- Fargo (allthetropes.org)
Fargo is a critically acclaimed dark comedy from 1996, written and directed by The Coen Brothers. It stars Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, and Steve Buscemi. Taking place in the Midwest circa 1987, the plot concerns Jerry Lundegaard (Macy), a bankrupt car salesman who stages the kidnapping of his wife in order to cheat the ransom out of her wealthy father. But then things go wrong. McDormand won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson.
- And as I observed that in the words I think, hence I am, there is nothing at all which gives me assurance of their truth beyond this, that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist, I concluded that I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true, only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.
- In the next place, I attentively examined what I was, and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.