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

Hell is Circular: True Detective 2

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