For more than a century, artists and intellectuals have castigated everyday folks who believe in hard work, personal responsibility, family, and God. The elite see middle-class Americans as drudges, materialists, consumerists, and exploiters, mired in commerce and industry, holding to pre-Enlightenment values and beliefs, ignorant of art. They give us unflattering (in their view) names: the bourgeoisie, philistines, Tea Partiers. Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, indirectly coined the term "bitter clingers," referring to guns and God and antipathy "toward people who aren't like them." So powerful is the disdain of the elite for the common man and woman that the Clever Ones now put great effort into saving children from their misguided, uncultured, immoral parents. See, e.g., unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, now a retired and, it is said, distinguished professor of public education. Karl Marx would have broken the grip of the bourgeoisie through revolution; modern radicals hope to do the same by corrupting the schools, mocking the bourgeoisie, and fundamentally transforming the institutions and processes of civilization itself. You can see this process at work on any given day by reading the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle, a self-anointed vanguard against the likes of you and me. We are unlovely, uncultured men and women of little brain and less heart, unlike our betters in, say, the Occupy movement. Modern artists, many of them, self-consciously set out to shock and insult common folks (épater la bourgeoisie, at they say).
What a shock it is, then, to see the most gifted American filmmakers of our time -- Ethan and Joel Coen -- dismantle the pretensions of the elite in one of the most brilliant scenes . . .
. . . in cinematic history. (I say cinematic even though I am talking about television because their recently-complete series -- Fargo -- was cinematic in origin and realization.)
The intricate plot is built around a competent, hardworking, righteous state trooper named Lou Solverson and his equally decent father-in-law, Hank Larrson, the local sheriff. Lou's wife Betsy (Hank's daughter) suffers advanced-stage cancer. Near the end of the tenth and last episode, she regains consciousness in bed and has this conversation with a teen caregiver, Noreen Vanderslice, a budding intellectual, deep into modern literature.
NOREEN. So . . . is it . . . do you feel it?
BETSY. Feel what?
NOREEN. My aunt lost her bosom to cancer. Said it felt like somebody took a hot poker and put it through her heart.
BETSY. No, not like that. Not yet. . . . You know, sometimes you get a peach from the bowl and one side is ripe and yellow and the other is black and moldy. That's the only way I can think to describe it.
NOREEN. Camus says knowing we're gonna die makes life absurd.
BETSY. Well, I don't know who that is. I'm guessing he doesn't have a six-year-old girl.
NOREEN. He's French.
BETSY. Ugh. I don't care if he's from Mars. Nobody with any sense would say somethin' that foolish. . . . We're put on this earth to do a job, and each of gets the time we get to do it. . . . And when this life is over and you stand in front of the Lord . . . well you try tellin' him it was all some Frenchman's joke.
That's the absolute high point of the entire series, but the next scene ain't bad either. Lou Solverson is driving home with Peggy Blomquist under arrest in the back seat. She's a proto-feminist whose series-long efforts to "actualize" have led to almost unimaginable carnage and to the moral corruption of her bourgeoisie husband Ed, a butcher. His life spins out of control as he tries to protect Peggy. Now he is now dead himself.
As Lou's police cruiser drifts through South Dakota on the way home to Minnesota, Lou breaks into a soliloquy about what happened at the end of the Vietnam War.
LOU. I was there at the end, you know, after the war, when Saigon fell, on the USS Kirk, patrollin' the coast. And when the country went, it went fast. And we had, like, twenty-four hours to get everybody out. And not just Americans, but our allies, the South Vietnamese, all packed on boats and helicopters. We stood on the deck and waved 'em in. And one by one, they land, unload, and then we pushed the whirly-birds into the sea. Damnedest thing. But then this Chinook comes. And those things, well you can't just land one on a ship this size, so we waved 'em off. But the pilot's got his whole family inside, and he's runnin' out of fuel, so it's now or never. So he hovers over the deck. People start jumpin', scared or not, onto the ship. There's a baby. Literally. A tiny baby. The mother just, just drops him. And one of my boys, like catchin' a ball, just sticks out his hands. [Sighs] So now everybody's out. And I'm thinkin', how the heck is this pilot, right, how is he gonna get out? Well, he maneuvers off the port bow, and he hovers there for the longest time, doin' what we learn later, takin' off his flight suit. And somehow he rolls the bird on its side, and just before it hits the water, he jumps, six thousand pounds of angry helicopter parts flyin' all around him. And somehow he makes it. How'd he do that?
PEGGY. What are you sayin'?
LOU. Your husband, he said he was gonna' protect his family, no matter what. And I acted like I didn't understand, but I do. It's the rock we all push, men. We call it our burden, but it's really our privilege.
PEGGY. I never meant for any of this to happen, you know. Not to Ed. Not to anybody. I just wanted to be someone.
LOU. You're somebody now.
PEGGY. No, see? I wanted to choose, by my own me, not be defined by someone else's expec---. And then that guy, that stupid guy, walked out into the . . . . Why'd he have to do that?
LOU. You mean the victim?
PEGGY. No, that's not fair. 'Cause I'm a victim too, was the victim first, before him.
LOU. Victim of what?
PEGGY. It's . . . . You wouldn't understand. You're a man. . . . It's a lie, okay? That you can do it all. Be a wife and a mother and a self-made career woman. Like there's thirty-seven hours in a day. And then when you can't, they say it's you, you're faulty, like, like, like you're inferior somehow. And like, like if you could just get your act together, until you're half mad.
LOU. People are dead, Peggy.
Fargo is not didactic, but the Coen brothers are clearly making a point about the moral and practical superiority of commonplace and traditional American values over the nihilism of European philosophy and the self-defined victimization our culture now often seems to require as evidence of authenticity.
Betsy and Lou are put on offer as better models for the good life than either Noreen or Peggy.
To which, amen.
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