TV’s Fargo and the Philosophy of the Coen Brothers

In 2014, the American basic cable network FX launched the TV series

Fargo. While clearly alluding to the eponymous Academy Award-winning
movie Fargo (1996), written and directed by the Coen brothers (who also
serve as the series’ executive producers), the nature of this allusion is yet
to be determined. Though both the ilm and the irst two seasons of the
series featured plots and characters located in the snowy expanses of South
Dakota and Minnesota, and though events from the ilm’s plotline are
alluded to in the TV series, in each of these instances the series introduces
interesting variations to the nature, narrative and tropes of their shared title.
In what sense, then, is the TV series worthy of its title? What is it that makes
the umbrella term “Fargo” meaningful, when applied to both? Why did the
Coen Brothers, who were not afiliated with the original production, sign on
as Executive Producers after seeing the early rushes?

One hint to the meaning and scope of this connection may be found in
the ilm’s famous opening caption, reconstructed (with minor changes) in
the openings of the irst two seasons: THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events
depicted in this ilm took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the
survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the
rest has been told exactly as it occurred. At irst glance, there is nothing

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new here – such captions are familiar to moviegoers and TV viewers from
many ilms, dramas and docu-dramas based on real events. In this case,
however, it is completely mendacious.

The Coen Brothers have admitted in interviews that the events of the
ilm, as well as the series, have never taken place, and that their characters
are completely ictional. Hence, this caption is not intended to indicate
the veracity of the events depicted, but rather to highlight the essential
impossibility of the claim. The inability to assess the veracity or mendacity
of a claim involves an inherent epistemic failure. What does the statement
mean, then? The answer is obvious: it is impossible to know – and this is
true of all epistemic arguments. The ability to determine their truth-value
depends on a code, a key, an evaluation criterion – but, as critics of the notion
have argued ever since Plato, these are chronically lacking. Assuming the
existence of such a criterion in advance would be circular logic at best, and
self-delusion at worst.

The name Fargo and the misrepresentative opening caption can

therefore be read as attempts to advance a philosophical argument about
the epistemic failure inherent in the human condition. This failure is a
philosophical subtext of both the series and the ilm, and is, in fact, a deining
characteristic of the Coens’ entire oeuvre. The impossibility of dealing with,
and accounting for, this failure is a central theme in all of their ilms.

In what follows, we propose a reading of the series as inspired and

structured by this human epistemic failure. We suggest viewing it as a
natural extension of the Coen brothers’ overall epistemic philosophy. We
further argue that the series adopts a panoply of the Coens’ ilmic strategies
and aesthetic hallmarks – in Fargo but also in their entire corpus – as a
virtual toolbox for depicting this failure. However, once the foundations
for the argument for failure have been set, the irst year of the series turns
away from its Coenian source, even to the point of challenging it. While
sharing the Coens’ epistemic skepticism (and the corresponding aesthetic
worldview), the series adopts a point of view more positive than the
Kafkaesque perspective which is characteristic of the Coens’ ilmic oeuvre.
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 In order to draw this contrast, we irst discuss examples of the Coen
brothers’ expression of this epistemic failure, and analyze the ilmic aesthetic
used to convey it. We then turn to the TV series, highlighting its densely
packed references to the entire Coenian corpus, including, but not limited
to, Fargo. But, on the other hand, we will show that the narrative structure
that the irst season of the series employs describes processes of gender
and identity construction which strikingly deviate from the typical Coenian
narrative structure. Finally, we will characterize the emerging philosophy of
TV’s Fargo – an interpretive level which will show how it is aesthetically
related to, but thematically distinct from, its Coenian sources. Note that
while we believe that this emerging philosophy applies equally to the series’
irst and second seasons, we will concentrate on the irst, as key differences
between the two will require separate treatment.

