In 2014, HBO launched the first season of True Detective, its biggest debut, an eight-episode story created and written by Nic Pizzolatto, watched by almost 12 million people. It’s not hard to explain the success, but it’s a rare thing these days—romanticism. True Detective is a story for the end of the American mid-century, combining all the mysteries that scared people, from serial killers to conspiracies. It employs Gen X’s preferred device for mystery—non-linear storytelling—and adds characters talking into the camera to the narrative. At the center of it all is a cool protagonist, perhaps the last action hero. And the atmosphere he breathes, the glamour of doom, blends the charm of disappointment with the threat of unleashing violence when hope has faded.
Pizzolatto was highly anticipated as one of the most impressive writers of his time. He began his thirties teaching writing in college and selling very well-regarded short stories, achieved success with his debut novel Galveston (2010), and then left the academic and literary world for Hollywood. He became a celebrity before 40 with True Detective (2014), which he ran for three seasons. Various other projects fell through and he hasn’t been heard from since. Inevitably, the romantic touch of True Detective has rubbed off on him; at this point, he might as well be a character from his own stories.
Social media has made his storytelling, with its hint of political paranoia and criticism of the collapse of morality in America, definitive of one part of our politics. There’s no pretty way of saying this, so let’s just say it: Jeffrey Epstein, now Sean Combs—what horrors hide behind all that glamour? What are our elites up to or concealing? Who but Pizzolatto was willing to dramatize that problem, particularly in his California story in Season 2?
Louisiana
True Detective will nevertheless be remembered for its first season, and for Matthew McConaughey’s portrayal of Rust Cohle, with its mix of existential despair and the threat of nihilism in the bayous of Louisiana. Flashing back and forth across 17 years, from 1995 through 2002 to 2012, Cohle and his partner Marty (Woody Harrelson) chase down a serial killer case that nobody else is interested in, which turns out to be politically and morally important.
Rust and Marty are a typical detective couple, fitting a mold that has existed since Sherlock and Dr. Watson: Rust is a genius, but he’s an unknown quantity out of Texas, whereas Marty is the steadier figure, trusted in the Louisiana State Police and more willing to get along. Rust is trying to embody the freedom America represents. He’s a rugged individualist—you look at him and see Teddy Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway: he either rules or else rejects society in order to chase freedom. Marty is a more recognizable Southern figure—you look at him and think: sports kid, popular in high school, went into the police because he liked life’s pleasures but would otherwise have joined the military. He’s gradually started turning into a good ol’boy enjoying life’s successes.
The plot turns on elite corruption in Louisiana leading to terrible evils—child abuse, human sacrifices, a complete betrayal of our Christian way of life, a pagan madness somewhat reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft. It reminded me of Walker Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome, which has a very similar plot and an existentialist protagonist for a detective, but with a different agent—modern science is the Faustian bargain for Percy. Pizzolatto is comparatively familiar, blaming the authorities in politics and religion. Southern corruption is much less interesting in the twenty-first century, however; the major artistic effect he achieves is a suggestion of the return to the past, an occasional glimpse of an older pre-feminist America. Even beyond the charms of nostalgia, this might be simply a necessity of storytelling, since Pizzolatto prefers men, their violence, and their conversations, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in contemporary storytelling.
Rust is, in a way, as big as America, a Texan who grew up in Alaska, but in another way, he’s a creature of extremes, and both qualities are needed to make him attractive to audiences, both iconic and enigmatic.
A deeper level of thinking in the story is that the detectives, by digging up the past, family secrets, and the details of private life, might reveal that the American way of life really does not turn on equal freedom under the law, rights and contracts, elections, or public deliberation by citizens. Secrets behind this façade matter more, whether it’s the passions that corrupt men or the arrangements that keep society going, whether culture or cults. Indeed, Louisiana is interesting because it is older than America, with its Spanish and French history. True Detective is attractive precisely because it questions American confidence. What if history is inescapable and there is no new world?
Faith and Evil
We could call this the postmodern condition—the all-American love of nature and the conquest of nature, baffled by some unforeseen failure. The manly assertion of will fails at the social level, but the cause of the paralysis is invisible and there are no institutional options for redress. The scenes of Louisiana bayou poverty are juxtaposed against the astonishing interstate highways, the successes and failures of America, the worry that freedom could lead not to Progress but to hopelessness and a resurfacing of ancient evils, a world in which you’re either always on the move or the past catches up with you. The police see the worst of it, daily witnessing the injustices that men perpetrate against each other in an attempt to escape the madness. Yet they have neither the public authority nor the knowledge to fix it.
A man then has to fall back on himself. This insight is encapsulated in Rust’s famous lines:
I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.
