Season 5, Episode 6: ‘The Tender Trap’
With many reversals of Coen character types this season of “Fargo” — Dot as a deadly Jean Lundegaard from the movie, Roy as a seductive Ed Tom Bell from “No Country for Old Men” — let’s add one more: Lars Olmstead , Indira Olmstead’s layabout husband, this season’s indebted, non-pregnant spin on Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson. Marge’s husband Norm also has a dream. He painted a mallard for a competition to win the 20-cent stamp. He loses to his friend, but gets the three-cent stamp, which Marge celebrates in the film’s touching denouement.
But unlike Lars, Norm’s ambitions are not a drag on his wife. On the contrary, she makes her eggs and gives the prowler a jump. They enjoyed fricassee together at lunch. Finally, huddled under a blanket against the howling cold of the rural Midwest, they were expecting their first child. If anything, it’s Marge who experiences a little lust when she leaves the Twin Cities to investigate the case and puts on makeup to meet an old classmate for drinks. The reliable Norm is always there to support him, but perhaps Brainerd, Minn., and its brown-gray buffet casseroles are not enough for a sheriff of his impeccable instincts.
Indira is too good for Lars; much is clear. When he stumbles inside from another night sleeping in his garage of broken dreams, he is angry with Indira for not supporting him as a proper wife. The scene is not remotely captivating, as there is no suggestion of why these two are married in the first place. He is trying to perform a traditional wedding where, based on all available evidence, one never existed. He’s in debt as an unemployed nincompoop who fancies himself first as a rock drummer and then as a PGA Tour pro, and he double-shifts at the police station to reduce their debt and to provide for his son Frosted Flakes guy. His bile at this moment was restless, and it was also unbelievable.
But the rough engineering of this scene becomes the larger theme of the episode and the series itself, which has become about united women carving out a place for themselves in a world where the best men are vague and at worst thoughtless and abusive. Indira’s quarrel with her husband, who somehow expects her to exchange recipes like other wives at the country club, serves as a catalyst for her to reconsider her position with Dot. Because of Indira’s ability to pull it together, Dot is no longer the cop-tasing miscreant in the back of her cruiser but a victim of abuse scratching and scraping to keep the happiness she’s worked so hard to achieve. That’s a woman worth fighting for.
Lorraine doesn’t naturally fit into Indira’s line of thinking, which is what makes her the most intriguing character on the show. His instinct is to support men like Roy Tillman, because he considers himself tough and unforgiving and tends to think of society in terms of winners and losers, many of whom owe his company. When Indira slides a thick file detailing Roy’s documented abuse by Dot/Nadine, Lorraine pushes it away. “People who claim to be victims are the downfall of this country,” he said. In his mind, Dot is still the cheater who married his only son.
However, Roy, for all his arrogant power play, makes it easier for Lorraine to change her mind. He only knows one way to deal with women and that is to assert his power over them, through his authority or the back of his hand. There might be an angle she could work to help Lorraine get her ex-husband back and solve her daughter-in-law’s problems in the process. But his disillusionment for Roy and his meeting with Indira begin to change his thinking about Dot, who is not the kind of “victim” he lives to harass with heavy-handed merger deals or threats. of the trial.
Framing the scenes at the Tender Trap, the strip club that gives this episode its title, one small detail stands out. When Roy confronts Vivian Duggar, the mustachioed banker “with the name of a girl” who sold his business to Lorraine, he brings up the fact that he is violating a restraining order against a dancer. The irony is rich, given what we know about Roy’s treatment of women, but it brings these men into dramatic alignment. When Lorraine eventually uses her powers to destroy Vivian’s life, it serves as a harbinger of things to come. He still thinks about the legitimacy of the “victims”, but he lives to flex.
