On Fargo and That Ending

This is my body, broken for you

I am going to talk about the end of Fargo Season Five, so this is your warning. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. I’ll wait.

The setting of Fargo—the movie and the TV show—is not so much Minnesota, the state, but Minnesota, the feeling. The feeling of Minnesota is an absurd charicature: a dripping level of cuteness and niceness that makes your skin crawl and also makes you laugh. And the flip side of it is an intense violence: bodies in woodchippers violence.

That feeling feels absurd and grotesque because there are times when you’re watching the show that before you’ve finished laughing, a character is bleeding out on the floor. But if the show’s central feeling is an absurd juxtaposition of violence and kitsch, it is also deeply philolosophical and even theological. There is a Cain and Abel level of opposition between good and evil that isn’t grounded in sociology (e.g. The Wire), but rather some primordial battle.

And never does Fargo feel more explicit about that deep metaphysical conflict than in the final episode of Season 5, which pits violence against violence and then presents a ridiculous, yet moving Sunday School alternative to violence. It’s a superbly profound meditation on the cycles of violence and debt.

To take a few moments for summary, Season Five centers around the harmless doofiness of Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) and all the people who would capture her, specifically those led by the militia-leader sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). In its most basic form, this is the story of a woman escaping domestic abuse. But bordering that central conflict are two more characters, the debt mogul mother-in-law Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the mysteriously immortal hitman Ole Munch (Sam Spruell).

The entire season leads up to a confrontation at Tillman’s compound, where we will learn: will Dot finally escape Tillman and will he finally get his comeuppance? Except, it doesn’t. The climactic fight lasts only fifteen minutes, causing the viewer to pause and think “is that it? Has it been an hour already?” The fights between Tillman and Dot or Tillman and the government are just preface for what the show really wants us to consider: what is the nature of violence?

The Debt Must Be Paid

The final third of the season finale is taken up by the reappearance of Munch, who tells Dot “the debt must be paid.” The debt here is nominally that he was hired to kidnap her, but also the violence that he suffered when she resisted him—he lost his partner and his ear. And here is where we’ve cut all the fat: this is a show about debt and violence. Debt is violence. And we’ll get to this final scene, but first we have to deal with its predecessor.

The penultimate scene pits Lorraine against Tillman. Tillman is still proud, because he’s a man who has found a new home. Sporting a swastika on his neck, he has simply traded one violent compound for another (“Prison is the natural order,” he says). But in this scene he meets his match, a villain who dwarfs his evil. He acknowledges it at first “Here, you’d be queen shit,” but it’s the slow realization of how truly small he is that makes for fantastic TV.

In watching Tillman’s come-uppance, we are invited to celebrate. This is the sort of retribution or justice that people have begged for in an era where facism goes so rarely punished. But it’s a trap. Revenge and retribution are traps, just more debt. They are violence returned upon itself with compounded interest.

Lorraine slowly lays out her revenge. “Now your real punishment will begin,” she tells him. And here’s where the metaphors become so opaque, they’re now lighting up like beacons. “Did you know that 85% of prisoners are in debt” she says, offering up a literal and financial demonstration of how prisoners must “pay a debt to society.” And as she lays out how she has paid prisoner debt, saying, “This has nothing to do with that book [the Bible]. It’s an older text, written on stone tablets, in the age of the skullfuckers.” This might be one of my favorite lines in recent TV.

It’s important that the violence here is twofold: a direct return of the violence he did to his wives (“I want you to feel everything your wives felt, every blow each humiliation, fear”) and that the violence is disembodied. Lorraine does not directly get revenge, she subcontracts. Her violence—the skullfucker violence of debt—metastacizes to those she controls through other debts. And this is the violence of capitalism. Nobody takes your home, your car, your livelihood. The sheriff might show up or the debt collector comes, but they are themselves victims of that system (earlier in the season Deputy Olmstead has had her car impounded by a debt collector just after she complained about having to evict people in her role as a sheriff’s deputy).

(A brief aside that people should read David Graeber’s Debt the First 500 Years. Graeber’s work is absolutely essential, but in this context, he tells us “If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who's doing something wrong.”)

Lorraine’s line about ancient skullfuckers is a laugh line, of course, but what she lays out is an ancient sort of evil: a violence of debt. And debt is a violence of hierarchy, exactly what Tillman describes in why he loves prison so much. These two—Tillman and Lorraine—are just two sides of the same coin.

