Goddamn it Rust, couldn’t you just have kept your big mouth shut?
On Sunday night, whilst receiving Hollywood’s shiniest award, Matthew McConaughey did his level best to torpedo the greatest performance he has ever given. And I’m not talking about Dallas Buyers Club.
Nobody in recent pop-culture has riffed on the mortality of God with more dusty panache than Rust Cohle on ‘True Detective’. So it was irritating to have McConaughey go and get all Jesus-is-My-Agent on us poor meat-puppets a week before the final apocalyptic showdown.
Let’s be clear: Dallas Buyer’s Club was shameless Oscar bait, lifted out of movie-of-the-week territory by fine performances by McConaughey and Jared Leto, both of whom underwent extensive weight-loss in preparation for their roles.
The story of a dissolute and venomously homophobic rodeo-rider who contracts AIDS and rediscovers both his humanity and his will to survive has been very well received by critics and audiences. The film is pure Oscar fodder but the performances are very high-quality and very, very skinny indeed. McConaughey is as thin as chicken-wire and meaner than a starving dog for the first half; Leto is suitably etiolated as the transsexual with a steely spine. The two stalk bonily around each other and the sight is impressive.
Treating your body as a sort of extreme costume is an impressive demonstration of studio commitment, as well as testament to the efforts of highly paid nutritionists and personal trainers. Gerard Butler reportedly became addicted to painkillers honing his body to a buffed and convex gleam for ’300′. He may have been left a bit of a wreck but the movie launched a thousand boot-camps. Taylor Lautner only managed to stay on Team Jacob by piling on the beefcake. Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling did the reverse for ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘Lars and the Real Girl’, padding themselves out with that convincing layer of beery weight that makes them look like regular guys instead of media assets. A few months and a whole lot of crunches later, the abs are back. In many cases, the project demands this sort of thing, but it’s hard not to look at it as a sort of penance: male stars proving that they are earning their money by torturing themselves physically.
Matthew McConaughey is no stranger to this: he had a flex-off with Bale ten years ago in a bit of rubbish about dragons nobody remembers or cares about today. Bale showed up to the post-apocalyptic shoot looking suitably haggard only to find McConaughey strutting bulkily about as though he was on Venice Beach: a battle of the barbells ensued and he made himself sick on tuna, raw eggs and chicken fillets. It was all for nothing: the movie crashed and burned. But McConaughey has been flaunting his beach body longer and more consistently than nearly anybody in Hollywood: his confident Texan beachiness is one of the main reasons that he was corralled into so many flimsy rom-coms and forgettable adventures during the nineties.
Magic Mike subverted that convention. As the mother-hen of a Florida male strip-club, he was still lithe and taut, but beside Channing Tatum he was starting to look tired, as though his knees were getting stiff, and he modulated his habitual lazy charm with a hard eye for profit. It was clear that he was looking for an exit-strategy.
Dallas Buyers Club was that exit. And McConaughey dashed through it on spidery denim legs, giving the (almost) performance of a lifetime. Everything looked great.
Then Leto went on a series of chat-shows and insulted the trans community by repeatedly referring to his character as ‘he’, which is a big no-no. After a bit of kicking, he finally seemed to catch on and, by Oscar night, had a speech prepared that paid muted respect to the victims of AIDS.
‘Muted’ is not the word that springs to mind when watching McConaughey claim his statuette. People who thank God for awards seem oblivious to the crass arrogance inherent in stating that your career has somehow been given a boost by a deity that ignores the suffering of millions on a daily basis. I guess that’s what evangelicals mean by a ‘personal Jesus’. And this was the old McConnaughy, as buffed and golden as the Oscar itself, not the skeletal cowboy or the scaly prophet of doom that’s been haunting HBO for the last seven weeks. His exhilaration was as depressing as Rust’s misery is weirdly uplifting. The artist failed his creation.
Thanks to McConaughey’s impromptu revivalist meeting, the right-wing hootingly ignored the fact that the movie is about people with AIDS and decided that the whole things was about Jesus, the power of the free-market and why big gub’mint sucks.
Just try to forget about it. The final denouement of True Detective as almost upon us and I want to expand a bit before all is revealed.
It’s pretty clear that, whatever happens with this show in the future, Rust will not be coming back. The events of the first season have already made a broken old man of him. I’ve heard rumors that the template for each season will be different cops and maybe even a different state. I have no problem with that. Locations outside the obvious big cities have started figuring powerfully as characters on American television in recent years. I’m thinking of New Mexico’s pitiless, arid presence in Breaking Bad and the dank, dilapidated Baltimore of The Wire. The idea of a grisly new scenario playing out in Minnesota or Vermont appeals. Still, I wouldn’t care to take over from Woody and Matt.
To qualify early assumptions, Rust Cohle is still as dry and dispassionate as a piece of human driftwood but Marty Hart has revealed himself to be a weak, violent, emotionally-deaf philanderer, demanding the love and devotion that he so clearly neither deserves nor returns. He and Rust are not buddies and they never will be. Rust watches Marty blundering around with his sandpaper eyes, and humiliates him in the eyes of his wife by simply standing about being better than him: stiller, more attentive, more responsible; stonier and somehow sexier at the same time.
When Megan, Marty’s wife, discovers that the miserable drunk slumped at her dinner table is a grieving parent, it marks the moment when her respect for her feckless and complacent husband starts visibly to crumble. And when the inevitable infidelity occurs, it feels as sordid, irresistible and calculating as an ambush.
Six episodes later, a grotesque and sickening conspiracy is slowly rising into view. The hunt has been pursued through the most gripping undercover bust – and-extraction ever seen on TV (Scorsese or Mann would cheer,) to a locked room of filth and horror and a case-closed that isn’t. ‘Nothing ever ends’ Always, when you reach the basement, another trapdoor opens and another staircase leads down.
Marty pops open the door of a microwave to stare at the incinerated remains of a child; Rust pops the button on a VHS player and plays a tape ‘nobody should own’; maybe it’s just a little arrangement of dolls on a child’s bedroom floor, or ‘I work for the parish’: some necessary levee of denial crumbles and the languid pollution that has been threatening to drown this whole show rises up.
Every signpost points to hell, and Hell, as Dante and Flann O’Brien warned us, is circular.
Hell is Circular: True Detective 2
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