The Film That Never Visited

The Coen Brothers' film Fargo was released in nineteen ninety-six, won two Academy Awards, entered the cultural permanent record, and was filmed almost entirely somewhere else. The opening title card reads: "This is a true story." It was not. The title card was the first of several games the Coens played with their audience.

Actual filming took place in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul area, in northeastern North Dakota near the Canadian border, and at a lake in Washington County, Minnesota. The scene involving the famous woodchipper was filmed on Square Lake in May Township, Minnesota. The cabin where Jean Lundegaard was held was also in Minnesota. The city of Fargo, North Dakota, appears mostly as a title, a name, a cold weather shorthand.

What Fargo the city received in return was complicated. The film depicted it, by implication, as a flat and murderous place populated by people whose accents were the joke. North Dakotans and Minnesotans have complicated feelings about this. The Coen Brothers did not make the accents up; that dialect genuinely exists across the region. They did, perhaps, lean into it.

What Fargo actually did with all of this was characteristically practical. The Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center acquired the original woodchipper prop from the film. It sits just inside the front entrance. Visitors can pose for photographs pretending to feed a rubber leg into it. The center provides props. The woodchipper is a popular stop for visitors.

There is something very Fargo about that response. The film made the city's name synonymous with dark comedy and winter violence. The city put the woodchipper in the lobby and let people see it up close.