Without revealing too many spoilers, the philosophy of the main characters was overwhelmingly skewed toward the idea of the “hen-pecked” “downtrodden” American male, completely emasculated by a society that demands respect and a lack of violence. At first then it appeared we were viewing a hyper-masculine awakening of the main character, Lyster Nygaard (Martin Freeman) and cheering him on as he committed his first acts of violence.
Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and Molly Solverson (Allison Tolmun)
Fargo, the 1996 black comedy from the Coen brothers, featured a beloved, innocuous female lead–a demonstrably unique, pregnant chief of police, seemingly full of Minnesotan goodwill and rural sensibilities, yet surprisingly quick and courageous. FX decided to do a remake, and personally, when I first heard this, I felt there was no way a network spin-off could ever mimic the ingenuity of the original: it seemed like nothing but a bad idea.
But after viewing, Fargo is the rare kind of remake that manages to hold true to the aesthetic sensibilities of the original while expanding the world/characters.
Within the pilot however, I had a few concerns. Without revealing too many spoilers, the philosophy of the main characters was overwhelmingly skewed toward the idea of the “hen-pecked” “downtrodden” American male, completely emasculated by a society that demands respect and a lack of violence. At first then it appeared we were viewing a hyper-masculine awakening of the main character, Lyster Nygaard (Martin Freeman) and cheering him on as he committed his first acts of violence.
Martin Freeman is Lester NyGaard: The Emasculated Modern Man
Similarly, the fantastic character of a less-young female chief of police, so outside of a tough and rumble portrayal normally shown, was no longer present, it seemed. Instead, there was a traditional male police chief–steady, measured, respected, with a pregnant wife and a cohort of bumbling deputies. In fact, in general, Fargo is overwhelmingly a male show, playing host to a lot of casual, intense violence.
The themes of savagery and aggressiveness sort of manage to double-back on themselves, however, where male characters are often referred to as predators and wolves, yet the two most savage characters are also the smallest and the most sensitive to bullying. There’s an underdog quality to the violence as those who are humiliated and emasculated, suddenly turn on their oppressors. Breaking Bad subtly led us down the dark side over five seasons, blurring lines between right and wrong all the time. Fargo though goes straight for the jugular and within the first few minutes we see a main character fundamentally change as he commits his first act of violence. Fargo is less about exploring the grey areas and developing an anti-hero in the vein of Walter White and Don Draper; rather it takes a more literal battle between good and evil, echoing its own biblical themes and references.
So, there are obviously several straightforward evil men running around Fargo, but where are the women, I asked?
Allison Tolmun in Fargo
But then, up came Molly Solverson and her ridiculous last name. Fargo DOES have a delightful female protagonist in the vein of the great Marge Gunderson. She’s smart, unassuming, and tenacious. In reworking the original, Noah Hawley has given us a new character to enjoy, but definitely evocative of Gunderson. Newcomer Allison Tolmon (Molly Solverson) brilliantly acts the part and has even been careful of viewing the original Fargo so as not to confuse her character and that of Gunderson: “I think the series lives and breathes as its own entity. I felt that I’d given myself enough time to work with Molly that I could go back and watch Margie and that I would’ve created enough distance between the two of them that she wouldn’t bleed over into Molly, which was my concern.”
Molly is the moral center of the show; there are no grey areas here either–Molly is the good guy, dedicated to peace and justice and an eye roll towards the overwhelming incompetence she encounters from the men in her office. And to give Noah Nawley credit he’s accomplished something very difficult in a female TV show character: he’s made her relatable. She’s competent, confident, silly and quirky, the very-real embodiment of a girl you’d probably watch a movie with on a Friday night.
So while the show still lacks a lot in the female character department, do we consider it a failure or success that there’s at least one, dynamic and unique female character? Even one as delightful as Molly Solverson.
Rachel is a traveler and teacher who spent the last few years living in Asia. Now back in her native California, she focuses on writing about media, culture, and feminism. While a big fan of campy 80s movies and eccentric sci-fi, she’s become a cable acolyte, spending most of her time watching HBO, AMC, and Showtime. For good stories about lions and bungee jumping, as well as rants about sexism and slow drivers, follow her on Twitter at @RachelRedfern2
But this to me is the part we should pay attention to. When we don’t get to be headstrong, sexy scientists with daddy issues, we’re locked away. Because evidently we’re worth a lot, which while flattering, also insinuates that we are prizes that can be traded, bought, or stolen. In any film of the above mentioned genres, it’s safe to assume that at some point, the concerned wife, sexy girlfriend, or charming daughter will be kidnapped. When the body is used as a bargaining chip, the images that flood our minds are women tied to chairs, kidnappers holding phones to our crying faces, and makeshifts rag gags in our mouths.
