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Fargo, North Dakota. A frozen, bleak, boundless terrain. The watery yellow headlamps of a car. The watery lifeless eyes of its driver as he walks into the downmarket ‘King of Clubs’ bar. Meet Gerry Lundergaard - a lost soul. The opening images of Fargo offer us a void abundant with meaning.
It is in the nature of conventional cinema narrative, the three-act structure so familiar to screenwriters and film theorists, that it can be read as the systematic depiction of Good's triumph over Evil, of Eros' domination of Thanatos: in psychoanalytic terminology, a transition from paranoid-schizoid splitting to the toleration of depressive ambivalence. Fargo is no exception: a fine example of a story well told.
However, Fargo is at the same time an exceptional film in the construction of its narrative, in its management of resolution and, most specifically, in the nature of its ‘force for Good’. Fargo leaves us not just with the expected sense of closure or resolution; satisfaction that justice has been done, but something more. As the perpetrator is driven away in the closing moments, the sense of resolution is accompanied by a stabbing poignancy, a sudden realization that this story has been about something far deeper than we suspected or than it purported to be. What is the added dimension at the heart of Fargo? What is it about Detective Marge Gundersson's open, enquiring face that lingers in the mind's eye long after her image has left the screen?
The psychoanalytic concepts and ideas of Wilfred Bion are rooted in his pioneering psychoanalytic work with groups. His work posits compelling evidence to support the view that it is only through our relationships with other people (the ‘container/ contained’ model), that we can possibly come to know our own mind. Inherent to this view is the notion that every one of our gestures and thoughts made in relation to others has its parallel in an internal landscape.
It is Fargo's preoccupation with community and the group which underpin