“Building an Empire State”: From Skyscraper Modernity to the American Midwest

The second season of Fargo (FX, 2014–) is devoted to the fall of an empire in the Midwest. Indeed, the entire season presents the middle region as trapped between that which lies westward (the corporate mob in Kansas City and Hollywood further onward) and eastward (political power in Washington, DC). In the season finale “Palindrome,” Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) catches one of the Gerhardts’ lackeys pilfering from the family homestead now that almost everyone in the clan is dead. The irreverent gangster gloats at his new status as king of all he surveys. When the surly lackey, knowing he is about to die, challenges Mike by declaring that we do not have kings in the United States, Milligan corrects him: we just call them something different.

Perhaps Mike is referring to the presidency, as the season-long narrative is set in 1979 and includes Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the White House. In an earlier episode, Reagan’s tour bus travels from the east to the west through the north-central states, engaged in various campaign stops ahead of the 1980 presidential election. We meet the future president ignominiously, as he is urinating at a highway rest stop. Star of cult films such as director Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and its various sequels, Bruce Campbell’s intriguing impersonation of Reagan tinges the “morning in America” optimism of his candidacy with a more horrifying future in which Reagan’s vice president George Bush would become the patriarch of a clan of governors, one of whom would go on to become a president who sank the twenty-first-century United States into unending war and financial crisis. Are the Bushes the renamed kings to whom Milligan points?

Within this context, season two of Fargo depicts the end of one chapter and the beginning of another in a double sense. The crime syndicate (the Gerhardt family) is replaced by a faceless capitalist empire. The neo-conservative presidents (Reagan and the Bushes) displace the liberal Carter administration. A new order supplants the old one. However, this does not entail fundamentally qualitative or quantitative changes to the system. Rather, it is more like a repetition of history as the title of the final episode, “Palindrome,” implies.

By emphasizing such repetitions, this season creates a television version of Karl Marx: “Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” but “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”¹ Milligan, as a kind of revolutionary, expects that the new opening empire will bring power and fortune to him and his clan. The US citizens might imagine their ballots will bring “morning to America,” or even “make America great again.” What they actually witness, though, is a bleak, even worse, future. In some grotesque replication of Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), an evil crime syndicate is replaced by petty, greedy merchants.² Any ostensibly revolutionary acts are no more than a trigger of another rerun. As will be discussed later, the show eventually invokes Albert Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” as the only form of resistance to this historical cycle.³ American citizens must embrace their ill-fated collective status as the seemingly tragic Greek hero. They will push the political rock up the mountain again and again, fully aware of the fact that the repetition will never end. Is this absurd or noble? Fargo gives ambivalent answers throughout the season.

Fargo’s engagement with the Carter/Reagan election oddly resonates with a recent film, writer/director Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women (2016). The film’s adoptive clan of women (and a few male hangers-on) gather to watch Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “crisis of confidence” speech. On July 15, 1979, the President delivered what is now derisively referred to as “the malaise speech.” Yet in retrospect, living under the crypto-Fascism of Donald Trump, the speech sounds shockingly prescient: “There is a growing disrespect for government, for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness, or reassurance. But it is the...