“I Just Don’t Understand It”: Epistemic Failure in the Coenian

Corpus

The epistemic condition that informs the Coens’ corpus is the

incapacitation of reason, resulting in uncertainty, misunderstanding and
failed action. This is evident as early as in the opening of their irst feature,
Blood Simple (1984), where a voice announces over shots of a ”broad, bare
and lifeless” West Texan landscape that ”nothing comes with a guarantee”
and that ”something can always go wrong”. More than two decades later,
No Country for Old Men (2007) echoes Blood Simple, as it opens with a
West Texas landscape as the backdrop for the voice of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell,
who laments his profound inability to fathom evil: “I don’t know what to
make of that. I surely don’t”. Sheriff Bell’s words also resonate with the
ending of Fargo, where Police Chief Marge Gunderson concludes, as she
drives through a snow-covered wasteland: “I just don’t understand it”.

The Coens’ preoccupation with the limited capacity of reason is evident

in how frequently they critique such archetypal knowledge-based institutions
as courts of law, universities, the CIA and the police. The ilms present these
institutions and their “masters of commentary” (lawyers, professors, agents
and police detectives) as barren, generating nothing but false interpretations.
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There are many examples of this. In Burn after Reading (2008) a false
interpretation of an ostensibly “top secret” document generates a string
of deadly misunderstandings. In A Serious Man (2009), protagonist Larry
Gopnik is engaged in a fruitless exegesis of signs, unsuccessfully seeking to
understand why his world is falling apart.

The most acute instance of the incapacity of interpretative procedures

is Fargo’s introduction of Marge Gunderson. In the snowy North Dakota
plains, Marge deciphers the signs left at the scene of a police oficer’s
murder. Upon leaving the scene, she tells her partner a joke about a guy who
changed his name to J3L 2404 because he couldn’t afford a personalized
plate. This imposition of meaning produces a decodable string, but the code
– and that is the punchline of the joke – has been predetermined by the
manufacturer. Consequently, message and code are trapped in a closed loop
and decoding is unable to produce new knowledge. Presenting the joke just
after Marge’s decoding of the signs – speciically the license plate of the
suspects – implies that regardless of Marge’s deductive reasoning abilities,
her interpretation will never be more than the imposition of meaning on
essentially meaningless facts. This alludes to the open ended conclusion:
the crime may be solved, but it is never truly fathomed.

None of these examples of interpretive failure result from a lack of

intelligence or motivation – on the contrary, many of the Coens’ protagonists
have sharp and motivated minds – but rather from the random and chaotic
nature of existence, which deies reason. A brilliant metaphor for this is
introduced at the beginning of The Big Lebowski (1998) with the tumbleweed
rolling along the streets of Los Angeles, powerless to resist the blind forces
that carry it along.1
In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh has a habit of forcing his
victims to gamble on their lives with a coin toss. The Coens’ characters
commonly protest against this chancy existential condition. In Miller’s
Crossing (1990), for example, mob boss Johnny Caspar demands compliance
with ethical codes after he inds himself unable to even “trust a ixed ight”.
Similarly, in The Big Lebowski, Sobchak demands that a bowling opponent
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adhere to the rules: “This is not Nam, this is bowling. There are rules” – a
demand acceded to only after Sobchak pulls out a loaded gun. For both
Caspar and Sobchak, rules distinguish culture from chaos, but the brute force
of these violent confrontations reveal these strivings to be self-defeating.

In this chaotic universe, all plans are bound to fail. Indeed, the
depiction of human plans gone astray is probably the narrative element most
commonly associated with the Coens’ ilms. In Raising Arizona (1987), the
McDunnoughs kidnap a baby to raise as their own, and all hell breaks loose.
In Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard’s plan to have his wife kidnapped (so he could
use the ransom money to pay off his debts to the car company) is thwarted
by unexpected violent twists. In The Big Lebowski, the Dude’s plan to be
compensated for the soiling of his rug launches him on a rollercoaster ride of
deceptions and counter-deceptions. Finally, in The Man Who Wasn’t There
(2001), Ed Crane’s wish to change his tedious life by teaming in a dry-
cleaning venture goes awry due to a series of deadly misinterpretations.2

In these and other ilms, characters either fall short of or wildly

overshoot their aims; their actions trigger violent plot swings, and their
attempts to return things back to “normal” only makes things worse. These
disruptions are not acts of an “evil God”, or the results of bad luck, but
simply the inevitable outcomes of rational planning in an irrational world.

