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April 7, 2024 - Straight White American Jesus
35:22
Surprise Episode: Fargo Season 5: Christian Nationalism, Patriarchy, and Pancakes

Surprise! Brad sat down with Rev. Angela Denker to discuss Fargo Season 5, a series rife with Christian nationalism and related themes: violence, patriarchy, and right-wing authoritarianism. It's also a series full of love, forgiveness, and the hope of going home. Angela Denker is a Lutheran pastor and veteran journalist. She has written for many publications, including Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, and FORTUNE magazine. Denker has appeared on CNN, BBC and SkyNews to share her research on politics and Christian Nationalism in the U.S. Her book, "Red State Christians: A Journey Into Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind," was the 2019 Silver Foreword Indies award-winner for political and social sciences. Buy Red State Christians: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506482507/Red-State-Christians Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Axis Mundy It's 2024, y'all.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here with you on this special episode.
Did something I haven't really done on this show very much and spent some time with Angela Denker, who I'll talk about in a minute.
Reviewing and analyzing and just having a chance to discuss a TV show, and that's Fargo Season 5.
And I'm not somebody who watches a ton of TV, but when I do find a series or something that I'm really into, my analytical brain kicks in.
If you're somebody who's a Fargo person, that's probably why you're listening.
Fargo is a great series, but this iteration of Fargo was so in the realm of what we talk about on the show, I just thought, hey, this is a chance for us to to really get into some of the themes, Christian nationalism, patriarchy, right wing movements, militias, all kinds of stuff.
So if you watch the show, you know what I'm talking about.
And so did that with Angela Danker.
Angela is a good person to do this with.
She's a Minnesotan.
So if you're familiar with Fargo, you know that most of the series iterations take place in Minnesota or somewhere nearby.
Angela is a former sports writer who's written for Sports Illustrated and the Washington Post and many other amazing outlets, but is now a pastor and is the author of Red State Christians, A Journey Into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind.
is also finishing a book that will appear in 2025 on the radicalization of boyhood and the ways that toxic masculinities, especially in Christian spaces, are really creating just bad forms of raising boys and teaching boys what it means to be men, what it means to be masculine.
And so on and so forth.
So I'm looking forward to that book coming out next year.
But for now, I'll just say thanks for tuning in to this special episode.
I hope you enjoy our review of Fargo.
We did deep dives into characters.
We did deep dives into themes like debt.
And forgiveness and love that are all present in the series and just had a really good time doing it.
If you're a subscriber, this episode is about an hour.
And so hang on and go on the ride with us for that amount of time.
If you're not a subscriber, subscribe now to get the full episode.
And so you can hear this content and all the other stuff we do, including bonus content on Mondays, special episodes every month, ad-free listening, our Discord server, and so much more.
So enjoy.
Here is our discussion of Fargo, season five.
But here's what we're going to do today.
You're a Minnesotan.
You're a minister and you're like the perfect person ever to talk about Fargo with, I think.
You betcha.
Fargo is like one of my favorite shows.
I love it.
Okay.
I hope we get a whole bunch of Minnesota isms today and catchphrases.
So if you're listening to this and you don't know what Fargo is or you're like confused how you got here, that's fine.
Fargo is a anthology TV series based on the film called Fargo, which came out like 25 years ago.
I can't remember the exact year.
I don't have it in front of me.
So every Fargo series is kind of different.
It's a little like True Detective just finished.
Very similar vibe.
Different characters, but the setting is the same.
It's always Minnesota or somewhere in the kind of Upper Plains, Midwest.
And the themes are always the same.
There's always a sense of bad actors who are greedy or power hungry.
There's always a presence of a kind of supernatural evil.
Like, the show's always butting up against, like, the horror genre.
Like, just dipping its toe into, like, there's a supernatural kind of evil element.
And then there's this sort of underdog person who's fighting for what remains of the American family, the American something, moral, good, whatever you want to fill in there.
It's oftentimes the character's a woman, but it varies in terms of the season.
And so if I'm not mistaken, Angela, was this your first Fargo?
Did I like effectively make you watch Fargo?
Yeah, I watched the first couple episodes and I'm like, gosh, this is really gory.
You know, that horror.
And also as a Minnesotan watching it, you're like, gosh, these accents are so put upon.
And this year, this season, it was set in Scandia, which is about an hour from Minneapolis.
And then they have them driving to North Dakota.
