In simple terms, Fargo is about a man, Jerry, who is desperate for money to fix his family’s financial situation. He hires two guys, Gaear and Carl, to kidnap his wife and hold her for ransom. He expects his father-in-law, Wade, to pay the ransom and Jerry tells the kidnappers he will give them a portion of the ransom. This plot drives each character to act according to which pieces of the plot they know and understand.
These actions reveal flaws and transformations in each of the main characters. Jerry for example reveals his flaws throughout the movie. His character tends to not think things through and his actions are usually desperate in nature. He doesn’t have h best communication skills and he has issues really understanding the reality of his situation.
Carl is one of the kidnappers and at first, he seems like a pretty low-level “bad guy”. He accepts the kidnapping job thinking it will be easy money, but his flaw here was in trusting Gaear to be his accomplice. Gaear is a more hardened criminal and Carl realizes this when they are pulled over by the police with Jerry’s wife in the trunk and Gaear kills the officer. This in turn causes the “simple kidnapping” to become a much larger ordeal and Carl panics as things get messy. The events cause him to murder two people and eventually lead him to his death.
Aristotle argues, “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end” (14). Based on this definition of tragedy, Fargo fits the description. A beginning, according to Aristotle, “does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be” (14) and in Fargo, the beginning isn’t a tragedy on its own, but rather sets up the entire plot of the tragedy to follow. Aristotle goes on to say that the ending “naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it” (14). The end of Fargo wraps up the entire plot of the movie, and while the characters would likely move on and live their lives after the tragedy, the end of the movie ends the tragic incident that is central to the plot. Not only that, but it ends tragically with multiple deaths and devastation.