[COLUMN] On Fargo, Freedom Has a Cost | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The fifth season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo is a meditation on two competing and often mutually exclusive American ideals: freedom and capitalism.

As the title implies, Fargo often plays as a remix of the Coen Brothers’ filmography. This season, the abduction of housewife Dot (Juno Temple) from her home by two hired goons evokes a sequence involving Jean Lundegaard (Kristin Rudrüd) in the film of the same name. At the end of the season, Dot returns home to find the assassin Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) waiting for her, as Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) does with Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) at the end of No Country for Old Men.

However, Hawley's show also adheres to the moral framework that defines the pair’s. For all that critics pondered whether the Coens’ early work was potentially “nihilistic”, or praised the duo’s “whimsy, with its edge of nihilism”, there is often a moral order to the universe created by the filmmakers. The innocent inevitably suffer at the hands of the guilty and the cruel, but those villains often discover that their transgressions have consequences.

While the Coen Brothers tend to make movies about avarice and greed, they also suggest actions have a moral cost. “That’s standard in Joel and Ethan Coen’s films, which often take a brutal, Old Testament tack on morality, defining good and evil along Biblical guidelines, and offering little wiggle room for anyone who doesn’t follow the Ten Commandments, or even anyone who strays from the Golden Rule,” acknowledged critic Tasha Robinson in her overview of the pair’s body of work.

Hawley’s fifth season of Fargo is about how those two ideas – debt as both a moral and a financial concept – are often intertwined in American popular consciousness. That is certainly the case with Munch, a seemingly supernatural force who has stalked the American landscape “from the age of the carrier pigeon and the 600 tribes.” Munch is hired to track down Dot by her ex-husband, Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). When Munch fails and Dot escapes, Roy tries to have Munch killed.

When Munch blinds Roy’s son Gator (Joe Keery) in retaliation for Gator’s killing of Irma (Clare Coulter), the old woman who homed him, he is exacting a very biblical retribution: an eye for an eye. “As the Bible says, what is taken must be given,” he explains to his young victim. “This for that.” Violence and death are transactional, in both economic and philosophical terms. Munch believes Roy owes him the money agreed, but also that Dot owes him for the harm she caused by escaping.

Roy Tillman brands himself “America’s Sheriff.” He is a brash, no-nonsense libertarian who has been elected sheriff of Stark County, North Dakota. He has little respect for the law of the land, arming local militias and imposing his own moral judgment on his subjects. He believes entirely in his own right to self-determination and independence from any external authority. He is a man of violence and brutality, both in his own home and in the larger community.

Roy and his son Gator believe that they are a law unto themselves. They operate with impunity, even shrugging off an FBI investigation into the weapons that Roy has been funneling to his supporters. However, there is always a sense that the bill will come due. State Trooper Whitley "Witt" Farr (Lamorne Morris) warns Gator late in the season, “I know you don't think they're coming. Consequences. But they're almost here.”

Dot fled from Roy years earlier. She assumed a new identity and married an unassuming car salesman, Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl). Wayne’s mother is Lorraine Lyons (Jennifer Jason Leigh), “the Queen of Debt.” Lorraine oversees the largest debt collection agency in the country. This gives her tremendous power and influence. As she notes, “Over 90% of American adults are debtors. In the red, living beyond their means. Kids waiting in the wings.”

Roy and Lorraine are repeatedly thrown into conflict. Roy’s confidence in his own unquestionable freedom brushes up against Lorraine’s trust in financial debt as a lever. “So, you want freedom with no responsibility?” Lorraine chides Roy during their first meeting. “Son, there's only one person on Earth who gets that deal.” For Roy, that is the embodiment of the American Dream. “The President?” he proposes. “A baby,” she corrects him.

Hawley wanted the fifth season of Fargo to “look at debt.” He has clarified that, to him, that idea encompasses “financial debt, yes, but then also the moral concept of debt and the things that we owe each other.” Through Roy and Lorraine, these ideas crash into one another. Two core facets of American ideology are set on a collision course: the pursuit of liberty and the belief in debt. In a capitalist country, can anything or anyone ever be truly free?

The fifth season of Fargo aired in the wake of a controversial and politically fraught campaign by the Biden Administration to forgive student loan debt. Indeed, one of the season’s characters – Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) – first began accruing debt as a student. Much of the debate over debt forgiveness is framed in explicitly moral terms, with economists even using the phrase “moral hazard.” In American consciousness, debt is about more than just money. It’s about righteousness.