So like in reality, I'm like, oh, they couldn't really make that drive in that amount of time and you're, you know, doing all... But as I continued watching it, it is so on the nose.
And I was watching it in conversation with some rural Minnesota pastors who were like living some of these events as we're watching it.
So that was a really neat conversation to be having as I watched it.
So that's something I want to like get into.
And I just, so, so let me just, let's just start here.
I think we want to talk about characters.
I think we want to talk about themes, but let me just start here.
So I'll just say I've watched all of the Fargo series and I think this is my favorite.
I think, I think season five is my favorite.
I think season one is, is fantastic.
I think season two is pretty good.
Season 3, I think, is an A-, is really, really good.
Season 4?
Nope.
Not watchable.
And I'm going to tell everyone right now, don't watch it.
But Season 5, I think, is my favorite.
And part of it is just, there was so much...
Poignant commentary on the state of American politics and culture.
So I'll just put it to you.
You're an actual Minnesotan.
This series takes place in Minnesota.
You're a minister.
You're embedded in religious communities.
You're working with people trying to go to church and build their lives in both rural Minnesota and in the Twin Cities and other places.
The accent's okay.
Some of them good, some of them not good.
But what else?
Give me just first impressions before we get into our wonky analysis of all this.
The writing is so good you know as a writer of course and listening to the dialogue and especially I will say that final episode and that's what I am we're gonna get into that but the the writing the religious image one of the rural pastors who I was talking to about this said you know he thought that was the best secular depiction of communion and the Eucharist and I was watching it with my husband who's an engineer and I'm like is he gonna get it?
Is he getting that this is supposed to be this like And just like in this theological space, and he kind of like looks at me, he was brought up in conservative Lutheranism, and he looks at me he's like, yeah, I got it.
It was really obvious.
So I'm interested to hear from all the different listeners from different parts.
I also thought to the, the Minnesota of it, the upper Midwestern-ish of it and just the The cross culture, you know, between this North Dakota sheriff and the intense conservatism of North Dakota, coupled with the relative progressivism of the Twin Cities, I thought they did a pretty nice job of depicting that.
The fact that it begins at a school board meeting, I just think that there were so many, like you said, so many touch points that were Very real.
And then the starkness of the landscape in some cases.
The starkness of North Dakota.
I've driven those roads, you know, out through rural Minnesota too.
So it's a piece of work that feels very American, you know, in this sense of where we think of white Midwestern as being American, which is problematic, but nonetheless...
Well, I think I agree.
It is problem.
And this series does include diversity in terms of of race.
And there's there's things I mean, I have some things to say about that, too.
But there are there are Asian characters.
There are black characters there.
It seems as if Scotty, the daughter-slash-granddaughter, is somebody who's... The series never tells us, but she's sort of a preteen who is, you know, sexed as a girl, as female, and yet seems to wear, like, male-presenting clothes, so we have that.
I think, though, you hit on something that brings me back to Fargo every time, which is, I love television and film that takes me to places I don't usually get to go.
If we think about Breaking Bad, Breaking Bad is in New Mexico.
I've never been in a TV show where for five seasons I was just in New Mexico and I was soaking in the landscape as best as they could present it.
Usually when we turn on the TV, we go to New York, we go to LA, and that's fine.
But to get to go to those, as you say, the stark open land of North Dakota in winter, that's like, we don't get that.
And I think the landscape becomes a character in itself.
And it really is a contrast between that open set of vistas and the Twin Cities, which have a skyline, are like real bustling, really important urban centers in the Midwest, in the United States.
And so we get all of that with Fargo, and I love that.
I love every part of that.
I made you watch this, and you had a generally good... It is gory, there is a lot of violence, but the writing is fantastic and all of that.
All right, let's get into it.
So let's do characters.
And, and, and break some of them down.
So I'm going to do something that is super annoying and my wife doesn't like.
And so everyone listening and Angela, you're going to have to suffer it so that I don't make my wife listen to it.
And she doesn't sort of look at me like, you know, do you want to be married to me or not?
So Juno Temple from Ted Lasso fame plays Dorothy slash Nadine.
And so here's my, just, I'm going to, we can do, let's just do Dorothy.
She is fantastic in this role.
She is, goes between sort of nurturing mother to fierce independent warrior, I think.
Her name's Dorothy.
To me, Noah Hawley is telling us the whole goal for Dorothy is to get home.
Like, Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wants to get home.
