Fargo: The violent production of the masochistic contract as a cinematic concept

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Using Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of “immanence”; and “concepts”; as an entry into the violent 1995 film Fargo, this essay argues for the necessity to produce a cinematic rhetoric of violence that gets beyond the crippling moralizing framework provided by the prevailing freedom‐of‐speech/censorship debate. Fargo is exceptionally well‐suited for developing this new cinematic rhetoric because the film connects “violence”; as a concept to a more traditional philosophical/rhetorical issue: that of the production of truth and fiction. By carefully mapping out and responding to Fargo’s immanent forces‐especially the film's incessant alterations between narrative speed and slowness that crucially frame its violence‐this essay works with the film to produce the masochistic contract as a specifically cinematic concept. Since Fargo not only suggests an essentially masochistic aspect of (violent) film but actually stages the masochistic contract as a genuinely cinematic concept, an encounter with this film necessitates a rhetoric of desires. This rhetoric rejects languages of representation and ideology and instead insists on always encountering violence in its singularity. By taking “desire”; as a starting point for engaging Fargo, then, this essay articulates an ethical (rather than moral) approach to cinematic violence.