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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.

The movie Fargo was really interesting to watch and now to discuss. According to Aristotle, a tragedy consists of 6 things: Plot, Characters, Action, Spectacle, and Song and Thought. The whole plot is that Jerry runs into some money troubles and hires a guy to kidnap his wife so he can collect the ransom from his rich father-in-law. I think a major flaw in Jerry is his refusal to ask for help and see reality as it is. Getting your own wife kidnapped? Are you kidding me? Take out a loan or better yet, swallow your pride and explain the situation to someone who, if not on your side, is at least on his daughter’s side. Throughout the movie, we see more and more Jerry’s inability to think through a situation, when the kidnapping ends up becoming bigger than they anticipated, when he doesn’t get the investment from his father-in-law, or his nervous behavior when being questioned by Marge. He doesn’t have any emotional bandwidth to process the mess he made; his major flaw is he cannot control his emotions enough to think through a situation clearly. For Marge, she is similar but opposite. She treats everyone perhaps too kindly and ends up missing details. She is comfortable in her small-town police chief bubble. It’s only until she is faced with an incredibly uncomfortable situation where an old friend Mike breaks down in front of her, then she finds out he lied, that she recognizes where she may have gone wrong before. Aristotle describes this as Recognition,

“a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune,” 

There’s a switch that flips inside of her and she goes back to question someone who acted very suspicious, but she gave the benefit of the doubt beforehand- Jerry. While Jerry cannot control his emotions, Marge prefers to keep big emotions out of the picture entirely, which she displays as she fearlessly puts herself in dangerous situations.

One short film that caught my attention was “She and Her Cat” by Makoto Shinkai. The movie follows the relationship between a woman and her cat from the animal’s perspective. Given its four minute run time, the story is simple but is explored in a unique fashion. We’re only given access to the cat’s thoughts and perceptions of what occurs around him. The limited scope makes exploring the narrative interesting as we’re never given all the details on the conflict that unfolds. An example of this is when the girl receives a phone call and becomes upset afterward. We don’t quite know what the subject of the conversation was or what exactly causes her to feel sad. We are only privy to the cat’s perspective on the event. In a way, this reminds me of Fargo as it takes a similar approach of deliberately leaving out information. It only includes what we need to know in order for the plot to make sense. For this short, I felt as though the creator left out the cause of the woman’s emotions because they don’t necessarily relate to the overarching storyline. In the end, the plot explores the relationship between the owner and her pet, so the backstory doesn’t feel needed. All that matters is the cat’s reaction to the woman’s feelings, not what actually happened to her.

I thought the events that led up to this moment were also well-placed. The relationship between the two cats at the beginning establishes how the main animal has feelings for their owner and is solely focused on that. By placing this early in the video, we know why the owner’s reactions to events matter so much to the cat. The film avoids the Aristotelian plot structure by building its outline around their relationship rather than a central conflict. Both the cat and the woman reach their own conclusions about life by the end of the video, which gives the movie its ending. Overall, I thought the film was a cute, wholesome way of exploring the relationship between humans and animals while illustrating how not every story should be told the same way.

This is my first time watching the film, and each of the characters had interesting personalities. One character that surprised me the most was Jerry Lundegaard. Even though he is a husband and a father, his character doesn’t seem to care about his family’s feelings. He puts his needs, in this case money, before family. In my perspective he can also be an antagonist because of the way he acted during the whole situation with his wife. Jerry is an important part of the plot, without him and his need of obtaining money, there wouldn’t have been any kidnapping or assassinations, no story, and no interference from the police. Act of ignorance coming from him. 

The Aristotle: Poetics book explains on page 10 chapter VI, “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…”, and “action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought…” Which applies to the tragedy that happened in the film. In this case the action taken in the film that led to the tragedy was the kidnapping of Jean Lundegaard. The action was taken which led to assassinations and police involvement. 

The character Marge Gunderson was the opposite of Jerry. She was too nice, polite, and also fearless. It is interesting how she is a police officer and is always calm and professional doing her job trying to catch the assassin. Which is totally different to her character reaction when she meets with Mike Yanahita. She was nervous when he was expressing his feelings, something her character won’t show during the dangerous situations she encounters.