As much as I would love to have Liam Neeson running around after me all day, I’d rather it not be because I had been abducted and stuck tied to a chair. But this seems to be one of the only ways that we get to see women on screen in today’s high stakes thrillers. In my last post, I talked about the use of rape in storytelling and its commonplace usage as a catalyst in stories. Today, I wanted to shed some light on the use of kidnapping the female body for the purpose of narrative drive.
Women have limited opportunities on screen; we all know this to be true and there are a number of reasons that this is the case. But looking beyond that fact, I think it’s important to examine the effects of these images. I don’t deny that I love fast-cutting action films. But when thinking back to a significant number of action, thriller, and psychological films, it’s challenging to think of some that don’t include the taking of a female body.
Take Blake Lively in Savages, or Penelope Cruz in The Counselor, or Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight, or Kristen Rudrud in Fargo, or Maggie Grace in Taken.
Penelope Cruz being stalked in The Counselor
Each of these films and many, many more, use the kidnapping of a female character, of the female body, to raise the stakes. It appears we’re worth something valuable to the story. But as pieces, not players.
Blake Lively in Savages
What’s concerning with these roles is that they perpetuate the quiet and commonplace commodification of a woman’s body, and it’s become the main function of our characters on the screen. This technique of taking someone hostage has been employed in well done ways before. Looking back to The Searchers, Natalie Woods’ abduction by the Comanches still plays on classic weaker female characters, while actually bringing about the space in the film for in depth character reveals and an odyssey that exposes many people over the course of 120 minutes. In films like The Dark Knight, it feels excusable to play on classic comic book themes of revenge, taking a female character hostage, and having some heroic and uniquely strong man come to save her. It’s a model Disney employs in many of its cartoons as well.
But this to me is the part we should pay attention to. When we don’t get to be headstrong, sexy scientists with daddy issues, we’re locked away. Because evidently we’re worth a lot, which while flattering, also insinuates that we are prizes that can be traded, bought, or stolen. In any film of the above mentioned genres, it’s safe to assume that at some point, the concerned wife, sexy girlfriend, or charming daughter will be kidnapped. When the body is used as a bargaining chip, the images that flood our minds are women tied to chairs, kidnappers holding phones to our crying faces, and makeshifts rag gags in our mouths. It seems strange that Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt can work their way out of any god-given scenario but women, even the smart ones we encounter in films, can’t seem to stay out of trouble.
The problem is that this storytelling device has been overdone and like violence, is now often used as a lazy attempt to raise the stakes and create tension. Everyone who loves anyone knows that losing that person would drive them mad. But does it always have to be the woman?
David Foster Wallace, in his heartbreaking series of shorts in Oblivion, describes all human beings as being comprised of an infinite number of eternities. It’s one of my favorite ways to understand people now. And so I ask, if that’s the case, if we’re all made up of an infinite matrix of capable emotions and therefore reactions, why has film, an art that encompasses so many senses, boiled itself down to simplistic storytelling where the best way to ignite anger or the want of revenge in someone is to “take” his woman?
Kim (Maggie Grace) hiding from her abductors in Taken
Let’s take a look at a few more contemporary films to illustrate this point, starting with Taken, and of course its sequels. Round one of Taken dishes up a nice storyline of a young American woman who travels abroad with her best friend, makes one ill-advised move and spends the rest of the film being sold into sex slavery. Meanwhile, her father, who thank god is Liam Neeson and has a very special set of skills (that he’s allowed to have, as male protagonists are), comes to save her. In Taken 2, shock me, shock me, Liam’s wife gets kidnapped. In both films, it’s the stolen woman’s body that gets things moving and that allows this stretch of space on screen for our hero.
Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) and his special skills in Taken
In Prisoners, a powerful film with incredible performances, who is it that goes missing? Who is made voiceless? Who is rendered a token of something? While in a film like this it is integral to the reveal of character and mystery, again we should ask – why at the cost of a young woman? Hugh Jackman’s character Keller Dover embarks on a manhunt when his daughter is kidnapped with her friend. Because why not? How many models have we seen where it’s not a female? Man on Fire uses the same technique- a young woman, a young child, taken for sinister reasons because by simply holding on to her, our usual antagonists can cash out and manipulate their adversary, who we’re in turn cheering on to “recapture” the victim.
There are, of course, comedic twists like Fargo, which also happens to be a film I absolutely love. But again here, we have a female role whose purpose, while hilariously treated at times, is to be stolen, missing, and the tool in the story that the plot revolves around.
Enjoying the day’s work (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, and Kristen Rudrud) in Fargo
My purpose in highlighting these tropes is that we must pay attention to the trade of the female body. If any characters in the film have a qualm, it is often settled by “taking” the other person’s loved one, and this is more often than not, a woman in their life. Our roles, as reflected back at us on screen, have limited dialogue because there is usually a rag in our faces keeping us from speaking.
We’re fed images of a woman who is made to disappear at some point in the film, left without a voice and made entirely helpless until the male protagonist comes along. This is plot device that is designed to distract from the fact that not enough story has actually been developed.
