Cop Out: True Detective Finale

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

American Gothic: True Detective (no spoilers, amazingly)

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)