Too far go, Fargo?

So I loved Fargo the film, not least because the female lead ( Frances McDormand ) was a heavily pregnant super sleuth - a pregnant Sherlock Holmes, if you will - who solved the bizarre crime riddle and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her troubles. The script, by her husband Joel Cohen and brother Ethan, was also hilarious, and the surreal snow setting of a deep mid-winter Minnesota was the almost literal icing on the cake.

The TV series inspired by the film has the same snow setting and general story-line of a bumbling salesman who gets himself embroiled in a darkly absurd crime saga to be solved by a somewhat unlikely female detective.

However the first series, made in 2014, which for some reason we didn't get around to watching till now, makes one small but significant plot change. Instead of the salesman arranging for his insipid, but otherwise unoffensive, wife to be kidnapped in order to pay off his debts - and it all goes horribly wrong from there and she winds up dead - he brutally murders his wife with a hammer (symbol of masculinity), a woman who is characterised as the ultimate nagging wife who tells him constantly he's not a proper man and goads him to kill her by saying 'what are you going to do about it, nothing?' The blood spatter on this poster is hers. He is right and she is wrong, presumably, men's justification for domestic violence and homicide throughout the ages (I have a PhD in this shit).

I almost couldn't breath after this brutal scene played out, as our sympathies had very much been with this guy up until then and the way it was done was as if the writers were justifying the graphic, cold-blooded murder of a woman with a hammer repeatedly struck to her head because she was such an emasculating nag.

Fargo: Season One cast and writers - winner of Best TV MiniseriesI almost got M to turn it off at that point - what a nag! - but, like I said, I could hardly breathe, and I think I needed to know where it went from there to see if they did anything to redeem the misogyny.

And they did - some. But was it enough? Could it ever be enough to counter the suggestion that if you think your wife is a nag and you can't get her to stop any other way, you are justified in killing her? No, of course not. There's a thing called divorce that decent people do if they don't get on with their wives/husbands.

Of course that wouldn't make for a black comedy, which this is, and one of the best in every other respect. But is it worth it to cross that line and effectively promote homicidal misogyny in a world where so many men every year (in every country on earth) do beat and murder their wives and are more often than not excused murder convictions based on her so-called 'provocation'? Nup. Definitely not.

And looking at this cast and writer lineup for the series it is not that hard to see why this sort of entertainment at the expense of womankind continues to get made. However, my feeling is that this line crossed dates the series and that since as recently as 2016, we are seeing a much greater reluctance to cross the misogyny line - as well as a greater willingness to have more gender-balanced casts for films and TV shows (see previous blog).

We haven't finished watching the first series yet but I am hopeful that if not the second series (2015) then the third series being made now will do better on this front than the first, even if the first won all sorts of awards and was very successful. It is very good, and funny, but that really is no excuse for sending the message to the millions who watch these things that killing women is in any way justified, much less entertaining.

I'm right, on this, and they are wrong.