A friend of mine laughingly noted that ‘True Detective’ is a very good show about Matthew McConaughey’s cheekbones. This is both unfair and fair: people are raving about it because it is a very good police procedural; rich in atmosphere and skilful in manipulating narrative tropes. The difference between manipulating tropes and serving up cliches is that tropes are flexible and devious and make for compelling stories. Cliches just lie there clammy and motionless.
The cheekbone joke is pretty spot-on. ‘True Detective’ is undoubtedly McConaughey’s show and, though he shares acting and executive producing credits with Woody Harrelson, there is no doubt that if this story is about anything other than tracking a murderer, it is about watching the sharp angles of Matthew McConaughey’s skull push their way slowly out from behind the taut, bronzed, flirtatious mask that he wore for the first half of his career. In the recent ‘Dallas Buyers Club’, he was wire-thin and dancing with death but the flirt was still evident, struggling mulishly against death. In ‘True Detective’, what might once have been Detective Rustin Cohle is already long dead and has nothing at all to lose.
The story is related as a series of flashbacks to the Louisiana summer of 1995. Two detectives investigate the ritual murder of a prostitute who is found lashed to a tree, smeared with occult symbols and crowned with antlers. Though partners, they are not friends; they have barely spoken in the three months they have been working together. Cohle, a blow-in from Texas with a murky past and no conversation, is regarded with frustration and eye-rolling dislike by Martin Hart (Harrelson), a so-so family man intent on doing the job and getting home sane. ‘This place is like someone’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading” Cohle remarks at one point. The self-conscious writerliness of the line, uttered by a man with a name that might give Cormac McCarthy pause, is dragged back from the brink of parody by Harrelson, who sourly tells him to shut up saying nutty things before someone hears him.
The flashback device allows us the luxury of ignoring the mobile technology that harassed scriptwriters have worked hard to incorporate into recent drama. God how mobile ruin a story and jack the mood. Two men can sit in a car and attempt to have a conversation. The conversation takes a nihilistic turn and the discomfited family man tells the death’s head to shut up. ‘Let’s make this car a place of quiet reflection’ he suggests grumpily, and they both go back to looking out of the window. No phones. Just silence, pregnant with thought, and sunlight sliding over the windshield.
Nothing about this show feels particularly original, from the fecund yet mouldering Bible-belt landscapes to the boozy mismatched partners or the gruesome crime-scene. The components are all familiar; whatever is good about this lies in its assembly and in the way that Cohle’s damaged and depressed personality seems to the the root of a disease that is visibly overtaking the world. The idea that the Deep South is a putrid Eden where rottenness and violence are overlaid with warm sunshine and the smell of magnolia: this is a giant cliche, but it’s McConaughey’s performance that anchors that trope back the realm of myth. It’s thanks to him that we can accept the Gothic machismo and heavy symbolism.
Rustin Cohle (say it out loud) is a bereaved man with a history of alcoholism and heavy drug-abuse who still suffers from intermittent hallucinations and whose worldview is blackened by an overwhelming nihilism. The only reason he is still alive, even in 1995, is that he is ‘constitutionally unfit for suicide’. Yet there he is almost twenty years later, chain-smoking and drinking in the police station. And boy can he smoke: I haven’t seen a character on television pull on a cigarette with such desperate conviction in years.
’95 Cohle looks almost, but not quite like the bronzed surfer or idealistic young lawyer of McConaughey’s youth: fine-boned and a wavy-haired. Only close up does one see the webs of tiny lines crisscrossing his too-taut skin. Flash forward to the present and there’s a shock of mixed dismay and admiration as you notice how perfectly the actor and the make-up artists have conjured up the damage that twenty years of robotic alcoholism can do to a face. It’s not just the stringy grey-green hair and patina of broken veins on his cheeks and forehead nor even the rubbery softening of his entire face: an aura of loose and missing teeth. There’s also a new stiffness in his movements and long moments when it seems as if he has suddenly forgotten how to breath. ‘I live in a room behind a bar. I work four days a week and drink the rest’ I know who I am.’
Harrelson’s part is to play sounding-board to McConaughey’s emptiness, and to be threatened by the void that he represents. His 1995 persona leans forward with a pugnacious thrust-out chaw-bacca jaw and incredulous bug-eyes. Later, he sits back, hair gone, and lets his belly out. The subtle transformations in appearance and manner suggest volumes without giving the slightest clue about the narrative’s trajectory other than they have both, in some sense, survived. But it’s not over.
I promised no spoilers and, to be straight, I haven’t many to offer. There’s a missing child and creepy ‘Blair Witch’ tripods fashioned from creepery twigs. There’s a looming unctuous Reverend, brother to the governor, threatening a fundamentalist, anti-Satanic task-force. There’s seeping psilocybin skies and wheeling swarms of sparrows. There’s oil refineries fouling the horizon, burnt churches and pick-up bars lit pink and viridian. Perhaps best of all, there’s a lost diary with scrawled notes about seeing ‘The King in Yellow’ in the woods, which is about as classic a piece of American Gothic mythology as I can think of. For show so completely conjured from the junkyard of American popular culture and suffused with an atmosphere as rotten as it is torpid, it’s as taut, compelling and visually arousing a piece of television as I have seen in a very long while.
You give anything away, I’ll break your wrists.
American Gothic: True Detective (no spoilers, amazingly)
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