I feel a bit cheated. I’m all for ambiguous endings. But, here, the conceit is that they are telling me a “true” story. Then, just tell me the whole story.
He wasn’t lying, he honestly thought someone would come get him.
Yes, and they dont, which is why Burgle smiles.
Also note Burgle got a big promo to HS officer.
She smiles because she is confident no one is coming, not enough time passed to know for sure. The ending is supposed to be ambiguous.
Or (I’ve seen it suggested) she smiles because she realizes that even if Varga walks free, she’ll still be eating a fried Snickers with her son at the fair, and that’s all that really matters.
And, Fiveyearlurker, they’ve always played around with the “true story” conceit. This season (unlike erstwhile seasons) they made the word TRUE fade out first and left the word STORY. And the real conceit this season has been that TRUE and FALSE are not always binary, but depend on many things, including beliefs and future events.
Which brings up another way of looking at it:
The story ends where it ends. Gloria smiles, maybe because she’s confident or maybe because she got what she really wanted, which turned out to be both much smaller and much bigger than anything to do with Mr. V.M. Varga.
That’s it. That’s all we know. That’s all that’s happened yet. So did she win? Does it depend on future events, like the quantum divorce decree? If Varga walks free in the future, does that event reach backwards and wrench Gloria’s smile, making it false, even in the moment?
David Mitchell has a great bit (which I can’t find ATM) about watching sports being an experience of waiting to find out whether you’ve been enjoying yourself. TV can be the same way. I thought I enjoyed watching Lost, but in the end, I was wrong. The final episode reached back in time and made all the time I thought I was having fun solving puzzles and following a coherent plot into a morass of futility and frustration.
For me, the theme of this show, and especially this season, has been that of the Bhagavad Gita. You fight evil not because you hope to win, or because winning will change anything, but because it is your dharma. Dharma is self-justifying; it brings its own happiness and well-being that does not depend on outcomes.
So which is it? Does the happiness of the ending depend on future events? Does it depend on beliefs about those events? Did Gloria and Varga both win, because they both believe they won (or were about to win–does that make a difference)? Does it depend on what the creators think about it, or on what the viewers think about it? Or maybe the story is just floating out there in space and it doesn’t mean anything at all until–bang! We collide, and suddenly, for maybe a minute, it’s real.
The Coen Bros. have a new TV project set to air next year: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=830703
Looks awesome! Thanks for linking to the thread!
Agreed!
I’m just tuning in three weeks late to this thread, due to having only just finished the season…
Some people on here seem to think that the serial killer which was killing Stussys was some sort of coincidence, but it seemed completely clear to me that Varga went and found some ex-con for hire, to go out and kill two more stussys in exactly the same way to get Emmett off the hook. Any denial and coinicidence was just him pretending not to be involved…
Who thought it was a coincidence?
Well, here’s a couple:
BTW, in a recent conversation, my other half mentioned Carl Hiaasen’s books in relation to Fargo, which I read 5-6 of way back around 2000…
Fargo does seem very similar in format. Someone out of their depth, perhaps having made a wrong decision. A stone cold killer tracking them down. Perhaps a separate PI being a foil, in Fargo it being a cop…
Ah. I forgot those. Yeah…no.
No, those are not about the obviously targeted later murders, they are legitimate (and apparently never to be answered) questions about whether Maurice killed Ennis. It seems to me that they went out of their way to make that ambiguous, and I’m wondering if the resolution got edited out of the final cut. Or maybe they just left it unresolved, like they did with “who’s right?” in the final scene.
RJM’s post is definitely about the later murders and I’m confused why people think the murder of Ennius is ambiguous. The ex-conn went to the wrong house and killed him while trying to torture him into revealing the location of “the stamp.” Since he was at the wrong house, there was no way for Ennis to give him what he wanted. What’s not to understand? It’s the mistake by an idiot that sets the story in motion.
his only reference to the later murders makes it crystal clear that he knows they were targeted by Varga.
That is the straightforward interpretation, but Fargo is not a straightforward show. And even conventional crime shows over the last several decades have trained viewers to expect that the straightforward interpretation is usually wrong. There were enough anomalies in Ennis’ murder to trigger weeks of speculation about who the murderer was, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t resolved by the writers. It’s just a dangling loose end now.
But briefly—
If you want to torture a guy into revealing something, presumably you want him to be able to speak, so you wouldn’t superglue his mouth shut. Even after you concluded that he wasn’t going to talk, if he’s already tied (or taped) to a chair and unable to easily call the cops, you could just
a) leave him bound and gagged, but alive, assuming you were bright enough to have worn a mask
b) bop him on the head to kill him
c) stab him to kill him
d) shoot him to kill him, although that would make noise.
I could go on, but supergluing him to death would be way down the list. I mean, how long would you have to stand there and hold the guy’s mouth shut? There’s just no logical reason for Maurice to use that method. If he didn’t want him to yell, he would just knock him out and gag him.
Maurice was a petty criminal who failed his drug test, not a murderer. Could he be nervous and want to get out of there as quickly as possible and hit an old man too hard and accidentally kill him when he wasn’t getting the answer he wanted? Sure. Could he question him at length, conclude that he was never going to get the answer, and then methodically apply glue to his mouth and hold it shut for several minutes to deliberately kill him? Doesn’t seem very likely to me, but YMMV.
There was also the detail that when Gloria found the body, she heard someone upstairs, but he got clean away. If that had been Maurice, he probably wouldn’t have gotten clean away, and he probably would have mentioned that he had very narrowly escaped the police.
But there seems to be confusion about the motive behind the later murders. The two random murders were organized specifically to get Emmett out of jail before he said too much. Varga said as much. He organized two killings that mirrored the deaths of two other people then paid an ex-con to take the fall. It closes everything up. Again, there’s no confusion, it’s stated.
With the murder of Ennis, again it was stated and there is no evidence to the contrary. Maurice might have glued his mouth shut as he was leaving, but most importantly, Maurice is a colossal fuck up and moron. I read an interview long ago where the Cohen brothers said that a big theme of their work is the consequences of bad decisions by stupid people. Maurice is one such moron.
Looks like true love bloomed on the Fargo set this past season: Celebrity Videos, Red Carpet Videos, Movie Trailers - E! Online
Interesting. I find it funny that so many actors protest (perhaps for the benefit of their significant others) that there’s nothing actually sexy or romantic about onscreen canoodling; but then so often we see at least brief RL relationships form between onscreen couples. Sure, occasionally it happens between actors who work together on a show in non-romantic roles (like when Peter Krause and Lauren Graham became an item while playing siblings on Parenthood); but those are the exceptions that prove the rule, as that type of pairing is far lower a proportion than one would expect by chance. It looks like, in the end, when you snuggle up with someone and kiss them in a way that looks passionate for the camera, you have a good chance of arousing feelings, whether or not you act on them.
So we had couples formed from seasons 2 and 3. What about season 1? Did Freeman and Walsh really get it on? Inquiring minds don’t really want to picture that.