A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere by Todd Melby

Author:Todd Melby [Todd Melby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m tired of this dirty old city

And tired of too much work

And never enough play

And tired of these dirty old sidewalks

Think I’ll walk off my steady job today

By walking into the King of Clubs with a stolen car attached to the hitch of his Delta 88, Jerry has pretty much walked off his steady job and into the dark netherworld of Fargo, North Dakota. It’s where skinny criminals smoke, fret, and guzzle longnecks, waiting for a chance at a free car and easy cash.

A friend of mine once compared Fargo to Chinatown. Neither movie really takes place in the location for which it is named, but each place is perceived as mysterious and depraved. It’s where bad things happen, beyond the watchful eyes of proper society.

FEBRUARY 2, 1995

When he first read the Mike Yanagita scene, Stephen Park couldn’t wrap his head around it. The Coens imagined Yanagita as fat and balding, a loner who hit on a pregnant woman at a hotel bar. Park was thin and sported a thick head of black hair. More importantly, he didn’t relate to what he read. Mike Yanagita possessed a sense of alienation Park didn’t feel. The character felt far away from him and the people he knew.

Why am I being seen for this? Park wondered. He told his agent, nope, he wasn’t interested.

A week or so later, the script found its way back to the Los Angeles actor. His agent asked him if he would read it again. And consider auditioning? Park pulled out the scene and read it again. It begins with Marge entering a hotel bar described as “a rather characterless, low-lit meeting place for businesspeople.” A voice asks, “Marge?” The voice is described as coming from “a bald, paunching man of about Marge’s age” whose “features are broad, friendly, Asian-American.”

With this reading, Park ignored Yanagita’s physical description and leaned into the emotional trauma. He thought about the other scenes when Mike isn’t in the room with Marge, but Marge is thinking about Mike. There’s the phone call to her Brainerd home as she’s drifting off to sleep. As Norm snoozes, a man from her past calls and asks for her by her birth name: Margie Olmstead. Later, after the drink with Mike, Marge tells a friend about him over the phone as she packs her bags inside a room at the Radisson. Marge learns Mike’s been lying. He never married Linda, as he had claimed during their date; she didn’t die of cancer. Mike stalked Linda, never married, and lives with his parents.

“A character like this feels far away from me,” Park recalled to me. “It took me awhile to get into this character and feel the pain. At first, I felt like I couldn’t even do it.”

Before Fargo, Park portrayed a Korean American shopkeeper in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. In the 1989 movie, a bespectacled Park, and his dutiful wife, struggles to understand Radio Raheem’s request to buy twenty D batteries for his enormous boom box. Raheem, played by Bill Nunn, gets upset when Park’s character doesn’t understand.

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