Will the real Roderick Jaynes please stand up?

continuing our look at the work of Joel and Ethan Coen

Welcome to the second part of this appreciation of two of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers, in which we finally discover the truth about the elusive Mr Jaynes…

Ethan and Joel Coen at the Cannes Film Festival, 2015. Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

FARGO (1996) is arguably the movie that sealed the Coen brothers’ reputation as filmmakers of the highest order. It tells the grisly story of two hapless but deadly criminals who are hired by a businessman to kidnap his wife. Through their own incompetence they are sucked into a killing spree, and are pursued by police chief Marge Gunderson, a small-town detective who conceals her formidable deductive powers and heroic physical courage beneath a deceptively homely exterior. Combining beautiful outdoor shots of the pitiless Minnesotan winter with a noirish plot, Fargo is littered with black comedy. It was released to huge acclaim, and eventually generated a spin-off TV series. I wrote about Marge Gunderson in The Dialectic’s series on fictional female role models, Let’s hear it for… . If you’d like to read the article there’s a link to it at the end.

Frances McDormand won a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance as Marge. She had met the Coens when she auditioned for her part in their first feature film, Blood Simple (1984). It was a fateful meeting both artistically and personally, since not only did she get the part, but she went on to marry Joel Coen. Fargo garnered seven nominations at the 1997 Oscars, and the brothers won the award for Best Original Screenplay. They were now established as two of the most important filmmakers to come out of America.

What is it that has earned this duo such widespread recognition? They definitely have a knack for making entertaining films, full of farce and slapstick, but there is a great deal more to them than a fun night out at the movies. The Coens tantalise their audiences with mythology, symbolism and occasionally deception, and seem to revel in an aura of mystery, either by pure artistic design, or because of an unwillingness to be constrained by having to explain their motivations. In fact Fargo is a case in point; its opening titles contain the following disclaimer: