Last week I began a discussion of the 1996 Coen brothers’ film Fargo. This week I conclude my commentary on the film.
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The script of Fargo is especially adept at capturing aspects of regional speech. The characters utter their “yahs”; drop the g from “ing” endings; frequently say “you bet” and “you betcha”; and take on many other aspects of the dialect. The actors have clearly been coached in the regional accent, but the accents often seem overdone to my ear. Jean Lundegaard’s is probably the most exaggerated. Although I’ve heard very strong regional accents, especially in rural areas, I haven’t heard one quite like hers. The accent that seemed most authentic to me is heard from the man being interviewed in his driveway by one of Marge’s fellow police officers. He is the bartender near Moose Lake who talks about encountering Showalter (Steve Buscemi), providing the information that eventually leads Marge to the killers’ cabin.

The Coens subvert another Midwestern myth in the film when Grimsrud kills Showalter at the cabin. He does so in Paul Bunyan fashion–with an axe. The tool that cleared the Upper Midwestern frontier, a symbol of regional industriousness, becomes a murder weapon. Then, in the most (regrettably) unforgettable scene of the film, a modern woodsman’s tool, the wood chipper, is used to dispose of the body. As Marge Gunderson approaches Grimsrud with her pistol drawn, he is reddening the pure white snow of the northern woods.

As we watch the awful body-chipping scene, we do not know who is in the wood chipper. I assumed it was Jean Lundegaard, but we learn later it is Carl Showalter. If the clean snow of the winter woods can be said to symbolize the region’s own estimation of its moral purity, then the Coens leave no doubt about their own very different estimation of that purity. It does not exist, they tell us; the Upper Midwest is no different from any other region. It has violence and mayhem and stupidity, just like any other place.

Or are people stupider here, as the film perhaps implies? With the exception of the Marge Gunderson and Wade Gustafson, Fargo represents the locals as overly earnest, slow-witted yokels. Think of the two hookers and Marge’s police department colleagues.
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On the lighter side, at least two Coen brothers’ films mention gophers, the University of Minnesota mascot (the Golden Gophers) and source of one of the state’s nicknames (the Gopher State). In Fargo, Wade Gustafson, Jerry’s father-in-law, is watching a Gopher hockey game early in the film. In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the main characters roast and eat gophers on a stick. This latter symbolism–could it have been unintentional?–was not lost on me, a U of M alumnus, though I have never heard anyone else mention it. The Coen brothers’ father, Ed Coen, was a professor in the highly respected economics department at the University of Minnesota. He once substitute taught in one of my economics classes.

Yes, I realize the gopher is an inherently funny mascot. Having a diminutive rodent for your mascot is funny. When you grow up here, though, you don’t think twice about it. And when you see pictures of Goldie the Gopher in his uniform and looking pretty athletic, he looks, well, almost fierce.
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In looking at the version of the screenplay that I found on the Internet, I noticed that it diverges from the movie slightly. For example, the script has an early scene in which Jerry checks into a hotel, but it’s not in the film. In another scene, the script has Wade Gustafson telling Jerry that he is watching the “Norstars” on television. In the film, however, it’s the Gophers, and they’re playing their archrivals, the Wisconsin Badgers.
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For a Fargo native’s view of the movie, see a Washington Post column by the talented James Lileks. For the most part, I agree with him.
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I have a few tangential connections to Fargo. I was in Minnesota the year that it was made (1995?) and tried to become an extra for the film. The casting call had asked that we come dressed in 1980s clothing, and they took pictures of the many people there. I must not have looked Midwestern enough, because I was not chosen.

The film has many fun local details, and I won’t attempt to go into them here. However, one in particular caught my attention. It was the name of the bar near Moose Lake in which, we are told, Carl Showalter asks the bartender where he can find some action. It’s called “Ecklund and Swedlin’s” (spelling taken from a screenplay found on the Internet). Ecklund and Swedlund are home builders in Minnesota. (Only in Minnesota or Sweden would you get a company name like that.) In fact, they built the Plymouth home that I spent most of my childhood years in.

