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Show 'Lorraine Nelson A Biography. " 118 map-began searching through snowdrift and ice for the fabled one million dollars in ransom money the film's kidnappers buried there. A little over a year after leaving DDS, while performing background research for this essay, I came across Konishi and the bewildering tale of her final days. Nothing from those news reports suggested that Konishi was especially money-hungry or gullible. By all accounts she was an ordinary young Japanese woman, a reasonably reliable office employee, devoted to her parents, unmarried, and stylish in that way some Tokyo girls are. Nevertheless, police say for two days she braved the freezing temperatures and inhospitable landscape. On the third day a bowhunter discovered her body near the village of Detroit Lakes, not far from the road that had taken her there, her limbs rigid, knees drawn up to her chest, lying on her side at the foot of a small bank of birch trees. Perhaps she was lonely, desperate, confused. Or perhaps she was only at the end of some rope fed to her through the impossibly small window of an untenable desire. As Melville knew, the congregation of the real is made up of the heart-broken and hard-lucked-those individuals he called isolatoes. Bartleby was certainly one-and as the scrivner's case demonstrates, the sad irony is that the real exacts its heaviest toll on the poorest, the loneliest, the abandoned and most desperate of us. In other words, exactly those people DDS hoped to reach with their mailers-the ones who still believed they were just one six-week correspondence class-or one business training seminar-away from wealth and happiness. The real requires belief, and perhaps because of this it is those with nothing more to give who offer it their last allegiance. Shot on location in Brainerd and Minneapolis, Fargo follows the sadly misguided attempt of one emotionally impotent car salesman to orchestrate the kidnap-for-ransom of his own wife. Its creators, Joel and Ethan Coen, grew up in Minnesota and returned to the frozen frontier to film the movie-a sort of hommage to their childhood hometown. But, despite its real location and a title card appearing during the opening credits which seems to suggest its authenticity, the story is entirely fictional. |