Like, to me, Dorothy, the most famous Dorothy in American film history, or screen history, is Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz.
So, Dorothy's doing everything she can to get back to pancakes and Bisquick and making breakfast at home with her daughter and her husband and just building a life that makes sense.
And so, when she's Dorothy Lion, that sticks out to me.
I'm going to throw it to you.
When you think of this character, this woman who starts out as a school board attendee, gets caught up in a weird moment, gets abducted in essence by her ex-husband, who's a terrible person, is committed to an asylum by her mother-in-law, has her home invaded, eventually is imprisoned on the ranch of her ex-husband, blah, blah, blah.
If you think of this character, I don't know, give me some thoughts.
Yeah, well, as we mentioned, I've been researching this new book on masculinity and so spending a lot of time on this idea of strengths and the typical sort of Right.
Historical white American version of what strength is.
And I think for me as a fellow Minnesota mom, Dorothy offers an alternative vision of strengths.
And I found even myself when I started watching the show at the beginning, you know, she's got this very heavy accent that you don't maybe necessarily hear like as strongly in Scandi or maybe I haven't.
I just am a nerd to it by now.
And she's It seems improbable, even all these sort of MacGyver thing that she's doing.
It seems like, is this really real?
Is it not real?
And I think what I eventually came to is that they were kind of, the creators of Fargo were actually showing me through Dorothy that my preconceptions of what it was to be strong were still gendered.
And what she really offers is this vision of strength that's in A body that that we've viewed as weak.
So I think that that was a powerful state.
Like, I found myself even thinking at first, too, well, she's so she's so thin.
She's so small.
She's so tiny.
Yeah.
And I think that, again, for me as this proponent of the theology of the cross in this sense that, like, God works through what the world views as weak.
I think that that was a journey that I went along to kind of understand Dorothy's strength.
I think you said something there.
Juno Temple, very small person, and yet continually is attacked by men in this series, and continually finds ways to outwit them, to use, as you say, these MacGyver-like techniques to rig her whole house, or invent ways to defend herself.
They try to put her in the asylum, and the dudes who show up to do it end up on the worst end of it.
Broken noses and stuff.
That's amazing.
All right.
We're going to come back to her because she's obviously the center of all this.
Let's go to Jon Hamm.
So Jon Hamm, like we all know, American sort of like elder millennial.
University of Missouri.
You know, undeniable.
Yes.
No.
Midwestern man.
Undeniable like sex symbol of the last like 25 years.
And yet he has a really, he has a profile as an actor of, I think, under appreciated wit and humor.
And he brings that here.
He's almost a caricature of a kind of character, but he plays it in a way that I think is wonderful.
So I'm going to do my annoying name thing.
His name is Roy Tillman.
So the way I interpret that is Tillman, he refers to himself continually as a hardworking American man.
He works the land.
He has a ranch.
He often rides out on a horse, not in a car.
So he's a Tillman.
He's like tilling, you know, in that sense.
And then Roy is king, like le Roi.
So he's the king and he really sees himself as that.
Like when you first meet him, you get that sense that he thinks of himself as a kind of Monarchical representative of God on Earth.
He meets the FBI agents.
And he's sitting in his hot tub in episode two, and he's completely nude.
And he meets these two FBI agents.
One is named Joaquin, who he continually calls Ja-queen, because he feels like he's not going to pronounce this man's name that he feels like is foreign to him the right way.
And the other is a woman.
And so he just disrespects them as other, as less than him.
And he really explains that he's a constitutional sheriff.
Who is given the right and the duty by God to interpret what is good and evil, what is right and wrong.
And it's not the law.
He's very clear.
I'm not here to enforce the law.
I'm the one, me, the king, in this region, in this land, who interprets what is right and wrong.
That's what I'm interested in.
And what is right and wrong is what I decide.
Right?
Waving arms at the Bible and at God and at Jesus.
But so here we have Roy Tillman, to me, the like Sheriff King, who really thinks he is the representative of God on earth and interprets himself as the arbiter of justice.
And he's not interested in American laws or policies or Any of that, he's interested in what he thinks should be done.
I have so many thoughts about Roy Tillman in terms of Christian nationalism and all this stuff, but I'll stop.
What do you think?
What comes to mind for you?
As you're talking about how he sees himself as the law rather than an enforcer of the law.
It's an interesting subversion of, if we look at this through like a theological lens, of Jesus coming as the person of God in some sense to fulfill the law.