It was nearly ten years ago that Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Fargo was released. Because no other movie–and perhaps no other cultural production–has so defined the region in the public consciousness, this 1996 film seems a necessary topic for this column. I recently watched the film again, and what follows are some thoughts on it.
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The great movie of the Upper Midwest has yet to be made. The Coen brothers come close with Fargo, but to my mind the film falls short. The film has beautiful and powerful images of the landscape in winter; generally accurate (though exaggerated) renderings of regional mannerisms, attitudes, and accents; a taut contrast of domestic bliss and domestic nightmare in two of its storylines; strong performances by its actors; and a wealth of regionally specific details that are the product of the filmmakers’ origins in the region. And yet with all this, as I watched the film for the second time nine years after the first viewing, I’m left with a feeling of emptiness that is not aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps that is the Coens’ point, but it seems a meanspirited point to make, especially as it is made largely with the violent deaths of innocent people.

The film seems powerful but nearly heartless. As I watched it again, I often felt as if I was going through a masochistic ritual without being a masochist; there was no pleasure in the painful moments. Was it because I knew the characters’ fates? I can think of other violent films that hold up in multiple viewings. Is it because the characters in those films are fascinating? The main character of this film is not so much fascinating as repulsive. Jerry Lundegaard is inept, corrupt, and craven, and his family pays the price for his sins.

The film punctures the myths of Upper Midwestern virtue and politeness (“Minnesota Nice”) and Lake Wobegon’s homespun simplicity. This is a region that prides itself on higher than average rates of church attendance, voter turnout, corporate philanthropy, and high school graduation. It’s a place of reserved manners and clean government. It’s a place ripe for artistic deflation and undercutting.

Most of the main characters bear the kind of Scandinavian surnames that are common in the region: Jerry Lundegaard and his family undergo the film’s domestic nightmare as he arranges for his wife to be kidnapped; Wade Gustafson is the wealthy car dealer father in law; Marge Gunderson, the pregnant police officer, unravels the criminal schemes; Gaear Grimsrud is the most violent of the two low-life criminals. One exception to these Scandinavians is the Gustafson’s Jewish business partner, Stan Grossman.

Grimsrud’s name epitomizes the grim spirit of the film. Yet I would say the film goes even beyond grim. Relentlessly dispiriting would be a more accurate description.

The film attempts to use the happy domesticity of Marge Gunderson and her husband to counterbalance the downward spiral of violence and destruction in the Lundegaard-Gustafson and Showalter-Grimsrud storylines, but it doesn’t achieve this. The weight of the movie’s action and emotional impact is on the destruction of the Lundegaard domestic life, the victimization of the innocent Jean Lundegaard, and the murder of various other innocents by Showalter and Grimsrud.

Although this is not the great film of the Upper Midwest, it is nevertheless great in its depiction of winter. It uses the season and its scenery extremely well. Just think of some of the film’s images: Jerry’s car materializing out of the wintry weather at the beginning of the movie; shots of parking ramps and parking lots full of snow; Jerry manically scraping the ice off his windshield when he knows his scheme has failed; the endless snowy flatness of the land and the comic image of Carl Showalter planting his ice scraper as a marker for his loot.
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Was the film meant to lash back at the Minnesota culture the Coen brothers grew up in? They were born in the same town I was, St. Louis Park. The film reveals an intimate familiarity with the region, but it also seems to be the product of creators who feel outside that culture and perhaps even hostile toward it.

Why do I have such a negative reaction to the film this time around? Am I trying to preserve some mythic image of the region? Do I possess some regional sensibility that makes me resentful of it?

Next week: more on Fargo.

This week I continue my review of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I. Last week’s review (see below) considered Dylan’s account of growing up in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing.
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After arriving in Minneapolis on a Greyhound bus from Hibbing in the summer of 1959, Bob Dylan immediately traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one and began to hang out in the Beatnik coffeehouses of Dinkytown, the area around the University of Minnesota. He had left “very narrow, provincial” Hibbing and never intended to go back.

