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Why a Cop Wasn’t the Hero of Fargo This Time

Showrunner Noah Hawley decodes the symbolism of season four of the Midwestern gothic crime series.

There’s always a cop at the center of a Fargo story, whether it’s the Coen brothers’ original 1996 movie or the previous three chapters of showrunner Noah Hawley‘s midwestern gothic crime series. But not for the story’s last go-round. 

This time, the anti-hero may have been Chris Rock‘s morally conflicted gangster Loy Cannon, but the hero of the story was a young girl named Ethelrida, played by E’myri Crutchfield, whose very existence was against the law. She plays a mixed-race teenage girl in 1950 Kansas City; the marriage between her white father and Black mother was literally a crime in that time and place. Yet she’s the moral compass that guides the viewer through this landscape of outlaws and outsiders.

Season four was packed with gangsters, bank robbers, assassins, corrupt cops, and a few fundamentally decent people like Ethelrida and her family, just trying to survive the bloodshed and chaos. As a show, Fargo is always offbeat and open to interpretation, but this season was more allegorical than usual, with characters who were so much larger than life that was impossible not to think of them as symbolic. The woman Hawley says represents “American madness,” for instance, even has the last name Mayflower. Ahead, even more detail on how Hawley built the fourth season of Fargo. 

E’myri Crutchfield as Ethelrida Pearl Smutny.Matthias Clamer/FX

There are many ways to interpret what goes on in Fargo. What do you hope viewers took away from this most recent season?

Noah Hawley: That it’s an empowerment story, really, if you look at Ethelrida’s character.  I really hope that as we move into this award season that E’myri gets her due. [Ethelrida is] a young biracial girl in 1950 who figures out a way to change the rules on the system of discrimination. Teenage girls aren’t taken seriously, especially mixed-race teenage girls in that year. And she really walked out of that story having empowered herself and hopefully having given the audience that feeling of triumph. I always say that Fargo is a tragedy with a happy ending, but I think for her, it’s more than just a happy ending.

How so?

There’s a sense of transcending a condition that’s been presented to you. What I wanted to do was  have these characters grapple with issues that are the forefront of our minds—race, immigration, class, power, money—and look at them in a clear-eyed way in which the show itself wasn’t traumatizing its characters to make a point. 

What do you remember about developing Ethelrida with E’myri?

One of the first things was to try to empower her as an actor and as a woman to come to me and say, you know, this is wrong, or I don’t feel comfortable saying this, or any of those elements that I wanted from her, because every actor you work with is a partnership. I talked about her character’s determination. It was to remind her how outside the bounds the character was, to be aware of the stakes of the moment. The marriage of her parents is illegal, and those people having a child was illegal. So for her to be as precocious as she was, it was really dangerous,

You used that word “illegal.” That’s a term we hear thrown around today as a pejorative and bigoted way of talking about immigrants. And of course there’s an immigrant story in Season Four with Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants clashing with each other, as well as rivals in the Black community, as they all try to survive on the margins of a country where they’re outsiders, where they’re not really welcome.

We have this dynamic in American history which is the last one off the boat is always the lowest one on the ladder. It creates a dynamic in which people whose interests should be to work together are actually working against each other, and for what? A little bit of money, a little more bread, you know? 

Rodney Jones as the boy who would become “Mike Milligan,” son of Chris Rock’s gangland leader.Elizabeth Morris/FX

This season reveals the origin of Mike Milligan, the mob enforcer played as an adult in 1979 by Bokeem Woodbine in Season 2 of Fargo. Like Ethelrida, he always struck me as someone outside of his time and place, a forward thinker, somebody who was not content to be a pigeonholed. Are there parallels between them?

I think so. A big part of the origin of this season was that both characters stuck with me as questions marks. Where does a guy like this come from, you know? In 1979, in a Midwestern crime family, he didn’t fit in clearly, and wasn’t respected in the white organization he was working for, but he didn’t seem to have a place in the Black community either. And so, as I thought about it, I had that image in my head of the two crime families swapping their youngest sons. Then I thought about it a little more and added another layer, which is that he was traded to an Italian family, but he was raised by an Irish man [Ben Whishaw‘s “Rabbi” Mulligan]  who himself was traded and raised by Jewish immigrants. I thought: That sounds like a history of America to me.

That’s definitely a melting pot.

I feel like we’re all in there, mixing it up together.

Chris Rock’s character as the leader of his crime family tries hard to be legitimate, he’s an entrepreneur, but those legitimate opportunities are closed to him. What do you think is the key to understanding him?

That comes back time and time again. Chris Rock has a speech where he says, “My competitors call me an animal. And when I don’t act like an animal, they get down in the dirt and show me how to be an animal. They try to force me to be what they’re calling me. And I won’t be that.” 

