committing the crime and, thus, inevitably leave incriminating clues behind. Apparently cold and calculating, they nonetheless act without adequate foresight; the consequences of their acts quickly swirl out of control. Called a film blanc because of the near-whiteout conditions that prevail in the film's setting in the plains of North Dakota, Fargo features criminals who suffer “snow blindness,” the self-deceiving illusion of infallibility.14 As in Blood Simple, here too criminals are subject to a comedy of errors. Yet Fargo is a very different film from Blood Simple; it inscribes the comedy of criminal error within a more traditional structure of the detective who affirms the goodness of conventional mores, a married and pregnant female detective named Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand in an Oscar-winning performance).
In the final scenes of Fargo, Marge's role as commentator eclipses in significance her role as investigator. Indeed, the criminals seem destined to destroy themselves. Marge's comments about her expected baby affirm a certain way of life as making sense, as bearing fruit, and as something worth preserving and handing on to the next generation. Her domestic life is void of the sort of calculating, radically individualist spirit that infects the families of the criminals in the film and the typical families that inhabit other noir films.
Despite its gruesome violence and somber tone, Fargo's conclusion calls to mind certain features of classical comedy, which often ends with a wedding, an affirmation of order, especially of the marital bond as the cornerstone of hope in society. Affirming the reasonableness of conventions, classical comedy mocks radicals—be they criminals or well-intentioned reformers. Marge does not seek deeper meaning beneath the surface; committed to a conventional understanding of justice, she is not on a great quest to discern the nature and causes of evil. The causes, if there are any discernible (greed for a “little bit of money”), are readily available on the surface of criminal action; yet, given the risks, the cost, and the affront to natural goodness (“It's a beautiful day”), evil remains inexplicable: “I just don't understand it.” Marge witnesses at close range the noir trap of criminality, but it does not destroy her—or even tempt her.
In a review of Fargo entitled “The Banality of Virtue,” Laura Miller observes the “dullness of the Midwestern characters” and the essential emptiness of their values. She wonders, “In the universe of Fargo, where virtue is a kind of ignorance and wickedness a nullity, where do real people fit in?”15 Indeed, the Coens’ alternatives to nihilists, the characters who avoid entrapment by the noir vices of lust and greed, seem not so much virtuous as incapable of the complexities of vice. They seem to suffer from a sort of Forrest Gump syndrome, a sort of banality of goodness, a strange and comic counterpoint to Hannah Arendt's famous thesis concerning the banality of evil.16 If this line of interpretation were correct, then we might see the substance, or lack thereof, in the Coens’ films as a “knowing, highly allusive” form of filmmaking that is no more than “pastiche.”17
Yet the gentle levity with which the Coens treat these characters and the way the characters embody natural tendencies, which they cannot themselves articulate, suggest the presence of something more than mere banality. Foster Hirsch, for example, describes McDormand's character as “a cockeyed optimist, wide-eyed but hardly stupid.”18 Indeed, the interweaving of comedy and fertility harks back to pagan and Shakespearean comedy, with the celebration of rites of fertility and marriage, of an order of nature that overcomes human vice and frailty and reconciles opposing forces and conflicting wills. No such complete reconciliation is possible in neo-noir, not even in the Coens’ comic neo-noir. Yet the Coens’ penchant for presenting fertility and, in some films, familial fidelity as ways of avoiding entanglement in the noir traps of lust and greed points in the direction of such comic reconciliation.
The themes of family and procreation are the preeminent issues in the Coens’ early pure comedy, Raising Arizona (1987), the story of a recidivist petty thief, Hi (Nicolas Cage), and a female prison guard, Ed (Holly Hunter). Over a number of years and many return trips to prison, Hi falls in love with Ed, and she accepts his proposal of marriage. The film includes a number of noir themes—crime, repetition, entrapment, and the spoiling of the future by deeds committed in the past. Yet here those noir themes are, ultimately, inscribed within an overarching comic structure that contains both the theme of fertility and that of hopeful reconciliation. Throughout much of the film, Hi appears incapable of learning or altering his behavior. He admits in a voice-over that he is not sure where folks stand on the incarceration issue, whether it is about rehabilitation or just revenge. As we watch him being arrested yet again, he comments that he has begun to believe that revenge is the only possibility that makes any sense.
His marriage to Ed seems to have a salutary effect, at least until Ed is diagnosed as barren. Hi comments that her “insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.” Seeing the announcement of the birth of the Arizona quints, born to the wealthy Nathan Arizona and his wife, Ed suggests that they kidnap one of the boys since the Arizona family has more than it can handle. Hi scales a ladder, enters the boys’ bedroom, and takes Nathan Jr. In a surprise twist, Hi is the one who cannot live with the thought of their deed. His conscience exacts revenge in a dream where he is pursued by the “lone biker of the apocalypse,” a vengeful giant of a man sporting a tattoo: “Mama Didn't Love Me.” The tattoo is a whimsical statement of the core theme of the film, that familial love is the essence of human life. The crimes that Hi and Ed commit are but a perverse pursuit of properly human goods, one in which there is a twisted acknowledgment of the primacy of familial bonds.
The few noir elements in the film are subordinate to a larger narrative, a story of fidelity and the hope for fertility. Hi and Ed eventually come to their senses and return the baby. Relieved of their burden of conscience, Hi has another dream, which may, he concedes, have been just wishful thinking, a dream of the future in which Nathan Jr. is happy and successful and Hi and Ed gather around a dinner table with their numerous offspring. What the Coen brothers hint at in a number of their noir films they explicitly embrace in Raising Arizona: the resilience of human nature's basic instincts, not the instincts for lust and domination of others, but those for love, affection, and procreation, instincts that steer human beings toward a happy ending, in spite of the damage done and the detours caused by their calculative misjudgments.
Notes
1. For a nice discussion of neo-noir and a division of it into modernist and postmodernist stages, see Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2002), 130–74. Also indispensable is Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York: Limelight, 1999).
2. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 218.
3. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 10.
4. Jean-Pierre Chartier, “Les Américains aussi font des films ‘noirs,’” Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 67.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), bk. 1, “European Nihilism,” no. 2, 9.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968), 129.
7. Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 22, 17.
8. Ibid.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), no. 257, 201.
10. For further discussion of the relation between Nietzsche, nihilism, and noir, see Mark T. Conard, “Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir,” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), 7–22.
11. See David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The Upper Class
