Audience Subversion
Exactly one short scene of Fargo takes place in Fargo, ND and it takes place inside a bar that could literally be anywhere in America. The most important female character in the movie is pregnant, yet her pregnancy has no impact on the plot. The movie is a thriller about violent criminals where many main characters die or face gruesome treatment, yet it is very often classified as a comedy. The one theme of Fargo beyond all argument is this is a movie designed to subvert nearly expectation an audience brings to it.
Dirt Behind the Daydream
At the center of the film is a traditional middle-class family: a guy who goes to work as a car salesman, a seemingly nice housewife and a teenage son engaging in low-form rebellion. It is a family that by no means should ever wind up the way they eventually will: wife and her father murdered, husband jailed for arranging kidnapping (though not the murder) of wife and son left an orphan. Fargo perhaps is intended as a metaphorical idea of a place where things like what happens over in Minnesota never happens. But then that interpretation would go against the entire thematic structure of the film. The upshot: there is always dirt behind the daydream.
True Story (or Stories)
One of the major subversion of expectations comes with the first words on the screen—even before the opening credits—informing that audience that the movie is based on a true story in which names were changed to protect “survivors” while the events remain unchanged out of respect for those who failed to survive. In the first place, the movie is NOT based on a true story, it is based on a STORY. Thus, in a sense, making it true in that it does occur on screen. (Yeah, mull that one over!) Secondly, when viewers are told a movie is based on a true story, it tends to legitimize even the most unlikely of events, if only subconsciously, thus allowing them to believe things that they might otherwise not. The most important thing to consider in that presentation of truth, however, is the part about the name changes. “At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed…the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” Take a moment to apply this assertion of truth to who survives and what exactly occurs in the movie. The only “survivors” are a psychotic murderer and the man who hired him to “fake kidnap” his wife in order to extricate himself from a financial crisis caused by his own stupid greed. What kind of filmmakers would ever agree to a request from such survivors? And yet, simply because the filmmakers asserted this “second truth” about the story, most people believed it—and many still do.