Bread

With violence meeted out upon Tillman, the show might move to a nice denoument where Dot settles back into her life. Good has triumphed over evil. Except, Munch.

Other Fargo villains have had something of a metaphysical air about them (the previous champion Fargo villain was David Thewlis’ absolutely superb V.M. Varga), but Season Five takes it up several notches. In Episode Three, we are transported back to 16th Century Wales, where Ole Munch is shown as a sin-eater (take a moment with the wikipedia entry if you’re unfamiliar).

The concept of the sin-eater is simple: a destitute man becomes the receptacle for the sins of another man. It’s a selling of the soul, but really it’s about the transferrence of debt from the wealthy onto the desperate. And the desperate sin-eater through no actual sins of their own becomes the outcast. Munch is a creation of debt, the lowest caste. And that debt is his code. His code here parodies that of the outlaw code common in TV and literature: “A man’s gotta live by a code.”

So he shows up in Dot’s living room because “the debt must be paid.” “Why? Why must debt be paid,” Dot asks. It’s perfect in her voice, because it’s a seemingly comical question in her very comical accent. And we can imagine Lorraine’s character guffawing at such naive stupidity, “OF COURSE debt must be paid. What does she mean?”¹ She proposes the better thing, the more humane thing “to say that debt should be forgiven? Isn’t that who we should be?”

The entire scene is comical, the perfect juxtaposition of violence and kitsch: Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl) uses his Minnesota Dad goofiness to try to deflate the uncomfortable zephyr in the room (“Well, games on at 7, probably time to make the biscuits”) while Dot tries to convince and 500 year old man to not kill her. But it’s that juxtaposition that keeps driving a wedge into the seemingly unbreakable pattern of debt and violence.

Dot forces him to wash his hands to help make dinner and we get a long take of Munch washing his hands (we’ve given up pretense at hiding metaphor here). We can slowly watch him shrink under the weight of the family scene. “A man has a code,” he starts, interrupted by Wayne handing him a beer.” (Rewatching, Spruell raises his eyebrows in surprise at honey in the biscuits and it’s so freaking funny).

Munch goes on to tell his story over dinner, he tells the story of his desperation. He lived on the moors eating fleas until a wealthy man comes and offers him coins and meal, but the meal was from the ceremony of sin-eating. “The sins tasted bitter.” And from then on he has no sleep, no death, no dreams, “all that was left was sin.”

Here, Dot doesn’t deflect or let air out, she gives us the final connection between the violence and shame meted out by Tillman on her and the violence and shame Munch endured. “It feels like that, what they make us swallow.”

“Do you wanna know the cure?” she offers up. And here is the final reveal—the most preposterous juxtaposition of all—“You gotta eat something made with love and joy and be forgiven.” Drop biscuits. Dot presents Munch with a secularized communion. “This is my body, broken for you,” Christ told the disciples as he explained how he was about to go on and wipe out the debt of their sins. The eating of bread would commemorate a debt jubilee that would free all humanity (“the wages of sin is death”).

Dot offers her own bread, a ridiculousy kitschy take on the Last Supper. And the scene crawls and inches as he finally takes the slightest nibble and breaks into a crying grin.

It’s a profoundly heart-wrenching moment and probably one of the best scenes in TV I’ve seen in ages. Ole Munch’s supernatural weirdness makes him an impossible character to really empathize with, but it’s the gorgeous simplicity of how Dot finally defeats the cycles of debt and violence.

Her’s is a seemingly stupid and naive question: “Why must debt be paid?” But it is precisely the simple naivity of love and joy and forgiveness that ends the violence. It’s a radical idea because it refuses the logic of debt. And it’s so radical because that logic of debt surrounds us, not just in the literal machinations of capitalism and debt that trap all of us. We see it in the comical levels of debt when someone who graduated college two decades ago hasn’t paid down a penny of principal. We see it in the logic of violence between Hamas and Israel, two forces addicted to the capital gains of violence. We see it in the shit-for-brains logic of bombing Houthis who themselves attack transport vessels. None of this will end the violence, but instead add to its debt. It is the logic of debt that is perverse, not Dot’s naivete. And Dot’s refusal is a final victory and jubilee. “Isn’t that who we should be?”

1. Anyone who has briefly perused the comments surrounding articles about student debt forgiveness is familiar with the skullfucker logic of believing that the forigiveness of someone else’s debt is a violence done upon them.