This interview includes spoilers for the fifth season of “Fargo.”
When Noah Hawley premiered the FX series “Fargo” a decade ago, it wasn't yet clear that instead of simply telling a longer version of Joel and Ethan Coen's 1996 Oscar-winning film, he was going to put a complete spin on it. the story of the brothers. works in a thread that examines modern American life while reconfiguring some other cultural milestones. With the fifth season ending Tuesday, Hawley has doubled down on his “Wizard of Oz” references, turned Rush and Britney Spears songs into anthems of toxic masculinity and used Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Home Alone” by John Hughes as plot devices.
The canvas is still a 10-episode arc and the paintings are, as usual, a big cast of marquee stars and scene-stealing character actors. But this time, Hawley has used the Coens' original story, a woman (Juno Temple) kidnapped in a plot orchestrated by her husband, as a lens on patriarchy, domestic abuse and the very American trait of being in debt. The season also has sin-eating practices from the 16th century; Jon Hamm as a misogynistic constitutional sheriff with nipple rings; and Dave Foley as an eyepatch-wearing lawyer for one of the Federalist Society's biggest donors, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
“The feedback I was getting from FX on the scripts was that this was our funniest season,” Hawley said last week in a phone interview. “Then, of course, when you stand it up, it's the story of a kidnapped woman with undertones of domestic violence.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
This season of “Fargo” felt much darker than the others, which are already dark. Did you feel that while writing it?
If you do it right, it feels real. Then it's about navigating the area so you can have the absurdity of the Coen brothers but also tell a serious dramatic story. In terms of being the darkest, for you, is it because intimate partner violence isn't really something you can joke about? Or are you more pessimistic about people?
I think a little about both. Ole Munch and his backstory. Jon Hamm's character and his treatment of his entire family. The puppet show was extremely disturbing. It's all a bit different than watching Jesse Plemons grind Kieran Culkin into hamburger meat in Season 2, which was gross but still had some humor.
The challenge of the show is to have a tone of voice, and the question is how to tell the story in that tone of voice. Juno's character is very resourceful: she never gives up and maintains her positivity until it is literally impossible to do so. That lasts about an episode, and then she escapes again and makes her own luck. My hope was that it would counteract the darkness, that she would be as light in spirit as she was.
The puppet show was a way to tell a very difficult story as one would tell it to a child. The director of that episode wanted the puppets to look more like the characters, he wanted to make them puppets from below, he wanted the mouths to move, and I thought the more realistic it was, the worse it would be. We tell you this very difficult story, but we try to do it in the kindest way possible. The fact that in the middle of a multi-million dollar production we are doing a 10-minute puppet show, there is some humor in it. My hope was that we were addressing this issue in a creative way that ultimately didn't seem abusive to the audience. As the son of a mother who wrote nonfiction books about incest and domestic violence, I think it's important that we tell these stories and honor the struggle that women go through in a way that doesn't shy away from it, but also doesn't feel like it. gratuitous.
It reminded me of “Punch and Judy,” which was kind of raw domestic violence as entertainment.
That first puppet show Dot enters is “Punch and Judy” style. Obviously at that moment, there's nothing funny about her; The sounds of violence are not puppet against puppet, they are person against person, and there are flashes of hospital photos from when she was abused. But yeah, it's also a way to look and say, “Why did anyone ever think this was funny?” There are a lot of needles in the show, including “Hey Joe,” which is the song about a man who is going to kill this woman; It's a song about domestic violence. Including these things is also a way to shed light on things we take for granted as part of our culture.
What attracted you to “The Nightmare Before Christmas”?
It's a family favorite in my house. It's a Christmas movie and a Halloween movie, but it also struggles with morality on some level. A specific choice is always better. I spend a lot of my time talking to movies I loved: “Fargo” and now “Alien.” [Hawley’s “Alien” series for FX is in production.] I think there's something interesting about reusing something familiar into something new.
In general, our culture has this interest in retelling stories differently; For example, it was just announced that “Purple Rain” will become a musical. As a storyteller, do you ever think that means we've run out of things to say?
No. Families get together and tell stories. How many times have you talked about that summer when Dad drove the car to the lake or something? There's something calming about revisiting stories, the kind of old campfire storytelling tradition: “Tell me that story again.” There is a nostalgia factor; “Purple Rain” is something from the 80s that has a lot of meaning to a lot of people. I think when people find themselves in those moments where they're searching for meaning, they're looking for something inherently meaningful to them rather than something new.
Ole Munch was a new kind of character for “Fargo,” although as a seemingly ageless man in 16th-century Wales, “new” is not the first concept that comes to mind. How much of his inflection and behavior was in the script and how much came from the actor who plays him, Sam Spruell?
The idea from a dialogue standpoint was that he was a man who sold his soul, so he basically gave up the sense of I or me. He never refers to himself as I or I; he is always “a man.” He's kind of an elemental figure and an ancient character who can't seem to die. As he says in the last episode, “I didn't talk to anyone for a century.” So what we talked about was that he had to relearn how to speak, which is why he has this unbeatable accent. Sam was a tremendously good partner in taking on this role and really trying to build this character from the ground up. The joy that he expresses in the final image of the season, the depth of real forgiveness and redemption, moves me so much every time I see it because that idea of forgiveness is so profound. At some point, we will all have to admit that we hurt each other and we will have to zero out the ledger, to use a debt metaphor, and start over.
In the ninth episode, Lorraine talks on the phone to someone she refers to as “Bill”, complaining that she can't kill someone. She assumed it was supposed to be William P. Barr, the former attorney general?
Yes, she is the largest donor to the Federalist Society. One of the things I tried this season was to basically not tell a story about the poles of American life. All the characters could be Republicans on some level. point and wayne [David Rysdahl] They may not be Trump voters, but they would vote for Romney. They are somewhat socially conservative. Lorraine is the Koch brothers' billionaire class. So Roy, obviously, is the new far-right, American Republican “Tiger King” guy. He wanted to have the conversation within that kind of social dynamic, versus Republican-Democrat, liberal-conservative. These people are all satellites of the same planet, and yet they don't seem to speak the same language.
I read an interview before this season started where you said your interest in this world had been reinvigorated. Is this still the case?
I told FX I thought this would be the last one, but I got halfway through and thought, Who am I kidding? It is a unique state of mind to tell a story. Under the auspices of telling a crime story, I can make something that defends decency, that is also a kind of philosophical document, and that is as suspenseful as you want. It fights against morality and can be extremely fun if you do it right. There aren't many other things that can convey that tone of voice and also allow me to honestly explore America and what it means to be an American, which is a topic that's getting more and more interesting, isn't it? I am supporting the United States. If I can tell these stories in which basically decent people prevail over the forces of cynicism and corruption, I would be remiss if I didn't tell as many as I could.
And you're probably the first person who could make Jon Hamm look completely repulsive.
He did it himself. He and I talked about it from the beginning: “This is the character you're going to have to immerse yourself in, and it's not that old-time Bible-thumping sheriff caricature.” He's the nipple ring, the Tiger King, the sexual trunk, abusive, moralizing – it's such a strange psychology to be so narcissistic. He tells Munch from the beginning that if a man is good, if his heart is in the right place, in his mind he can do nothing wrong. And under that belief, he does so many horrible things without ever admitting to himself or others that there is anything wrong with them.
This is a guy who can shoot another man in the neck in his own living room because the man hits his wife, which is something he does himself. Then he can calmly explain how he is going to get his way while he makes the wife complicit in the lie. Creating your own reality in that way was a challenge that Jon really got into and I think the evidence of his success is on screen.