And so that Jesus becomes what Christians are called to put their faith in rather than only the law.
It's an interesting subversion.
It also reminds me of This way in which Christian nationalists seek to put themselves or their leaders or Trump, for example, in the position of Jesus rather than pointing to Jesus.
It becomes an idolatry.
So I think that's an interesting side point.
It's also this constitutional sheriff's movement, you know, as you mentioned, he brings humor to the role, but this is also a real thing.
You know, a few months ago, we had a representative of the constitutional sheriff's movement doing sort of a book tour throughout Minnesota, throughout the Twin Cities.
He happened to have an event in the small town where I previously pastored for three years.
People from that town had told me in the past that, you know, they were serving the township board and there were representatives from constitutional sheriff's movement coming, telling them, you know, we need to work on overthrowing the constitution.
And so if there was just a guy in a bathtub in North Dakota who thought he was king, That'd be fine.
But the thing is that there are people who have given them power.
And we have, in many cases, through local government, the Republican Party and Christian conservatives have weaponized local government, particularly in rural places and red states, to give individuals immense power.
And so just the reality of all that is in the background.
I was really impressed with the Fargo creators.
It seems like they must have An understanding of, you know, what's happening in reality and then bringing that to the screen in such a powerful and realistic way that people may not know is realistic.
Well, and I really hope, I mean, I think some of you listening know what the constitutional sheriffs are, but I hope if you don't, this show and this episode will, like, lead you to go look that up because he explains it so clearly, you know, in his own words that he is not answerable.
Like, he cannot be arrested.
He cannot be held accountable by anyone but the governor.
And he's kind of like, you think the governor is going to come do anything to me?
He's not.
So he's basically saying I can act with impunity.
I don't have to be somebody who is worried about any kind of punishment because I'm the king and the constitutional sheriffs really have this view.
It's not about the Constitution.
It's not about the law.
It's about what they believe is right and wrong.
And it's so scary.
And we could do 10 hours and a deep dive on the constitutional sheriffs because, as you say, if it was a dude in his bathtub thinking he was king, great.
It's not.
This is a whole network of constitutional sheriffs across the country, and they have immense power.
Like, if you live in a small town in the Midwest or the South, And you get on the wrong side of the sheriff, he may do things to you and your family and there just may be very little you can do about it.
And I think the show kind of demonstrates that pretty well.
All right, we then have the lion family.
I forgot to mention that Dorothy is referenced throughout the series as a tiger, right?
Like Old Munch refers to her as a tiger.
There's a whole kind of like overlay of her as the tiger in episode six or seven.
But then we get to her mother-in-law, who is Lorraine Lyon.
So she's a lion.
And then she's married to Wayne Lyon.
That's her husband.
So Lorraine is a fascinating character.
Not a good guy, good person, good something in the show by any means.
Not someone I want to like feel sympathy for because she's a billionaire debt collector.
Like very clearly on the side of like, I do everything I can to make money off of other people's debt and suffering.
But her company is called Redemption Services.
So I just, we've got to come back to that.
Like, come on.
Redemption services and she's in the debt business.
There's just a lot of religion there.
Wayne is Dorothy's husband.
I'm gonna throw this to you to talk about masculinity and Wayne, but Wayne is kind.
He's constant.
He's an equilibrium in terms of like, he never seems to waver in his love and affection.
He doesn't get upset.
He doesn't get out of whack.
He just seems like somebody that, if you're thinking about a not macho, not toxic, not aggressive man, but nonetheless a man in the show who is perhaps the, well, we'll get to, we'll get to Whit in a minute, but the only one who's kind of Trying to emblematize this kind of masculinity.
I think it's Wayne.
So I'll just throw it to you.
Now, his father, I'll say one more thing.
Sorry.
His father is just clearly a kind of absent alcoholic.
He carries around like a shaker of cocktail wherever he like, even in the hospital.
He's like, he's offering people cocktails from his mobile shaker that he seems to have everywhere.
And I just think there's a general Theme in the show that the men are on one side either toxic, masculine, wannabe kings like Roy, or kind of absent, meandering nitwits like Wayne's dad.
And we'll get to Gator and Wit in a minute, but anyway, it kind of puts Wayne in the middle of that, I think.
So, sorry.
Lots of thoughts there, but what do you think about the lion family?
Yeah, we'll get to the golf simulator guy later too.
So, yes.
So, toxic masculine, nitwit, or just eternal boy?
