In the Flesh: Fargo s5e06 'The Tender Trap'

“I want a wife,” says Lars (Lukas Gage) to his very real wife Indira (Richa Moorjani). He says it with real masculine vulnerability, like he’s going out on a limb for her, almost the way Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt she makes him want to be a better man in As Good as It Gets. Then he starts in on the incel shit. He wants a wife who supports him, a wife who puts out when he wants her to, a wife who doesn’t make him pull out before coming, a wife who cooks better than Indira, who doesn’t make him remember he contributes less than nothing to their shared household, who doesn’t criticize him for burying them in debt, who supports his ridiculous dream of being a pro golfer. He wants, in short, a wife who makes him feel like a man. The impossibility of that task is self-evident, not just because Lars is a bottomless well of entitled insecurity for whom Indira has already stretched herself to the breaking point, but because what exactly is a man supposed to feel like? Powerful? Satisfied? Confident? None of these things is achievable without significant effort on the part of the man himself.

And when a woman does make her husband feel like a man, where does that get all parties involved? It hasn’t worked out too hot for Karen Tillman (Rebecca Liddiard), sheriff Roy Tillman’s (Jon Hamm) current wife. She’s absorbed his neoconservative fervor, lamenting the ongoing “persecution” of president Donald Trump, whose deranged whining delivery of his post-election “tit for tat!” speech soundtracks the family’s morning at the breakfast table, but when she nicks the back of his neck while cutting his hair — it’s unclear whether Roy moved when startled by a commercial or if Karen genuinely lost her focus — he strikes her with a closed fist and reprimands her for getting caught up with things that don’t concern her. Roy is powerful, and he feels it. His every sexual whim is catered to without complaint. He’s confident enough even to admit his mistakes, as when he pays the enigmatic hitman Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) to end the vendetta between them, but none of this prevents him turning to the back of his hand the minute he’s inconvenienced or annoyed. The end result of his having a dutiful, diligent, obedient wife is that he’s free to be much, much worse.

And what’s the answer to all this grasping, infantile stupidity? Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh) offers Indira a job managing her security detail, a position that would catapult her from poverty to white collar well-to-do security and put her in charge of squads of armed professionals. Guns. Respect. Authority. Things, in other words, to make one feel like a man. Indira, uncertain about the offer, comes with her own agenda: to present Lorraine with the facts of her daughter-in-law Dot’s (Juno Temple) history as a domestic abuse survivor, an act seemingly motivated by a combination of frustration with her husband Lars and anger at the FBI agents uninterested in protecting Dot. Leigh plays the exchange as a petulant tyrant realizing she’s insulated herself too completely, and the reptilian appreciation in her eyes as Indira reams her out is enough to simultaneously curdle milk and humanize Lorraine as a character. She likes being challenged. It’s an interesting trait for someone so repulsive, but as we see as she pores with horror over photos of a battered Dot, there’s something human left behind all that money.

And speaking of Leigh’s performance here, her phone conversation with banker Vivian Dugger (Andrew Wheeler) is one for the books. She takes him apart like a cut of meat without even stepping into the strip club where her lawyer finds him slumming it. His choice to kowtow to Roy rather than her is met with a scorched earth response. The IRS, she purrs, is already picking his company’s bones. His personal and corporate accounts are frozen. His son is calling on the other line to tell him he’s been expelled from Notre Dame for failure to pay tuition. It’s intensely sexual, a calculated emasculation from the very moment he puts the phone to his ear and she growls, “Are your balls nice and warm hiding inside you?” She’s an animal. He’s her prey. Thematically it’s a rich scene for the season’s dive into conservatism as a philosophy and society, but push that aside and on a primal level it’s enough to make you loosen your collar You can practically smell the blood on her face when she hangs up, a self-satisfied smirk curling her lips. Whew.