This article discusses the first season of True Detective in its entirety.
When True Detective debuted on HBO last January it entered the hyper-busy television fray as both a known and unknown commodity.
On the one hand, there was a great deal of excitement thanks to the high profile cast, with national treasure Woody Harrelson and newly-redeemed pretty person Matthew McConaughey leaving the movies behind for an eight-episode story on what is still thought of as the premiere network for prestige television.
But there was also a mystery element hovering over True Detective’s hype, mystery courtesy of the behind the scenes personnel. The show was created, and each episode written, by Nic Pizzolatto, whose only previous experience with screenwriting was a pair of scripts for the first season of AMC’s wretched The Killing. And all eight episodes of True Detective season one were directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who had never directed anything so exhaustive as an eight-hour story.
So even as critics and audiences alike began to rant and rave for the show, and to disappear down rabbit holes of analyzation ranging from quantum physics to the American tradition of weird fiction, there was a great weight hanging over the show.
‘Can these guys pull it off?’ we wondered. ‘Can they tell a satisfying mystery story AND succeed with the characters’ emotional narratives AND pay off the metaphysical and philosophical concerns of the story properly?’
When the final hour finished with Rust and Marty staggering out of a hospital parking lot, each wounded man supporting the other as they stepped off screen and into a great unknown, reactions varied. Some were effusively positive. Others were outraged, believing that they had been hoodwinked into dedication to nothing more than an especially chatty bit of pulp. A great deal more fell somewhere in between.
In the time since the show ended, there have continued to be conversations pitched about what True Detective was trying to be, what it ultimately was, and what it all meant. Criticisms of misogyny and plagiarism have hounded Pizzolatto as he prepares the second season, criticisms that only picked up momentum as many felt dissatisfied with the whole.
(In this writer’s opinion, the plagiarism charge is overblown nonsense. We’ll discuss the misogyny-debate further down.)
True Detective season one, if you don’t know, follows the 1995 investigation into the bizarre murder of a young woman who was discovered in a field with a crown of antlers erected on her head. The investigation is led by good ol’ boy Marty Hart (Harrelson) and his new partner, the jittery nihilist Rust Cohle (McConaughey).
The story of the investigation is narrated to us by present day Marty and Rust, as a possible copycat killer has struck and a new pair of cops are curious to learn everything they can about the initial investigation.
Through this device, Pizzolatto is able to tease out the mystery storyline, while also giving Harrelson and McConaughey ample room to comment about their past selves. Rust, in particular, is keen on turning his testimony into a kind of sermon, expounding at great length about what these mundane murders say to the inherent evil of the universe in which we live.
The device also works nicely as a narrative technique, as we are able to see the places where Rust and Marty evade, elide, or flat out deceive, which only causes tension to mount as we move towards events from which there is no escape.
At a certain point, though, Pizzolatto sees fit to have first Rust and then Marty leave the interrogation. The 1995 investigation is resolved early in episode five, with the remainder of that episode and the one after detailing the build-up to the pair’s angry split in 2002. The final two episodes take place entirely in the contemporary time period, with Rust and Marty pooling forces to hunt down their serial killer, a mysterious entity known as the Yellow King, once and for all.
Watching True Detective in its entirety for a second time, it was incredibly easy to fall back under its southern Gothic spell. Fukunaga’s images create a world of terrifying thinness, a palpable sense that some greater, awful truth is hovering just beyond the borders of what we can see. True Detective was a show of incredible restraint, leaving the most graphic images and appalling ideas unseen and unspoken. Our two seekers were caught in a ravaged world, a world in which rot had soaked beneath every surface.
And Pizzolatto’s scripts were more than worthy of all this craftsmanship. While a great deal of attention was lavished on McConaughey’s long, poetic speeches on the existential plight of the human soul, it was often forgotten just how funny and enjoyable the show was on a scene-to-scene basis.
Much of that credit must also go to Harrelson and McConaughey’s work as Marty and Rust. McConaughey received most of the attention and accolades, given just how thoroughly he has revived his career as a serious actor, with Rust’s gaunt expression and haunted invocations as radical a departure as possible from the beach bum persona of his various romantic comedies. And as great as McConaughey is here, Harrelson is every bit as good, finding the smallest moments to let you see the rage beneath Marty’s aw shucks demeanor. Both detectives are several degrees of fucked in the head, but Marty is the only one in denial about it, and Harrelson allows both heartbreak and horror to come from those moments where the darkness cannot be pent up anymore and the mask slips.
But once you go beyond the central pair and their concerns, True Detective becomes awful thin, awful fast. None of the other detectives or cops, not even the pair who we spend eight hours with in the interrogation room, are given any personality or function beyond bouncing off Marty and Rust. The same goes for anyone our duo interview for the investigation, in either decade. Characters exist to either advance the plot or provide Rust with an excuse to expound upon his philosophies.
This hits its nadir in the writing for Maggie, Marty’s estranged wife. Played by Michelle Monaghan, Maggie is every bad cliché for the modern television antihero’s put-upon spouse, angry and confrontational in every scene. That is until after the time jump, at which point she seems to be simply medicated. Monaghan is one of the brightest, sharpest female performers in Hollywood, a criminally underused talent, and to see her struggle so mightily to induce nuance and layers to a character so undefined is deeply aggravating.
The defense for this flatness is two-fold:
1) The show only ran for eight episodes, so it’s not like Pizzolatto could spend an exhaustive amount of time digging into the backgrounds of every tertiary character.
2) The show is not ABOUT the other cops, the suspects, Maggie, or even about the case. True Detective was about Marty and Rust, and about showing how these two incredibly different men dealt with existing in a world gone mad. The supporting characters are just that: supporting.