This immense sense of failure is stylistically manifested throughout

the Coenian corpus, in ways that include some of the brand attributes of
Coenian cinema, such as the extensive use of intertextual allusions and
narrative interplay, or their frequent cinematic representations of logical
conundrums (like paradoxes, oxymorons, fables and parables). More than
anything, we contend that these attributes are stylistic manifestations of the
core epistemic failure we are highlighting. They expose human signiication
systems as trapped in a dead-end world of images and imaginings, with no
access to transcendence, either human or divine.

For the cinephile, one of the most delightful characteristics of the Coens’
oeuvre is their intertextual play of allusions and references.3 Examples are

21
countless: Blood Simple’s ilm noir allusions, the references to The Wizard
of Oz, Sullivan’s Travels and Cool Hand Luke in O Brother, Where Art
Thou? (2000); the homage in The Man Who Wasn’t There to the hard-boiled
detective story, etc. In this regard, the Coens’ ilmography constitutes one
of contemporary cinema’s most consistent postmodern corpuses. Their use
of an intertextual play on references presents signiiers detached from their
signifying context and thus embodies postmodernism’s engagement with
the loss of the source (i.e., the ground of human meaning).

The ilm that deals most profoundly with the absence of source (though
not solely via intertextual play), and that most brilliantly ties this concept
to the theme of epistemic failure, is A Serious Man. Set in 1967, it depicts
two weeks in the life of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish Professor of physics who
teaches (appropriately) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Larry suffers
a string of unpredictable misfortunes: his wife Judith asks for divorce; his
brother Arthur is arrested; Judith and her intended husband Sy Ableman ask
him to move out. Meanwhile, Judith has emptied out their bank account,
so when Sy dies in a car accident, Larry is asked to pay for the funeral.
Meanwhile, he suspects that a mysterious student is trying to bribe him
for a passing grade, and anonymous letters are being sent to the head of
his department, urging the latter to deny his application for tenure. Larry
tries to make sense of those events, but to no avail. When Larry presents
his student Clive Park with the cash-illed envelope found on his desk after
their previous meeting, when Clive had pleaded for a passing grade:
Larry: Well... then, Clive, where did this come from? This
is here, isn’t it?
Clive: Yes, sir. That is there.
Larry: This is not nothing, this is something.
Clive: Yes sir. That is something . . . What is it?
Larry: You know what it is, I believe. And you know I can’t keep
it, Clive. […] I’ll have to pass it on to Professor Finkle, along
with my suspicions about where it came from. Actions have con-
sequences.
Clive: Yes. Often.

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 Larry: Always! Actions always have consequences! In this of-
ice, actions have consequences! […] Not just physics. Morally.
[…] And we both know about your actions.
Clive: No sir. I know about my actions.
Larry: I can interpret, Clive. I know what you meant me to un-
derstand.
Clive: Meer sir my sir.
Larry: Meer sir my sir?
Clive: (careful enunciation) Mere... surmise. Sir. Very uncertain.

Apparently Larry and Clive can agree that there is “something” before
them, but any interpretation of this as a sign, a “meaningful something”
(like bribery) is, as Clive says, “mere surmise”. Larry had presented the
scientiic model for such inherent interpretive failure in his physics class
earlier in the ilm, when he discussed Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought
experiment, which concludes that we are unable to determine whether a cat
is dead or alive.

