Emmy Spotlight: True Detective

Can you believe that we’re far enough past True Detective’s finale to have already arrived at the True Detective backlash? Neither can I, but here we are nonetheless. In the words of the ever-quotable Gawker Media, Nic Pizzolatto is a schmuck, and he probably also hates women? Pizzolatto mostly disregards that criticism, and mostly he does this for good reason. True Detective tells a story of violence against women—systemic, socially engrained, physical, sexual, and emotional violence against women. From beginning to end, the implication is that it the capacity for this violence is basically in the soil of the godforsaken Louisiana that the show depicts.

The crime that sets this whole chain of events in motion, in 1995, is like something out of Hannibal, and is unlike any case Marty Hart or Rust Cohle have worked on before. Their investigation leads them down a dark, twisting path, until they appear to catch their man, and Hart shoots him dead in anger. But in 2002 it becomes clear that this is not the case, and Cohle spends the next decade trying to unravel the mystery. Like the audience he becomes bogged down in mythology, in ideas of the Yellow King and Carcosa, and it drives him half-mad. And in the intervening time, we watch each man in fits and glimpses, always comparing them to each other, watching as the case, or else their inherent natures, chips away bit by bit at their souls.

It goes without saying, then, that True Detective is relentlessly dark, and not just in terms of the violent crimes that Hart and Cohle investigate. These men have dark lives, as well. Rust Cohle is divorced, and has recently lost his young daughter, and has turned to a Nietzschean, nihilist philosophy, refusing to recognize any meaning to life or the world around him. Marty Hart is a womanizing bastard, a perennial philanderer, and a misogynist hypocrite. Through some awful twist of fate, it is these men who are charged with the investigation of a serial murderer who abducts and horribly maims children. But True Detective is less interested in being a mystery about this killer’s identity than it is in being a portrait of these two men across the nearly two decades that their investigation spans. This doesn’t become immediately obvious to us until the end of the seventh episode, “After You’ve Gone,” when Errol Childress, he of the scarred neck and spaghetti monster ears, is more or less dropped into our laps. Much of the finale, “Form and Void,” is then devoted to Hart and Cohle retracing their steps, explaining how the clues they’ve been presented with do, indeed, lead to the Childress clan. I highly doubt that anyone could have arrived at this conclusion on his own, through careful study of the show, not least because the most essential clues are not given until after the killer’s identity is confirmed.

If you are watching True Detective expecting the thrill of clues coming together and solving a mystery, then “Form and Void” is your Lost moment, a crushing disappointment at the realization that your expectations not only have not been met, but were in fact way off base to begin with. If you were watching with more interest to form and style, to the performances being given, and to the character studies being carried out, then you perhaps are more pleased with the final product than you would have expected at the beginning. By and large I fall into the second camp, and that is owing to several key components.

First and foremost is Cary Joji Fukunaga’s wonderful direction. True Detective is a formal rarity in television, with all eight installments by the same writer and director. The result is a consistency of tone and vision that is almost completely unparalleled—the only other example I can think of is Breaking Bad, which is all the more impressive considering it achieves that consistency over many more episodes, with many more writers and directors in the room. There is hardly a shot in these eight episodes that is not utterly breathtaking. More than anything else, Fukunaga achieves the perfect atmosphere for this story, a hard-boiled Southern Gothic detective yarn, with the requisite strong imagery that goes with those vastly different territories. His instinct for framing is unmatched, and there are countless images throughout that will stay with you for a very long time. There are many wide shots, industrialized landscapes with billowing plumes of smog that never seem too symbolic. The lighting, as well, is excellent, leaving everything in murky shadow or else this bitter orange light—and all this is contrasted with the bright, lush green landscapes of the Louisiana swamplands, including the fields where eventually we arrive at Carcosa itself.

Another component, briefly mentioned before we get to the meat and potatoes here, is T-Bone Burnett’s excellent music curation, along with the opening tune and credit sequence, all of which capture the Creole vibe of the show’s setting, as well as the more haunting aspects of the narrative. Particularly with the songs that close out each episode, Burnett picks some killer cues that keep us thoroughly, emotionally engaged.

And finally we have the lead actors, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, each in his own way thoroughly unlikely to be found in this sort of project, and yet each perfectly suited to his role. McConaughey especially is a revelation here, at the beginning of his so-called “McConnaissance,” imbuing this difficult character with a vital spark of humanity that is necessary to make the constant dorm-room philosophizing remotely bearable, let alone believable. In McConaughey’s hands, Rust Cohle becomes a real man, irreparably damaged by grief, whereas he easily could have become a noir cliché. The same is true of Harrelson, whose Marty Hart is as clichéd a hard-boiled detective as they come, and yet remains relatable to the audience even in his most horrible moments. Both actors commit fully to the idea that they are not portraying good men, and that level of understanding is crucial to the performances they give. This is their show, and they steal it, both rightly nominated for Lead Actor this year.

