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Friday, October 3, 2008

Palin = Fargo's Marge Gunderson - Video

Conservative Rob Dreher points out an eerily apt comparison between Sarah Palin's contrived folksiness of last night with Fargo's Chief Marge Gunderson:

Palin's folksy "you betcha" demeanor undermined confidence in her ability to handle a serious crisis. It brought to mind police chief Marge Gunderson in the great film "Fargo," and it irritated me. I thought: "This is heavy stuff, stop it with the welcome-wagon shtick."

Having said that, Sheriff Marge was the hero of "Fargo," and her you-betchaness concealed her fundamental seriousness, while at the same time telegraphing a foursquare simplicity that, in the end, revealed the greatness of her character. Perhaps it does with Palin as well.

This fake McCain campaign ad starring Palin Gunderson is hilarious:

1 comments:

snoozn said...

I think Rob Dreher is absolutely right in the Palin/Gunderson comparison, but he missed the point of Fargo. I couldn't possibly put it better than Thomas Pope from his book Good Scripts, Bad Scripts. On the folksy language used by both Jerry and Marge: "...the inability to articulate can lead to an inability to feel; that the blandness of speech that Jerry and Marge employ indicates a deeper blandness of thought and emotions; that we are, to a greater degree than we'd like to admit, the words we speak." That inability to feel was most clearly revealed when Palin was unable to muster even feigned sympathy after Joe Biden choked up when talking about late wife in daughter in the debate.

Also, Marge may be the protagonist, but hers is not the typical movie "hero's journey." As Pope says "Marge will forever believe in happy endings and smiling faces, living a life in which , in the words of Arthur Jensen in Network, 'all necessities [are] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

Yes, Sarah Palin is Marge Gunderson in a much deeper way than a sprinkling of "doggone's" and "you betcha's" might initially suggest.