A few less than profound epiphanies

Tonight watching Fargo (2014- ) the series and At Midnight I Take Your Soul I came to a few minor revelations.

The second season of Fargo is a prequel to the first and uses many of the same themes and tropes. However, Fargo also shares many thematic elements with other Joel and Ethan Cohen projects. Common to pretty much all the Cohen Brothers' films is the theme of simple people getting deeper and deeper into trouble by lying, idiocy or malice. Fargo (1996) the film is most exemplary of this concept, but certainly The Big Lebowski (1998) and Burn After Reading (2008) also heavily play on this idea.

In the second season one of the characters is reading Camus. Although there is a short monologue that includes a polemic against Camus, it struck me that the Cohen Brothers could be said to be Camus-esque directors. Their films always center around the absurdities if everyday life and the multiplied absurdity of trying to make decisions in an absurd world.

*Contains Spoilers*

Writer-producer of the show explains the UFO scene to Entertainment Weekly thusly:

In addition to Fargo being “based on a true story,” can you say what was your inspiration for including the UFO in the first place?

The Coen Bros. sometimes put something in because it’s funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s meant to be comic. … There’s a couple things that felt right about it. One is that it plays very well into the conspiracy-minded 1979 era where it’s post-Watergate, you had Close Encounters and Star Wars. There was a Minnesota UFO encounter [in 1979] involving a state trooper. It was certainly in the air at the time. Alternately in the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There they had a [running UFO thread]; certainly it was more ’50s inspired, but it was part of the cinematic language of their movie. So it felt like it worked for the time period and worked for the filmmakers, and is a way of saying “accept the mystery” — which is a staple of the Coen Bros. philosophy in their films. And I thought it was funny. But obviously it affects the story in a very real way. It’s not just a background element. 

I’m just picturing you in the writers room at some point going: “You know what? I’m going to put a UFO in this season, and just see if I can pull that off.” Because I know you like to challenge yourself and see how far you can push it, and you had to think that if you could creatively pull it off, it would be pretty impressive.

An executive from MGM came to take us all to lunch before the season and they said, “Can you tell us anything about this season?” and I said, “Yeah, we’re going to make three fictional Ronald Reagan movies and there’s a UFO.” There was a long beat and they said, “So can you tell us anything about this season?” Nobody expected Fargo to be about any of those things in the second year. Ultimately what I think is exciting about a fake true crime story is that in actual history there’s a lot that we understand and there’s a lot of it we’ll never understand. The Zapruder film captured the JFK assassination, and we still don’t know what happened. It’s not just that truth is stranger than fiction, it’s that what we call truth is a small part of the historic picture. There are so many elements that usually get weeded out of the story so you can have a simpler narrative. 

I've always thought that FX's shows were heavily editorialized in order to not contradict the conservative ideology of Fox's executives, especially Rupert Murdoch.  This was especially apparent in known liberal Louis C. K.'s show Louie (2010- ) where they spent several boring episodes on a U.S.O. tour that the main character supposedly went on.

Watching At Midnight I Take Your Soul (1964) I realized that what makes José Mojica's films so fascinatingly creepy and uncomfortable is the way everyone relates to Coffin Joe so familiarly. It's as though he's that drunk uncle that all the nieces and nephews are secretly afraid of. I think the grittiness, the psychological terror and the sheer abhorrence of the Coffin Joe character in particular and Jose Mojica's films in general are due to this Freudian subtext. It is as though Mojica's alter-ego Coffin Joe taps into a deeply rooted fear from the first time as a child we learn to distrust adults. This is why Mojica's films are affective and disturbing.

Watch the whole film: