“This [Sounds like] a True Story”: Scoring the Heightened Reality of Noah Hawley’s Fargo

Noah Hawley’s anthology series Fargo (2014–) occupies a unique position in the peak television landscape. Inspired by Joel and Ethan Coens’ classic film of the same name (1996), the series’ Coenesque worldview anchors four disparate yet profoundly-interconnected seasons, woven together by Jeff Russo’s award-winning score. This chapter examines the sophisticated ways in which Russo’s score counterpoints the “side-by-side variation” on the film performed by Hawley’s text. As an example, Carter Burwell based the opening theme of the movie on a Norwegian folk song, setting it as a melancholy orchestral theme that communicates the ethnic character and hushed silence of a Minnesota winter, while suggesting the moral and epistemic failures to come. Russo’s series’ theme remains in the same tonal universe, literally and figuratively, beginning with solo violin, piano and glockenspiel before a full orchestral swell. But his use of violin, raised and lowered ˆ6 and ˆ7, and portamento suggest the narrative’s hints of Jewish mysticism, and recalls Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra. As the series continues it spirals both out- and inward, referencing both its allegorical nature and its continued reliance on uncanny juxtapositions between the mundane and the fantastic. I draw on recent research in film music theory to explain how subtle differences in the shift from diegetic to non-diegetic scoring and sound design illuminate the philosophical themes, and intertexts—fictional and otherwise—to which film and series’ allude. The score’s power to confirm this heightened reality lends it a unique authority in the world of Fargo, and suggests how a sliver of truth—say, money buried in the film to a bass pizzicato, but found to the sound of English horn in the series—might synecdochally stand in for a whole world.