True Detective

As much as I loved this season, I really want to it to end right there.  Unless there was a very well written story, I just don't see any sort of TV-sho-novelization-series as capable of doing justice to this show.

Motherfucker's always biting my shit.

(To be fair, I was far from the first person to want Angela Bassett in S2.)

Jessica Chastain was offered one of the roles for season 2.

Or not. Stop getting my hopes up, world.

Interesting.  I think Pizzolato is drawing a false dichotomy here.  The terms are vague, but caring deeply about other people, having an innate moral outlook, being sensitive, etc., isn't incompatible with also holding the view (which, biologically, a psychologically normal person can only do at some level of abstraction) that there isn't any external order that renders those dispositions ultimately meaningful.  That's as fallacious as thinking you've refuted someone who says we have no free will because the person making the claims nonetheless feels and acts as though they do have it.  Inherent in thinking free will (and therefore morality) is a fiction is the belief that no-one can entirely escape the illusion of it.  I'm actually disappointed to read that Pizzolato seems not to appreciate that, because Cohle's monologues were compelling and seemed to evince more insight than Pizzolato himself does in that quote.

It sounds like Harrelson's character was espousing Pizzolato's view here in the tent revival scene, when he appears to accuse Cohle of hypocrisy for thinking life is inherently meaningless but being so troubled by the question itself, but Cohle addresses that himself earlier when he says that he thinks death is preferable to life but is constrained by his programming.  If Pizzolato was anxious to demonstrate that Cohle was not a mere nihilist (again, I think that's possibly a confusion on his part), that might explain the incongruous final dialogue about light beating out the darkness and so on, which I thought was the very kind of thing Cohle saw through everywhere else, including in the preceding moments when he felt he'd awoken back into the prison of life.

The yellow king wasn't anyone. The yellow king at most was basically a thing these people worshipped. Spaghetti monster wasn't the yellow king, spaghetti monster was the guy who was doing the killings, and he was doing the killings for the yellow king. It was kind of a whole cult worship thing that believed they had to sacrifice these women and kids for the yellow king, because Carcosa and what not.

I am pretty unexcited for the new season based on the commercial/trailer HBO has been running. Just a lot of people standing around looking serious.

Lifemate, who didn't watch the first season, said the same of that one every time she walked by while I was watching. So maybe it will be OK.

What with everyone assuming that Taylor Kitsch is gay because of his erectile issues in that one scene, perhaps we should call him John Carter









































OF MARS COCK

Pretty fucked-up, right?  Oh he must be gay, can't get hard with a supermodel in his bed.

OK, I concede to the internet.  A needless offhand comment about how he almost punched some "fag"?  I'll take that that as evidence that this show's writing isn't smart enough to make him something other than closeted.

I haven't seen an episode of TV so subtle since the last Ryan Murphy show! 

Also, the 'bint in the club' is AWESOME! She always has just the right sullen tune to set the mood. Because she loves gloom just like a miner loves gold, or whatever she was babbling about.

And I now I really want to read No Angels For Me. I take it isn't the lost sequel to Where Angels Fear to Tread? 

And of course it looks likely Paul is closeted, which sucks so hard (but not as hard as he will, ba-dum-TSH).

True Detective takes the antihero trend in prestige TV to a new, disquieting low. The characters are flawed, written with mixed proportions of good, evil, regret, hope, and all that, but the locale itself is utterly bereft of optimism. No one in South Louisiana or Southern California is trying to make it better. It's all chemical plants, exploitation, spiritual breakage, artistic corruption, political corruption, job corruption. The place itself is the antihero. So far season one has proved superior to season two, but in one way it had an advantage. People are ready to accept all kinds of nonsense about South Louisiana that would get laughed out of the box for most other regions of the country. Sure, L.A. has its tropes, but they're more diffuse. So we get some L.A. Confidential, some Chinatown, some Mulholland Drive, some The Player, but none of it can skate by in the unified sweep of such a fundamental misunderstanding as season one made for Acadiana.

And that's to be expected since it replays some fraught tension inside real South Louisiana. Bitterness over outsiders' misunderstandings is in the top rack of local drama, along with politics, music, food, race, water, oil, and the whole Evangeline expulsion. But it's not a broken place, it's place where things are constantly breaking. Half the people are trying to make it better, knowing it's a long bet, in a cycle that hovers over depression. The other half are thinking it already is, something, but not somewhere else. It's the most royalist place in America (fix is in), and the most Jacobin (eat the rich). The reforms of the 1930s were twisted beyond recognition into exploited institutions. But they're always working on something new. The half that are exhausted overlap with the the half that are realistic. It's flat circle.

Nobody from Texas would be able to come in and treat them the way Cohle does, but from within there are people exactly like him, with the same contempt for the system and ways around it. It all comes from solidarity, and lone wolfs cannot do much.

Los Angeles too will get the hopeless treatment. But we're so familiar with SoCal from previous portrayals (made by people who live there, move there, etc.), that season two has a harder hill to climb. We know L.A. is full of wackos with hearts, or illusions, of gold. But it's not that kind of show.

There will be no Noah Cross, the character in Chinatown who looked like Jason Robarts and was played by the great director John Huston, like Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Blvd. (Instead we get the cartoon version in the mayor.) There will be no Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. (Instead we get the twitter version in various interchangeable underwear-ers.) There will be no Greta Scacchi in white. (Instead we get a paper thin guru in robes.) We don't even need to give up on these characters. Look at where they live.