True Detective

I’ve put off going into the philosophy Cohle espouses in the early episodes because I don’t want people making assumptions about the character of Cohle, or the ultimate aim of this season. The totality of Cohle’s character and the show’s agenda won’t be clear until the eighth episode has ended. It’s also important to me that the mass audience doesn’t need to know or engage these associations in order to enjoy the show. Likewise, I wouldn’t want any viewers to assume we had some nihilistic agenda, or reduce Cohle to an anti-natalist or nihilist. Cohle is more complicated than that. As I’ve said recently, Cohle may claim to be a nihilist, but an observation of him reveals otherwise. Far from “nothing meaning anything” to him, it’s almost as though everything means too much to him. He’s too passionate, too acutely sensitive, and he cares too much to be labeled a successful nihilist. And in his monologues, don’t we detect a whiff of desperation akin to someone who protests too much? When Cohle speaks of the unspeakable, is it with the same illusory perspective as when Hart speaks about the importance of having rules and boundaries? Perhaps that is what Hart references when he tells Cohle in episode 3, “You sound panicked.”

That doesn’t lessen the potential validity of the ideas he expresses, and that is what I finally think is disturbing about the show so far. It’s not the serial killer that’s unsettling; television shows you far worse than that all the time. What unsettles are the aspects of being human which the show chooses to highlight. That this stuff is being delivered through actors as instantly amiable and comforting as Harrelson and McConaughey makes it doubly subversive. And then I think you’ll find, as we go forward, the show keeps subverting its own subversions.

Before he started doing the revival meeting thing, Joel used to work for Tuttle's group where part of his duties were custodial, and one night he accidentally knocked over an ancient volume of letters by the 12th century mystic Teleos de Lorca belonging to a senior minister, only to find images of naked children inside. He brought it to the attention of the higher ups in the church who handled the matter internally, with the matter never pursued any further. But wait, who was Teleos de Lorca? According to Google, he doesn't exist, but if you search "mystic telos" you stumble across something that can't be a coincidence (incidentally, teleos is the Greek word for perfection). The word is an offshoot of teleology, which essentially describes any philosophical belief that concludes that nature always moves toward a definitive end. And "mystical telos" puts forth the notion that if evil exists in nature, its presence is part of a divine plan. Perhaps I've gone bug eyed in extrapolating and unpacking whatever I can from the show, but "True Detective" has already dipped its toes into philosophy, religion and more, so I can't help but think that Pizzolatto is throwing a sly nod to the architecture of the show.

When it comes to women, True Detective is undeniably shallow—but I think it’s being shallow on purpose.

Ignoring women may be the show’s blind spot, but it is also one of its major themes. True Detective is explicitly about the horrible things that men do to women, things that usually go unseen and uninvestigated. No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up. Another little girl was abducted, and a report was never even filed. “Women and children are disappearing, nobody hears about it, nobody puts it together,” Rust told his boss Sunday night, outlining what he believes is a vast conspiracy in the Bayou. Rust is haunted by women who aren’t there—his ex-wife and his dead daughter—while Marty cannot deal appropriately with the women who are.

It’s with Marty that True Detective most often tries to have its misogyny and get away with it, too. (“How good is cake if you can’t eat it?” he says to his girlfriend Lisa when she chides him for wanting a mistress who doesn’t sleep around.) The show presents Marty’s women as kinky and crazed and seems overly sympathetic to Marty’s skewed view of them. But if Marty’s peccadilloes have been used for titillation they have also been used for character assassination. While True Detective has luxuriated in the tawdriness of his particularly pronounced virgin-whore complex, it has also interrogated it: Marty’s inability to control himself with women is his defining, disfiguring character flaw.