry gets involved with scuzballs, however; Jerry is right from the beginning revealed as no more than a step or two above them at best. He cheats his customers, he gets involved in white collar criminal activity and he arranges for his wife—who seems to actually be a nice person—to be kidnapped by two men he doesn’t know. The real irony is not that a nice guy like Jerry gets mixed up in criminal activity out of his league, but that he is ultimately proven to be no better than the killers.
Crime Solved
One of the greatest ironies of Fargo is that even though it is presented as being based on a true story when it is not, it is one of the few movies about cops that shows the apprehension of criminal suspects based on how most crimes really are solved in America: through luck, happenstance or accident. Admittedly, Marge would not just accidentally happen to be driving past the property where that car she’s been trying to track down is parked if she hadn’t been doing the grunt work that characterizes proper investigative procedure. And it is also true that more often than not the fate that guides police to apprehension of suspects is by-product of doing the grunt work: Oswald was arrested not for shooting the President, but for shooting a cop; Timothy McVeigh was already in jail after being arrested for traffic violations when it was learned he was suspected of the OK City bombing; Ted Bundy was likewise stopped for a traffic violation and arrested for resisting arrest before police discovered he was on the FBI”s most wanted list. Most cop movies do not turn on such luck; the bad guys get captured precisely because of the investigation. Ironically, it is those movies and not Fargo that are offer more unrealistic portrayals of the police.
