Noah Hawley is far from the typical Hollywood creative. A screenwriter and novelist with Emmy awards to his name for the FX series Fargo, he could happily boast of his current King-of-the-Mountain status in show business. And yet he’s unassuming in person, highly introspective and fascinated by the decidedly unglamorous life of the average citizen.
“Average sounds like such a negative,” Hawley tells me in his office in Santa Monica, California. He’s promoting his fifth novel, Before the Fall, preparing season three of Fargo, and executive-producing an adaptation of the Marvel Comics character Legion for FX.
A comic book character might seem a curious choice for a writer known for dealing in the world of the mundane. But Hawley is reflective about that issue, too. “Right now, the stories that we seem to be telling ourselves are stories about superheroes. Literally people who are invulnerable or so beyond capable that you never really worry about them. I find those stories, while entertaining, are hard to relate to. It’s not like you can watch or read those stories and feel like you are taking something away for your own life.”
There’s certainly much to take away from Before the Fall, the story of a down-on-his-luck artist named Scott Burroughs who inexplicably finds himself on a private plane that crashes on the way to Martha’s Vineyard, killing everyone but him and a young boy. What follows is the familiar story of the media’s dissection of the tragedy and the cable news host who is eager to cast suspicion on Scott, an artist who happens to have painted scenes of plane crashes before ending up in the situation himself. The question of what actually happened on the plane drives the plot, but it’s not quite the expected mass-market thriller one might read on a beach this summer.
“There’s a mystery, in that we have to figure out what happened. And that’s a process that takes time. So, to that degree, the answer to why the plane went down is a time-release answer, then yes, it’s a mystery, but one I was always hoping to solve with the characters rather than imposing something external on them,” Hawley says. “The danger of writing a so-called thriller is that in your last 100 pages, all of these really interesting characters you’ve created are just running away from something or toward something, but they’re no longer capable of innovation or discovery.”
What compelled Hawley to write this novel was his love of the characters, particularly the sad-sacks that he feels go overlooked in so much modern fiction. “When I realized that solving the mystery could be done by solving the characters, that was the moment I knew I had a story, that it would allow me to humanize everyone and tell a larger story about a larger group of people.”
As with Fargo, Before the Fall is a story that defies certain conventions of storytelling. It’s prone to digressions, it doesn’t unfold smoothly, and the resolution, while satisfying, is not the kind to inspire comparisons to Agatha Christie. “What are the elements of coincidence that inform the story and how do people deal with it? In the case of Bill Cunningham, the news anchor for this conservative news network, he doesn’t live in a universe with coincidence. Everything means something. So, the minute there are these things that don’t add up, then it starts to seem nefarious to him. On some level, that’s the pattern-seeking animal saying, ‘Well, how is it possible that a painter who was in a plane crash painted a plane crash before he crashed? How does that not mean something?’ That search for meaning is at its height after a tragedy. Why, when a plane went down, did some people survive and not others?”
To Hawley, that kind of ambiguity and desire for order are reflections of reality, which he prefers to the strict adherence to narrative convention. “Every story is about a search for meaning. I think that we’re pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there’s no puzzle pieces left over. The most confounding stories are the ones where there’s an element of the unknowable, or randomness. You look at the Kennedy assassination and that it was caught on film and we’re still debating what happened to this day. You can watch it, you can see what happened, but there’s still these extra puzzle pieces. Fictionally, people don’t like those stories, so we’ve weeded out the randomness. Part of why making Fargo is really enjoyable is because that randomness is part of its DNA. Because it says it’s a real story or a true story, and therefore truth doesn’t unfold the way fiction unfolds.”
Little is known about season three of Fargo – the TV series based on the Coen brothers feature film and Hawley’s best-known work – other than it is a contemporary story, it will be released next year, and it once again revolves around his trademarked small characters falling into a story they are unprepared for.
“In the middle of winter, it’s a big expanse. Big tableau, little people, scale-wise. There is a sense of how hard it is to live there that has bred this Minnesota nice” – the reserved courtesy inhabitants are said to possess. “Some might say, this exaggerated sense of optimism in the face of the fact that you could freeze to death walking down the street,” he says.
The entry point for this season, according to Hawley, is the idea that technological advances of the current era don’t necessarily mesh well with that Minnesota nice. “What does our modern virtual friend community world bring to that? What does it do to that sense? That sort of flip-side of the Minnesota nice thing is the Lutheran humility, that you don’t talk about your feelings, you don’t ask other people about their feelings, because you don’t want to embarrass them. But now we live in that world where people text pictures of their food or post it on Instagram. It’s just this oversharing culture, so I wanted to play with this idea that there’s always a sense of danger and threat in the show, but what if one of the things that’s in danger is this very idea of Minnesota nice? How are we all grappling with what it means to interact with each other on a screen, even when there’s someone right next to you?”
How does a writer who delights in upending the norm function within the structure of the comic book saga, then? Legion’s publicity machine is starting to ramp up and a trailer dropped at San Diego Comic-Con last month. Hawley refers to the series as “sort of an X-Men fable”, rather than something connected to the larger mythology being portrayed in the feature film series. It not being connected to the cinematic universe is, in itself, a radical notion in the age of intricate stories told across multiple platforms by Marvel and DC’s theatrical and TV arms.
The more Hawley talks about Legion, the clearer it is that this series is far more in line with his brand of entertainment than it seems at first glance. “What the show is about, to some degree, and the book as well, is a story about stories and how we use stories to define ourselves. David Haller, who’s a character in Legion, is 30-something years old and has been told he’s schizophrenic and that’s the story of who he is. Then he meets these people and they tell him, ‘No, you’re not crazy. You have these abilities.’ I find that that’s very interesting. All these things happen to you and you’re told they mean this one thing, but if you look at them in this other way, they mean something else.
“There’s an element of romance and escape to it. Who doesn’t want a secret identity where you have anonymity on a certain level and be your best self?. It’s interesting that people have to hide to be their best self rather than just being their best selves in these stories.”
At the end, we’re back to Hawley’s affection for those he’d prefer not to call average. “Legion isn’t a show about saving the world or going out on missions. They’re not heroes, in that sense of fighting battles to save the world. It’s a more existential show. I’m more interested in what it’s really like to go down the rabbit hole and find yourself suddenly part of a world you don’t understand and abilities that make you different than human. What does that say about being human, but what is it really like?” Genre entertainment at its best asks those heady questions through the lens of the outre, but even seminal works of superhero fiction like The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen rarely find the time to ponder the spaces between the cataclysmic struggle of good and evil.
“We never, in a two-hour movie, get to explore the ephemera, where in an eight- or 10-hour season, you can take detours into things that are just interesting. ‘We’re not fighting anyone at this moment. It’s just Tuesday.’”
