Fargo and Wicked Little Letters take on the patriarchy
It’s hard to dramatize the evils of patriarchy without falling into melodrama or historical difference.
Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyons in the most recent season of Fargo (Photo courtesy of FX Networks)
Early in the first episode of the latest season of Fargo (created by Noah Hawley), Dorothy “Dot” Lyons (Juno Temple) fights off attackers who have broken into her home. After she retreats upstairs, we watch the attackers follow a strand of yarn that she seems not to have realized is leading them straight to her hiding place. It turns out the yarn is a lure, not a trail, and we are just as surprised as the attackers to discover what waits on the other end. The rest of the episode is a whirlwind of chaos and violence as we realize this Minnesota mom is more than she seems.
Dot has already had a rough 24 hours leading up to this fiasco. The episode opens in the midst of a middle school committee meeting that has gone horribly wrong: parents and teachers wrestle and punch each other, throwing furniture and screaming in each other’s faces. Dot is arrested when she accidentally tases a police officer as she tries to shepherd her daughter out of the brawl. We never learn what caused a planning meeting for the fall festival to erupt into physical violence, but it is 2019, and the menace of civic breakdown haunts the show at every turn.
Fargo is an anthology series, so every season is a new story with new characters. What connects the seasons to each other—and to the 1996 Coen brothers film of the same name—is a darkly humorous exploration of the forces of good and evil that overwhelm ordinary lives. Usually, the forces of evil in Fargo take on almost supernatural qualities, represented in figures who unleash violence and chaos beyond the control of any one person to rein them in. There are several contenders for this role in the current season. Dot’s mother-in-law, Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is the head of a “debt empire” that has made an exorbitant fortune profiting off people trapped in debt of all kinds. One of the bounty hunters who attack Dot in her home is a payer of debts on a cosmic scale. In another season, the entangling power of debt and forgiveness would be the central story. But this season has its sights set on even more prosaic and unambiguous evil: patriarchy in all its guises.
