>I'm assuming everyone has seen Fargo. What do you think of what will now >and forever be known as "the Radisson sequence"? A colleague argues that >it is atypical of the Coen oeuvre in that one can usually account for every >detail in their meticulously constructed, peeled-eye-ball universes. Is it >an extraneous bit of fluff meant to showcase Joel's wife? Or does it fit >with the twisted middle-American milieu? I just saw it for the second time tonight and I watched it with a keen eye to placing this sub-plot into the larger film. All I can come up with is that it shows how beneath the most innocent and "nice" (the key word for Minnesota culture) person lies danger, deception, and sickness. It also could tie into a city/country thing - when Michael Yamahita (I think that's the character's name) moves to the city, he loses his innocence, but this doesn't necessarily seem consistent with the rest of the film. There's also the potential for the race issue - the two non-white characters in the film is this Asian-American mentally ill lecher and an American Indian criminal. This is certainly consistent with the more critical jabs the film aims at Minnesota culture, where whiteness is assumed and racism is prevalent but repressed (like everything else). My personal call is that it's a wild card, like many of the scenes in Barton Fink. I don't agree with the above colleague's opinion that all Coen brothers' films are so meticulous - Barton Fink contains many elements which seem inconsistent with a uniform reading of the whole film (like the Michael Lerner character's militarism, the final scene, etc.). The Radisson sequence functions to throw us off base, keep us guessing, and make our skin crawl with the way our emotions can flip flop - we think he's a creep, we feel sorry for him, we think he's a really big creep. But does it work? You're darn tootin'! ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]