Ananlysis of Sound and Editing from the Coen Brothers 1996 film 'Fargo'

The scene begins with diegetic sound of a conversation between Margie and an offscreen cop on the radio then she sees the car she is looking for and we start to hear a pleonastic offscreen sound of a wood-chipper. The wood-chipper gradually gets louder as Margie gets closer to the source of the sound, this builds up the tension as the audience has no idea what they are about to see. Also when Margie is walking through the snow the sound of her walking is pleonastic and I believe that the Coen Brothers again use pleonastic sound to build up the tension of the scene as she slowly makes her way to the unknown. We then find out that what has happened is that Gaer has killed his partner ,Carl, and is now making an attempt to cover up the evidence, again the wood-chipper is pleonastic to show the horror of the situation.Near the end of the scene the sound track starts of tense which is parallel to what is happening on screen with Margie about to catch Gaer but then when he starts to run the soundtrack becomes contrapuntal to what is on the screen because Gaer starts to run but instead of using fast-paced music that is usually used in film the soundtrack is more slow and peaceful as if the Coen Brothers are telling the audience that since the films gimmick is that they say that they are based on a true story they are now showing that in a true story there wouldn't be an epic 15 minute chase scene but it would more realistically end abruptly and quick. The scene the ends but the soundtrack bridges onto the next scene, perhaps to signify that this is not the end for cases like this in Fargo and that they will still carry on.

The editing is also very important in this scene. The editing is very slow with scenes lasting a few seconds without any cuts. This could at first be used to build up tension as Margie is walking very slowly towards Gaer but most of the films scenes last quite a while before cutting even the part where Gaer runs away. I again believe this is done to make Fargo seem more realistic and to make the audience believe that this is an actual case that happened, which is what they tell the audience at the beginning of the film. The scene also uses all straight cuts because they don't want to distract the audience from the tension onscreen, also again to make it have a realistic feel. The only time they don't use a straight cut is when the scene end and they use a dissolve, it is interesting that they used a dissolve instead of a fade to black because this along with the sound bridge again shows how the story of crime in Fargo is not over and there will still be crimes like this.