Inside The Gospel According To ‘Fargo’
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) Season five of “Fargo” welcomes commentary on Christian ideas of forgiveness, but what it misses about those ideas is as important as what it understands.
I’m a big fan of “Fargo” (the original movie classic by The Cohen Brothers), which I consider one of my favorite films of all time. I have never seen the show until its fifth season, but I understand and love the premise, which largely follows the film.
The show is an anthology where each season focuses on a different set of characters set in the American midwest, primarily Minnesota. This season follows Dorothy “Dot” Lyons (played by Juno Temple) who seems like a typical housewife until she gets kidnapped and escapes, leading to questions about her past.
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“Fargo,” both the original movie and the series, has a solid schtick that is simple but incredibly effective: Combine folksy Midwestern charm with violent human wickedness. Watching people who either are — or at least present themselves as — charmingly simple and wholesome fight to the death over petty human vices, but ultimately seeing what is wholesome win out, creates a cognitive dissonance. It makes it impossible not to laugh on the one hand, but be deeply engaged on the other.
Watching a folksy housewife politely fight off two killers, or a brutal mercenary awkwardly sit down to eat a biscuit at a dinner table, is exactly what makes “Fargo” appealing. While this season can often be a bit of a slog, it’s this balance that creates the majority of each episode’s enjoyment in its most tedious moments.
The wickedness that this season focuses on is misogyny and abuse, both worthy topics. Dot is an escapee from an abusive husband who sends hitmen to track her down and bring her back. The series goes into largely tasteful, but still painful, detail of how he groomed and abused her and others. We also watch him pass his misogyny down to his son. We see Dot’s rich mother-in-law have to fight the sexism of her business partners.
The problem is that the show doesn’t have enough to say about these issues to last 10 episodes. Pretty much every insight it has on these topics you get by the second episode. Each one that follows is just banging the same drum over and over again. The movie “Fargo” worked because it was barely over 90 minutes. But when you’ve got 10 hours, your satire and critiques have to go deeper. They say “misogyny = bad,” but they rarely pop under the hood to truly understand it in deeper ways. Of course, the other problem is in the rare instances when their critiques do go deeper, they end up being nonsense.
Sadly, much of their takedown of misogyny ends up falling into anti-male sexism. This movie leans heavily into the “Doormat Ken or Deploriable Ken” trope where men can only be weak or evil. In this case, the good men in the story do whatever the women in their life say without standing up to them.
The most toxic off-handed comment made was when one of the good men is found dead. One of them remarks that it turns out he had a lot of sisters and “that explains why he was so nice.” In fact, we know that it’s more male influence in a young man’s life (specifically a close relationship with one’s father) that is one of the biggest things that can help prevent toxic masculinity.
What will happily surprise many is how often the show both overtly and covertly explores and affirms the Christian faith. For most of the show, the only person who talks about faith is the central villain, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Roy is the beloved but corrupt and tyrannical small-town sheriff (played to perfection by John Hamm) who quotes the Bible while claiming God has made a natural order for man to be free and for men to rule over women, which amounts to abusing every wife he has while arming himself and his followers to deny and defy any federal oversight.
In this way, he’s a blunt critique of conservative, pro-patriarchy Christians like theologian Doug Wilson who claim to be standing for God against a corrupt and pagan secular culture. Again, this is a fascinating part of American Christian subculture to explore, but it fails to spend any real time in its 10-episode arc unpacking it in any meaningful way. All it does is hammer home the stereotype that it did in the first episode all the way to the last one.
It’s at the end where the season takes a turn with how it portrays faith. For example, this happens when Dot and her family, when confronted by the enigmatic Ole Munch, who claims he must kill her because her debt “must be paid.”
She pushes back: “Why must the debt be paid? … Why can’t it be forgiven?”
She also argues that many people can’t pay the debt, often not by any fault of their own. Dot then shows him hospitality by inviting him to share a family meal. They all say grace and Munch opens up and explains how he was abused in the past (a ritual where rich people passed their sins onto a peasant who “ate” them) and now there was nothing in him but sin.
Dot replies that abusers always try to make their victims feel like the abusers’ sins are the fault of victims. But the cure for “eating” sin is to “eat food made with love and joy and be forgiven.” The whole thing ends with a shot of him awkwardly taking a bite of a biscuit.
People who are familiar with Christian theology will notice the overt symbolism. Jesus came and died because we couldn’t pay the debts of our sin. He instead forgave us our debts (Colossians 1:14) and welcomed us into his family (Hebrews 10:19). As a result, Christians are called to forgive each other and be welcoming – particularly to our enemies — into the family of God (Ephesians 4:32). Being redeemed by eating the food of that family is much like taking Holy Communion.
This type of Christian forgiveness is important, yet rarely portrayed on screen. It’s a lot like at the end of the first season of “Ted Lasso,” which shows one of the most radical and complete acts of forgiveness I’ve ever seen. Things like this are what repair the world and what Christ has called us to do.
That said, there are important ways where the Gospel according to “Fargo” diverges from Christian beliefs. When Dot argues for why we should forgive people’s debts, she says it's because people can be in debt for reasons that isn’t their fault. When she talks about being forgiven from sin, she talks about the sins abusers have gaslit you into believing about yourself when you’re actually the victim.
The Christian Gospel is more radical. It says that we are sinners and debtors because we deserve to be (Romans 1:18-32, 3:10-20), but God forgives us anyway (Romans 3:21-31, 1 John 1:9-10) and therefore we are called to forgive others who deserve judgment as well (Matthew 6:14-15). We are called to fight for victims; we are not called to forgive them only if they are victims, but despite the fact that they’re sinners.
You can see the difference the “Fargo Gospel” makes in its treatment of who it sees as victims and victimizers. For misogynist abusers like Roy, we are treated to constant and repeated cathartic humiliations (to the degree that he stops feeling like a threatening antagonist very quickly) and a finale that calls us to cheer that he spends the rest of his life as an abuse victim. Meanwhile, the people that it treats as victims (because it gave us a backstory of abuse for them) get sympathy and forgiveness.
The problem with the “Fargo” version of forgiveness is that it forces us to blind ourselves to our own sins while demonizing others in order to justify our seat at the table. If only victims deserve forgiveness — and we need forgiveness — we must tell ourselves a story where we’re the victim. And if victims need abusers, we must find people who’ve abused us (and therefore don’t deserve forgiveness) who we can punish.
The answer is to see everyone as both a victim and a victimizer, which is what we are, and to defend everyone when they’re abused. That doesn’t mean that we will all be equally victim and victimizer at the same rate. Dot and Roy don’t both need to be forgiven and defended equally. But they both need to be forgiven and defended at least a little for something. Easier said than done? Yes. But it’s a heck of a lot harder if we don’t even know that’s the standard we should be setting.
“Fargo” deserves applause for dealing with difficult social and theological topics and for the ways it gets them right. But its agonizing repetitiveness and its social and theological missteps need to be noted as well so that we make sure we can actually solve the problems it is so eager to critique.
All five seasons of “Fargo” are now available for streaming on Hulu.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.