Winter Cities in Film; Seeing Myself in Fargo (1996).
My friends came up with a list of a thousand movies they wanted to watch over the next decade, and they, being engineers, made some matlab code to pick a new one each week. In September, when the movie picked for our watch party was Fargo (1996), directed by Joel Coen, I didn’t think much of what this movie would mean to me.
Movies and tv, in my experience, tend to be set in backdrops that have some glamour to them. Urban movies tend to be in cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Paris, LA, or London; megalopolises that can take over the scene, like in Fallen Angels (1995). Rural environments in media can be a character unto themselves, such as The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) and its idyllic Irish countryside. Rarely in these situations where the locale is so involved in the story and environment of a film, is the location set in the prairies.
Fargo tells the tale of a series of schemes gone wrong in Minnesota, set across the state with both rural and urban settings throughout the film. The whole time my friends and I were watching we saw this as a story that could be entirely told within the context of the Canadian Prairies. The city focused scenes set in Minneapolis in the early, snowy spring made me shiver thinking about how that will be Edmonton in a few short months. Seeing winter driving, scraping ice off windshields, shoveling sidewalks, and the massive winter boots for life in winter city, all represented in a non-Christmas movie made me feel seen. The rural settings and highway chases were so reminiscent of Albertan highways in the winter and trips out to small towns. The drab undertones of there being almost nothing around for miles except canola fields buried under piles of snow. If you ignore the thick mid-western accents that Frances McDormand and William Macy put on, you could easily convince me that this movie took place in Edmonton or Winnipeg. Watching Fargo was the first time I have had this recognition of the prairies in a movie, and found a representation of my home biome that I had never seen before. While it may not be an exciting or awe-inspiring location, setting a movie in the prairies makes it feel like home. That tone fit this movie perfectly and I will happily look out for that feeling again in future films.
This article was written by GAPSS VP Marketing Eric Prefontaine.
Photo Credits Fargo 1996 Directed by Joel Coen