As for the rest of the “main cast,” they don’t get much to do. Michael Potts and Tory Kittles play the detectives who have taken over the Carcosa case in 2012, and while they are named, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember the names. Michelle Monaghan has the next-largest role, as Margaret Hart. Credit where it’s due: Maggie is a stronger character than many critics would have you believe, but the fact remains that there simply isn’t enough here to make much of a judgment on her one way or the other, especially toward the end of the season, where she serves only to drive conflict between the two men. The argument here is that this is a closed-perspective show, telling the story from Cohle and Hart’s points of view, to the exclusion of other perspectives. That’s a fine argument, but there are multiple scenes throughout the season that are from Maggie’s point of view, and they sort of torpedo that argument.

In a story about wanton violence toward women, whether physical or emotional, it’s completely legitimate for female characters to function as objects, or as reference points for the male characters. This is something that happens fairly often in literature—I’m reminded most strongly of James Salter’s short story “American Express”—and it only really becomes problematic here when Pizzolatto opens his mouth about it. (I guess maybe he is a little bit of a schmuck after all.) But I don’t find it to be a fundamental problem with the show the way that other critics, chief among them Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker, have. When toward the end of the season, Maggie seduces Rust, for the sole purpose of hurting Marty, it’s easy to read Rust’s angered reaction as misogynist, as the narrative reducing Maggie to a sex object. And yes, she is being used to create conflict between the two men. But it’s much more rewarding to read the scene as a damnation of both men, as a way of equating Cohle with Hart, even though Cohle sees himself as better than Hart is. Assuming that Maggie’s portrayal here is negative or misogynist or anti-feminist is, frankly, lazy. Yes, it’s a problem that the character eventually exists only to drive a wedge between Hart and Cohle, but the script, and more so Monaghan’s performance, ensure that it’s the men who are at fault.

Really, the plot is the weakest part of the whole affair here. It’s overly complicated, especially considering that the human elements of the story are foregrounded in the climax, and it’s all too easy to tune in and out of the (rather convoluted) specifics of Hart and Cohle’s investigation. That Cohle more or less cracks the case off-screen is a big red flag. Each episode has hugely interesting set pieces, especially those concerned with Hart’s home life. His relationship to his wife and daughters is consistently contrasted with the dead girls he investigates, and ideas of virginity and patriarchy are fully explored through Marty’s various experiences and, yes, his bad decisions with regard to women. No one should walk away thinking that True Detective endorses his behavior—but yes, it would be nice if Monaghan had a bit more to work with.

Basically, the show is at its best when it’s not concerned directly with the detective work, whether that’s when we’re exploring the characters’ lives outside of work, in the fantastically directed chase sequence that closes out “Who Goes There,” a long, unbroken carnage that is certainly the highlight of the season, or in the rip-roaring climax that briefly becomes a supernatural showdown of epic proportions. It’s impossible to overstate how magnificently tense the final confrontation with Childress, there in Carcosa. It’s no stretch to accuse the show of teasing occult or supernatural elements that it never quite delivers on, but in this sequence, those elements are out in full force nonetheless. The set design of Carcosa is staggering, and the way that Hart and Cohle make their way into this literal heart of darkness is a perfect ending to the long, strange journey that has led them there.

That said, I have a quibble—neither of them dies, despite grievous injuries that probably should have killed one or both of them. That instead both Hart and Cohle survive this long ordeal is somewhat beyond belief, but is nevertheless in line with the story that Pizzolatto ultimately tells. They survive precisely so that they can realize the folly of their actions, of their belief systems. Yes, this is a story in which our heroes, such as they are, are made to learn something. It’s a weirdly warm and fuzzy ending, and while it doesn’t come out of left field—in fact it’s well supported from the very beginning—it does subvert audience expectations, and that can often feel like the same thing. Mostly this is a case of Pizzolatto being a Writer with a capital-W, used to writing a complete work and letting it stand for itself. Television is a different animal, and while we can now in retrospect view it as a creative whole, we’ll always have those six weeks of rabid speculation that was, at best, misguided. At worst, it was an utter waste of time.

So the show is not perfect. I think at times its reach exceeds its grasp, especially in the later episodes. Moreover, the show ends up telling a simpler story—in which it tracks the progress of two very damaged men over nearly twenty years—than it purports to at first; you can look to the degree of disappointment in the show’s finale as proof positive of this. It certainly would have been helpful if Pizzolatto had tipped his hand earlier with regard to this. Instead, as with The Killing over on AMC, a series of clues turn out to be red herrings, and the mystery itself turns out to be almost beside the point. There’s nothing wrong with that—but when your show is called True Detective and you’re laying out clues like crazy anyway, it might be helpful to give your viewers a heads up.

But by and large this is a very good series. It starkly portrays the very worst aspects of human nature, and does so unflinchingly, but it also makes a strong argument against nihilism, against the resigned acceptance of this world as a cruel, random place. It leaves us with our notion of good and evil intact, and perhaps even reinforced. You could watch it on mute and it would still be gorgeous, if nothing else. The narrative is long and winding, too much so, with occasionally too inflated a sense of self-importance, but the script is nonetheless effective in its smaller moments, and each episode has several sequences that are truly great television. For the atmospherics and direction alone, True Detective is a stellar achievement; that the other elements all occasionally align as well is even better, and more than enough to forgive its few failures.