The inherent human incapability to discover the meaning of facts, to

unearth the sought-after code, culminates in the Parable of the Goy’s Teeth.
Confused and dejected, Larry turns to his rabbi for epistemological solace:
“What is Hashem [God] trying to tell me [...]? And, did I tell you I had
a car accident the same time Sy had his? Is Hashem telling me that Sy
Ableman is me, or we are all one or something?” Larry seems to (want
to) regard his misfortunes as a divine message – all he needs is the key. In
response, the Rabbi tells Larry a story. A Jewish dentist named Sussman
prepares a plaster mold for corrective bridgework in the mouth of one of his
patients, incidentally a goy (gentile). When Sussman examines the mold,
he is amazed to ind Hebrew letters engraved on the back of his patient’s
incisors: ‫י‬-‫נ‬-‫ע‬-‫י‬-‫ש‬-‫ו‬-‫ – ה‬Hoshi’eni – help me, save me. Sussman decodes the
message according to the Hebrew numerical system and as a 7-digit number
and suspects it as a telephone number. He calls it and reaches a grocery
store. He drives anxiously, but it is a store just like any other. Bewildered
and helpless, Sussman visits the rabbi and asks: “What does it mean, Rabbi?

23
Is it a sign from Hashem? I, Sussman, should be doing something to help
this goy? [...] Or maybe I’m supposed to help people generally – lead a
more righteous life? Is the answer in Kabbalah? In Torah? Or is there even
a question? Tell me, Rabbi – what can such a sign mean?”
While Sussman articulates the basic questions of semiology, he also
alludes to the absence of code by suggesting that there might not even be
any question to begin with. The message, if there is one, may be unlocked
using any number of keys but these never lead to the source – to a solution
that provides a sense of relief.

“You Have to Try”: TV’s Fargo

The Coen Brothers typically focus on protagonists who are unable
to accomplish their goals, and their plots generally lack positive character
development. From the failure of Blood Simple’s protagonists to execute
“simple” plans, through Barton Fink’s (1991) writer’s block, to the singer’s
iasco as folk musician in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) – failure is always
accompanied by abandonment of the typical psychological move in popular
ilm narrative. Instead of identity construction leading to the achievement of
an objective at the ilm’s conclusion, the Coen brothers offer us ambiguous
narratives where the characters learn nothing, and almost always end up no
better than they were in the beginning.

This persistent failure takes a new turn in the TV series. Having broken
his nose in avoiding the ist of the class bully from his high school days,
failed insurance agent Lester Nygaard meets Lorne Malvo (a contract killer
who is virtually death incarnate) in the emergency room. The two chat, and
after Malvo chastises Nygaard for his unmanly conduct, Nygaard wishes
his nemesis were dead. Malvo asks him if he really wants the man dead,
and when Nygaard does not say no, Malvo murders the bully with a knife
to the back of the head. This sheerly accidental encounter quickly leads to
a pair of killings. Not only does Malvo keep his part of the “bargain” (in
a manner reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), but Nygaard
soon “proves his manhood” by bashing his nagging wife’s head in with a
hammer.
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 A police investigation ensues, led by sharp-witted Bemidji (MN) police
oficer Molly Solverson and an inexperienced Fargo (ND) policeman named
Gus Grimly, who is a sensitive widower raising an adolescent girl. Gus
had a disturbing encounter with Malvo: on the night of the killings, Grimly
pulled Malvo over for a trafic citation, and let him go out of sheer terror
when the latter refused to produce his license and registration. As beits
her name, Solverson ties the murder cases together and solves the mystery,
but lacks suficient evidence to successfully prosecute either Malvo (who
deceives the authorities by constantly changing identities) or Nygaard
(who manages to pin the murder on his successful brother).

Right before the big shootout in episode six, Grimly states his position
to Solverson:
Grimly: When a dog goes rabid, there’s no mistaking it for
a normal dog. Here we are, we’re supposed to be people,
we’re supposed to know better, to be better.
Solverson: Must be hard to live in the world if you believe
that.

