On True Detective Series One

I picked the opening series of True Detective back up again this week, for the first time since it aired back in 2014. It shouldn’t be a surprise how much I enjoyed it, as a modern walk through the Southern Gothic genre. I feel I haven’t immersed myself enough in the brooding landscape of Southern Gothic – I think the last cultural artefact I swallowed that bore any resemblance was the fairly dumb but fairly brilliant True Blood from years ago, a show about Louisiana vampires that was a truckload of spooky Halloween fun. True Detective isn’t that. It draws its Gothic magic from its quintessential location, in the chillingly flat, spacious swampland of Louisiana. There’s a lot to praise about it – the directing, the acting, the ‘themes’, unsubtle as they are – but as with all the best pieces of art, the show’s power is in its palpable atmosphere, which True Detective gets exactly right.

No new ground is broken in the show’s plot, of a chalk-and-cheese cop duo hunting a serial killer. Like the resemblance of a child to its parents, you can recognise here the features of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, mixed with a little Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but its more obvious, or perhaps open, influences are strangely literary. I didn’t know about The King in Yellow before this show aired, like most people, it seems, as the book had a resurgence in its wake, and if nothing else I can thank this series for bringing that book back to the world’s attention. The relation the show has to the 1895 collection of weird stories is arguably superficial, taking namesakes and elements; the ‘Yellow King’, a mysterious place called Carcosa, the appearance of the Yellow Sign. But by giving this series a heavily-telegraphed relation to the book, it can be understood that the show’s priority isn’t character, themes, or mystery, strong as they may well be, but in its embrace of the sensation of weird.

There’s nothing to suggest that any of what happens in True Detective’s story has any supernatural influence, but nonetheless the show seems to exist in some disquieting unreality, talking of devil worship, symbols, totems, the afterlife. The character Rust even hallucinates regularly, supposedly due to a history of drug use, though he refers to them at least once as ‘visions’, and this allows for a few moments of surrealism, when nature falls apart. The crimes themselves are baroque and ceremonial, with certain atrocities wearing the bizarre paganism of The Wicker Man. All these nods or allusions to something metaphysical, these unseen forces and hidden layers, are what give the show its unsettling personality. Though the subject, miserable as it may be, is a grounded one, it still feels throughout as though the rational world might abandon the viewer completely, and so there is always a sense that something beyond the comprehensible evils of criminality lurks beneath the soil or at the bottom of the bayous.

The show’s philosophical wanderings also caught much attention, being lacquered with a pessimistic attitude where very little respect is given to any perspective that isn’t aimed squarely towards the abyss. I can see why Rust Cohle can be a hero to many, openly shitting in the proverbial breakfasts of Jesus worshippers, and I can also see how he could be irritating to many others, espousing well-rehearsed dialogue about the nature of existence at a moment’s notice, acting as the show’s thematic mouthpiece. Nietzsche is predictably mentioned by name, redrawn once again as a proponent of nihilistic fatalism. I actually haven’t any hostility towards these famous ‘time is a flat circle’ moments, but I do feel as if they’re better digested when they’re taken less as thought-provoking standards to march under, and more as additional support to the aforementioned queasy atmosphere. At the heart of True Detective is a lightless and frightening world. As well as being a world of local sex offenders, or of an organised establishments of sex offenders, or of possible folkloric demon-monsters, Rust’s diatribes expand this terror to the entirety of the universe. They add to the show’s nature in much the same ethos of philosophical horror, with creator Pizzolatto citing Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race as another of his influences. Just as Ligotti’s ultra-negative philosophy is the centrepiece, not just the inspiration, of his horror writing, I believe that True Detective weaponises an openly atheistic, pessimistic, antinatal worldview to add to its menacing flavour, one that is given a glimmer of Hollywood optimism as the series bows out.

Watching it again, I got the sense of Rust Cohle as a bit of a Mary Sue. Not only outstandingly talented at basically everything, he also sees the world with total clarity, penetrating through all of mankind’s deceits with total, accurate certainty. I picked up a Holmes-and-Watson vibe to him and Marty’s relationship – Rust as the brilliant mastermind and Marty, with his flaws and his family, as the vessel of humanity to be the audience’s ambassador. It could be argued that Marty’s warm heart counteracts Rust’s cold one (Hart and Cohl, I’ve literally just got it), but in actuality there’s certainly a one-sidedness to their partnership, even if Woody Harrelson, showing as fine an acting spirit as McConaughey or Monaghan, keeps his character magnetic throughout his innumerable bad decisions. I thought about this as a problem as I watched it again, with Rust’s gravelly voice stealing the show as he took the lead in practically every plot point. By the end, at least, I did come to appreciate that what bound these differing characters together was their fealty to justice, and that Marty does, eventually, put aside everything to join Rust in the pursuit of something he knows is right. So despite Rust being written as superior to Marty in a myriad of ways, it is in this, their moral sense, that the two of them are equals.

True Detective couldn’t keep up its momentum, which was probably an inevitability. I didn’t care for the second series and as of yet have not seen the third, which swam under my radar with minimal fanfare, seeming to speak of the trauma that the response to the second series left on its creators. The decision to make the series an anthology, swapping setting and characters every season, made sense to me, but the problem I found with the second series is that they lost the first series’s two shining assets: its haunting mood and its dynamic central characters. The characters in series two were empty and dull, and the setting was completely dry of atmosphere. It’s a bit of a shame, as like I said the real draw of the show for me was its ominous weirdness, palpitating beneath its removable parts. Then again, the first series is so tightly constructed, with its excellent back-and-forth structure that couldn’t simply be reused, that any continuation might always have been doomed to fail. I might get to watching the third series, as one of the positives of an anthology series is it can always change for better or worse, but either way this opening series has proven itself as a short, strong and supremely effective work of television.