Minnesota Nice: Fargo

I’ve been thinking about the Joel and Ethan Coen movie Fargo (1996). I’ve been trying to figure out why it left me elated and flattened all at once. A big part of my mixed reaction is due, I’m convinced, to the film’s setting in the state on Minnesota (with a preface and afterword in North Dakota). I happen to have recently moved to Minnesota [in 1994], and I went to see Fargo with all the anticipation of the newly baptized to their first church meeting. Before Minnesota, I’d lived on the East Coast, and trust me, nothing on the East Coast can in any way prepare you for what is west of it. The Minnesota I’d been creating for myself since my arrival was necessarily more exotic than prosaic. I really wasn’t interested in how it conformed to what I knew, only how it differed.

The key to the difference was the Mississippi River, legendary divider of America’s East and West. The epic grain elevators that flank its shoreline give the place a purpose that is mythic—feeding America. Here was where the harvest of the Great Plains was distributed so that a nation would never go hungry. A couple of car rides later, the grain silos were joined by the ore docks, which spread up along the shore of Lake Superior from Duluth. Unlike the wholesome volumetrics of the concrete elevators, the ore docks are spidery and sinister. Railroad tracks feed down to the lake from the Iron Range and disappear behind chain-link fencing through jumbles of smoking outbuildings and onto silhouetted trestles where the ore is loaded onto waiting tankers. For me, ore is almost better than grain—more brutal, bigger businesses and bigger bastards running them. Also the names of the