Cinematic Zodiac

This season of Fargo enters its second act with a bang, or, more specifically, the crack of a high powered rifle shot. The shootout in the woods that opens “The Gift of the Magi” is as brutal and shocking as the show needs it to be: the death of one silent Kitchen brother as well as Joe Bulo, a character who the writers invested no small amount of time and effort in, achieves the intended effect of telling the audience that no one is safe from now on, a sense of danger that i

This week’s episode of Fargo, titled “Fear and Trembling,” reinforces the second season’s focus on family. The Gerhardts, the Blomquists, and the Solversons have been knotted together by circumstance, and, despite internecine struggles, are forming battle lines for the coming war. The Gerhardts are the largest and most complex of these organizations, with three generations vying for control over the crime family’s legacy: Dodd and Floyd butt heads at nearly every opportunity,

​​​​This week’s episode of Fargo is titled “The Myth of Sisyphus,” after, assumedly, the underworld fate of that eponymous Greek hero. Sisyphus was cursed by endless toil without progress, yet this episode features quite a bit of progress for all of the characters: Lou and Sheriff Larsson identify Rye Gerhardt as the likely suspect in the Waffle House murders, Floyd Gerhardt begins to muster the troops for the looming war, the Blomquists put the final touches on their coverup

Marriage is the fundamental unit of American society. It is the most common legal agreement between two people, and tracking the progress of who is allowed to marry whom across history is a quick and easy way to judge how progressive American society is at any given point. Marriage was a key theme in the first season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo: Lester’s initial uxoricide and remarriage and then uxoricide-by-proxy, the widow Hess’s attempts to cash in on her late husband’s murder,

One of the defining moments of my cinematic life was my mother showing me the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo when I was twelve years old. Her motivation was simple: I had just been assigned North Dakota for my fifth grade state project (as an aside, my parents gave up very early in my life on censoring films and music for content and instead [wisely] filtered what was and was not okay for me to watch through the lens of quality. For example, all it took to convince them to take me