House of Eratosthenes

If I view Club Dread while getting it done, that means closing credits will roll at about a quarter to six. That’s too late, it’s hard to find a parking spot at work lately. Eighty-eight minutes is better than a hundred nineteen, so I watch Fargo instead.

Hate to admit it, but after hundreds of viewings over 19 years, I’m still noticing new things. They’re not trivial new things, they’re rather important.

So I Facebook‘d it.

Jerome Lundegaard is, of course, a shifty fellow with lots of crooked schemes going on that he wants to hide. Fargo fans have frustrated themselves trying to figure out what exactly these are, with the lot deal being $750k and the GMAC hijinks being $320k, but the movie is a study of characters. So following the strands of the Lundegaard scheming-crazy-quilt pattern is out of scope and they’re missing the point. The point is how Lundegaard behaves.

It is obvious he fancies himself to be highly skilled at manipulating people, the reality of this is far different because he sucks at it and can’t accept the truth. A thoroughly unremarkable man, just like his counterpart “Lester” in the series, he doesn’t imagine himself to be accomplished in this area the way most egomaniacs imagine themselves to be accomplished in their respective areas; he never set out deliberately to snooker people, or to get good at snookering people. He’s just created a position for himself such that he has no other choice. His lot in life is the natural consequence of dealing with challenges by, as a first step, eliminating from one’s mind the possibility of failure. This is not how successful people behave. They achieve success by competently coping with the possibility of failure at each step.

Here I left something unmentioned. I suppose that’s okay. But then again, there’s no crime in filling in the blanks, either…

Lundegaard has been confronted, at several key moments, with an unsavory choice: Let the whole house of cards come tumbling down, or fool people. He doesn’t want to scam his father-in-law out of three quarters of a million, just like he doesn’t want to sell “Bucky” an unwanted application of True Coat (language warning)…

The throwaway, two-minute scene is simply a metaphor. It’s an introduction to the Lundegaard life. The man hasn’t asked himself that most basic of questions the rest of us ask ourselves, whenever we do anything that involves the prospect of failure: “What’s it take to fail?” “How do I prevent failure?” So he gets ambushed, and he’s always ambushed by the same thing: Deceive someone and fail possibly, or else don’t deceive, and fail for sure. So he deceives.

Or tries to. But in the entirety of the film, he never actually fools anybody. Continuing…

Because the Lundegaard scheming ultimately depends on absolute control of what other people are thinking and how they are behaving, but its practitioner has no skills or tools available to achieve this, he keeps relapsing into what becomes his catch-phrase: “What t’heck do ya mean?” whenever Carl Showalter, or his father-in-law, start going where he doesn’t want them to go. His attempt is to corral them, like livestock, by feigning an inability to comprehend what they’re saying and hoping that will somehow rope them into line. They don’t give a rat’s ass what he can & cannot comprehend, of course, so this fails time after time. But it’s all he’s got, so he keeps on doing it. What t’heck do ya mean? What t’heck do ya mean?

Do you know anyone like this?

Halfway through, Showalter has begun to mock him for saying this. And yet for the rest of the movie he keeps on saying it. When all else fails, feign ignorance, feign an inability to comprehend. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll stop someone from doing what they would otherwise do.

Inside or outside of movies, I’ve never seen that ruse work. Not once. But I’ve seen a lot of people try to put it into practice. What makes Fargo such a masterpiece is that it reflects so precisely the behavior, as well as the motive, of those who do it. They seek to control the actions of others, at the micro level as well as the macro. Their schemes depend on being able to do this, and depend on it fully.

But like Lundegaard, they have no tools to achieve this control. None at all, except one. Which doesn’t even work that well, but it’s all they got…

So stop everything. And explain it all to them. After all, you owe it to them, you’re the one who’s incoherent. What t’heck do ya mean?

Nice. I shall add Fargo to my viewing list.

It might be worthwhile at some point to attach names to specifically liberal sub-fallacies of general logical fallacies. The “Lundegaard Gambit,” maybe, for that special libtard appeal to ignorance. “I don’t understand what you’re saying; therefore DISQUALIFY; therefore you’re wrong.”

It’ll be tedious — they all arrive at “therefore DISQUALIFY” in one or two steps — but having catchy names for quick reference might be beneficial.
- Severian | 05/14/2015 @ 06:59

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