List the four main cycles of genre movies, and briefly explain what cycle Fargo best represents and why

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. The four many cycles of genre are primitive, classical, revisionist, and parodic. The Coen Brothers film Fargo is a revisionist detective film for several reasons.
2. Genres in their classical phase tend to portray a world where right and wrong are fairly clear-cut, where the morals and values of the movie are widely shared by the audience, and where justice eventually triumphs over evil.
3. But in Fargo, the protagonist is a woman, Marge Gunderson, who is the very pregnant police chief of Brainerd, Minnesota. The movie is also often funny, and interspersed with unsettling scenes of brutality and gore.
4. Though the chief finally solves the case, the film’s “happy ending” is considerably undercut by its tone of sadness and pessimism concerning our pathetic species.
5. Today’s most respected film artists, like the Coen Brothers, are likely to find the “classical” values out of touch and naive, if not out-and-out false. The contemporary cinema tends to favor genres that are revisionist—less idealistic, more ambiguous morally, and far from reassuring in their presentation of the human condition.