Before The Fall

Telling stories set in the universe of a beloved movie is a thin premise for a TV show, but Fargo has more than lived up to its namesake. Rather than trying to spin off characters from the movie, it took its underlying DNA - quirky criminals and even quirkier police officers interacting in a Midwestern society where everyone, even the most vile, is unfailingly polite - and ran with it. The writers toe the line between drama and dark comedy, and earnestness and nihilism, and it’s a formula the show’s creator Noah Hawley has replicated in Before The Fall. The book is a slow and meandering tale of a plane crash and its survivors, which incorporates a whodunit mystery with a coming of age tale as well as some deeper questions about the meaning of life.

The structure of Before The Fall resembles the first season of Lost, with a present-day storyline about the crash and investigation interspersed with the backstory of every person on the plane. Instead of a commercial flight, the plane is a private jet ferrying some of the top one percent, most notably a thinly veiled version of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, and a private equity executive who launders money for just about every country on America’s hit list. The power each represents (and the enemies they have) makes the possibility of an accident unlikely, raising an ominous shadow over what really happened.

Resolving the mystery, though, is not the central driving force of the book. For the most part, the investigation happens off the page, as various federal agencies bicker over who should be in charge and what direction to take the probe. Hawley is more concerned with the lives of the people who boarded the flight, and how they intertwined and wound up together on that one fateful night. Even the most seemingly insignificant passenger may have played a role in what happened to that plane. Hawley has a gift for creating characters.

As you would expect from the writer of Fargo, there’s one with an origin story bordering on the supernatural, as well as several twists on familiar types, from the bored housewife to the overworked executive and swaggering pilot. The villain is the star commentator of the fictional version of Fox News, who uses the untimely death of his boss as a springboard to wage a personal vendetta against the vast conspiracy he imagines is plotting against him and his network.

One of the running themes is the way TV distorts reality, and how fact and fiction blur when news becomes entertainment. It’s nothing anyone who has watched cable news isn’t already familiar with, but it’s still interesting to hear it coming from someone intimately familiar with how the business works:

How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV -- the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time -- after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond.  

To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer then click on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them -- sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later) -- is the same? 

Every piece of media you consume impacts your worldview, whether you realize it or not. There are a lot of people who view politics through the lens of Harry Potter. Is it any wonder than a former reality TV star is now our President? Does Donald Trump actually perform the duties of the President, or does he just play one on TV? And is there even a difference anymore? Does CNN exist to cover the news or does the news exist to provide content for CNN?

The book explores what it’s like to be caught in the middle of the TV fishbowl through the life of Scott Burroughs, a 40-something painter who caught on a ride on the plane through a series of fluke encounters and becomes an unlikely hero when he puts a 4-year old on his back and swims him to shore following the accident. Burroughs, like all overnight celebrities, watches his life played back to him, as the media delves into his past in ways almost designed to mislead. Only a saint could hold up to that much scrutiny, and none of Hawley’s characters, either on page or screen, could ever be accused of being that.

Burroughs lives the type of rootless existence that becomes progressively sadder the older he gets. He chases pleasure and career success without any greater purpose behind any of it, and the things he paints (disasters and their aftermath) only deepens his existential crisis. Like several of the characters from Lost, he is a man without anything in particular to live for until the crash gives him meaning. He develops a bond with the boy he rescues and starts to look after him when he is handed off to his well-meaning aunt and scheming uncle, neither of whom is prepared to become a parent.

Were it not for the child, Burroughs would probably have drifted back into aimless hedonism, parlaying his fame to a more lucrative career. Instead, with someone else counting on him, he is forced to grow up. He has a zen-like indifference to the way his character is assassinated on TV, but when it starts to impact the boy, he has to act. Having no attachments is one way avoid suffering, but our relationships are what give life meaning in the first place. That’s the message of Before The Fall. Turn off the TV. Invest in others. Don’t let work (or pleasure) define your life. We only have a limited amount of time to spend in this world. Make the most of it.

There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. “For whom am I toiling,” he asked, “and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?” 

- Ecclesiastes 4:8