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Fargo

Fargo’s second season deserves to go down as one of the greatest seasons of television ever to air. Everything from the story-telling to the direction —those split screens!— to the casting to the performances to the referential yet unique visual landscape is, in a word, thrilling. Even more so is that this world might just be a woman’s world. In a time where we’re demanding more dynamic representations of women on screen, Fargo more than delivered: its cast of female characters were written with such tender care and truth (even within the absurdity of the unfolding plot) that the show set a new standard for female heroes and anti-heroes.

From the very beginning of the season, we were introduced to the notion of the empowered woman was the great threat to existing, male-dominated power structure of this post-Vietnam, pre-1980s working woman era. In Episode 1 (“Waiting For Dutch”), we see a skittish, irrational Rye Gerhardt (Kieran Culkan) confronting Judge Mundt (Ann Cusack) in an attempt to scare her into unfreezing his partner’s business assets. In a different world, one not that far removed in time from this one, there were no female judges. And in that not-so-distant past, women were subservient and complicit to the demands of their men, both at home and in the workplace. But Mundt does not stand down: this trailblazer is articulate, bold and defiant. The last thing she is is afraid, which sets us up to meet a cast of women with similar dispositions.

Mundt is eventually shot and killed by the very threatened and verbally emasculated Rye (not without putting up a serious fight), who is in turn run over by Peggy Blomquist (someone give Kirsten Dunst all the awards for her performance), a random (or was it?) accident that sets in motion the events that propel the entire season.

(I just want to take a small digression to talk about the UFO sighting that caused Rye to pause, and be run over. The lights in the sky represent the alien, the unknown. Much like the otherworldly mystery hovering above Minnesota, the empowered woman is a terrifying enigma for the men of Fargo. Never is this idea more prescient than in the penultimate episode, “The Castle,” in which the men are paused during a violent, bloody shoot-out by a flying saucer beaming its light down upon them. The only person entirely unmoved is Peggy who exclaims, incredulously, “It’s just a flyin’ saucer!” as she drags her dumbstruck husband along. Like the foreign spaceship, no one knows quite what to make of a woman with purpose — except the woman herself.

Ok. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.)

The consistent theme through both seasons of Fargo is the wolf at the door, but in season 2, there’s the wolf (the encroaching violence) and then there’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The latter is represented by the women who, in a world of violence and chaos, might just be the true threat. That’s not to say that Fargo is diminishing women, or hellbent on creating poisonous femme fatales, but rather that the show captures a very real anxiety emerging at a time when women were beginning to become more visible and, indeed, more demanding within the male-dominated environs of their society.

Peggy is the ultimate anti-hero. She’s the Walter White or the Tony Soprano we root for, even though she too is pretty much a straight-up criminal. Peggy is, in the Fargo landscape, the puppeteer. If this were a James Bond film, she’d be the author of everyone’s pain. Her actions are a catalyst by which others act. Her husband, Ed (Jesse Plemmons), the local police, the Gerhardt family and the Kansas City gangs are motivated by on a series of events set off by Peggy … and they barely even know it. Peggy is the antithesis of Bergerian theory of men acting and women appearing. Peggy acts —whether it’s her initial hit and run, her insistence on hers and Ed’s innocence or her torturing of Dodd (Jeffery Donovan)— and the men around her have no choice but to react. She’s a disruptive, unruly woman in a comfortable, midwestern world that, as yet, has not encountered this kind of unpredictable femininity.

Peggy acts largely in retaliation to being told she can’t pursue her dream of becoming “fully actualized” at a seminar in Sioux Falls. She rebels against her husband’s insistence on their provincial life and starting a family, and her determination to break out of mundanity manifests itself into a criminal streak. It’s unclear whether Peggy is mentally ill, although all signs suggest that her mental state is, at the very least, delicate. Her hoarding of travel and beauty magazines certainly betrays her anxiety at being trapped in her life, and her visions in “Loplop” are suggestive of a fragile mental state, although it could just be a vivid and visceral imagination. Either way, Peggy is at odds with her universe, fighting at once the violence of the masculine world and it’s clipping of her wings, as well as the violence inside her own head. It’s fitting then, that the second most agent of chaos is Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon), the Native American guerilla soldier, who, like Peggy, has been forced to live in society’s margins, neither respected nor taken seriously by those around him.

By the time the season wrapped up, it was patently clear that Peggy was both the cause of and the eye of Fargo’s hurricane. But that’s not to say the other women haven’t been as instrumental and diabolical as Peggy herself. Floyd Gerhardt (Jean Smart) was a rousing, formidable woman who took on the leadership role of a patriarch. Her granddaughter, Simone (Rachel Keller), fought the male-inflicted violence she experienced using manipulation and sexuality. Simone, in another setting, might have been a warrior in the second wave of feminism (which co-incides with the 1979 setting of Fargo’s second season). Both women were challenged by Dodd, who acted as a proxy for an anxious male community. Dodd’s violence against his daughter, Simone, his spitting disrespect for his mother taking over the family business, and his directive of “Son, you’ve got a woman problem” to Ed (regarding Peggy), serve to inform the insecurity brewing within the patriarchy. Dodd’s molestation and mistrust of women is, then, our periscope into the more general gender-based anxiety of the time.

Floyd and Simone are both vanquished by men, both of them needing to be snuffed out for their threat to be eliminated. However, in death, it seems, the power of a woman is just as tactile. Betsy Solverson (Cristin Milioti) is just as threatening to her world as Floyd and Simone were to theirs, or as Peggy is to the world at large. Betsy has mastered the men in her world, managing to be smart, biting, motherly and gentle all at once. It’s no surprise that she’s universally loved by the Luverne town folk. But riddled with cancer, she’s fighting another sort of violence, a physical, unstoppable force. And her death threatens to disrupt the respective worlds of the men in her life, her husband, Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) and her father Hank Larsson (Ted Danson), which becomes apparent in her raw exchange with Karl Weathers (Nick Offermann) in her kitchen in Episode 207 (“Did you do this? No, you did it!”). Betsy asks Karl to look after her family when she’s departed, and encourage Lou to remarry, and in a poignant, painful turn, it becomes clear that the wolf cannot be kept at bay, and even in this humble Minnesotan home, the beast has crept in.

But Betsy isn’t just a threat to the men who love her: she’s a threat to the accepted order of the gender hierarchy. Indeed, in Episode 2, “Before The Law,” Betsy finds Rye’s gun in some weeds by the diner while Lou is inside examining the crime scene. In the third episode (“The Myth Of Sisyphus”) she’s set up as Peggy’s antithesis as she postulates to her father, Hank, (while having her hair cut at Peggy’s salon, no less) that Rye was the victim of a hit-and-run. Betsy represents justice and order, while Peggy represent mayhem and immorality. Like Peggy, however, Betsy is able to usurp roles and traits traditionally reserved for men. She does the job of both her father and husband in solving the case. While Peggy is violent and merciless, Betsy is rational and studied. They’re opposites, and yet they both exude traits, which, even still, challenge ideas of what is really “feminine.”

The world of Fargo is a violent one where even the wily don’t always survive. But the women of Fargo are the ones who left an indelible mark on its narrative. Fighting violence, whether external or internal, is a daily reality for them. But at the same time, they asserted and empowered themselves in what was still most definitely a man’s world. The writing team should be applauded for portraying its female protagonists (and antagonists) as rich, complex, flawed and ferocious creatures. While the men lived in the shadow of the Vietnam War and attempted to step away from it and back into the proverbial sunlight, the women in turn lived with their collective history of disenfranchised womanhood, which was demonstrated to be just as oppressive as the shadow of war.