Staying that summer in a fraternity house (he does not tell us that it is Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity at the university), he soon met kindred spirits in the big city and with their help began to soak up new influences. Folk records were not easy to come by at that time, so he learned of old and new folk singers–the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Jacob Niles, Woody Guthrie, and many others–by listening to records in libraries, at other people’s homes, or in record stores. He heard other performers who came through town as well. It was an informal education in folk music, from traditional English and American ballads to songs by newer folk artists.

Dylan calls this world of folk music his “parallel universe”:

“Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it…Folk music was all I needed to exist. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes… I had no other cares or interests besides folk music.”

During that first summer in the Twin Cities, he was playing his guitar “morning, noon, and night.” When he wasn’t practicing, he was performing in coffeehouses, pizza places, on the street, and at house parties, supporting himself with the little money he made. He often played with another young singer, John Koerner. It was the start of a performing career that would hardly pause until years later.

By the fall of 1959 he was living above Gray’s drugstore in Dinkytown. At this point he learned about Woody Guthrie’s music for the first time. “Stunned” by its power, determined to be “Guthrie’s greatest disciple,” Dylan sang nothing but Guthrie songs until local folk music maven Jon Pankake–a “classic traditional folk snob,” according to Dylan–confronted him and shook him up by comparing him to Jack Elliott, another folksinger influenced by Guthrie. Dylan had to finally admit Pankake was right. He still had a ways to go as an artist.

Although Minneapolis-St. Paul was much bigger than Hibbing, Dylan knew he was “still stuck in the boondocks” compared to another folksinger his age that he admired, Joan Baez. Baez had already been on television and had made a record in New York. Eventually, he knew it was time to go to the American cultural capital: “Just like Hibbing, the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. The world of folk music was too closed off and the town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle. New York City was the place I wanted to be.”

Dylan left town one morning in the winter of 1961 with a suitcase, a guitar, and a harmonica rack and hitchhiked his way east to find Woody Guthrie. He was heading to a place “where life promised something more.”
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These are some of Dylan’s musings and memories on his life in the Upper Midwest. As with any autobiography, the reader must take the narrative with a grain of salt. Any writer has an agenda, and that agenda may not include complete truth and accuracy. Is Dylan attempting to create a youth worthy of his legend, falsely presenting himself as an earnest student at the foot of the folk music tradition? Tom Carson, reviewing Chronicles in the New York Times, is a harsh critic of Dylan’s book in this regard. For him, “calculated image-tending dominates the agenda” in the book as Dylan attempts to present himself as “a 20th-century incarnation of primeval Americana.” Carson writes:

“The voice is transparently fraudulent, eliding one side of the young Bob Dylan (his callowness) and playing fancy chess games with another (his ambition). Yet simply as writing, it’s some of the best fake ‘Huckleberry Finn’ I’ve ever read.”

Carson also comments on a strange omission in the book that I noticed as well: Dylan makes no mention of being Jewish. One must wonder why. Did his family not see themselves as Jewish? What was it like to be Jewish in Hibbing? Did it play any role in forming his identity? Not if this book is any indication.

Carson’s criticism seems too heavy, to my mind. Dylan might have grown up as a middle-class kid in Hibbing, relatively privileged compared to Twain’s Huck Finn, but why is his story not as authentic a piece of Americana as any other? If his autobiography bears any resemblance to what really happened, Dylan’s story is a remarkable one. To start in an obscure corner of America and end up in the limelight is no small feat. And going out of your way to master the old power of poetry and music–in effect creating your own apprenticeship independent of any formal school–is even more admirable.

For me, Dylan’s thoughts on the songs that influenced him and their considerable effect on him ring true. Such experiences are necessary for a person to choose the impractical, even scorned road of being an artist. These descriptions of his musical education are also what make him believable when he says later, about his days of fame in the 1960s, that he did not want to be the political spokesperson for a generation. He loved the art and craft of music–not just folk music in the end–and was not seeking anything more. He had mastered the power of the song and the lyre, and young people looked to him as a kind of prophet. His misfortune (as well as his good fortune) was doing so during a time of social upheaval.

The comparison to Huck Finn does not seem outrageous. Taking chances, lighting out on his own like Huck–these are elements of Dylan’s story. He left the familiar surroundings of home and took up a guitar on the street and in the humble coffeehouses of the Twin Cities, then left again to try to make it in the nation’s cultural capital, where failure was much more likely. In doing all this, in taking risks to pursue his dreams, he showed more courage than most of us.

Like people in other places, Minnesotans–Bob Dylan among them–usually know something about their native sons and daughters who become famous. In the closing pages of his new autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I, Dylan mentions other famous Minnesotans that he felt “akin to”: Roger Maris, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Eddie Cochran, an early rock-and-roller. “They were all from the North Country,” Dylan writes as he remembers his youthful self on the brink of musical stardom in New York City. “Each one followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed. Each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one or all of them put together.”

With a single-minded purpose, enraptured by the folk music that he would later master and transform, Dylan pursued those dreams from Hibbing to the Twin Cities to eventual success in New York and beyond. His songs have always had a passionate following and inspired extravagant praise, even among the intelligentsia. One leading literary critic, Christopher Ricks, recently published a book on his songs, Dylan’s Visions of Sin.

As for this first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles, it is powerful but also curious–powerful because it conveys the passion he has for music, curious because it employs a confusing, nearly stream-of-consciousness style of narrative that jumps around in time. The rewards of the book outweigh these weaknesses, however, as Dylan proves himself to be an unsurprisingly poetic prose writer, if often an idiosyncratic one.

Other reviewers can do more justice to Dylan’s commentary on his career and on music history; as for my views on those issues, suffice it to say that the book is strongest when Dylan is describing his musical influences and the apprenticeship that brought him to his first professional recording session in New York. Dylan wonderfully describes his experience of hearing the music and words of such disparate artists as Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Woody Guthrie, and many others. That said, I will focus on Dylan’s views on the Upper Midwest.

Out of Hibbing

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth in 1941. The family later moved farther north to Hibbing, a small town in the mining region called the Iron Range. Dylan recalls his early years in northern Minnesota with general fondness, and one wonders if he has made the focus of his picture too soft:

“The world I grew up in was…still mostly gravel roads, marshlands, hills of ice, steep skylines of trees on the outskirts of town, thick forests, pristine lakes large and small, iron mine pits, trains and one-lane highways. Winters, ten below with a twenty below wind-chill factor were common, thawing spring and hot, steamy summers–penetrating sun and balmy weather where temperatures rose over one hundred degrees. Summers were filled with mosquitoes that could bite through your boots–winters with blizzards that could freeze a man dead. There were glorious autumns as well.

“Mostly what I did growing up was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too.”

Though he professes acceptance of his life in Hibbing, there is a hint of dissatisfaction in his comment that he was simply “biding his time.” In another passage he recalls a visit to his hometown for his father’s funeral, when he sees again “the flimflam, …the Simple Simons” of small-town life. And he remembers the cultural divide that separated him, a lover of art and music, from his much more practical family. When a teacher tells his father that young Robert has the temperament of an artist, his father asks, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” The opportunities in Hibbing for an artistic youth would certainly have been limited.

Limited and remote as it was, the life of northern Minnesota, especially its radio, exposed Dylan to a wide variety of music ranging from polka to country to popular ballads. He loved rock and roll from the start and formed his own short-lived bands. He sought out and briefly played piano for Bobby Vee, a regional rockabilly singer from Fargo, North Dakota, who would later gain national success. Eventually blues and folk music would claim his soul, however.

Though northern Minnesota is on the American periphery in geographic terms, culturally it did no feel that way for the young Dylan. He claims to have felt connected to the musical currents of the entire country, including the South, from the very beginning:

“Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from…Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

With visions of Jack Kerouac’s road in his mind, Robert Zimmerman left Hibbing in the spring of 1959 on a Greyhound bus bound for Minneapolis, “looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it…” He had already experimented with new names when performing in northern Minnesota. Now he picked one that would stick. When he arrived in Minneapolis, he introduced himself as Bob Dylan.

Next week: Dylan arrives in the Twin Cities.

Weather Note

In our topsy-turvy climate, we are now enjoying record-high temperatures, with Minneapolis-St. Paul setting a record of 50 degrees today. We have beautiful sun in this midwinter thaw.