by Kim Filchak, Reporter
Warning: This essay is not really a recap, it’s more like a lengthy obsessive rambling, trying to fit everything together in my head about the show True Detective.
It hits my sweet spots on both a psycho-sociological level and a writing one, which means I got wordy. Ladies and gentleman this is what happens when a liberal arts education goes to seed. My apologies in advance and also make sure you kids end up in STEM based fields so this does not happen to them.
A lot of words have been written about True Detective, everyone on the internet seems to have all the thoughts and ‘feels’ about this show following Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as they search through the backwaters of Louisiana for Carcosa The Yellow King and the serial murderers of women and children. The show just wrapped up its last episode and I am here to throw my hat in the ring with my own thoughts and ‘feels’ in a season one post mortem, to try to do my best to get to the bottom of it’s dark messy mire of southern fried noir. There is something about this show, with its air of H.P. Lovecraft mysteries and it’s deeply flawed protagonists. (I call these guys protagonists because there is no way they are heroes in the traditional sense of the word.)
For one thing this show is weird, deeply weird, in a way that teases us with hints of dark worlds and the promise of Cthulhu hiding in the deep shadows of abandoned churches and rotting schools. But all that weirdness ends up being utterly beside the point, because in the end the evil they face is purely human and all the more horrifying because of that. This show is made for fans to obsess over, with its dark twisted details that may or may not mean anything but still lead you down false paths to dead leads, turning you round and round until you have no idea where it may end up. We want it to be some dark conspiracy, possibly involving the elder gods, it would be a relief if the evil in this show was rooted in something other the fetid confines of the human soul. Monsters are easier to face when are not looking back at us with our own eyes. In the end all the Blair Witch projects and occult coded naming (Carcosa, the king in yellow, and dark stars) disguise the hard truth buried at the bottom of the well. The truth being that people f*cking suck.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It starts with two guys telling two other guys with a video recorder their story, and storytelling is what this show is about. Elaborately crafted mythologies including the ones that exist as a part of a larger social context and the more personal ones we make up of our own histories, and the ones monsters make up to hide the base nature other their evil.
Marty Hart (Harrelson playing grounded and flawed character he excels at) and Rust Cohle (a transcendently good McConaughey giving his best performance to date and this is the year he won a freaking Oscar) have been called in seventeen years after the fact to go through the facts at hand on a case they solved back in the day.
When it all began Marty said: “You attach an assumption to a piece of evidence, you begin to bend the narrative to support it.” That line seems to resonate through the next eight episodes. Both of these men have made assumptions about themselves and each other and that assumption comes to color everything they experience and by extension we experience throught their eyes. There is a story they tell themselves about who they are and what the narratives of their lives are; this assumption being that Rust is smart and Miles is good. As True Detective progresses it unravels those assumptions and becomes clear the lies we tell ourselves can only hold up for so long until the weight of reality brings the whole web crashing down. It’s quite the before and after, the contrast between the damaged but still functional men they were back when the story began and who they are here at the end, so broken nobody want them, not even themselves. All they seem to have left is this story they tell, and at this point even they know its 90% bullshit.
Everything here feels like a dark hyper masculine fairytale of male power and the mythology built up around the idea of what makes a “good man” vs what makes a man good, and what is it that is required to live life by that code in the face of man’s capacity for violence and evil. The violence outside us and the violence within, both are the battleground and there are no clean wins in this show. Even the most heroic of acts are marred by cover-ups and lies and when you save the children from the monsters, all you are saving is an empty shell and you can count yourself lucky if you get to save even that. The narratives they cling to help them reconcile this harsh reality, they can solve this crime because Rust is smart and Marty is good.
Sitting in the interview room seventeen years after the fact Rust C and Marty H craft this narrative, they think it’s about the dead girl but that’s only secondary to what their interviewers are really after. It’s actually the story of them; who they are to each other and just how far from the narrative they are telling the truth of them really lies. But at least linearly, for Rust and Marty, it starts with the dead girl bound on her knees, bearing a strange mark and a crown made up of stage horns.