Eternal, like, little kid.
Yeah, no, I was listening to the Under the Influence podcast earlier today, and they were talking about sexy TV dads, and Wayne came up of somebody who May not present as sexy at first glimpse, but his steadfastness, his kindness, and also for me as a woman and a mom watching this, it struck me in that final episode that Wayne is the one who is serving
He's the one who is saying, oh, here, would you like a beverage?
Oh, here, would you like some?
And that is so traditionally the woman's role, particularly in like a stereotypically white, Midwestern, Christian sort of, how do you treat people coming to your home?
And even when we look at the ways in which biblical passages have been interpreted of that women are the ones who serve.
To see a man be the one who is serving and acting in that role of hospitality.
It offers a space for men to be in that role and to play a part in creating the home as a safe space for children, for family, for guests.
So I thought that that was a really powerful scene with him.
And again, this idea of subversion of strength.
Like, at first glimpse, you know, Wayne is not this stereotypically muscular, strong guy, but he is that constant for, for Stadi in a sense, he is like, he finds a way at the car dealership to make things work, I guess, you know, maybe he's not the most hard-nosed salesman, but it's just, it's an alternative vision that we don't get to see enough of, but I think,
Is present in our lives and needs to be talked about more because sets the stage for children to be able to have options of different masculine role models.
I love the idea that in that last episode, he's the one kind of welcoming into the home.
Hey, do you want to drink?
Hey, do you want to like, he's the husky.
Like the representative of hospitality and it's fantastic to see that in his role.
Speaking of strength, let's go to Indira.
Indira is the police officer in town.
She is kind of the The one who puts the pieces together in this this whole caper.
But what I appreciate about her character arc is she's also strong like she doesn't back down.
She doesn't sort of let things scare her.
And if we're talking about right and wrong with Roy Tillman.
She's obviously committed to the law and doing what's right according to the law, but there's moments with her character where she also realizes that doing what's right is more important, and that seems to be like taking in Scotty for a few days, even though that's probably not what Her superiors at the police department want her to do, and she'd probably get in a lot of trouble as a police officer, blah, blah, blah.
So I think she's just a sort of constant force of positivity in the series, but she also shows this strength, like she catches her husband cheating on her and just says, we're done, go leave the toilet seat up on someone else's life, and so on and so forth.
She's married, as you just sort of referenced.
To this man who is an eternal juvenile.
I mean, he's just the picture of, like, no responsibility.
And I think it brings me back to something that Roy Tillman hears from Lorraine in their first meeting.
Lorraine Lyon in their home is like, so you're one of those constitutional sheriffs, huh?
Libertarian.
And he's like, he gets all, like, proud about it.
He's like, let me tell you what that means.
And she looks at him and she's like, so you want You want freedom with no responsibility.
You want freedom without any cost.
And there's another moment where Old Munch, who we're going to get to, is sitting in the bathtub covered with all kinds of disgusting elements, and he himself is saying, you want freedom that's free.
Well, freedom is never free.
Freedom always requires life and death and so on and so forth.
Indira's husband, to me, is the emblem of this.
He wants to do whatever he wants all day with no responsibility.
And what Lorraine Lyon calls that, she says, there's only one person in the world who gets to be free with no responsibility.
And when they're talking, Roy Tillman's like, You mean the president?
And she's like, no, a baby, a baby.
And, and there's this, there's this way that the show is trying to show, like demonstrate that whether it's, whether it's Indira's husband or whether it's Roy Tillman, your understanding of freedom without responsibility means you're a child.
You're not this, you know, big tough man or whatever you think you are.
You are a baby.
And I just love that.
So anyway, all right.
Indira, her husband, thoughts on this.
And then we got to get to old munch because old munch is just like an, on Yeah, I mean, how scary that the vision of the presidency is to have a president who has no responsibility.
I mean, that's how we ended up with so many folks voting for Trump, I guess.
And the reality is the presidency comes with a huge amount of responsibility.
And when that responsibility is shucked off, that's when we end up with, you know, a pandemic that runs wild with misinformation.
So let's go to Indira and Lucas, her husband.
I mean, I feel like I've known so many guys like this.
Unfortunately, especially in my work in sports writing, sometimes, I don't know, our neighbors have a golf simulator in their garage.
But I love the arc of Indira's storyline with her debt, you know, and she's getting these calls from credit card companies, and she feels this crushing weight of it.
