SUSANA BERNAL URIBE

WINTER SEMESTER 2017

FIOFA / SCREENWRITING

WHAT IF YOU’RE RIGHT AND THEY´RE WRONG?

Lester Nygaard notices something different in the sound of the washing machine
today: it sounds angry. On the surface, to everyone, he is a regular guy with
nothing outstanding in his life, a man without dreams or ambitions, a follower of
society´s herd that doesn´t question anything or anybody. But then again, today
everything takes a turn: he´s capable of feeling the angriness of the washing
machine inside him and something quietly bursts his unconscious anger and
consciously makes him act, motivated by his antagonist, Lorne Malvo. But what
exactly pushes Lester as an individual to act against the society that surrounds
him?
According to Nietzsche, the individual must have an agreement with the herd in
order to be accepted socially, and it is through the intellect that he develops
mechanisms of defence in order to survive. “The intellect, as a means of
preserving the individual, develops main powers in dissimulation; for this is the
means by which the weaker, less robust individuals survive, since in the struggle
for existence they are denied the horns and the sharp teeth of beasts of prey.”1

In contemporary storytelling, serial narrations in film and television have gained

a major social influence in the video-streaming Netflix era. Such is the case of
Fargo, the series, produced by MGM/FX in which Lester Nygaard is the
protagonist. In a serial narration, the protagonist, or main character, is the central
part upon which the whole story structure will develop; the entire narration of the
story is character-driven. The phenomenon of the character driven-narration in

1Friedrich Nietzsche- On Rhetoric and Language OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Edited and
Translated with a Critical Introduction by Sander L. Gilman Carole Blair David J. Parent
(PDF.246ln) retrieved from
https://archive.org/stream/NietzscheOnTruthAndLying/nietzsche%20on%20truth%20and%20lying
_djvu.txt
modern narratology has developed simultaneously as part of the social
phenomena of individualization of western societies. Psychology as a science
has taken serious part in this process of understanding the individual, magnifying
a person´s psyche above the collective behavior. Therefore, the protagonist of
every contemporary story reveals the true dramatic nature of its time; what the
historical and social context has brought into light as the protagonist’s particular
dramatic dilemma. The interest of understanding the psychological development
inside the character of Lester Nygaard lies in the question of whether it is the
individual that acts solely on his internal behavior, or it is the society that makes
the individual behave in such manners by permeating the inner self. This
question will lead us to understand and analyze Lester through an ambivalent
external/internal psyche that makes him act and become a killer by standing up
through defense mechanisms.

To begin with, if we picture Lester Nygaard as an animal he would be a rat; a

small mammal that hides from big predators. Lester’s big predator and antagonist
is his high school bully, Sam Hess. In the first episode, Lester reveals his
weakness and incapability to confront Sam’s aggression, so his first reactions
this violent encounter, as well as the passive-aggressive comments of his wife
and his own brother, are to laugh, deny and hide, reactions Psychology labels as
normal defensive processes. Apart from this, his incapability to react, result of his
rodent weakness, makes him a type of vulnerable personality that society grasps
and takes advantage of. However, Lester still needs a motivation to act out
(defensive enactment) switching his character into his superego, revealing his
unconscious desires within the narrative sotry. The encounter in the very first
episode with his antagonist, Lorne Malvo, makes him take a life-changing
decision (almost by force) and thus his psychological journey begins. This
meeting is the scattered seed that develops into his motivation, although when
he reacts by killing his wife, we may find that this action is against his nature and
so, for a moment we see him showing some remorse. When Lester meets Malvo
and tells him about all the people that have been mean to him throughout his life,
Malvo suggests he should remind them that he is primarily and ape. In an
unconscious level, Lester receives the message from Malvo that he should
impose his animal instinct to his female mate and so, he acts. From Freud’s point
of view, Lester’s superego is incarnated in Malvo, howeer, this superego advices
Lester to survive from as a predator in the male kingdom. Malvo is a predator,
and one the biggest predators around, with a developed philosophy about life,
which he follows accordingly. I would go as far as to say he is Nietzsche’s
intellectual man. His Nietzschean philosophy glorifies the human intellect but also
our capacity to lie and survive. To Malvo, Lester is an experiment to prove his
theories and philosophies, a game of personal matter to prove his scientific
mastery. He is clearly a psychopath whose defense mechanisms include
intellectualization and rationalization.

