Fargo’s fifth season gave us a villain straight out of Alt-America
Byron Clark offers a review of the fifth season of Fargo and how it comments on contemporary American politics and anxieties. First published in the fifth issue of The Commonweal, May 2024.
Over the last decade and across five seasons (each with its own set of characters but taking place in the same shared continuity) Noah Hawley’s Fargo, based on the 1996 Coen brothers movie of the same name, has given us some great antagonists. In the first season, it was a mysterious hitman played brilliantly by Billy Bob Thornton, and season 3 introduced us to V. M. Varga, portrayed by the British actor David Thewlis, who personified a particularly predatory form of finance capitalism. The show’s fifth season brought us Roy Tillman, played by Jon Hamm, a character whose archetype has long existed in the vast expanse of the United States between the coastal cities where most television and movies are set, now being depicted on screen after the last few years of political upheaval have brought that archetype to the fore.
‘In the old days, a character like Roy, who is a Bible-quoting, constitutional sheriff, you wouldn’t have seen him as a square conservative, moral majority.’ Hawley told The LA Times[1] But I think what we learned during the Trump era is that we live in ‘Tiger King’ America now’.
So what exactly is a ‘constitutional sheriff’? The concept has its roots in the Posse Comitatus movement which emerged in the late 1960s in response to federal civil rights legislation. The name comes from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which removed the military from regular civil law enforcement following the civil war and the reconstruction era. In his 2017 book ‘Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump’ David Neiwert described the ideology of the Posse Comitatus movement:
It was openly bigoted, and promoted conspiracy theories that Jews were a nefarious presence scheming to enslave white people. Its primary goal was to take away the government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws. This led to its main focus being a kind of radical localism based on the power of a county sheriff, or other law officer, to conscript any able-bodied man to form a posse and assist him in keeping the peace or to pursue and arrest a felon.
As the moment evolved it dropped most of the overt racism and antisemitism. It went on to influence patriot militias and ‘sovereign citizens’, a group of people who, via misinterpretations of historical legal texts, believe themselves not subject to the law. In 2009 Richard Mack, a former sheriff, published The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope which portrayed county sheriffs as the ‘last line of defense’ against tyrannical government. Two years later he founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). He also sits on the board of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose founder Stewart Rhodes was last year sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the insurrection that took place in Washington DC on January 6 2021.
Each season of Fargo has taken place in a different time period, spanning from the 1950s to the early 2010s. Season 5 is set in 2019, allowing the story to be as contemporary as possible without having to account for the COVID pandemic and the resulting societal changes that occurred in the early 2020s. ‘[T]he violent outsider driven by extremist views and hate-filled philosophies, is everywhere now’ wrote Hawley in The Atlantic[2] several months before Fargo’s 5th season aired.’Incel spree-killers and race-war propagators. Young white men radicalized and weaponized. They are the children of the Unabomber, each with his own self-aggrandizing manifesto.’
Roy Tillman is the villain, but his character sees himself as the hero. A lawman trying to do what’s right by the US constitution and the Christian bible, up against the tyranny of the federal government. ‘No myth has a greater hold over the American imagination than the Myth of the Reluctant Hero’, writes Hawley. ‘He is John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood. He is John Wick, Jack Reacher, Captain America. A man who tries to live a peaceful life until the world forces him into violence.’
That myth of the frontier hero, the vigilante hero, permeates American culture. ‘This is why Trump’s face is on Rambo’s body, says Hawley. ‘Who was Rambo if not a reluctant hero trying to live a life of peace? But the system—small-town cops with their rules and laws—wouldn’t leave him alone. So he did what he had to do, which was destroy the system that oppressed him.’
Rambo belongs to a genre that Michael Parenti called ‘the Reaganite Cinema’, named for the man whose CV includes both ‘Western movie actor’ and ‘President of the United States’. The first Rambo film sees Vietnam war veteran John Rambo getting in a scrape with a local sheriff (evidently not one of the “constitutional” variety) which triggers memories of the war, causing Rambo to go on a rampage against the police and the National Guard.
Fargo refuses to let the audience see Tillman as a hero. In the penultimate episode, carloads of militia members converge on Tillman’s property with the soundtrack playing the Village Peoples ‘YMCA’. The 70’s disco hit appears an odd choice here, except that the song has in the 21st century taken on a bizarre change in meaning; used by Donald Trump at campaign rallies, and later blasted at the Michigan State Capitol[3] while it was occupied by heavily armed militia members calling on Governor Gretchen Whitmer to end the state’s COVID lockdown.
On screen the militia has arrived as the FBI is about to surround the property, mirroring real life incidents such as the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada,[4] where a rancher’s dispute with the government over cattle grazing rules escalated to the point where Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers had arrived ready to back up Ammon Bundy in an armed conflict with the forces of the federal government. (Daryl Johnson, a former senior domestic terrorism analyst at Department of Homeland Security, has said there is ‘a straight line that you can draw’ from the Bundy standoff to the insurrection on January 6 2021).