These are both completely fair arguments, but I don’t think either truly succeeds when we dig into the execution of the show.
In regards to the first point, you don’t need a ton of time to establish the humanity of a character. For comparison, David Fincher’s Zodiac did a much, much better job at making sure that the investigators, suspects, and victims of the Zodiac serial killer all registered as full and actual people. That film, even in its expanded director’s cut, comes in at under three hours long. With over twice as much time, Pizzolatto and Fukunaga never even approached the levels of intimacy and empathy which mad bastard David Fincher pulled off in mere minutes.
But, OK, let’s accept that the show was never going to give characters like Maggie or the other detectives any real depth. Let’s embrace that this is a feature for how Pizzolatto wanted to tell this story, and not some kind of bug.
Even acknowledging this, the creators of this show are still are not able to live up to their own premise(s).
For example, many in the critical community lambasted the show for what they perceived to be either witless mistreatment of women at best, or outright misogyny at worst. This criticism ranged from the lack of agency for Maggie or Alexandra Daddario’s Lisa, Marty’s mistress, to the anonymity with which they regarded the case’s victims and the various other prostitutes and abused women at the margins of the story.
Now, it needs to be said that True Detective is very much about misogyny, and Marty’s mistreatment of the women in his life is not some accident that Pizzolatto forgot to fix. Marty’s casual emotional abuse (which becomes full blown physical abuse) to his wife and daughters is clearly intended to exist in parallel with the cyclical system of rape and murders that the Yellow King and the gradually-revealed cult surrounding him has employed for generations. Your outrage is intentional.
But while Pizzolatto’s words call out the way men objectify and dehumanize women in one episode, a later episode sees Fukunaga’s camera lovingly panning across a row of nameless strippers’ asses, their thong-clad rears bent over the bar. Even as the show decries the male gaze, it can’t keep its own libido under control.
It’s a case of the show seeming to promise one thing, only to choose the easier route.
Or look at the way the murder mystery resolves. True Detective spent episodes casting a fog-soaked pall over the world, suggesting a universe with no moral center, moving steadily towards Hell. Perhaps the most terrifying concept at the heart of the investigation was the intimation that there was no one killer, that there was no single bad guy that the heroes could defeat and make the world right. The problem was not that there was a monster loose in the world, but that the world itself was monstrous.
Absolutely that remains as a theme for the entire stretch of the show. Pizzolatto, to his credit, does not tidy up every loose end that he might have, instead allowing the vast majority of the murder-cult to go un-unmasked and unpunished. Evil might not be triumphant, but much of it does get away scott free. On a subtextual and thematic level, Pizzolatto’s scripts do not err from their proper path.
But on the visceral, emotional level, the audience is allowed to see that the creepy redneck did it. For a show that had done such a remarkable job at showing how petty cruelty begets unspeakable cycles of violence, a show that challenged viewers to connect the darkness of the cosmos to the darkness in their own hearts, the resolution is frustratingly pat. Instead of attacking the hearts of his audience, Pizzolatto gives us a boogeyman with a spooky stick fort, and a big loud confrontation complete with an awesome finishing move to close out the story.
Again, we can talk for hours about the philosophical underpinnings of this showdown. We can talk about the way that the show comments on how we build up society’s wretches into mythic monsters. We can talk about how Errol, the killer, embodies the way that the wealthy and powerful disassociate their most animalistic urges into something uglier and crueler (shades of Wolf of Wall Street) and all of these points will have validity. But on the dramatic level, Pizzolatto lets the audience off the hook. The sister-fucking freak who lives in the swamp did it, the text says. Kill him and claim your reward.
Even if we strip it down even further, and say that the show was not about the case, or the philosophies, that it was just an exploration of these two detectives, they still only do half the job. While Pizzolatto and Harrelson are fearless about calling Marty out on every bullshit hypocrisy that he uses to mask his rancid core, McConaughey’s Rust is spared this kind of honesty.
Rust remains a macho fantasy all the way to the end, regardless of which timeline he’s in. Not only is Rust a genius detective and master orater, he’s also the greatest interrogator in the history of interrogators, an expert tracker and hand-to-hand fighter who rebels against any one and anything that he choosess because Rust is so morally righteous he doesn’t need your institutions, man. He’s got a tragic backstory that makes him juuuuuuust vulnerable enough, and he’s also got a mystery past loaded with false identities and underworld contacts. He’s fucking Batman, is what he is, but Batman crossed with Tyler Durden’s knack for macho speechifying and disdain for authority.
The closest the show ever gets to calling Rust on his bullshit is in the disparity between the wired Rust of 1995 and the hollowed out alcoholic of the 2012 time period. For several episodes, it seemed like Pizzolatto was rebuking the character at the same time that he was idealizing him, showing that the endpoint for Rust’s self-satisfied nihilism was emotional ruin.
Nope. Turns out that Rust’s mania is a put-on so he can throw the investigators off the trail while he goes outside the law and seeks true justice. Rust isn’t a damaged madman, he’s the Lone Truth-Seeker in a Mad World, another layer of fantasy for men to project themselves on to.
And maybe that’s all Rust, and True Detective, is meant to be. Maybe this show really is nothing but an exquisitely made pulp story, nothing more and nothing less, and asking it to be something that it is not is simply unfair.
But I know that the show, at its best, was more than that. This is a show that aimed for truths about the fundamental nature of being alive, that sought to explore the very nature of story and storytelling. This is a show that could capture something capital-H Human in a way that most art never attempts, let alone achieves at all.
So if I criticize Nic Pizzolatto and True Detective, it’s because I think this man is capable of true greatness, and I think this show is capable of being the vessel for that greatness. It’s just a matter of living up to the lofty goals which the show itself has established.
Next year’s got a new cast and a new case. I’m ready to be amazed.