Fargo Season 5: Of Contracts, Sin-Eating, and Redemption

At the center of the narrative in the Fargo series' brilliant Season 5, although you don't know it until the epilogue, is a contract.  The series is so good, I have to write about it, and fortunately, contracts abound.  Unfortunately, there's no way to do so without spoilers, so if you still want to watch the series, let this serve as your SPOILER ALERT, and skip down to the trailer at the bottom.  If you've already watched the season or don't think you will, maybe you'll be interested enough in the profound insights into contracts law that the series elucidates to read on.

The protagonist of the series is Juno Temple's Dorothy "Dot" Lyons (right), but the hero of the contracts narrative is Sam Spruell's Ole Munch (below, left), one of the strangest characters to ever appear in an American television series.  I'm ready to give Mr. Spruell the Emmy for best supporting actor right now (sorry Jon Hamm, you were great too!). 

Ole Munch is a centuries-old sin eater.  That is, he is a man paid a pittance to eat the sins of the dead so that the well-to-do can ascend to heaven. As he explains in the final scene, he ate the sins because he was starving.  There is a sin-eating scene far earlier in the series, and Mr. Spruell is amazing in evoking both ravenous desperation and consciousness of the eternal weight that his character is taking on.

Munch was a sin-eater in Wales, but he bears a Swedish name, and his accent is mostly that of a man who rarely speaks and has no confidence in his ability to make his meaning understood, so estranged is he from communication through words rather than violent action.   When one has lived for centuries, time is not of the essence, so he speaks deliberately. 

As Anthony Breznican explores in this interview in Vanity Fair with Fargo creator Noah Hawley, debt is a theme running throughout Season 5.  Dot's mother-in-law, portrayed brilliantly (another Emmy? -- do they still do supporting actor and supporting actress?) by a perpetually scowling Jennifer Jason Leigh, has built a fortune on debt collection.  If you ever wondered what would have happened if William F. Buckley had gone into debt collection rather than journalism, now you know.  Dot's first husband, realized with boundless malevolence and self-delusional grandeur by Jon Hamm, believes himself to be the beneficiary of some divine covenant, the details of which are difficult to reconcile with his thirst for power and vengeance.  One part of that covenant is his belief that his serial wives owe him loyalty and obedience unto death, which he repays with the back of his hand.  Having put wife #1 in the ground and married wife #3, he sets the plot in motion with his desire to collect the accrued debt of marital submission from Dot, who was wife #2, with additional principal due to her betrayal of him, plus interest compounded during her extended absence. 

Munch is obsessed with what is owed him, because his interaction with other men and women is transactional.  He is offered money to do a deed, and then a debt is owed.  He announces to a stranger that "I live here now," and "here" is her home.  In exchange, in a reworking of the timely end of Steve Buscemi's "funny looking guy" character in Fargo, the movie, Munch does her the favor of axe-murdering her worthless son.  

Jon Hamm's Roy Tillman sets the plot of Season 5 in motion when he contracts with Munch to kidnap Dot and return her to Tillman.  The kidnapping scene reworks the kidnapping scene in Fargo, the movie, with more unguent.  Munch's accomplice ends up with facial burns and Munch loses much of his ear.  The kidnapping succeeds for a bit, but Dot escapes, killing the accomplice in a manner far more innovative than the wood chipper scene in the movie.  She brains Munch with a shovel, and he comes to his senses enough to vanish before the police arrive.

Both Tillman and Munch think that a contract has been breached.  Tillman plans to have Munch executed for failure to perform.  Munch asserts an affirmative defense of misrepresentation.  He had been told to kidnap a woman.  Tillman did not mention that the woman was, in fact, a tiger.  Kidnapping a tiger is a very different job from kidnapping a woman.  It requires different personnel decisions and more consideration.  Munch eventually blinds his would-be executioner (Tillman's son, Gator, whom you might know as Steve from Stranger Things), and he frees the Tiger so that she can do what she needs to do.

