21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist

Fargo

I’m convinced that if you watch all three seasons of Fargo in order, you’ll see that the show’s arc mirrors the trajectory of American politics in the last five years with eerie accuracy. Season 1 is a fairly optimistic foil to Breaking Bad-type antihero shows; decency triumphs, and the crooks get their comeuppance. Then, season 2 complicates the order = good/disorder = bad dichotomy, effectively predicting the conservative backlash that would follow the Obama era, à la Reagan’s rise in the ‘80s.

By season 3, the moral compass became unmoored from the magnetic field and spun wildly. At first, it seemed farcical to the point of frivolity. Plots involving valuable stamps, shady business dealings and mistaken identities piled up, and none of them amounted to more than a fart in the wind. Yet, the “unfathomable pinheadery” slowly coalesced into a coherent narrative. What began as a petty brotherly rivalry grew into an international conspiracy that implicated society itself.

The season is rife with stealthy topical references. In Emmit Stussy (Ewan McGregor) and V.M. Varga (David Thewlis), it presents a pair of figures that could stand for competing perceptions of Trump. Emmit is Trump as a bumbling dimwit, too self-absorbed to realize that he’s wreaking havoc. Meanwhile, Varga is Trump as a malevolent con artist, manipulating the public with false promises, fear-mongering, and lies that everyone sees through but no one with authority cares to set straight. The truth probably resides somewhere between these extremes, which is the point.

Morality isn’t relative; rather, it’s irrelevant. Fargo used to abide by the karmic philosophy that defines the Coen brothers’ work. Now, it denies its characters any control over their fates. People are merely cogs in enormous bureaucratic systems, from the government to the economy to the universe itself. You can climb the ladder and maybe change the rules, but you can’t escape it. We invent philosophies — religion, the American Dream — to convince ourselves that what we’re doing matters, but it’s really just so much red tape. If you tell a lie, and everyone else goes along with it, it might as well be true. The system always wins.