Hello everyone,

The short film that I chose to watch was called “She And Her Cat.” It follows the story of a Japanese woman who adopts a male cat. The cat soon falls in love with her, and later on, in the story rejects the affection of a female cat that he later meets.

Toward the end of the story, the woman receives a phone call that causes her a great deal of distress. She starts to cry intensely and falls into a depression. The cat can’t do anything but comforts her. As time goes on, she eventually recovers and the show ends in a happy tone.

This short gives me “slice of life” vibes. There is no overarching conflict, just something that appears randomly and isn’t foreshadowed at all in the short, just like what can commonly happen in real life.

The short invoked feelings of nostalgia in me, as it reminded me of the cats I had in my childhood home. A lot of the things the cat said invoked feelings of romance and longing, which makes perfect sense given the tone and setup for the relationship between the cat and his owner.

The narrative structure that I found reminds me greatly of the kind found in the previously mentioned slice-of-life genre. It’s really just two people (or one person and a cat in this case) going about their lives and dealing with life’s mundane problems as they are handed to them. This makes the plot more relatable, but it comes at the cost of making the stakes much lower.

– Gibson

When we think of stories Aristotelian plot structure comes to mind. There is usually clear central conflict and a hero to rise to the occasion to conquer it! Well some stories don’t have that type of structure. They tell their stories in different ways. The Short stories that I watched were very interesting and were all so different from each other. Some were split up into sections and some were very artsy. What seem to connect them all was that the conflict in all of them was more of an idea rather than a physical thing. For example, in Small Deaths, I got the sense that the main idea was small tragic events in a person’s life that can add up to change and develop who a person becomes. That was my take away. My personal favorite short film was 160 Characters. The title is quite clever as 160 characters was all you could type in one message on nokia cell phones. The world was based through those messages as well as a little dialog here and there for context. But, the main way of storytelling was through those messages. This conflict between Victoria and the Father is very real and a conflict that isn’t clear cut. There is a pattern between all of the short films as there is still a hint of tragedy among all of them. Each story has a different conflict told in a certain way but all tend to be negative and have a moment of shock within them. It’s kind of like they all have their own rising actions and climaxes. It’s very interesting to observe.

Hey Everyone!

I’m Nichole. This is my last term at WSUV. I’m a humanities major with a focus on English and communications and a minor in creative writing. I graduate this May and intend to continue my education at Portland State University in their publishing program.

I’m a freelance book/story editor and a mom of four. My favorite story media is, obviously, books (given my career choice). I spend nearly all my free time reading or listening to audiobooks. I do enjoy movies and games as well, but I feel there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

My favorite genres to read vary. I tend to gravitate towards fantasy and sci-fi stories most often, but I also highly enjoy YA books, horror, and the occasional romance.

I’ve been freelancing since early 2021 and finally have a client base large enough (for me) to turn my “side gig” into an actual business. I launched PNW Editing at the beginning of the year, which is incredibly exciting. I’m hoping one day to turn my small editing business into a small publishing company.

When I’m not in class, working, or shuffling kids around town I’m usually at home in my PJs reading and snuggled up with my cat, Flash.

Who thinks kidnapping your wife and embezzling the money is a good idea? Well Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo is a classic depiction of a greek tragedy. There are a lot of moments that spark conflict in which prompts the plot to move forward and proceed to keep getting worse and worse. The film starts with Jerry and the two criminals meeting in a bar to discuss the plan that they were about to carry out. This conversation shows that no one really knows what they are doing and heavily hints at how awful the plan will be carried out. The plan turns out to work at the start but then is turned around by the shooting of a police officer. This sets in motion the tragedy that would befall Jerry and almost everybody in the story. Aristotle explanation of tragedy is apparent in Fargo and it has the main three story beats. The first act sets up the story and gives the setting and the introduction to the main characters. The next act starts when the officer is shot and when the whole plan goes downhill. The film switches between Jerry and Marge, a police chief investigating the murders. It shows both of their efforts to try and get to a solution. The last act is finally the resolution of everything. Pretty much everyone gets killed or arrested and the only good part about the ending is that Marge finally arrests the “bad guy”. Overall this movie is a total tragedy and all the events spiral down to a unsatisfactory ending.

