Fargo Season 5: The Giuliani Files

Just when I had finally decided to place a razorblade on my wrist to flee reality and end existential depressions, news broke that the 5th season of the Fargo series comes with the most thrilling TV lawyer since Saul Goodman. Man seeks hope, so I pushed the blade back into the rose soap one last time, and sat in front of the television.

This time the story is more complex and absurd than ever, but once you accept that Fargo 5 is an entirely crazed out work of fiction with no claim for being realistic, you can enjoy the surreal mayhem of the series. Fargo Season 5: The Giuliani Files is a dystopia set in the USA in a time that seems to be a not too distant future. The new installment of the empathic “tragic loser” series revolves around the events that take place after the sitting president Mr T. rejects the outcome of a lost presidential election.

It’s refreshing to see that Fargo 5 leaves well-trodden Freudian paths by depicting Mr. T as the most uncategorisable of all pathological figures in modern epic narration. After having worked his way up as most successful self-promoter in the real estate and television business, his most daring venture to date comes true against all odds and pushes him into the highest office in the country. Little does he know that he was exactly chosen for that job, he is exposing and accelerating the division of the country and setting up a great theatre to distract the nation fundamentally. He fills his role successfully. He is a rating superstar, keeps the attention focused on himself with his unconventional authoritarian leadership and the help of his followers and opponents- those too are openly and secretly addicted to the domestic bioweapon Mr T., masochistically extending their collective trauma for four lost years, like junkies or obsessed lovers who cannot get enough of their fix.

It’s while depicting his presidency in a two-episode prologue where the storyline of Fargo Season 5 gets a bit too fantastic, wanting to make the viewer believe that the presidents opponents kept up a cold-war narrative of rigged elections because of Russian collusion for full four years, going so far as to impeach him to no outcome, while Mr. T in the meantime is establishing a conspirative parallel world and lunatic arm of Christianity simply called “Q”, which serves as both an eightball for the riddle-hungry gamer society AND a fascistic shelter. The creators overdid it a bit by also letting a global pandemic and police brutality sweep through the country at the same time, triggering the biggest economical and racial protests in the country since the 60s. On top, his opponents grant the growling powerhouse nothing more than an ancient dinosaur with beginning dementia, age spots, and a Ray Ban Aviator on his face as a sparring partner in the presidential race. Mr. T is going to have a bad time, isn’t he?

Yet, the energetic and disgraced president is not the tragic loser who typically has the starring role in all Fargo works. He cannot be. He who has divided the world into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ will rather successfully burn the Empire down like Nero than being a loser, and he’ll sacrifice everything and everybody on his way down, friends and allies included. It is in this final infernal act, after the opening of the cannibal games by Mr. T , in which the great epic loser of Fargo 5 must be sought.

Giuliani is the leader of a hired team of lawyers, who with stubborn doggedness are trying to overturn the presidential elections in favor of Mr. T. When the more law-abiding flappers of the team fail to show the appropriate fighting spirit and unscrupulousness, the hour of old hand Giuliani strikes. Giuliani is the Fargo series best figure yet, a beautiful, eccentric firework that is a mixture of a burnt sparkler and the penguin from Batman. Giuliani moves exclusively in the spheres of his own greasy perception and non-morality that’s ranging somewhere between Sopranos and Golden Girls, and his character is embedded in a never-ending bizarre press conference.

In episode 6, Mr. T announces “A big press conference at Four Seasons” to announce news on the contested presidential election, which by now is the world’s new favorite car-crash. The world tunes in, but instead of the glitz and glamor of the expensive hotel chain, Giuliani and his team present the austere charm of the ‘Four Seasons Total Landscaping‘- the press conference takes place in the parking lot of a suburban garden center which is delicately situated between a sex-shop and a crematorium, and decorated with several rolled up hoses. Giuliani has the aura of a man who has received a hundred thousand dollars from the Greenland Tourism Authority to deliver a false weather report in front of a South Sea photo wallpaper. In another press conference in episode 7, he sweats out the drinks from last night and his dark hair dye runs down his temples like the blood of Qrist. Behind him stand bigoted escort troops, crammed together and lined up like forgotten confirmands waiting to parrot rehearsed incriminating slogans with religious zeal.

The creators of the series were heavily criticized for having overdrawn the characters and plot so grossly, nonetheless it is great fun to follow the absolutely unrealistic events on screen. However, the makers counteract these exaggerations in a congenial manner with the reactions of Mr. T, and manage to create a contrasting dark and gloomy psychogram and Rosebud moment for cinema history.

The president watches and falls silent without doing much to stop the tragic show of Giuliani’s escalating battle. Interrupted by a few revenge-sprees in which he fires politicians and officials who show no solidarity and cancels media figures and broadcasters because they do not follow the madness unconditionally, Mr. T practically spends all his days on golf courses. He has realized that he is surrounded by losers and parasites long before the lost election.

In an unforgettable dinner scene in episode 9, we see a tired and disgusted patriarch who realizes that hell is a place on earth. Throning at his gigantic dining table, he looks at his parasitic family from a distance while a storm is raging outside and a veil of sulfur settles in the atmosphere: here is his wife Melancholia, who coldly avenged all the model/escort-girl humiliations that she endured for money and status, and now let her husband run around with a ridiculous fake tan for years already, telling him how good he looked in orange. There his three adult children who had no talents of their own and shamelessly led a parasitic existence and lived on the achievements and prominence of their father, continuing to ill-advise him and stirring up his rage because they saw their livelihoods in jeopardy. In this haunting scene that blends with frames of the past in which Mr. T is walking down Broadway, above him a billboard by Jenny Holzer, we realize that like so many tragic alpha-patriarchs, T. was just trying to hold the shit called “useless offspring” together.

But now the problem had increased, and he had degenerated into the patriarch of not half but the entire country: he was the unreachable and fanatically worshipped father for one half that would suck him out for identity and get him into all kinds of trouble. For the other half he was a pathological fetish: that of the cruel father and the traumatized childhood, a mental accessory that allowed a more righteous and long-lasting kind of rage.

The father is fed up.

All is triggered by his son Junior, who comes back from a barber’s visit with freshened up facial hair and a truckload of t-shirts with the words ‘ALL LINES MATTER’ printed on them and to be worn on Giuliani’s next press conference. And just like that, Fargo Season 5: The Giuliani Files mutates into an explosive emancipation story and vengeance of a father who’s had enough in its final episode, which ends with lots of burnt earth and souls. A must see!

by Saliha Enzenauer