Fargo: The Heart of Brainerd

“The offing was barred by a black band of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky —seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The answer to the where of the Coen brothers' Fargo (North Dakota) is the same as the answer to the location of Conrad's heart of darkness: They are both out there and in here. The relentlessly wintry climate of the northern Midwest indexes a certain psychic condition. The dark nocturnes in which much of the action transpires is eerily lit by lunar snowscapes, and the cloudy daytime is not notably brighter. It is nearly impossible to demarcate one's surroundings — where does land end and sky begin? With no clear horizon and no visible sun to rise or set, boundaries dissolve in the blankness of space, and the void encroaches.

Inhabitants fortify themselves in various ways — the banality of the diurnal, the reflexive echoing of Norwegian monosyllables, domestic securities. Margaret Atwood has recently written about the uncanny mad lure of the North as a seductive and devouring monster, cabin fevers, and the dread of getting “bushed” or spooked. The Coens' denizens don't exactly succumb to the psychotic magnetism of the North, but it forms the preconditions for their succumbing to other magnetisms of desire. The psychic country of Fargo mostly circumscribes the zones of the borderline and the hysteric. Confined spaces promise a safety buffer against the white abyss, but they're always being invaded, and the ensuing panic makes one tear loose, run amok.

After opening whitish-grey on grey shots, auto-sales manager Jerry's (William H. Macy) vehicle materializes through the snowy mists and pulls up at the “King of Clubs,” a desolate bar near Fargo to transact a shoddy deal with a pair of sleazeball ex-cons, Clay and Gaerer. Later, Jerry's wife, Jean, is seen mindlessly knitting in front of a TV show on travel up the Nile, while the two t