joseph@spectra.net.removethis Why Fargo matters. den 10 maj 1998 10:40 This is the introduction, written by Ethan Coen, to the screenplay for "Fargo". Each of the Coen's films deserves close scrutiny, and this film, being their most recent, can be considered a direct look into how story telling is the basis for all films. Interestingly, this is the first time the Coens have had a "true" introduction, and it should be read before considering the true purpose of "Fargo". Introduction to the Fargo Screenplay Speaking of true stories, our grandmother told us this one. It happened in New York, many years ago. Alone one day in her apartment, Grandma heard a knock at the door. She opened it to 'a large Negress', as she would later say, who, tired and thirsty, asked if she might have a glass of water. Grandma invited her to sit down in the foyer and went to get the water. Grandma stopped before reaching the kitchen and returned to ask the woman if she wanted ice. She surprised the woman as she stood over a side table going through Grandma's handbag. As the Negress withdrew Grandma's wallet from the purse she looked up and, for a frozen moment, the two women stared at each other. Then Grandma leapt. She grabbed the arm that held the wallet. A struggle. The Negress reared back and swung her free hand at Grandma's face. Grandma's glasses flew off, hit the floor and shattered, but Grandma hung on tenaciously. Grandma dug her fingernails into the Negress's wrist. The Negress howled, dropped the wallet and fled. Grandma told the story of the large Negress many times and we never tired of it - the innocent ringing of the doorbell, the meeting, the startling character reversal, then the drama of the slapfight. Grandma always became agitated at the point where the Negress hits her and her glasses fly off; the digging of the fingemails into the wrist is always presented as a great brainwave, and the howl of the predatory Negress being put to flight is not just the story's climax, but a shocking culmination of the woman's metamorphosis from meek water-seeker to raging harpy. Either by virtue of its drama or its repetition, the story came to feel mythic. One pictures the black woman a huge Southem Baptist with a sun hat, reading glasses and mountainous bosoms. Grandma, a small wiry Russian, is flying at her like a dog at a rearing bear. The eyes of the black woman roll with fear and rage. Her floral print dress is frozen mid-swirl with the twist of her body; one hand, flung back, clutches the wallet towards which Grandma, teeth bared in a snarl, leaps. 'Grandma and the Negress' - it is a theme that might have inspired great artists through the ages. But in retrospect some elements of Grandma's story test credulity. Do eyeglasses really 'shatter' when they hit the floor? Do people who are tired and thirsty really ascend to twelfth-floor apartments on West End Avenue seeking glasses of water? If not, would a burglar use such a story? And even if so, would it work, even on Grandma? And then - how exactly did the fat woman flee? Did she stampede, wheezing, bosoms a-jostle, down twelve flights of stairs? Or did she summon the elevator and anxiously wait, hopping from foot to foot, humming old temperance songs? One is forced to wonder about the other 'true' stories that Grandma told us. Having grown up in Tsaritsin (later renamed Stalingrad and, later still, Volgograd), did she really almost drown on a flatboat on the Volga River? Well, why not? But did her cousin, who became an officer in the Red Army, really marry a beautiful woman who from her wedding night on did not rise from bed where she passed the time eating chocolates and waxing fatter and fatter until (and perhaps past) the day when her husband appalled, frustrated, despondent - shot himself? Grandma said so. They are true stories; they happened like this. You might think that by virtue of their setting alone they would be incredible to two children growing up in suburban Minneapolis. But no, we accepted all of her stories, either because children are credulous, or because we were credulous, or because the frozen plains of Minnesota are not so different from those outside Tsaritsin. And then, also, our grandmother was not unique even in our Midwestern town. Mar Ralnick, a teacher in our Hebrew school, would tell us about how when he was a youth the Cossacks would break into his family's house - in his account it sounded like a daily occurrence - searching for sacks of grain. Young Mar Ralnick would tell the Cossacks that there was no grain. One day he did so with too little respect, and one of the Cossacks took umbrage. 'And then,' said Mar Ralnick, now an elderly man with Hubblesque eyeglasses, vein-roped hands and waggling jowels, 'the Cossack let me feel his whip.' The tension between the familiar (Mar Ralnick) and the exotic (whip-wielding Cossack) is striking only now, years later, in retrospect. At the time it did not seem strange that these Cossacks searching for sacks of grain should tramp so close to one's own experience. But even if it is strange, that is no evidence that the thing didn't happen - just as the relative banality of Grandma's adventure with the Negress is no guarantee of its truth. It is a fact, speaking of Russia, true stories and personal perspective, that Leon Trotsky lived briefly on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx; a headline in a local paper in October of I9I7 read: 'Bronx Man Leads Russian Revolution.' Why not believe it? The world, however wide, has folds and wrinkles that bring distant places together in strange ways. An adage says: 'All politics is local.' This is a special case of the truism that all experience is personal. A corollary is that in some sense there is no exotica. Everything gets compared to your own experience. Paradoxically, what is closest to home can seem exotic. We can't read about the South Seas without comparing it to Minneapolis, and can't describe Minneapolis, even to ourselves, without it seeming like the South Seas. But to return to Grandma. She emigrated from Tsaritsin to New York as an adolescent after the Revolution. About seventy five years later she began to lose her memory. It went quickly; her speech lost its sense and then she stopped speaking English altogether. For the last year of her life she did speak - Russian. She hadn't used her mother tongue in almost eighty years, or had used it rarely- for some reason she encouraged us to memorize the phrase 'Yayik do Kieva Dovedet', meaning 'By your tongue you will get to Kiev', a maxim whose sense is, 'If you don't know, just ask'. What use she thought we might find for that phrase in Minneapolis, we don't know. But picture the world as Grandma might have, as a great ball thinly crusted with oceans, soil and snow. People crawl across this thin crust to arrive at some improbable place where they meet other crawling people. Some of these people are Red Russians, some of these people are White Russians, some of these people are not Russians at all. They do various improbable things with and to each other, and later tell stories about the things they did, stories having greater and lesser fidelity to truth. The stories that are not credible will occasionally, however, turn out to be true, and stories that are credible will conversely turn out to be false. Surely young Grandma (itself a paradox) would not have believed anyone telling her that she would never in her life see Kiev, but would see The Jolly Troll Smorgasbord & Family Restaurant in Minneapolis. The story that follows is about Minnesota. It evokes the abstract landscape of our childhood - a bleak, windswept tundra, resembling Siberia except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee's restaurants. It aims to be both homey and exotic, and pretends to be true. Ethan Coen I996