When he let Malvo go out of fear for his own life, and concern for the well
being of his daughter, he didn’t live up to those beliefs. He becomes a “real
man” when he does what he is supposed to at the end.

A year goes by. Solverson has started a warm and loving family with
Grimly, who (much to his relief) has left the police force, and fulilled his
childhood dream by becoming a mailman. Nygaard has attained professional
success, is remarried, and is brimming with self-conidence. Malvo has
a new identity (and appearance) as a hipster dentist. Nygaard and Malvo
meet – again, by accident – in a Las Vegas hotel. Cocky and overconident,
Nygaard hounds the “dentist”, threatening to expose his true identity. This
quickly leads to three more murders, and a renewed police investigation,
which is now focused on Malvo.

When Malvo returns to the northwoods in pursuit of Nygaard, it is

25
Grimly (of all people) who, motivated by concern for his loved ones,
ambushes Malvo in his cabin and shoots him to death. Grimly also discovers
Malvo’s tapings of his victims, thus obtaining the evidence required to
convict Nygaard. The irst season ends in a warm and harmonious family
scene starring Grimly and the pregnant Solverson. All’s well that ends well,
as Grimly receives a citation for bravery, and Solverson is promoted to
Chief of Police.

Even this brief description shows TV’s Fargo to be a particularly

dense mosaic of Coenian references, that reproduces and ampliies the free
play on conventions and allusions so typical of the brothers’ aesthetic. The
word “reference”, however, fails to capture the series’ textual assimilation
strategy, since Fargo’s references are never “one-to-one” correspondences,
but always “side-by-side” variations. Thus, the score does not simply quote
the eponymous ilm, but offers instead a kind of pastiche of its musical
style. The woman who is pregnant at the start of the series is not the
protagonist police oficer, but rather the police chief’s wife, and the police
oficer’s partner is not a stamp painter but a mailman. Finally, while Molly
is pregnant by the end of the series, and does lead Malvo’s investigation, she
remains at the station directing the manhunt, and it is her formerly wimpy
husband who dispatches the bad guy in the end.

The same referential displacement is also evident in allusions to ilmic

and TV texts external to the Coens’ corpus. In an unforgettable scene from
Magnolia (1999), frogs drop from the sky and wreak havoc in L.A. In
Fargo, it is ish that fall from the sky, and another Plague of Egypt, locusts,
is visited upon a local supermarket by the divine Malvo. In a clear reference
to American Beauty (1999), Caroline hugs her husband’s clothing after his
death, while Nygaard (another castrated man) weeps in front of his wife’s
wardrobe after having murdered her.

The characters make oblique references to a hodgepodge of sources of

inspiration. Thus, Malvo is Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men by
virtue of his character; Ed Crane from The Man Who Wasn’t There by virtue
of the casting; and Walter White from Breaking Bad (2008-2013) because,
26
by the end of the series, he is on the run and living in a wooden cabin in the
snow. The displacement of these references strongly suggests the Coenian
theme of the loss of source. Even if every moment in the series is quoted,
borrowed, or adapted, it is very dificult to pinpoint the source, and hence
to appreciate the intertextual references to the fullest. The series does not
present the theoretical idea of the loss of source, but rather demonstrates it
in practice, as the identity of the quoted sources becomes indistinguishable,
due to its overwhelmingly convoluted textual interplay.

TV’s Fargo not only emphasizes the lack of source (which is echoed
in the lie that opens each episode regarding its own truthfulness), it also
highlights the word true by letting it linger for a few seconds after the other
parts of the opening statement have faded out. This element – the only one
that recurs in the opening of all the episodes – suggests that the elusive
concept of truth is what TV’s Fargo is really after. Taking into account
its heavy use of dissociated quotes, as well as their source material in the
Coens’ ilmography, it seems that the series seeks the truth in a quoted
world, whose sources are referential fabrics in their own right.