‘Are you Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?’ Tillman’s father-in-law, the leader of the far-right militia, asks him as the federal agents amass outside the property. Recapping the episode for the New York Times,[5] Scott Tobias describes Tillman as ‘cowboy Hitler’. if you’re still rooting for Roy at this point, that’s who you’re behind. Tillman, who has already been shown to be a domestic abuser, is now also shown to be weak and cowardly. ‘Roy has always been Hitler in the bunker’ writes Tobias. ‘He has been cosplaying Ammon Bundy for votes, money and unchecked power, but sometimes an actor immerses himself too deeply into a role. And now he has the feds surrounding his ranch.’
In this season of Fargo the heroes are the federal agents. ‘I feel compelled to champion the system of justice, not the exploits of a single person’ wrote Hawley in his Atlantic piece,’to spotlight the collective efforts of a team of hardworking public servants putting in the hours, solving the cases, bringing the wicked to account. In the real world this is how the peace is kept, how rules and laws are written and enforced.’
It’s an imperfect viewpoint to put across as a theme. The armed forces of the state have throughout US history been wielded against civil rights activists, native Americans and the political left, and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other unarmed African Americans by police in recent times led to protests and calls to defund city police forces throughout the country. The cop-who-plays-by-his-own-rules character of so many Reaganite cinema action movies may now be passé, but the cops following the rules are still acting within a set of rules established largely to protect the existing social order.
This reality isn’t entirely unacknowledged by Fargo however. Alongside Tillman, one of the most interesting new characters is Lorraine Lyon, the new mother -in- law of the ex-wife Tillman spends much of the season pursuing. Lyon is the CEO of Redemption Services, a debt recovery company that has made her exceedingly wealthy. Unlike the ideology that drives Tillman, Lyon is driven primarily by class interests. ‘Her politics Noah and I did talk about’ Jennifer Jason Leigh, the actress portraying her, told Vulture.[6]
A lot of times with companies, you want politicians who are going to be on your side with the rules. There’s so much corruption involved. She wants people that she could pay off and are leaning to her side. Knowing where she stands is important, but her politics aren’t based on a worldview. They’re more based on her pocketbook and her business.
When the two characters meet Lyon looks down on Tillman and his ‘constitutional sheriff’ ideology, describing him as wanting all power and no responsibility, ‘like a baby’. The influence on this dialogue is suggested in Hawley’s Atlantic article, where he writes of noticing while on a road trip that vehicles displaying the American flag seemed less likely to adhere to the rules of the road. ‘As if the performance of patriotism frees one from responsibility, not just to the law, but to other people.’ He quotes the journalist Sebastian Junger who argues that ‘The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.’
While TiIlman sees his elected position in law enforcement as giving licence to be a law unto himself, Lyon sees her position as a billionaire, and her willingness to use both strategic political donations, and the power that having someone indebted to you gives you over them, allowing her to sit outside of the law entirely. ‘What is your function?’ she asks a Minnesota Police Deputy in her office.
The police. I mean, why do we need you? Except as a tool to keep a certain element in line. To separate those who have money, class, intellect from those who don't. You're gatekeepers, standing outside the walls, keeping the rabble from getting in. But in here, inside these walls, you have no function. You should remember that.
While initially seeing her daughter-in-law Dot (Juno Temple) as a ‘low-rent skirt’, marrying her extremely polite but not exactly intellectual son for the future inheritance, Lorraine grows to become her greatest ally in Dot's domestic violence revenge narrative.
The story raises an interesting thought experiment for viewers of an anti-Fascist and anti-capitalist worldview. Is the existing order, with its unequal wealth and political corruption that gives disproportionate power to the Lorraine Lyons of this world, at least preferable to the social order that would exist if power were handed to -or taken by- the constitutional sheriffs and far-right militias who, as I write, are making their way to Texas to “defend” the border from an “invasion” of migrants?[7] Perhaps even the FBI, though certainly not the do-gooder civil servants Fargo depicts them as, are at the least a ‘lesser evil’ to what the alternative could be. It was after all the FBI who took down Stewart Rhodes, not the street level anti-fascist movement. In fact, were the antifascist movement to practise their own form of vigilante justice, Americas heavily armed far-right, itching for violence against the left as well as federal government, would no doubt respond in kind. It’s a complex world right now (especially in the United States) and Hawley has done a decent job of depicting it on screen.
Fargo is streaming on Hulu in the USA, and on Neon in New Zealand.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-11-22/noah-hawley-fargo-season-5
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/fargo-creator-american-culture-politics-wild-west/672237/
[3] https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/research/spotlight-research/why-donald-trump-dancing-ymca
[4] https://abcnews.go.com/US/standoff-nevada-years-ago-set-militia-movement-crash/story?id=82051940
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/arts/television/fargo-recap-episode-9.html
[6] https://www.vulture.com/article/fargo-jennifer-jason-leigh-lorraine-finale-ending-interview.html
[7] https://www.wired.com/story/extremists-far-right-armed-convoy-texas-border/