Hello, my name is Andrew. I’m a junior here at WSUV and have lived here my whole life. I’m interested in all genres of storytelling, but science fiction and fantasy are two of my favorite genres. Since I was a kid, I’ve loved reading and watching stories of other worlds. My grandparents had the original Star Wars and I would watch them repeatedly, along with Indiana Jones and other movies. Avatar was a huge spectacle for me when it came out in 2009, and I watched it more times than I’d like to say. My love for these genres is not solely focused in film, but in reading and games, too. My parents didn’t let my have free reign over when and what I watched early in my life, so I found myself reading a lot. I read what a lot of other kids read, like the Percy Jackson series, but I also tried more complex stories like The Hobbit and LOTR and found that I really liked stories about things that I haven’t or can’t experience. I think it’s amazing what we can do now with storytelling and technology. The new avatar film, for example, is almost completely CGI, and without CGI, we wouldn’t be able to achieve most of the shots needed for a movie like this one. Gaming is also something that I love, although for the most part, I don’t play narrative games and am more interested in arena/pvp type games. There are a few, though, like Assassins Creed, that I have played and loved throughout the years.

“Again Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possesses certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves” is a quote from the Poetics by Aristotle on how a character is reflected in their actions. The actions of Jerry reveal to us as an ambitious man but are extremely anxious when he goes into sudden bouts of aggression. He is willing to go to extremes if it means he can get to his goal, which is the money he needs to make a real estate deal. Carl starts off as prideful of himself and tries to play himself off as a well put together criminal but after a slew of clumsy efforts and lack of acknowledgement from his partner, he progressively gets more agitated and that leads to him agitating his partner Gaear to kill him. Gaear is mostly standoffish but will always resort to murder to get away quickly. It leads him to getting arrested. Marge is shown as a kind and will go out of the way for people. She has more interaction with various people out of the main four as she tries to strike up conversations to get ideas on her case. When looking at these characters closely, most of their actions can be classified as a reaction to their environment that has been altered by another with their actions.

Just as said in Poetics, “For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists of action, and its end is a mode of action not a quality.” The plot is moved by these actions. Jerry’s fears of getting caught in this elaborate scheme is heightened by the actions of Marge investigation. Carl starts to lose himself because of Jerry’s continuous delays and his own actions and with how Carl chooses to act resulted in tipping off Gaerad who resorted to murdering him along with people that acted in a way that Gaerad perceived as wrong. Majority of these characters are described 

tommy o.

But is it a tragedy?

If so, who is the hero? There may be two, but I’m going to argue against that. I will start by saying Marge is not a protagonist. Maybe I’m wrong. Let’s start with the character Mike.

Mike seems to be a reversal of fortune for Marge and I believe tied to Geaer as well, at least as a push toward realization for her.. When it’s revealed that Mike’s story is entirely untrue Marge can not understand why he does it. In the same way when she is scolding Gaear in the police car about violence for the sake of money she can’t conceive of a reason why he did it. Both of these moments push Marge’s  realization that she just doesn’t understand the motivation to do wrong, and she says so directly when she says, “I just don’t understand.” What interests me about this is her acceptance. Despite her inability to comprehend these motivations in others she easily accepts evil’s existence in the almost idyllic world around her. It appears to me that outside of that moment of recognition Marge will remain effectively unchanged. So, is Marge ever reversed or, perhaps, is she an unchanging balancing element within the plot that drives the actual protagonist? In this context Marge may not even qualify as a protagonist because she doesn’t seem to be permanently reversed or changed in character.

Jerry appears to be a protagonist in that the audience sees he is pitiable, he is flawed, and his downfall is feared, or at least concerning, and the audience wants to avoid his fate in their own lives. Jerry seems to realize the catastrophe he has caused and in the end laments the misfortune of his own weakness and pride, weakness in that he makes self-serving choices and pride because he believes he is entitled to be more than he is in the world. Yes, his motivations appear base as Aristotle attributes to characters in comedy, but Jerry’s motivation is arguably to become a greater person then he is.