In TV’s Fargo, as we shall see, truth inally takes shape in the image
of a moral anchor in a world whose metaphysical and epistemological
anchoring is questioned in virtually every scene. In this sense, the series
borrows from the Coens’ ilmography the philosophical question: is morality
possible in a world uprooted from its epistemic ground? In the ilms, this
question inevitably leads to an epistemological and ethical dead end. The
series, however, answers “Yes”, morality is indeed still possible.

Accordingly, it seems highly appropriate to see the series as engaged

in a moral discussion. Not only are the words moral novel an anagram of
Lorne Malvo, but the entire series is organized along two ethical axes,
each serving a narrative move with distinct outcomes – rather than dead
ends. The irst follows the construction of Lester Nygaard’s identity, with
Malvo’s help. The hub of “the Lester axis” is located in their irst meeting:
“Your problem is you’ve spent your whole life thinking there are rules.
There aren’t”, says Malvo. His words are subsequently echoed by a poster
27
hung in the basement of the Nygaards’ home, of a ish swimming against
the current, bearing the statement “What if you’re right and they’re wrong?”

To Malvo’s nihilism, and the poster’s relativism, we may add Lester’s

castrating humiliation at the hands of both his wife and the bully. This allows
Lester to justify murdering his wife, and framing his disloyal brother for her
death. His newfound assertiveness makes it possible for him to remarry,
become a professional success and initiate the second showdown with
Malvo. Having accepted the notion that there are no rules, Lester is a man
reborn: he gets rid of his stutter, and acquires the social graces he lacked. He
is now assertive with men and charming with women. The transformation is
immediately apparent: the bully’s widow seduces him when he brings over
her husband’s insurance policy. Lester’s successful identity transformation
thus stems directly from the encounter with Malvo’s moral nihilism.

Contra “the Lester axis”, a second axis in the series follows Grimly’s
identity construction. It is this transformation, in comparison and contrast
to Lester’s, which functions as the narrative anchor upon which the series
builds its ethical ediice. In fact, this focus on constructing a more traditional,
ethically superior masculine identity constitutes a reversal in the series of
the ilm’s more progressive depiction of gender roles.

In the ilm, a pregnant woman successfully leads an investigation of

violent murders in the dead of winter, while her husband is almost a caricature
of domestication, seen only in the bedroom or the kitchen. In TV’s Fargo,
on the other hand, Molly is partly domesticated by her pregnancy late in the
series, a pregnancy that pushes Grimly to take matters into his own hands.
This reversion to traditional gender roles, with its reactionary implications,
allows the series to do what the ilm doesn’t ― focus on masculine identity
construction. It traces a traditional linear narrative where the main character
develops into a better person and achieves his goal thereby, living happily
ever after, in stark contrast to the more typical Coenian depictions of ethical
and epistemological breakdown.

The hub of “the Grimly axis” is located at his nocturnal meeting with

28
his Jewish neighbor. Grimly is troubled by an ethical question: should
he risk his safety and that of his loved ones, to do justice? The neighbor
responds with a parable: a rich man opens the paper and sees the world is
full of misery and he says, I have money, I can help. Another day, now poor,
he sees another article that says organ donations save lives, so he donates
a kidney. But this only saves one person’s life, so he goes back and says he
wants to donate all of his organs. Then he gets in the tub and slits his own
throat. The neighbor’s point is simple: only a fool thinks he can solve all of
the world’s problems, to which Grimly counters: “you have to try though,
right?”

This instructive fable is an explicit stylistic parallel to the above-

mentioned Goy’s Teeth Parable. “Is it a message from God?” Sussman
asks at the end of the story. And how is the goy to be saved? Or does the
message mean that people in general are in need of help? To these and other
questions posed by the distraught dentist, the rabbi replies rather listlessly:
“The teeth – we don’t know. A sign from Hashem [God] – we don’t know.
Helping others – couldn’t hurt”.

