Lessons in Capitalism #40: Happy

“There’s a word for people like you.” 

“No. That’s your word. You invented it to make yourself feel bigger. But that’s not what I am.”

There are many crimes that America is guilty of. Slavery, Imperialism, The Nuclear Bomb, Concentration Camps, Genocide, the list just goes on and on, even if you don’t include the comedy examples. But perhaps the quintessential American crime, as Fargo notes, are the con and the serial killer. While important to the events of the season, the serial killer has gone the way of the dodo in terms of the modern crime scene, in favor of the mass murderer. The school shooter who kills indiscriminately without any rhyme or reason. For all that they prosper in the pre internet age, they aren’t as prolific as they once were. Or, at the very least, their story has been deemed too convoluted to survive into the future outside of the realm of fiction.

 

A con, by contrast, is a rather straightforward crime all things considered and thus more prosperous in the modern day. There’s not as much scheming as a bank heist or a presidential term. It requires a story to be told. Throughout these seasons of Fargo and the subsequent 41 lessons in capitalism, we have seen a great number of cons performed. From Niki Swango’s fake grenade to the botched con of the police to end the war with an L for Kansas City.

 

But in terms of this season, we must put our gaze towards that of the various factions in this crime war. The obvious con, in terms of this episode, would be that of the titular Happy. As with many con artists, Happy attempts to play both sides of a conflict, acting as if he’ll help one side while secretly helping the other. Now, if you were to ask Happy, he’d probably tell you this wasn’t so much a con as karma. Loy Cannon struck his son and whipped him, and that man needs to pay, regardless of the reason why. The point of the con is to accrue power and stick it to Loy.

 

Alternatively, we could look at the con that pushed the war to go even further than it needed to. Josto Fadda, in an attempt to kill his brother, tries to con Loy into doing it for him. He spins a yarn about Loy’s son, Satchel, being murdered on Gaetano Fadda’s orders. The con ultimately fails due to Loy realizing he’s being conned. Because men like him have always been conned by the American Dream the way men like Josto never were. Both Josto and Loy’s ancestors may have come from a boat, but only one of them came in chains.

Which brings us to the core con at the heart of this season of Fargo: You too can become an American. The nature of what it means to become something when the definition of the thing is as mutable as can be has been talked about before in Fargo. Actualization, as Season 2 termed it. But the nature of it here is far different. Not merely becoming the person who was always within you, but actually being considered a person by the world around you. That if you just behave the right way, succeed in the right way, then the Americans will accept you as one of them.

But it’s a con. It’s a story being told to keep people from imagining the world as something different than it currently is. A belief that all these things that have happened have happened before and will happen again. The cycles keep on trucking, looping on and on and on, sons killing brothers killing fathers and so on and so forth. Rabbi becomes Josto becomes Satchel becomes Scott Free. The small details may change, but the rudder of the world never does.

 

What a nice story.

 

But there’s a bigger con going on, a con that goes back before all these stories have been told, before even the first lesson in capitalism. All the way back in the original motion picture Fargo. The movie is a rather simple story, lacking the television shows leaps in chronology, mysticism, and identity, opting instead to approach the subject of a rather absurd crime straightforwardly.  Not to say it’s a bad movie, there’s a reason it and not Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or Scam got a television series out of it. But it does remain among the top 10 Coen Brothers movies rather than among Miller’s Crossing, O Brother Where Art Thou, Raising Arizona, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Burn After Reading.

 

But at the heart of the story is a rather absurd crime where all the characters seem to get the fates they deserve. Jerry Lundergaard ends up in jail, Carl Showalter dies, and Marge Gunderson lies in bed with her husband feeling good about her lot in life. And yet… what of the rest of the Lundergaard family. Sure, Wade was a rather shitty man, but that doesn’t mean Jean Lundergaard deserved to have her head shoved into an oven or Scotty deserve to be orphaned. The more you look at the story, the more holes you see in the belief that life is fair.

 

That is, after all, at the heart of the con: Life is fair. Everyone in Fargo believes that there is some force out there— be it God, Aliens, or the System itself—that makes sure that all the goodies get their reward and all the badies get their punishment. But what determines some criminals more in need of punishment than others. Sure, Odis Weff killed one of the breakout characters of the season (and, also, Dick Wickware), but Wickware was a man unbound by traditional law, willing to threaten a minor if it meant getting his man.

 

Hell, if we remain bound to traditional law, we must consider Swanee Capps deserving of her fate. After all, it was illegal to be a lesbian for close to 150 years at the time this season of Fargo takes place. Not to mention her various murders, theft, crossdressing, and other such crimes. And yet, her death doesn’t feel just the way other deaths might in Fargo. It feels cruel and awful and completely arbitrary.

And then there’s men like VM Varga. Outside of the scope of the season, but then we do not know who gets away at the end. This is not the final episode. But for Varga, his story is done. He got away with it. To be clear, there is a degree of ambiguity to his fate. A coin toss as to whether or not he goes to prison or fades into the either. But it is in ambiguity that men like Varga, for all their talk of certainty, thrive within.

 

Consider another American con: Hope. Hope, as a concept, is a rather solid concept. It’s the desire for something to occur. But often within the political landscape (and, indeed, the fictional landscape), that word is used without qualification. Characters will spout lines like “I have hope” or “You just need to hope more” without ever truly saying what, exactly, they hope for. It can be easily turned into a conservative idea rather than a liberal one.

 

To use comics as an example, noted Ethan Van Sciver collaborator Geoff Johns framed Superman as a figure of hope in his twelve part Maxi-Series, Doomsday Clock. In particular, the end of the narrative reveals that hope fuels reality and Superman is the purest avatar of the hope that reality has. Superman will hopefully defend the values of truth, justice, and the American Way as he punches an army of angry foreigners from killing President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, including one who is explicitly a child refugee. All the while sympathetic characters bemoan that we have all this fighting when there are good people on both sides. Without meaning, without content, hope is just another commodity to be used to pacify the masses, another con.

 

But like any story, cons don’t last forever. For good and for ill, the con artist can eventually be caught by those they tried to con. Be it a serial killer poisoning the old and ill because she hates them all, the brother out to kill his fellow brother, or the business man trying to expand his empire by any means necessary. All these cons are consumed in the end. No story can ever defeat coming into being without some damage, and the same story told over and over again will be worn out quickly.

 

And yet, the con can also save a life. Consider the end of the penultimate episode. Here, Ethelrida Smutny proposes a con of her own to Loy Cannon. While the full details aren’t there, the base facts to be used for the con have been given: 1) A woman by the name of Oraetta Mayflower has been murdering sick people and stealing their shit as trophies. 2) Among the dead is a man named Donatello Fadda, leader of the Fadda Family. 3) From Fadda, Oraetta stole a ring, which Ethelrida has given to Loy.

 

It’s not a story, not quite yet. But the pieces are in place, the players are set. The show is about to end.