Remove the woman from this equation. You have character A wanting to get something from character B. There could be any number of mysterious ways to do this. Manipulation, lies, fights, theft, threats, coaxing. There are a thousand ways around the central and overused plot device of the female body. Personally, I think we’ve stop noticing. We’ve stopped paying attention to the fact that we are treated a commodities on screen. Not a far cry from the use of rape as a narrative catalyst, what does constantly kidnapping a woman say about what we are? We have become the stakes.
We have complacently accepted that a crime against a woman is rarely a crime against her. Rather, it’s an indirect attack against her husband, boyfriend, or father. It is a violation of the male character when the female is traded in some illicit way. Even intelligent, scientific, and clearly downplayed but sexy scientist characters somehow still find their way into these traps. We identify these crimes against women as crimes against someone else. This removes us from the responsibility of a committing a heinous crime against a female figure and makes her simply a piece in the malefaction rather than the recipient of the aggression–which she is.
This rids us of human qualities. It rids women of screen time, of dialogue, of control. It once again quietly pushes us from roles as real people in film and in life, to props for narrative mobility. In using women in this way, we visually inform ourselves over and over and over again that our only option is to wait for someone stronger to come. . We’re the thing that they need to get back.
Liam Neeson, come running for me. Anytime you want. But I’d rather it be for love than because I didn’t have enough pepper spray on me to avoid a really shitty day.
*Side note worth mentioning – in trying to find images for this article, it was surprisingly hard to find pictures of the women in their hostage situation. It’s almost like it never happened. Or you find porn.
Mara Gasbarro Tasker
Mara Gasbarro Tasker is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She’s currently working as an Associate Producer at Vice Media and has co-created the Chattanooga Film Festival, launching later this spring. She holds a BFA in Film Production from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is directing a grindhouse short in April and is still mourning the end of Breaking Bad.
Rewatching Fargo the other day, it struck me that Marge Gunderson’s pregnancy barely figures into the film.But I challenge you to find a review of the film that doesn’t note that the character is pregnant. And If you can, I’ll find you ten more that describe her as “very pregnant” or “heavily pregnant” so as to underline this seemingly crucial detail.
Clearly, we find Marge Gunderson’s pregnancy striking and notable. But can we sit back for a moment and examine why?
Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson in Fargo.
Rewatching Fargo the other day, it struck me that Marge Gunderson’s pregnancy barely figures into the film. She gets a wave of morning sickness at a crime scene, it comes up in her small talk with Mike Yanagita, and in pillow talk with her husband. But Marge and Norm talk more (a lot more) about stamp art than their impending parenthood.
But I challenge you to find a review of the film that doesn’t note that the character is pregnant. And If you can, I’ll find you ten more that describe her as “very pregnant” or “heavily pregnant” so as to underline this seemingly crucial detail.
Clearly, we find Marge Gunderson’s pregnancy striking and notable. But can we sit back for a moment and examine why?
Marge Gunderson is curious as well
Marge was (and sadly, 18 years later, remains) a refreshing female character largely because she’s not defined by her gender. She solves the case through good police work, not some kind of “intuition.” She’s incredibly sweet, but so is nearly everyone around her: Fargo gets a lot of thematic and comedic mileage out of “Minnesota Nice.” In this setting, kindness is not a feminized trait.
Almost everyone is nice in Fargo
I suspect the Coen brothers decided to make the character pregnant, and then to make that fact so peripheral, was a way of doubling down on the irrelevance of Marge’s womanhood. And I have mixed feelings about that. Even though it is effectively refreshing to see a pregnant woman represented in film as something more than an active baby-factory, I don’t like the implication that pregnant women are somehow “extra female.”
Marge Gunderson aiming her gun
And I worry that viewers’ tendency to spotlight Marge Gunderson’s pregnancy is rooted in that concept, in direct contrast to her characterization. She’s one of the most recognizably human characters in film, and I worry we all find that so remarkable because she’s not only—gasp—a woman, but a seven-months-pregnant woman to boot. How can she be so competent and likable and human when she’s not only a woman, but a woman at seven-ninths of her peak womanliness!? It’s dehumanizing to women and pregnant women, cissexist, and (to use any feminist critic’s favorite word) all-around problematic.
Nauseated Marge Gunderson
To slightly-misquote Marge Gunderson herself, I think I’m gonna barf.
So maybe let’s all pause before we append Marge’s name or job title with “pregnant” in our discussions of the rightfully revered character. Let’s focus on her appeal, her goodness, and Frances McDormand’s wonderful performance. Let’s make her pregnancy as much of a non-issue as it is in the film.
———————————– Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa, don’tcha know.
Leading up to the 2011 Oscars, we’ll showcase the past twenty years of Oscar Acceptance Speeches by Best Actress winners and Best Supporting Actress winners. (Note: In most cases, you’ll have to click through to YouTube in order to watch the speeches, as embedding has been disabled at the request of copyright owners.)
