Coen Brothers Film Analysis

Coen Brothers are known as the most famous and popular independent film makers nowadays, they have produced many films labeled as B movies. The Coens’ films, unlike the Hollywood ones, often carry radical skepticism or a liberal outlook, from their very first film Blood Simple to the recent Inside Lewin Davis, always achieve on a low-budget with a small scale of production and their own stock company of actors. Their films are known for the mixing violence, dark humor, film noir, their films are frequently researched within a postmodern perspective. Though postmodernity and postmodernism are two distinctive ideas or theories, one responds more to an aesthetic, and the other is more of a condition of the society, but in many of their films, …show more content…
Postmodernist claims a collapse of human identity which is obviously manifested as subversively different from the previous time, as Stuart Hall advocates in “ The Question of Cultural Identity”, the modern identities are breaking up, for the transformation of the cultural landscapes of class, gender, race, etc. which have given us stable sense of selfness. During the last thirty years, enormous social changes have taken place, which is defined by the ways we experience time and space, because of the vast sweep of globalization, media brings human beings together while also splits themselves apart. Now social changes shifts of wavering human identity. The identity is no longer unified, completed, secure and coherent. Fargo is the reflection of the non-fixed identity of that period. Fragmented identity in Fargo will be analyzed through two ideas, the shifting selfness and selflessness by analyzing the characters in …show more content…
The typical classic noir films in 1940s and 1950s mostly share a common setting and theme, Fargo is set in a snowbound lifeless place, the cinematographer uses lots of long shots to depicts the environment, for the Coen brothers, they emphasis on the natural settings and environment to establishes the noir elements from in the snow area, from the poster we can see that hardly any bright color come across our eyes except the white snow land, the blood and dark clothes are at the corner, though it is a unusually environment for film noir, the plain color of the snow, earthy color of the character and setting, etc. But when we look at the dark, noir characters together with the environment, it is a world with high contrast between black and white, which is a typical noir depiction. It framed the character as being dark, lonely and uncertain in the postmodern world. Those unusual noir parodies stand in the line with postmodernism’s stance. That is to reject the traditional aesthetics of Beauty and of uniqueness, the adoption of noir parody in Fargo disguises the character in a black and white world, making their identity more pastiched with