"Fargo" braci Coenów jako lekcja świadomego, analitycznego podejścia do interpretacji dualizmu faktu i fikcji w amerykańskiej narracji filmowej

In "Fargo" Joel and Ethan Coen deliberately blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction by manipulating their audiences into believing they have been faced with an almost documentary account of real events. For the perceptive viewer, however, the film’s guise of realism soon turns out to be yet another manifestation of the brothers’ inclination towards extreme stylization of their pictures. The duality of fact and fiction is reinforced by the film’s title which cleverly undermines the city’s significance for American history as well as the subversion of the traditional Western film iconography and the deconstruction of the pivotal national myth of Paul Bunyan. The technique of tall tale deployed by the directors intent on frustrating their audiences’ expectations not only closely parallels certain strategies of postmodernist literature keen to destabilize the ontological boundary between the realm of fiction and the real world but also conveys the grotesque sense of the vacuousness of the nation’s moral, social and cultural environment, which becomes evident after deciphering the picture’s numerous deceptions and duplicities by applying a conscious, analytical approach to its interpretation.