Overall, it could be a tragic-comedy because of the base motivations of Jerry if he is the protagonist. However, I think Fargo is more closely tied to straight tragedy regardless of Jerry’s selected means to change his fortune, which was immediately reversed from the very beginning of the film.  If Marge is seen as an unchanging balancing element instead of a protagonist, then Marge is inevitable as that force and Jerry was doomed by this force from the moment he confirmed the deal with Gaear and Carl, if not from the moment he committed fraud prior to the story. It’s arguable that this is not a tragedy, at least not to Aristotle, if we note that for Jerry there was never a moment of prosperity; his tragic flaw (hamartia) was always active, his reversal of fortune (peripeteia) was at the beginning if not before, so the structure of the story doesn’t follow the Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end for a tragedy. There is catastrophe and Jerry suffers consequences, and a catharsis is fostered in the audience, but modes of narrative have changed over the last 2000 years so maybe it’s okay to mix the parts up and still call it a tragedy.

What do you think?

The plot in Fargo is delightfully wild. Introduced as a “true story”, the audience is immediately more dialed in to the story and characters from the get-go. We see Jerry engaging in a shady and ill-advised scheme to get money from his father-in-law. By setting up this contract, we see that Jerry believes his father-in-law wouldn’t give him money of his own accord, and neither would his wife. Two of his most immediate family members, and he believes neither of them would help him is he asked. An excellent setup for the relational strife ahead.

By being in this situation at the beginning of the movie, some sympathy can be directed Jerry’s way by the audience, but his continual downward spiral makes it really challenging to hold onto such sympathy. The plot is driven forward by things going wrong and getting worse, often because of him, and those events in turn drive Jerry deeper and deeper down his dark path. Driven by fear, which is a classic plot device in Greek tragedy. All of the events that befall Jerry compound. With each wrong turn, such as the parking lot sale going bust, he becomes angrier and more desperate for a solution. Any solution at any cost becomes his mode of operation towards the end of the film. The compounding tragic events in Jerry’s character arc can be described by this Poetics quote: “Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will thee be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.”

Marge is an interesting comparison as the second main character of Fargo. We are introduced to her as a reliable, competent police officer. She has a strong connection to her family, namely her husband and their baby on the way. As the plot moves forward following Jerry’s game of life and death, Marge is always right behind, investigating him and getting ever closer. She’s unwavering in her search for truth and justice, which is probably her strongest character trait. As Jerry is forced into his situation by his own dangerous scheme, Marge wants to unravel it and get to the bottom of this mystery.

When all else fails, what do you do? We see a real man’s tragedy turn into a film. Knowing the film really adds another layer to the story that mystifies the audience. Believing what happen and having more empathy for our characters helps the storyline. This strikes something strange with Aristotle’s text. He mentions that poetics is greater than historians because historians only have real-life events to go off from while poetics can explore what might happen. Poetics are universal, but what happens when the story is based on a true story?  Is the poetic a historian now? Having this be my first read of Aristotle, I see the importance upon which filmmaking is grounded. Aristotle’s ideals of the importance of the plot in his analogy of two paintings were brilliant. The film follows Aristotle’s ideals on tragedy, in the tragedy of suffering and character. He mentions the importance of plot and character. What character types thrive in tragedy and not. Our main character is in a downward spiral and becomes unrecognizable at the end. As the story progresses, it gets worse and worse with many dead and no good things happening to Jerry. There will have to be a second read to really consume Aristotle’s ideals.

I am almost positive I wrote my Fargo blog prompt last semester and titled it the same thing. I am original until I am not.

Fargo is a story, but in that story the two main characters, Jerry and Marge, struggle against the plot towards their own individual goals. The plot is like a cause and effect sequence of events that begins due to Jerry’s unlikable, undeserving attitude and idea. He hires some shady characters to kidnap his wife so that he may get some money from her father out of a return deal. Things go south because the people in the story are not perfect beings, but humans who make mistakes. His father-in-law demands to take charge of the situation, something Jerry had not planned and thus must overcome. While those conflicts are set up and running, our second main character, Marge, must sift through Jerry’s long line of mishaps to uncover her own truth and recognize her own flaws. Marge has to react to the killings that happened because Jerry wanted his wife kidnapped and Jerry has to try and fix his mess, or, run away like he ended up doing.

