Lester Nygaard on the FX series Fargo is the serialized attempt to
depict William H. Macy’s character Jerry Lundegaard from the classic film of
the same name, and it sure adds a lot of layers that, in some respect, put the original
filmic character to shame. Lester, played by the ubiquitous Martin Freeman, is
an unassuming, unfailingly polite salesman, in the same way that Lundegaard
was. It’s a thin politeness, though, used as a bulwark against having a
substantive personality beneath the pleasantries—politeness as a shield, a life
raft. This is a man who has never asserted himself or set boundaries to the
liberties that others can take with him. As always with such characters, we
wonder how they’ve managed to even carve out their modest family and
professional lives, being as meek as they are.
In the film, Lundegaard’s wife is sort of a
mirror version of himself—just someone who was equally nonthreatening and
satisfactorily attractive, which makes a kind of sense. But in the show,
Lester’s wife is a bully who takes every opportunity to remind him what an
ineffectual loser he is, constantly telling him to man up and make his own
success in the insurance sales world, to which he offers neutral, hasty
agreement. Eventually she actually dares him to take action against her, fully
confident that he won’t, and she ratchets up the insults, bringing flooding
back all of the abuse Lester suffered in high school. Of course, he lashes out
and bashes her skull in with a hammer, freshly confident from his chance
hospital encounter with the free floating mass of malevolence Lee Malvo (Billy
Bob Thornton).
Lundegaard was a man who was desperate to get
money by any means necessary after a life of meekness left him without any
other recourse, so he hired psychopaths to hold his wife for ransom to his
wealthy father in law. Nygaard is a man who had been bullied his whole life,
and convinced by Malvo that the man, Hess, who bullied him and bloodied his
nose even as an adult, deserved to die. Nygaard didn’t explicitly tell Malvo to
kill Hess, but it was left vague enough that a man as unfettered by laws or
morals as Malvo could interpret it widely. It might not be accurate to say that
Nygaard is glad that Malvo killed Hess, but the series of events that the
murder inspired, especially with the verve he gleaned from it to club his wife
to death, seems to offer more of a definitive direction to his life than he’d
ever had.
People who have a life history of not healthily
asserting themselves and looking out for their own interests will eventually
overcompensate by making up the deficit of self-assertion in an antisocially
sudden way. They aren’t aware of the harm that their sudden overly dramatic
course correction causes the wider world, because they are so energized by the
idea of not just being nothing anymore. And that is the root of the evil
depicted in Nygaard’s type, and really to the Walter White type, who was a
similarly milquetoast man innervated by the late in life discovery of the
seeming limitlessness of his own gall—the excitement of suddenly not being
simply nothing obscures the fact that one should step carefully in the world,
being aware of the impact one has on one’s peers and surroundings. Smacking his
nag of a wife in the skull with a hammer was the first true act Lester Nygaard
ever committed, and certainly the most alive he’d ever felt. But this of course
is an aliveness that has no purchase in the wider world, as it can’t be shared,
and it had to come at the expense of someone else’s life.
The question arises—what other option did
Nygaard, or Walter White, have? Can we really imagine people as meek as that
ever healthily asserting themselves, expressing their values and opinions in a
meaningful public context, proclaiming their worth and selfhood? The world as
experienced from such a perspective really is an impossibly unfair place, ruled
by the pushy and the baselessly confident. There is very little reason in the
public sphere as viewed by such men—actions, relationships, experiences, none
are ever adequately articulated or given a kind of context that can inspire
faith in the logic and order of the human enterprise. So such men, in order to
merely not feel bad for once in their pathetic lives, enact in distilled,
immediate form the entirety of their experience of the illogic of the human
situation, rather than doling out illogically aggressive but ego forming
behavior in accretion.
Is this a new trope, the ineffectual, neutered
professional male who finds healthy self-assertion so utterly beyond the pale,
so steeped in illogic, that he can only find his true self through antisocial
outbursts? Has the world become more observably absurd that the kind of unironic
engagement with it necessary to form and sustain a healthy adult ego is viewed
as more hopelessly beyond the pale than before? Or is this how evil has always
been, an unsubtle attempt by the socially awkward to eke out a sliver of
self-actualization that isn’t earned or natural, because doing so in the light
of day seems to require more absurdity than can be comfortably engaged with?
For such people, standing firmly and setting a line that the world cannot cross
is less valid or possible than killing your wife with a hammer.
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