Fargo Movie Quotes

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.

Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude--the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.

The transformation of Hollywood into a foreign-first business has also made sequels, spinoffs, and cinematic universes the smartest bet in the movie business. Newly minted middle-class customers in developing nations like China love prestige Western brands like Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. The same logic applies in cinemas. American cineastes may reach for the Advil when offered the choice between the latest superhero, dinosaur, or talking robot spinoff, but to many foreign moviegoers, that response is somewhere between condescending and confounding—the equivalent of complaining that there aren’t enough modern art installations at Disneyland. One more trend fundamentally changed the movie business this decade: the golden age of television. As TV has gotten better, the pressure on major movie studios is not to keep up with Breaking Bad, Orange Is the New Black, and Fargo (a property that was perfect for the movie business of the 1990s and for the TV business of today), but rather to stand out by offering something different. Most people, particularly middle-aged adults, simply don’t go to the movies for sophisticated character dramas anymore. Why would they, when there are so many on their DVR and Netflix and Amazon queues at home?

The future was certain, only the past was unpredictable. I wanted to attribute that quote to Lenin. In fact, it was something David Thewlis said as V. M. Varga, archvillain of the uneven third season of the TV reboot of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. The attribution was Varga’s, and if memory served, the person to whom he said it had questioned the veracity of the quote.

Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude—the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: “Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!” Because if you’re up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you’re shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.