The entire film, the audience can sense that Jerry is not a good person. He is not inherently evil, but his own misgivings and inferior status in life develop into a complex that ultimately brings his mental demise. Also physical, if you count going to jail as one. He cannot keep up with the horrible cause of accidents that started with his poorly thought out plan at the beginning and fumbles any chance he has, through work with his deal or at home with his wife and child. Marge, on the other hand, starts out as a likable and charismatic police chief. What we start to learn though, is that she may be unhappy with her unexciting marriage to a man named “Norm.” He is the norm, a regular man that Marge married. She meets up with an old friend and takes everything he says at face value, which is the same thing she did to Jerry when she first meets and questions him. It is not until one of her friends rattles her simplistic understanding of the world and it’s people does she begin to look under the surface level. Her old friend had lied to her face and she believed it, as did Jerry. After realizing her mistake, she goes back to our first main character and calls him out on the string of lies he keeps weaving.

On page 25 of Aristotle’s Poetics, he states that “we must not demand of Tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is proper to it.” What he means is that for a tragedy to work out, a story must not continually make every single plot or action end up in one. There is a fine line between tragedy and straight up devastation. That is why, in Fargo, we did not see Jerry get away with his crimes or why Marge did not end up dying. That is why Gaear was caught in the end, and while multiple died, there was a lesson to be taught from Jerry’s mistakes. Not everything must be tragic to the nth degree for a tragedy to move and teach an audience.

Hello! My name is Libby Skalisky and I am a senior Humanities major. I specialize in English, Human Development, and DTC. I have already tried to take this class, but because of personal extenuating circumstances I had to withdraw. The most I remember about it is liking it a whole lot! Stories and storytelling in general is an art. It is hard to master, but I guess that’s why we’re all taking this class.

I am personally more partial to fictional stories because of the absolute out of this world stuff that can happen, but I am down for a little realistic story every now and then. I enjoy fantasy, comedy, romance, and animation. I grew up reading a lot of manga and books, as well as watching a lot of film and TV shows. My entire life has been based on what I could consume next, honestly. Even now, I am writing this and wanting to get back to binging a TV show I started a couple days ago, but alas.

I like stories, I like trying to write them. I do write fanfiction, but it’s never in a professional sense. I personally think I am a better poet than any type of storyteller, but that is why I want to see this class through until the end, to harness whatever stories I end up creating and liking them in the end. So, you know, don’t laugh at whatever silly stuff I come up with!

Here are some of my favorite stories in different media:

Movies: Baby Driver, Everything Everywhere All at Once

TV Shows: Bobs Burgers, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Books: The Child Thief  by Brom, The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins

The plot in the movie “Fargo” begins with Jerry Lundegaard meeting two criminals, Carl and Gaear, to plan the kidnapping of his wife in order to get money from his wealthy father-in-law, Wade Gustafson. Once the plan was put into action things quickly started to go wrong and problems continued throughout the whole movie. This accurately represents what Aristotle would call a well-constructed plot. To be a well-constructed plot he says it needs to “be single in its issue” and that the change of fortune should be from good to bad.

The change of fortune from good to bad shows a lot about each character. While these situations unfold we can not only see how they handle the situation, but we can also see how they interact with each other. From the start, when Jerry comes up with his plan, we can see that he is a desperate and selfish man. He continues to prove this as the story continues with each bump in the road. Then with the criminals, we are able to see that one is more emotional, talkative, and angry. While the other is emotionless, ruthless, and keeps to himself.

Aristotle explains an important aspect of a tragedy, which is fear and pity. He says “Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect.” This is shown when the two kidnappers are on their way back with Jean and they get pulled over, which then causes a surprising domino effect of issues. Once the cop becomes suspicious of the two men Gaear decides the best solution is to kill him. But someone saw them while driving by which then led to a car chase that ended in a double homicide. This chain of cause and effects happened very quickly which added to the element of surprise.