The replacement of “couldn’t hurt” with “you have to try” is at the

heart of the uniquely positive message TV’s Fargo introduces into the
Coenian cosmos. This message is reinforced by an instantaneous cut from
the parable scene to a shot where Grimly is lying awake in bed, thinking
about going after Malvo himself. This, in turn, references the moment in No
Country for Old Men where Llewelyn Moss realizes he would have to “do
something stupid” and go back to bring the dying Mexican some water. This
ilmic reference provides an answer to Grimly’s moral dilemma: if only a
fool believes that his actions have moral value, let us do foolish things.

If one’s moral compass must often ly in the face of common sense,

it would be a mistake to try to reach any ethical conclusions based on
epistemic failure. The ethical sense that motivates Grimly (despite his
inability to rationalize it) is validated unambiguously by the season’s inale,
when he takes on what is likely to be a suicidal mission and guns down
Malvo to protect his family. Doing the right thing and risking one’s life are
29
not contradictory but rather complementary facets of the same act.

The resolution of the moral conundrum is bound up in the series with

the cathartic moment of killing the monster. It is at this moment that Grimly
comes into his own as a man: the moment where the clumsy cop and career
mailman takes up a gun and slays the dragon threatening his wife. Lester’s
reconstruction of his identity as a man is grounded in Malvo’s moral
nihilism, which leads him to murder his irst wife, betray his brother and
(inally) send his second wife to die in his place. Grimly’s transformation,
on the other hand, is based on the solid ethical ground of his commitment
to his family.

As it would happen in an ethical universe, at the end of the series Lester

falls to his death through the ice, while Grimly is seen happy in his snug home,
cuddled next to his loving wife and daughter, and soon to receive a citation
for bravery. This constitutes a considerably greater achievement than the
award for stamp design won by his ilmic doppelgänger, Norm Gunderson.
Unlike Marge, Molly does not puzzle over Malvo’s malevolence, and looks
forward to replacing the present Chief of Police, who (like the sheriff in No
Country for Old Men) quits because he can no longer make sense out of
things. Grimly is also untroubled by the “incomprehensible evil” of a man
like Malvo. He shot Malvo down without hesitation, like a rabid dog, and is
comfortable with having done so.

Converting “couldn’t hurt” into “you have to try” deines the irst season
of the series as a rejection of Coenian pessimism and apathy. The cathartic
identity construction we have identiied, with the clear differences it
depicts between Grimly and Lester, provides the narrative backing
required to validate this moral reaction. Indeed, in stark contrast to the
process that leads to Grimly’s positive character development, Llewelyn
Moss and Sheriff Bell, Larry Gopnik, Llewyn Davis and the protagonists
of Burn after Reading are not engaged in an identity-building journey, and
learn nothing. At best, they realize, as stated by the FBI inspector at the
end of the latter ilm, that they must never make the same mistake again, a
mistake whose precise nature eludes them.
30
Notes
1. See: Douglas, Matthew K. and Jerry L. Walls. “Takin’ ‘er Easy for All Us Sinners: Laziness as
Virtue in The Big Lebowski”, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers: Updated Edition. Ed. Mark
T. Conard. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012, 147-162: 147-8.
2. For an account of the film’s engagement with the possibility and failure of creating one’s future
see: Gaughran, Richard. “‘What Kind of Man Are You?: The Coen Brothers and Existentialist
Role Playing”, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers: Updated Edition. Ed. Mark T. Conard.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012, 227-241; Hoffman, Karen D. “Being the Barber:
Kierkekaardian Despair in The Man Who Wasn’t There”, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers:
Updated Edition. Ed. Mark T. Conard. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012, 243-265.
3. For further discussion, see: Moss, Andrew. “Schizophrenia and Postmodernism: Raising
Arizona, Barton Fink, and ‘The Coen Brothers’,” Essays in Film and the Humanities 27.2 (2008):
23-37; Dunne, Michael. “Barton Fink, Intertextuality, and the (Almost) Unbearable Richness of
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