Cops in Culture #1: Fargo
Towards the end of the first season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, officer Gus Grimly looks across a cafe table at officer Molly Solverson and says:
Never wanted to be a cop, you know. Some kids grow up thinking about it, but not me… You’re going to think it’s funny, but I always wanted to work for the post office. Be a mailman. I like that you get to see the same people everyday. Bring ‘em that check they’ve been waiting for… presents for Christmas… be part of the community. But, when I wanted to apply, they were on a hiring freeze, and this pal from high school tells me local PD is hiring, so I took the bus downtown…
In this short confession, Gus puts to the rest the idea that cops are part of the community. He sees clearly the separation that exists between him and the people he is meant to ‘serve,’ imagining an ideal life where he does in fact serve them. Gus was never a ‘good’ television cop. His incompetence as an ‘officer of the law’ is what sets the horrible events of the first season into motion. Hesitant, stammering, with average powers of deduction and terrible reflexes, he does not command respect from his peers and spends most of his time monitoring speeding cars on a highway. Shortly following the scene described above, in a panic at a crime scene, Gus accidentally shoots Molly, almost killing her. In this scene, however, Gus imagines a different life for himself, and perhaps, for policemen and women everywhere, one that might have been possible for him had the postal service perhaps not been so terribly underfunded.
Like the Coen Brothers film on which the show is based, Fargo seems committed to humanizing the police; the film, of course, did this by giving us the extremely pregnant Marge Gunderson as the audience point of view, an officer so committed to her job that she visits grisly murder scenes while on the verge of giving birth. The show likewise performs this humanization in a variety of ways; we often see officers with their families, for example, eating and cooking. Yet, I think Gus represents a hidden current in the show’s representational logic, one I want to bring to the surface in this short reflection. Namely, that while Fargo is ostensibly a show about good cops trying to keep a handle in a world of utter depravity and corruption, Fargo also really wants to abolish the police. In fact, it is the officers in the show who want to abolish themselves. The first three seasons, all available on Netflix, contain this particular unconscious desire, as each of the seasons’ cop protagonists give up on being cops and lead better, more useful, and richer lives as a result. Gus himself, shortly following the discussion above, leaves the force and joins the US postal service as he had always dreamed of doing. It is only after doing so that he manages to ‘save the day’ as Molly, a ‘good’ TV cop par excellence, sits on the sidelines.
Molly, we learn in the second season, is a ‘good’ cop because her father himself was also a ‘good’ cop. When we first meet Lou Solverson in Season 1, he is a smiling old man who runs a diner; content, cheerful, happy to spike his daughter’s milkshake with a shot of bourbon when it seems like she needs it. In Season 2, we go back in time to see him as a young man quietly dealing with trauma of the Viet Nam war, working as a small time cop in the small town of Bemidji as he takes care of his ill wife and young daughter. Most of his police work involves driving his drunken friends home, and in a memorable scene, acting as a security detail for Governor Ronald Reagan on his presidential campaign tour. Over the course of the second season, Lou finds himself caught in the middle of gang war that is above his pay grade. Stoic to the end, Lou sticks to his morals despite the political meddling that constantly gets in his way. When the season concludes with Lou catching the perp and settling into a well-earned rest with his family, he remains a police officer, troubled, sure, but ultimately committed. Yet, we know that his retirement is near, and that it makes him a much happier man.
Season 3 breaks with the characters of the first two seasons, and we meet Chief Gloria Burgle, a dedicated officer and single mother. The season begins with Gloria’s department being absorbed by the county, and her demotion. She has to contend with a new boss, a crass and unimaginative misogynist who seems to take a dislike to her from the get-go. A good amount of the conflict that occurs over the first three seasons of Fargo lies in dynamics similar to this one and should be extremely familiar to anyone who has watched any media that revolves around the police; our ‘hero’ cop, honest, intelligent and committed, must fight against the bureaucracy of the force itself, with corrupt, inept and lazy bosses, in order to get anything done. For Gloria, this kind of conflict is literalized in a very specific way in her personal life; motion sensors, whether they be the ones in toilet sinks, hand dryers, or automatic doors, do not seem to recognize her, adding a touch of magical realism to Gloria’s personal struggles as an officer. By the end of the season, Gloria realizes that she cannot face the evils unleashed on her world as a police officer because they operate at a much larger scale; she quits and joins the Department of Homeland Security. In the season’s closing moments, however, as she is finally face to face with the criminal she has been hunting for years, we are left with an ambiguity as to whether even this upgraded form of policing can finally solve society’s problems.
This is finally because the real ‘villain’ in Fargo is not any one of the numerous imaginative and brilliantly performed bad guys the show drafts, but capitalism. Each season deals with an alternative vision of what capitalism means to the lives of the characters whose lives are ordered by it. In the first, it is the particularly brutal logic that Marx grouped under the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. This can be seen in the way that the central intrigue of the season revolves around ‘The Supermarket King of Minnesota’, Stavros Milos, who received the start-up capital for his supermarket empire through a mysterious and secretive boon drenched in blood. In the second season, the gang war isn’t just a simple gang war between two families, but the corporate takeover of a ‘mom and pop’ criminal enterprise by a modern, corporate criminal business, mimicking the wider economic politics of the Reagan era. In the third season, it is the globalized financial capitalism embodied by the rotten-toothed, bulimic and very English V.M. Varga, brilliantly portrayed by David Thewlis. The police, as the tools of the state, are not simply powerless in the face of these impersonal forces, but, as the show demonstrates over and over, are themselves finally tasked with ensuring their reproduction. For the cop characters in the show, the only way they begin to see this clearly is when they quit the force, distancing themselves from the logic of enforcement and punishment which they were previously committed to.