E’myri Crutchfield as Ethelrida Pearl Smutny in Fargo.Elizabeth Morris/FX

Ethelrida is just a kid, but she becomes the investigator, the one who faces down all the various crimes and threats. That’s different this time around, isn’t it? Usually you can trust the law in Fargo, but you took a different approach this time.

There’s always this moral scale in Fargo where you have characters who are all good, which is Francis McDormand in the [1996] movie, and characters who are evil, which is Peter Stormare. And you’ve got someone like [William H. Macy‘s] Jerry Lundegaard, who’s in the middle and it could go either way.  In our first three series seasons, the all-good character was always a cop. [Alison Tolman in Season One, Patrick Wilson in Season Two, and Carrie Coon in Season Three.] I thought, well, if I’m telling a story about Black characters and characters who are immigrants, that’s not their experience with the police, primarily, you know?

So how do you work around that? 

This is where Ethelrida came in, who served the role of a cop on some level, but he wasn’t an actual cop. It’s this Rear Window scenario in which she was suspicious about this nurse [Jessie Buckley‘s Oraetta Mayflower] who lived across the street, who kept coming to funerals for her patients. And that started her down the path, which ultimately led to some justice being done. 

The police characters are actually in need of some justice, too. Timothy Olyphant’s merciless U.S. marshal and Jack Huston as a PTSD-afflicted local cop.

That allowed me to say, all right, well, now I can have these law enforcement characters who are morally compromised, and really explore that. You had Jack Huston’s character who was clearly corrupt, right? He was taking money from the crime family. And then you had Tim Olyphant’s character, the U.S. marshal, who who very quickly realize  was totally racist. 

No good choices there.

Your empathy has to go with one of them or the other, so the audience had to work through that idea of who’s a good guy in this car? The answer is neither of them on some level, but as an audience, we’re never objective. Stories that make you ask yourself, “Where’s my morality?” can be very powerful stories.

Jessie Buckley as Oraetta Mayflower.Elizabeth Morris/FX

Speaking of the nurse, Oraetta Mayflower, she’s a serial killer. She seems like a Karen on overdrive, just murderous and immoral and predatory. And if her name isn’t symbolic, what is?

I told Jessie this character represents a certain American madness that comes from being something and denying you are that thing at the same time. She’s clearly a very racist character who would deny with her last breath that she was racist, you know? And she’s a serial killer who would deny to her last breath that she had done anything wrong. You can’t survive being something and completely denying you’re that thing at the same time. So there’s a certain American madness of saying, you know, “I am this noble Christian woman, who is a pillar of moral authority and at the same time I am this patient-killing nurse involved in a really bizarre masochistic relationship with a gangster.”

That would be Jason Schartzman’s character, the ascendent mob boss. Is he just drawn to the her craziness, that American madness you describe? Is he the person who gets suckered by it?

Jason confides in her is that, when he was a boy and he was traded to the Irish, that his surrogate Irish father abused him. His emotional maturity stopped at that age. That’s why he’s so bratty and childish and plays the victim. In the beginning he was attracted to her because, she was attractive, and willing to break a few rules, and snort some crank in the back room. But he was just overwhelmed by her. There is this kind of just dysfunction to their relationship that I thought was funny, but also tragic.

Ben Whishaw as Rabbi Milligan.Matthias Clamer/FX

And coming back to Ben Whishaw, his character is the counterpart, the other kid who was traded and had to fit in, but sort of didn’t. He’s very somber, and mature, and responsible, willing to risk anything for a boy who was traded, like him. Is that a contrast to Jason’s character?

If you want to know who’s really moral in the show, look at their relationship to a child. Ben is the only person who’s who puts the health and welfare of a child above all other priorities. He was a kid whose life and his future was ruined. He became a child soldier. When he’s given the duty of raising this Black kid, he thinks “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure this kid doesn’t end up like me.” Even that child’s own father traded him.

That returns us to Chris Rock’s character, and his less than noble side.

You can say what you want about Chris’s character: Is he a good guy or bad guy? But he did trade a son. At one point his own son says to him, “You’re always in the situation of the more powerful you become, the less safe the people you care about are.” But for Chris’s character, there was this moment, this transcendent moment at the very end, when all power has been taken away from him and he went home and he looked through the window and he saw his family, they were well, and his son who we thought was dead, was home.

But he was the one who wasn’t safe.

He personally wasn’t. That was the last moment of his life. We spent a lot of time in the writer’s room talking about what was going to happen to him, what realistically would happen to him. [Other credited writers include Lee Edward Colston II, Stefani Robinson, Enzo Mileti, Francesca Sloane, and Scott Wilson.] For a man in his business at that time, he was either going to be dead or in jail. None of us wanted to send the message of seeing him behind bars. There’s an ideology in the Coen brothers movies, which is that the things you do are going to catch up with you if you live long enough.

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