And I think about conservative Christian culture and the amount of shame that people like Dave Ramsey have attached to debt, when in reality, debt is most often heaped upon people like Indira, who are Middle class workers, often people of color, often living, you know, exurbs, rural areas.
And so I think that them bringing to light this person who is struggling under the mountain of debt and contrasting her sense of responsibility to her husband's lack of responsibility and the ways in which I do think we tend to shame women around money much more than we shame men, especially white men.
So I just thought that that was an interesting character arc in coupled with the Wayne's mother's company where she's making all this money off of debt.
So yeah, who else who else should I talk about?
Was I going to talk about?
Well, well, there's Lucas.
And so, I mean, I, so you said something I want to like, just press you on a little bit, which is, all right, you, you were a sports writer, which I'm sure carried its own challenges as a woman entering what I think historically has been this industry of like good old boys.
So I'm sure you met, you met a bunch of Lucases.
So I just want to know about those Lucases.
Give me something.
What does it look like when a dude wants all the freedom, but none of the responsibility?
And why do they think that that's OK?
I mean, because I think that if you look a lot at a lot of married men, they're so often propped up by the women in their lives.
And we have enabled that as a society, particularly for, again, white men, and that they're allowed to be boys into their 50s, whereas black boys have to be seen as men when they're 11, 12 years old.
So, yeah, I did see that a lot.
money, wealth, you know, people brought up with money, wealth, where your parents can kind of float you for a while and you're pursuing these dreams.
And then there's often a soft landing from, you know, pursuing professional athletics into things like insurance or pharmaceutical sales or.
And that's the thing about about Lucas, too.
It's like he's not he's not a constitutional sheriff.
He's not an overtly bad, violent guy.
He's just not a good guy.
And he's a drain on himself.
He's a drain on society.
And it's, yeah, I think it's a neat side character arc, coupled with this responsibility that Indira feels that he really doesn't feel at all.
And I think this is what, for me, makes good television is when you have a character like Lucas who's 9th or 10th on the importance scale, he's still memorable.
You still learn something about relationships or gender or something from that character.
It's not a just forgotten corner where nobody decided to actually look or develop and I love that.
You're a minister.
You're trained clergy.
So we've got to talk about Ol Munch.
Ol Munch is like one of those characters that's just amazing.
So Ol Munch is the element in Fargo that sort of defies our common conceptions of reality.
And there's always one.
There's always like some sort of radical evil or supernatural that is always sort of implanted in the series that for the most part, 85, 90% of it is just, hey, we're in the Midwest doing, you know, chasing a bad guy kind of deal.
Old Munch is basically supposed to be this eternal timeless element of a sin eater.
Like we get this image very early on in the series of Old Munch in what is probably like medieval England or Wales going through a ceremony where he eats
He eats ceremonial food that is supposed to mean that he's eaten the sins of a recently deceased person and therefore freed that person from hell or purgatory and allowed them to go to heaven and that the consolation for him is he gets to eat because you know that's something people concerned about.
The curse is that he's a sin eater and he's cursed with all this sin.
He talks about this in his little bathtub soliloquy where he's like it used to be that you freedom was a potato.
Right?
That, you know, you just wanted to eat and fill your stomach.
He talks about a code.
And the code that Munch lives by, to me, is an eye for an eye, right?
Life for a life, punishment for punishment.
And we see him carry that out with Gator, who we haven't talked about yet, in the very, like, final episodes.
But, you know, Munch is in some ways brutal.
And yet, You can understand Munch's standard, right?
You can understand the system of debt that Munch works on.
We're going to get to debt here further as a theme, but debt is nowhere more apparent than in the character of Munch.
You can understand how he works.
If you take this, you have to give that back.
That's how it goes for him.
I will say that my favorite line from Munch in the whole series is when he stands up in the bathtub and he says to this poor old lady whose house he's occupying, No, she says, I don't understand.
What do you want?
And he's mumbling about potatoes and death and all this stuff.
And he says, I want pancakes.
And in the moment, I thought the way that Sam Spruill delivered that was really good.
He didn't overdo it.
It wasn't overly whimsical or zany.
But when the series ended, I realized Munch was saying, I want pancakes, meaning I want to go home.
I wish I had a home.
I wish I had a place that welcomed me.
I wish I had hospitality.
And he finally gets it in episode 10, which we can come back to.
But that's my favorite bit from Munch in the whole series, just in terms of his arc and his journey.
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