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For me, there’s always been something that sets Joel and Ethan Coen apart from a lot of other filmmakers – notably, that they make films I feel like see myself in. The first movie I ever saw by the pair my parents showed me when I was 11 – Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? It likely needs no introduction, but for whomever might be reading this that hasn’t seen the film (what are you doing? Go watch it right now), I’ll summarize the film as a loose adaptation of the Odyssey set in Mississippi during the Depression. Later here I’ll describe the plot in more depth.
 
In this film, however, I see myself represented particularly as someone who holds strong ties to his Southern identity (in such a way that the scene in which our heroic quartet rescues their fourth member from a Klu Klux Klan lynching, slaying the story’s Polyphemus in the process, brings me immense joy). I see myself in the locations they chose for the characters to traverse – places I’ve been to, places I know, and places I have good friends from. I see myself in the values they have, the focus on family ties and how these characters react to being betrayed by them. I see myself in the music they chose for the score, that old timer music, porch picking stuff that my friends loved to play. In short, this is a movie in which I see a mirror of a South that might become a better place than it is today. There’s something very real in there, and it’s something I see myself in.
 
However, the film’s relationship to reality is rocky in other places. For one, their journey makes little logistical sense. Ulysses et al. begin their travels near Parchman Farm (a plantation turned prison after the Civil War, a common story behind many of the most brutal prisons across the Deep South) and then travel from the Delta, in the western edge of the state, to Tishomingo, in the extreme northeast corner in the hill country of Mississippi. From Tishomingo, they travel much further south, eventually reaching Itta Bena, where they help George “Baby Face” Nelson rob a bank, and (via montage) travel even further south to Satarnia before turning back north and eventually freeing one of their company from Parchman for a second time. After this point the exactness of the locations become even less distinct, although given my understanding of the geography they likely crash the Klan rally and then the gubernatorial campaign fund raiser in Clarksdale and the have to retrieve the wedding ring around Batesville, in either Enid Lake or Sardis Lake, which we see flooded in the penultimate scene of the film (my personal opinion is that Sardis Lake is the better candidate, as it’s much larger and would have had a much hillier landscape prior to flooding). Thus their journey would look ridiculous to anyone attempting to plot it on a map (I've tried!). 
 
            Obviously, many of the highways we take advantage of today wouldn’t have been available to the travelers in the 1930s, but they help us establish that, given we only see about two weeks pass in the course of the story (maybe three, if we’re being generous), that their pathway is not bound to a reality. We can now begin our speculation – why did the Coen Brothers choose to decouple this part of the film from reality? Did they simply choose places that sounded interesting from a map? Did they deliberately choose to do this, to frustrate observant viewers familiar with the geography of Mississippi? Did they even, perhaps, map a route exactly, that the film does not give us the explicit locations of, making it difficult to pin down exactly where our ship-less crew traveled?

            I would argue that none of these answers matter. Instead, that these place names only serve to help the reality of this story find purchase. The truth of this narrative is that people find ways to love one another, even in hard times. Maybe they find it through religion, washing away their sins in an impromptu river baptism. They find it playing the guitar, selling their soul so that they can play it better than anyone else. They find it running from the law, to win back their lover and reestablish themselves as the pater familias.

            This fact is paired with something the movie most definitely gets right: the heat. In the summer, the heat of Mississippi is oppressive, and there isn’t a scene in this film where almost everyone isn’t sweating. The hear paired with the dreamlike motion through the landscape of the state: the long straight dirt roads that lead on forever across the delta, dust clinging to your skin; the oak groves where you can hide in the shade and rest your eyes even as you sweat through your shirt; driving with the window down just to get a breeze for a second. You lose track of time when all you can think about is how hot you are; you lose track of your place.

 

            To shift gears, there’s another Coen Brothers film I can always find myself in, this time very different in place and season. Of course, I’m talking about Fargo. Whereas Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? is a film set in a dreamscape of a Mississippi Summer, Fargo is set in a very real Minnesota Winter (in spite of the name, only two scenes takes place in North Dakota).

There are a few things that set Fargo apart in this sense. First, that there is no sense of lost time or place like in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? – there are only four places in the film: Fargo, Minneapolis, Brainerd, and Moose Lake. The time our characters take to travel between them feels realistic, and we’re often shown them driving alone through long stretches of snow covered highway.

Second, the violence has much higher stakes. Although there is a lot of violence present in the latter film, most of it feels low-stakes for our characters. Even when they’re being subjected to it and have to face the consequences of making violent people angry, there’s a sense of security – that our group of well-meaning criminals will find their way out of the current predicament whole. In Fargo, this violence is real. The criminals (in another juxtaposition) are not the kind but unfortunate people we see in Oh Brother, but men who hold a genuine malice for others, and who are shown to kill because it is the most convenient way out of a bad situation or because they’re simply annoyed with another person. These stakes are driven even higher when we realize that our protagonist – Officer Marge Gunderson, police chief from Brainerd who is investigating the triple homicide committed by one of the criminals – is seven months pregnant. This violence comes to a tense conclusion, when Gunderson finally tracks down the kidnappers for hire, to find one of them stuffing the other into a wood chipper. She, the honest and well-meaning police officer, is able to stop the man with two bullets – one of them a wide shot, the other a well-placed and non-lethal shot to the leg.

The final difference I’m going to highlight here is simply how normal our protagonist is. Marge and her husband are simply very normal people. He makes her breakfast when she wakes up, her car needs a jump, they go out to eat at the local buffet and they both get far too much food when making their plates (but that’s what you do at a buffet), she feels uncomfortable in fancy restaurants, and she’s smart as a tack and good at her job. There’s a sense you get when watching Marge Gunderson interact with the world that you’re not watching a character made fantastical for a fantastic world, but rather someone who might have been dropped in from our world, who is simply a good police officer wanting the best for people (which, of course, leads into the argument that she exists in a fantasy in which police are that rather than the enactors of state violence against the general population and especially Non-White people, but that’s both something of a common trope in American fiction and a subject for a different essay).

This normalcy walks hand-in-hand with the cold. Whereas the Summer of Oh Brother shimmers into a heat mirage, making it hard to pin town time and place; the Winter of Fargo makes sure we know where we are – we are in Minnesota, we are on the highway outside of Brainerd, we are standing in the snow inspecting the body of a Minnesota Highway Patrolman. We are in a reality that exists.

Yet, in this actually existing place, we can see ourselves reflected too. We can see ourselves in the love for family; we can see ourselves someone scared for their mother, unsure of what is going to happen to her; we can see ourselves even in the frustrations of the antagonists when he’s complaining about paying a parking fee.


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