Jennifer Jason Leigh vs Jon Hamm (SPOILERS)

aka ecarle

So I kept tuning in to Fargo Season 5(despite too broad a brush in characters like the young female cop's boorish husband, and too heavy a political hand) just to see Jon Hamm "get his." I was banking on his getting killed, but it turned out to be, literally "a fate worse than death."

His arch enemy Jennifer Jason Leigh visited Hamm in prison and after some initial back and forth between these two natural enemies(one a man with little regard for women, after all) Leigh used that bizarre snobbish sneer left over from her turn in the Coens "Hunsucker Proxy" to inform Hamm that: she was basically paying off the debts of a large contingent of big male convicts to inflict rape and beatings upon Hamm for the rest of life in prison. Ouch!

Two thoughts came to mind:

ONE: In a bit on SNL's "Weekly Update" from the 90's(since edited out of the episode), anchor Norm MacDonald mused "how come when they are sentencing men to prison they don't make mention that the term will include endless male rape? I mean, that's kind of the worst part of the punishment, isn't it?"

(Indeed, I watched a repeat of that episode waiting for that outrageous joke and -- it was gone.)

TWO: Some years ago, a state politician mused about some official going to prison and said something like "And I'll bet he's going to get a big hairy cellmate to make him uncomfortable." There was actually an OpEd column AGAINST the state politician for so endorsing male rape as punishment.

So.

"Fargo Season 5" took up this punishment option most deliciously -- after all, we'd seen Hamm torture, beat and (implied) rape practically every woman he wanted(he considered women beneath men) and..payback. But: see above.

AND:

Jennifer Jason Leigh had been portrayed as quite the villain too, for the duration of the show -- just not a violent villain. With her wealth and empire built on the misery of people's inability to pay their debts(which, of course, she would see as THEIR weakness, THEIR fault -- yeah, maybe), she dominated everyone around her with her wealth, her privilege, her snobbish disdain for "the little people" and her ability( we saw) to bring men to ruination through legal and fiscal means(she told one man she drove to poverty: "You see, there are worse things than death.")

And yet: by the end of the series, Jennifer Jason Leigh had clearly WON. She kept her wealth. She kept her power.

Worse yet, she had pretty much co-opted the "decent" female cop(a victim of debt herself) into working FOR Leigh's venal company, and pretty much trapped the plucky Juno Temple into the family permanently(as wife to the feckless dweeb of Leigh's son.) Though we can figure that Juno and family will eventually share in the wealth and perhaps inherit it.

In this way, Fargo Season Five" ended up aligning itself with the theme "the bad guys win" even as Hamm and his clan went down.

In the end, the Jennifer Jason Leighs really do run the world and step on the lives of the people beneath them.