After his meeting with Malvo, Lester tries to repair his washing machine as if he
were trying to fix something broken inside him, but the apparatus finally breaks
down as a comic metaphor. As he is confronted by his abusive wife, Lester puts
into action Malvo’s evil suggestion and kills his wife with a hammer. From this
moment on, Lester transforms from the loser next door, to an action man. He will
lie, he will get away with his lying, he will be really “bad”, but his personality won´t
change, he will still be the rodent-man, trying to get away or hide from the
predators in order to live. As Nancy McWilliams points out, “Personality by its
nature is a fairly stable phenomenon….2 I will dare to say that although Lester
acted by free will, he appeared to act without consciousness, almost driven by
external circumstances that seemed to have forced him to react. This is clear at
the ending of the series’ season, when Lester is finally going to get arrested and
he runs through the snow and accidentally falls into the freezing water of a lake
causing his own death. Malvo’s small lab rat fails the test of survival proving that
that his rodent fate is to die as all creatures hunted by the biggest predator, in
this case, the police or the law. Especially if we take into account how Malvo

2Nancy Mc Williams. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the

Clinical Process
dies, we realize that both of them died hunted by their predators, while trying to
survive. The question remains whether Lester becomes a killer as a result of the
rules and norms imposed by a society that has pushed him to lie in order to
coexist; or whether he went through an internal defensive process to fight against
everything that oppressed him. As revealed in Malvo’s discourse when they meet
in the dinner café, he himself clearly blames society and justifies his actions
against it.
Malvo:
Your problem is that you spend thinking your whole life that there are rules.
There aren´t. We used to be gorillas. All we had is what we could take and
defend. The truth is you are more of a man that you were yesterday.

Lester:
How did you figure?

Malvo:
It´s a red tide Lester this life of ours. The shit they make us eat, day after day, the
boss, the wife, etcetera, wearing us down. If you don´t stand up to it, let them
know you´re still an ape deep down where it counts, you´re just gonna get
washed away.

This speech is Malvo’s apology for being a psychopath and this is how and why
he fights against everything and everyone who does not share his view. And if
we take into account that Lester’s acting out is also a sign of psychopathy we
could agree that Malvo’s experiment successfully turned, or encouraged Lester´s
latent psychopath tendencies to come out of the closet. Or is it that Malvo’s
experiment with Lester, and others that he recorded confessing murders in his
cassette tapes, are part of his theory that psychopathy erupts from American
society as the biggest predator of all? Lester was opressed and bullied by his
loved ones (his wife, his brother) and therefore what could he possibly expect
from the others who were not attached to him? In a sense, we all pity Lester
because he was never taken into account and we feel disgusted by the abusive
behaviour of his wife and brother towards him. When his life changes
dramatically after having killed his wife and gets away with it, he felt as a master
rat that got away with murder. So suddenly, he has some kind of power towards
the others that makes them feel empathy for him, he is now noticed and
everybody wants to take care of him and to know if he is all right. This power
rose up his super ego, making his ego inflate to the point of feeling superior to
everyone. This is shown in the scene where he reencounters with Malvo by
chance in Las Vegas, later in the story. He decides to confront Malvo and Malvo
ignores him. This makes Lester upset because it reminds him of the old Lester
that no one noticed, so he demands Malvo to acknowledge him. –Are you sure
you want this Lester? - Malvo asks, and contrasting with the scene where they
first meet and he ask him if he wants him to kill his bully, this time he says -yes! -
with outstanding security. And so again, Malvo kills for him, and takes him to the
point of indirectly killing his second wife. As in a cycle, they both play the
psychopath’s game and they are once again engaged in an apparently endless
killing vicious cycle.
Finally, they both die hunted by their biggest predators, the police, or in this case
the searchers of the truth, as I perceive the nature the secondary characters
embodied by agents Gus and Molly. In their endless cycle of killing and lying of
the psychopaths, only the believers and seekers of the truth and life such as the
two police agents can beat these two.

Returning to the question of whether Lester and Malvo are psychopaths raised
up by a psychopath culture, or natural-born-killers, I would dare to say they are
the first. Although their personal behaviour and the accountability of their actions
are subject to be judged and punished, I think they are both sadly main
characters of our time. We are facing the narcissistic era where we are not
growing as a collective, empathizing society, caring about the needs of the other;
but rather as an alienated selfish and openly psychopath society, using the other
to fulfil our needs and desires. We like Lester and Malvo as characters because
in a way they are outcasts of a society that has crushed them, the weakest
animals, so to speak. In a way, they are both anti-heroes avenging their abused
selves, fighting those who bullied and oppressed them. We like them because
the tone used in the narration is black comedy and we can laugh about their
situation, and also feel empathy for them even though they are criminals. This
use of comedy is crucial in the series so that we feel empathy for their characters
and somehow, identify with their anger, with their non-conformity. But the bottom-
line, What if you´re right and they´re wrong a phrase written in the poster where
Lester commits his first crime, keeps appearing as a leitmotif through all the
season’s episodes of Lester and Malvo. I think the series Fargo makes us reflect
upon who to blame, or rather to analyse the causes and motivation, before we
jump to judge the evilness in Lester and Malvo. Are they really the bad guys in
the story? I would not defend them through their awful actions, but I would put
also the weight of the blame in a society that raises children without love and
attention, a society that pushes the weak or the nonconformist Lesters and
Malvos of the world (or of the United States) to become psychopaths. The series,
a drama with a comical approach, is clearly a tragedy in its core and subtext, and
is a deep, witty and intelligent reflection from its creator Noah Hawley, on
American society, which by the way, permeates all capitalized societies.