Seventeen years ago Rust rattles off the specifics, clinical and detached, about her. Ligature marks, signs of rigor, stab wounds and abrasions carefully noted in his ledger. She is no longer a person, she is a crime scene. The more personal details they save for themselves: the origin of Rust’s nickname, Marty’s family drama interwoven; this is the story they are telling and the dead girl is at this point only stage dressing. What they are really telling us are those assumptions they made about themselves and each other. You can see why the dead girl faded into the background, there really is no space in this story for anything but the men telling it.
Some people would point to this show and cry misogyny, and there is no denying that it is there in the characters and their actions, but the show itself? Maybe not. It is very clear that to Marty and Rust, women aren’t people. They are victims, whores, wives and daughters, they are labels. Things; accessories to the men and their narrative but not real. Women are not people, they are merely what they represent to the men in their lives.
Miles lives a carefully crafted life to remind him to be the ‘Good Family Man’. He does not craft it however, though he assumes that it is under his control and it will always be there to carry him. The one to tend to this imaginary hearth is his wife, who does it to aid him in the story he tells himself so that maybe he might actually follow his own narrative. He never does. His wife knows this and she tries to buy into his narrative,doesn’t buy it, but they have two kids and she owes it to her daughters to at least try. She is so real and alive, it is almost frustrating to watch as Marty treats both her and their girls as mere supporting characters in his elaborately crafted idea of who he thinks he is. Marty is the king of bullshit mountain and Maggie has pulled out her waders because he’s her husband, but she knows exactly what she is wading though and for that Marty resents her because she see the truth of him and stays.
Rust is different. He crafts elaborate nihilistic rhapsodies about the futility of existence. His pain is what makes him better, more insightful, more intelligent that those around him. He drops terms like “meta-psychotic” and the utter nonsense of “This is gonna happen again, or it’s happened before. Or both. It’s fantasy enactment, ritual, iconography. This is his vision. Her body is a paraphiliac love map. An attachment of physical lust to fantasies and practices forbidden by society.”
Rust seems to only half understand what the hell he’s talking about but is positive that even that partial understanding of nonsense is better than the willful ignorance of anything outside the closed system that is rural Louisiana. His contempt for what he sees as the stupidity of everyone around him blinds him from any insight they may offer, because the only one allowed to know anything is Rust Cohle. The creators of the show say Rust is driven to look at the worst the world has and not to flinch away from it, that it is his penance. Penance for what though? The loss of his family, the loss of his heath and home? Because he no longer has that external reminder of his identity as a good man he sets very strong boundaries as to what is acceptable and what is not. Which is what drives his conflict with Marty. Marty has what Rust lost and he destroys it thorough his own assumption of importance within that familial dynamic. To Rust, the family is what you protect and support and for Marty, the family exists only to cater to him.
In the end Carcosa is just a place, rotting and filled with madness, but a real world place none the less. The Yellow King is a symbol and their killer is all that is left of the cult/family of pedophiles who dressed their perversions in voodoo and the occult to hide the human nature of their evil. He was their victim and their final legacy. The last man standing, the distillation of their corruption and insanity, a being who has dropped all his masks and exists only as foul grotesquery with monstrous needs and perversions. Rotting away like his house and the world around.
And finally in this dark place, facing the evil they choose to stand against, Marty and rust become heroes. Their illusions are stripped away, all they have is this final case they will solve and in solving it find each other again. Which in some ways allows them to reaffirm who they are to each other. They regained what they lost, Marty was good and Rust was smart but because they complete each other now they both encompass their joined mythology. So it’s Rust’s goodness that keeps them going in the face of darkness and Marty who’s insight put together the lead to find the greenhouse breaks the case open. The monster in the heart of the maze is brought to a final justice and all the dark secrets the powerful men kept that allowed to operate for so long are brought into the light.
As I said at the beginning of this essay, there has been a lot of ink spilled in the name of this show and there will be much more after the finale which was one of the best hours of television in a very long time. And this is not a recap, just a post mortem, one person trying to figure out what they hell she just watched and why it haunts her. In the end all I can say if you like twisted explorations of humanity and deeply personal stories that wrap around those mysteries, and are willing to invest the time and obsessions it is totally worth it. So watch it, obsess, and be grossed out and write about it on the internet because this show was born for that.