In the final scene, we learn that Dot and Munch have very different conceptions of contracts, and I think Dot has the stronger argument.  He explains, referring to himself, as he usually does, in the third person, "A man's flesh was taken.  Now a pound is required in return."  Dot replies, after enlisting the giant, kilt-wearing mercenary to help her make biscuits, that she was not a party to any contract.  He took on a risk.  She was just the table on which he stubbed his toe.  The table doesn't owe him anything and being mad at the table doesn't make a lot of sense.  

Moreover, she adopts a contextual approach to debt.  Dot's first husband (Roy), her mother-in-law (Lorraine), and Munch are all obsessed with debt collection.  Roy collects debts that are not due or at least are not due to him. Lorraine enriches herself at the expense of the less fortunate without compassion.  On the contrary, she judges people for their misfortune, and subjects them to her will.  Munch tries to explain that he has a code, and the code requires that debts be paid.  

Dot isn't having it.  She has a counterargument.  Sometimes debts can't be paid.  She asks, "Isn't the better thing, the more humane thing, to say the debt should be forgiven?"  The message might as well be intended for Lorraine, who, in her own small way, still consistent with her transactional approach to life, has learned this lesson.  She has freed Indira Olmstead, the police officer leading the investigation into Dot's kidnapping, from the her debts by making Indira part of her security team.  Indira's debt, by the way, is the product of her husband's irresponsibility and some student loans.  She leaves her husband, whom she catches in flagrente delicto, suggesting that he can leave the toilet seat up on somebody else's life from now on.  And soon she is running Lorraine's security team and serving as her bodyguard, perhaps softening Lorraine ever so slightly with her compassion.

Munch, who has known nothing but suffering at the hands of other men, views contracts much as Karl Marx did.  They reduce human interactions to their cash nexus and alienate us from our species-being.  All Munch knows of the world is sin -- greed, envy, disgust -- and the world he encounters contains nothing but bitterness.

Dot has a different perspective.  She responds to Munch with empathy.  Her family chatters on irrelevantly and performs their wonted rituals.  This forgotten version of humanity surprises Munch.  He has come to seek his pound of flesh but his thought and his violent deeds are arrested.  He does not yet comprehend what he is witnessing but he cannot bring himself to end the encounter.

While Munch has come to collect his pound of flesh, Dot's ditzy husband Wayne reminds them that the game is on at seven.  It's time to set the table, and Dot notes pointedly to Munch, it's a school night.  In the Marxian transactional world governed by the cash nexus, these statements have no value.  A debt is owed; it must be paid.  Talk of sports, or table-setting, or school nights is irrelevant.  But in Dot's contextual world, talk of debt collection must yield to life's more pressing matters, even if each of those matters is of small consequence.  The debt will still be there once the game is over, the table has been set, the meal has been eaten, and Dot's daughter has gone to bed.  

And then Dot offers him a new experience.  Consume something that was not created for its exchange value and is not the product of sin.  Consume something made with "love and joy.  And be forgiven."  Well, that's laying it on a bit thick.  But still, the point is that exchange, including contractual exchange, does not have to be divorced from fellow-feeling.  Dot realizes the potential of mutually beneficial transactions undertaken between parties who want to enhance each other's well-being.  She responds to Munch's Marxian perspective with that of a Karl Llewellyn or an Arthur Corbin and restores the humanitas to human exchanges.  Sometimes, the debt will never be paid, because life is not all bitterness and pain.  It also can be filled with love and joy, if you just fill your mouth with the right stuff.

How can this scene possibly be convincing?  How can an ancient warrior be swayed by the taste of home-made biscuits?  I have no great faith in the comfort foods of the upper Midwest.  But the acting makes the scene, although each of the characters is a bit off, seem natural.  I am convinced that Munch's perspective is altered because that is what I see in Sam Spruell's face as he eats the biscuit.  I don't know if Sam Spruell is a method actor, but he achieves what method acting is supposed to achieve.  He is not acting.  He is experiencing what the character experiences and that why I can accept this other-worldly encounter with an other-worldly character as right at home in my world.

This was a great season of Fargo, and when we got to episode 8 out of 10, I began to worry that there just wasn't enough time to wrap it all up.  They did, with a bow.  But then the coda, a three-act play in Dot Lyon's living room/dining room, moved the series into a new realm, that of transcendence.

Do yourself a favor and watch!