Rust calls this philosophical pessimism. Walker Percy famously pointed out that the notable men of the South were seldom Christians, but usually Stoics, and therefore pessimists. (Think of Atticus Finch.). But Rust shows us a new version of this problem. Instead of a teaching of natural law that somehow embraces the cosmos, the modern correlative is a science that excludes man from nature. The two teachings do share an interest in man’s freedom to act and a claim to ground it in reason, but they are remarkably different otherwise. Politically, Stoicism is aristocratic—it demands self-mastery and implies great contempt for weak people. Modern science is comparatively democratic, full of philanthropy. Theologically, Stoicism has no use for Christianity because a perfect man exercises self-control and thus has nothing with which to reproach himself. Modern rationalism is the opposite—our endless need for protection from a harsh universe implies endless reproaches against an insufficiently provident God. And yet Rust is unsatisfied with this rationalism and, though he tells Marty plainly that he’s not a Christian, nevertheless, he has a crucifix above his bed. He explains: “I contemplate the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.”
Rust spends much of his time complaining about the stupidity, laziness, and incompetence of the people he meets in Louisiana, civilians and officials both. They do not share in his alarm at evil, they seem to be more grounded, but he is only able to see what’s wrong with them and to demand a great conversion to a task that’s surprisingly Christian: caring for the widow and the orphan. After all, Rust dedicates himself to trying to save these most vulnerable people or avenge them. Indeed, it is easy to see in Rust’s suffering a reminder of Christ’s parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. But if Louisiana and, indeed, the world proved to be as smart and effective as Rust thinks himself, he’d still be unhappy, nor would the heartrending death of his child be prevented.
Rust’s hatred of Louisiana, his moral collapse in the middle of the story, and his redemptive return to solve the mystery, avenge the innocent, and rid the world of a terrible evil are therefore of a piece. In his heart, he’s a believer, not a scientist. The two can be confused against the backdrop of the quest to understand evil, but they’re different once you dedicate yourself to justice, which requires acting in the circumstances, not merely establishing principles. The resolution of Rust’s complaint, therefore, can only be that he becomes a ruler—yet he sees that America would rather go on with every evil under the sun than bow before him as the man who delivers justice. There is an inner contradiction within freedom that splits America from its heroes and one consequence is that we as spectators become divided from ourselves as voters—we see what we cannot change and what we cannot stop desiring.
Rust is, in a way, as big as America, a Texan who grew up in Alaska, but in another way, he’s a creature of extremes, and both qualities are needed to make him attractive to audiences, both iconic and enigmatic. His fighting strength, as much as his researching intelligence, puts him outside of the ordinary peaceful life of America, a guardian of a commercial society whose indifference he cannot understand, even as he reproduces it in his own lack of self-knowledge. If I may hazard a shocking thought: Rust getting drunk and becoming a drug addict is his correlative of American materialism, consumerism, fashioning an identity according to a mute, but apparently irrepressible desire. He’s trying to be one of us. The sequel of that madness, the suffering and a long passage of time, are connected to it—they allow Rust to return to Marty, to recreate their partnership as avengers of injustice. Both finally recognize that America is greater than they are and they owe something to the country, never mind the decadence. This is the secret teaching, the meaning of True Detective, and it’s meant to make the audience, especially the men, understand themselves as Americans.
American Romanticism
The popular interest in crime now is true crime podcasts, which have an almost entirely female audience. It doesn’t involve the grandeur we find in True Detective’s articulation of the fear of evil and the concern that the universe might be hostile. In fact, Pizzolatto’s storytelling seems antiquarian by contrast (with his attempts to fit Progressive identity politics in his second and third-season stories embarrassingly out of character). His attempt to reconcile his stories to American life is more successful—the protagonists of season 2 are victims of trauma trying to regain their dignity and their sanity, then in season 3, we see veterans trying to make sense of the return to peaceful society.
Pizzolatto, however, writes at cross purposes. His surest instinct is for tragedy, but his heart yearns for an American reconciliation that accepts the violence of American life and tries humbly to withstand it. From the very beginning of the show, this comprehensive view includes a confrontation with evil and a reconciliatory interest in society. Season 1 packs in everything from biker gangs (a Texan interlude in episode 4) and drugs to prostitution and jail gangs. We have good reasons to avoid so much sordid stuff, but the price we pay is ignoring what men have to deal with and, therefore, what kind of education is necessary to withstand such things. I won’t claim that Pizzolatto’s survey of men facing evil is a substitute for such an education, but his storytelling does deserve its popularity and prestige. It’s the best we’ve got just now.
Recent Comments