These philosophical and financial obligations are intertwined through Munch. Flashbacks reveal that Munch was a sin eater. He was born in poverty, starving and illiterate. “Then one day, a man comes on a wealthy horse and offers him two coins and a meal,” he tells Dot. “But the food was not food.” He elaborates, “It was sin. The sins of the rich. Greed, envy, disgust. They were bitter... the sins. But he ate them all, for he was starving.” In doing so, Munch took on a spiritual debt for a financial fee.

While the bulk of the show takes place in 2019, the closest to the present day that the series has ever come, the fifth season is fascinated with the idea of capitalism as a primal force that predates the existence of concepts like credit or money. When Irma’s son, Kevin (Laurent Pitre), discovers that she has taken in “a boarder”, he demands to know how much the stranger is paying in rent. “No payment,” Munch responds. “Trade.” He explains, “Like the dog in the yard, we guard the house.”

The fifth season of Fargo declares a clear winner in the conflict between Roy’s belief in absolute liberty and Lorraine’s faith in the mechanics of capitalism. “I’ve now told 51 hours of story about the evils of capitalism,” concedes Hawley of the narrative’s resolution, “and unfortunately, my money’s on capitalism.” The last scene to feature either character finds Lorraine visiting Roy in prison. Reflecting Hawley’s philosophy, they are still having the same debate with the same outcome.

Roy opines that prison is the ideal environment for him. “Prison is the way the world should be,” he explains, almost romantically. “The natural order. No apology. Men separated by race. Races stacked with the strong on top. You fuck the weak, you kill your rivals, sleep with one eye open.” However, even prisons are cathedrals of capitalism. Lorraine reveals that “85% of all prisoners are in debt”, and that she can leverage that debt just as efficiently inside the walls of prison as in the outside world.

Hawley structures the season finale in an interesting way. The seeming climax of the series – the government’s siege of the Tillman ranch – is over quite quickly. Then, the episode jumps forward a year, allowing it to unpack the consequences of everything that has happened. All debts have been settled and all payments have come due. This is when Dot returns home to find Munch waiting for her. “A debt must be paid,” Munch states simply. From Munch’s perspective, Dot still owes him.

In this final stretch, Dot and Munch untangle this idea of debt, divorcing it from a ruthlessly capitalist idea of what is owed and due. “Why?” Dot challenges Munch. “Why must debt be paid? I understand keeping a promise. But people always say debt must be paid. Except what if you can't? If you're too poor or you lose your job? Maybe there's a death in the family? Isn't the better thing, the more humane thing, to say the debt should be forgiven? Isn't that who we should be?”

This may be what drew Dot to Wayne. Late in the season, while Dot has been kidnapped, Wayne returns to work at the dealership. A family is looking to buy a car, but their credit won’t allow it. However, Wayne has an idea. “Unless, a car for a car… just trade?” he suggests. Pointing out that the value of the car they’d be trading is less than the car they’re purchasing, the salesman (Sean Tyler Foley) replies, “Except that's not really how capitalism works.”

Wayne pushes his point. “Because what do we do here?” he asks. “Well, people need a car, and they come to us.” It’s an interesting juxtaposition with Munch’s more ruthlessly transactional philosophy, something that the scene reinforces by allowing Wayne to cite his justification for such an idea. “Each has received a gift, use it to serve one another,” he muses. “That's in the Bible. Right?” Wayne suggests that it is possible to think of morality in terms that extend beyond zero-sum transactions.

Dot argues that Munch’s claim against her is unfair. He is seeking recompense for wounds that she caused trying to escape from his custody. “Maybe you're feeling sideways about it, 'cause of what it cost you,” she offers. “You took a job that had a risk to it. You got hurt. You can't be mad at the risk. That'd be like getting mad at the table you stubbed your toe on.” Like Roy, Munch is ultimately seeking to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of his actions by forcing a debt on others.

Fargo’s fifth season is bookended by two competing images of modern America. The season opens with Dot fleeing a parent-teacher conference that has descended into violence as a community turns on itself. It closes with Dot sitting down to share a meal with a paid killer, breaking bread together. While Fargo suggests that American capitalism will always triumph over American libertarianism in direct competition, just as Lorraine will always defeat Roy, this final stretch offers a third option.

Hawley has described Fargo as “a tragedy with a happy ending”, and the fifth season suggests that the path between those two extremes is charted not through the desire to settle debt or live free of consequence, but to navigate with understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness.