SPOILERS FOLLOW
When you’ve enjoyed a show this much and this viscerally, then it’s hard to admit that it has failed you at the last moment. I guess warning-lights should have started flashing when True Detective stopped being merely popular but a phenomenon, and good word-of-mouth became a constant exhortation to watch it. Shows usually take some time to gain what is somewhat ominously called ‘a following’; The Wire is a cult series: this was a church built overnight.
And now it’s crashed and burned. Sorry to all of you who are completely satisfied with last night’s denouement but I felt cheated of something larger.
What raised True Detective from a routine police procedural was the quality of the two lead performances, Rustin Cohle’s articulate and uncompromising world-view, and the powerful atmosphere of stagnant evil conjured up by the bayou setting. Apart from that, there was nothing much here that we haven’t seen before: a ritual murder, a shadowy conspiracy, mismatched cops and a very attractive wife.
(I am not going to discuss the lack of credible female agency here: it is a large subject and other people are doing excellent jobs elsewhere.)
Rust has stated that the death of his daughter saved him from ‘the sin of being a father’. It’s a bold, memorable statement and expresses a universal parental fear that we’ve all heard before: ‘How can I bring a child into a world like this?’ And what a world. From the initial corpse kneeling pallid under the twisted tree, the Louisiana of True Detective is one where evil seems rooted in the polluted soil, in sick families, in secret history, in the Mississippi turgid with cancerous chemicals. It’s everywhere. Rust’s ascetic refusal to admit hope seems the only way to maintain a bulwark against appalling chaos and brutality. He becomes a religious figure out of Flannery O’Connor: a martyr of the Church without Christ, haunted by visions; bereft of family or possessions: a pilgrim laboring towards crucifixion.
Powerful symbolism and archetypes abound, encouraging us to make sense of the patterns that emerge, just as the killer imposes appalling rituals and codes on the bodies of his victims. All the way along, Rust keeps warning that this is an illusion; that we are just machines programmed to find patterns where there are none; that there is nothing but chaos, endlessly repeating itself. ‘Tell ‘em stories while they’re tying sticks together.’ says the minister as Rust contemplates a cross. The killer arranges violated bodies; Rust arranges beer-can puppets; Marty’s daughter arranges dolls. Evidence of chaotic resonance keeps piling up: a video of an act so terrible that nobody can watch it; a baby incinerated in a microwave; the King in Yellow haunting the woods; Caracosa.
Eventually, the two men arrive at the heart of darkness, which turns out to be one of those rural hellholes made famous by redneck maniacs since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: fetid rooms filled with broken dolls, moldering books and clattering bead-curtains. When Marty discovers a festering body with alpine fresheners dangling above it, one thinks irresistibly of David Fincher’s Se7en. That film was also about a stoic, world-weary detective and his flawed and vulnerable partner. And it ended up with a woman’s head in a cardboard box and the triumph of evil. So we expect the worst as Rust pursues the Minotaur into the labyrinth.
At the center of the maze, Rust has a vision/ hallucination of what appears to be a black vortex, suspended over the spot where so many innocents have died. The possibility is tentatively advanced that maybe there’s more to this than just a madman, or even a unclean conspiracy. Perhaps there is something else sowing evil and horror in the land and possessing people with the urge to violate and kill. Or maybe it’s just Rust’s drug-addled synapses misfiring. The vision passes, a duel ensues and, against fearful strength and terrible injuries, the two men manage to slay the beast.
This is where any decent writer would have ended the story: two warriors bleeding out on the carcass of the monster.
That must not have tested well, so we are treated to a lengthy epilogue. Rust improbably survives being disemboweled, the flashing police lights arrive deus ex machina, and the two heroes are whisked off to hospital where they recuperate. Marty receives a visit from his wife and daughters and has a good cry. Cohle assumes a fully Christ-like posture in his hospital bed.
The black pit is opened, the innumerable bodies of children are exhumed, the murder cult is dispersed, the unwatchable video is sent to every major network and newspaper. Everything comes to light.
Outside the hospital, Marty presents Rust with a pack of cigarettes and Rust confesses that at the moment of death, he felt the love of his daughter waiting for him in the warm darkness below death. The two men look up at the stars in the night sky and discuss which is stronger: darkness or light. ‘You ask me, the light’s winning,’ murmurs Rust as Marty helps him away from the hospital towards a more hopeful future. The camera lingers on the sky as more and more stars come out.
The tone, which I find utterly unconvincing and at odds with the message of the show and McConnaughey’s mesmerizing performance, is that evil can be exorcised. The story stops being one about pilgrims toiling in a savage land, and becomes one about purification of the land and the self. The catharsis is too complete and lapses into exactly the kind of self-delusion that Rust used to mock as no weapon against true evil. I did not want to feel good at the end of this story. I wanted Rust sacrificed on the corpse of the beast and Marty alone with his regrets, and the world the way it is.
There is an aerial shot that occurs just before this: combing over plantations and levees, bayous and townships, back to the murder tree silhouetted against the setting sun, that I think would have made a far better closing image for True Detective. Perhaps the camera could have lingered on something ill-defined, hanging in the branches, or on the black hole at the center of the wreath of twigs.
Lengthening shadows, and watchfulness and the void.
Cop Out: True Detective Finale
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