Fargo's (1996) opening shot sets the tone for the film (Fig. 25). It is all white, the forbidding white of a Dakota winter in which we can not differentiate snow-smothered earth from sky. Here, and at other points in the film, the white is oppressive, almost malignant. A car emerges from the whiteness, and it soon becomes sadly evident that the greedy, desperate man driving the car and the criminals he drives to meet will not only cause great harm to others, but are also blindly and recklessly weaving their own doom.

This kind of plot and these kinds of characters resemble those in the hard-boiled novels of the 1920s and 1930s (such as Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep) for which Joel and Ethan Coen have expressed great affinity. Characters in such works, driven by overheated compulsions, typically embark on a sinister scheme. The scheme falls horribly apart as the schemers go “blood simple,” a term from Hammett referring to the self-destructive, short-sighted and half-crazed behavior that people involved in murder often display.

Critics have frequently associated Fargo with film noir, which it resembles in its doomed endeavors and grim theme of desperation. The Coens, however, have attributed their inspiration not to film noir but to the hard-boiled fiction upon which many classical films noirs were based.