Anti-Anti-Hero: Basically a Love Letter Regarding Marge Gunderson

Anti-Anti-Hero: Basically a Love Letter Regarding Marge Gunderson

In a time so full of the anti-hero, a trope to which even I have fallen prey and secretly love, it is becoming increasingly rare to see a character that is truly genuine. However, Marge Gunderson, local police chief in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, is everything that our anti-heros are not and is still regarded as one of the best film characters of all time. The “folksy” environment often established by the Coen Brothers in many of their films is presented and applied wonderfully in this film, and in Marge especially. We first meet Marge in bed, who is woken up with news of a triple homicide and calmly proceeds to eat a quiet but content breakfast of eggs made by her husband before leaving for a crime scene with a little morning sickness. Marge exists fully outside of the world of the plot; she has a husband and a home and a child on the way. It is an uncomplicated lifestyle, but she greets it as well as those around her with authenticity. Marge is direct without being impolite, opinionated without searching for an argument, and clearly good at and committed to her job. Perhaps one of the most poignant moments of the film, preceded by the fact that we’ve just seen a main character being fed into and spewed out of a wood chipper, is Marge pulling everything into perspective in a small, straightforward speech as the film begins to conclude. She says to Grimsrud, who she watches in the rearview mirror of her squad car, “So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.” In a film rooted so deeply in irony, it is almost refreshing to see a main character without it.