A good caricature of the white Midwest, but with a fly in the ointment

Rating: 6/10 (31 October 2013)

Fargo is a satire of the blankness and bleakness of the American Midwest. The movie is set as a crime story, but actually the Cohen brothers are poking fun at the monotonous, unimaginative, and humdrum life there under veneer of well-to-do. The thing is that the brothers are Jewish, and they were concerned that the white populace there would take the movie as what it really is—a social commentary on the goy way of life. Hence the solution, which is a racist solution—As a sop, create a nerdy and contemptible character and cast a colored person for the role, and balance it out. The Cohens picked an Asian because Asian Americans do not have an NAACP and would not picket the movie or create a ruckus unlike the blacks would have. That is why an Asian appears out of the blue in a movie set in Minnesota where less than 1% of the population is Asian. In other words, in a perverse way the Cohen brothers chose a racial solution to the political-correctness problem of their own movie. The dastardly solution speaks volumes for the Jewish brothers' essential cowardice, despite their apparent claim for making a social statement clothed in a crime story.