In which this is my least favorite life.
So MAN ceased to be MAN-a rational,
moral creature, a being who once transcended the causality of nature. Instead he became a meaningless, enigmatic
machine-like piece of MATTER. Even the
MANIPULATORS who controlled UTOPIA ceased to be MAN in the old sense of the
word. After denying their mannishness
for so long, they finally lost it and so became the most terrifying animal on
the face of the earth. (The Western Book of the Dead/1970)
Rust: “Well, once there
was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.” (“Form and Void”/Season 1)
What’s that Rust? That
valedictory sentiment about the stars in the sky symbolizing the worth of
fighting against a seemingly overwhelming universal darkness? Have you been to Vinci, CA Rust? Have you ventured out of the Louisiana
backwoods since going mano y mano with death and the great beyond?
The brilliance of the first season of True Detective was born from many mothers. Its limited run format ramped up the tension
of the week to week plot progression, the specter of resolution of some form
lurking at the end of Episode 8. The way
that Nic Pizzolatto deftly played with tropes from the Southern Gothic
tradition, Lovecraftian horror, the great Noir canon, and a very post-millenial
sense of guilt and paranoia tapped into the zeitgeist from several different
angles. And the casting of Matthew
McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, stoner icons extraordinaire, to play the
embittered, hollowed out knights of the Vermillion Parish highways engendered a
level of audience identification and affinity that allowed the show’s various
plunges into the abyss to retain some semblance of meta-narrative comfort.
It was all very deep and dark nightmare juice that flowed through that
first season. The waking terror of the
past living in the present on the gnarly, alcohol-ravage face of a once studly
detective. The tales of late night
ceremonies in the woods which conjured something deeper than just child abuse
for their youthful victims. The
suspicion that something greater than all of us was enacting its bad juju on
the corporeal forms which populate the inner recesses of the gulf coast, those
abandoned farm houses that we all pass during road trips through the country,
the ones that we always fear might be host for some real Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style perversions turning out to be exactly
that. And the very real possibility that
the existential speechifying of one Rustin Spencer Cohle was, in fact, all
true. That the secret fate of all life
is that we are all doomed to be reborn into the profoundly fucked up lives we
inhabit, like a nightmare that we keep waking up into.
But even at the show’s darkest, the easy charm and charisma of
McConaughey and Harrelson offered reassurance to viewers. Both actors turned in career best
performances, sacrificing ego to explore their own inky depths. Star power, however, will always hold sway
over any twisting of perception. And
like it or not, this dysfunctional buddy cop duo was still entertaining as hell
to watch each week. There’s an inherent
pleasure to laying witness to the personal apocalypses on display in Season 1,
a good horror story that adheres enough to a traditional quest narrative that
dipping your feet in that black pool of madness offers a thrilling frisson, but
also an easy way back to the safety of your normalcy. The world of Vermillion Parish can still be
tucked away when you finish that first season.
The darkness might still be out there, but, significantly, it’s out there. Moral and ethical corruption that deeply
rooted is relegated to a part of the country where snakes are still handled in
religious ceremonies. And as shown in
the final episode, the supernatural fog that threatened to envelop the world
was merely humanity showing its nastier side.
Which is why True Detective’s
second season exists in such stark contrast to the first. Gone are the troubling, yet still accessible,
boogeymen of cult rituals. Gone are the
lush Southern Gothic vistas. Gone are
the sexy, charismatic leads to serve as dual Virgils in the journey through the
underworld. What remains is something
altogether more disturbing, and impenetrable, and darkly seductive. Time’s flat circle come back around, echoing
in the dankest recesses of the mind.
It’s fitting that after an enigmatic opening scene featuring
pink-ribboned wooden stakes in a field, Season 2’s first character introduction
is that of washed up detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), dropping off his
son to another day of the interminable hell of middle school. As his son leaves the car, the scene cuts to
Ray being interviewed by what will be revealed as a lawyer attempting to expand
his visitations rights. At first blush,
it’s a visual callback to those long police interviews with Hart and Cohle from
the show’s first go around. But this
time, the camera slowly creeps toward Ray, and the soundtrack gradually
envelops the ear with a vague, unsettling rumble, cutting off only as the
lawyer notes that the man who raped Ray’s wife (thus producing the son that the
Velcoros were so desperately trying to conceive on their own) was never
found. And then Ray tries to bribe the
lawyer to grease the skids for him.
It’s almost as if Pizzolatto is serving up swift and immediate
refutation of Season 1’s more charming aspects for those viewers expecting a
repeat of bleak mystery tinged with a smattering of “All right all right all
right.” Even the opening credits song
(Leonard Cohen’s minimalist “Nevermind”) is a reversal of the dark, lush
romanticism of The Handsome Family’s “Far From Any Road.” Farrell and McConaughey have both played
their share of pretty boys and steamy sex symbols, but the latter’s easygoing
demeanor provides a much easier lure for the viewer. Farrell has been pitched as leading man
material for more than a decade, yet there’s a flatness to his persona that
often distances him from fully engaging an audience in classic star system
fashion. For me, his peak came in
Michael Mann’s maligned 2006 big screen version of Miami Vice, in which Sonny Crockett is more conflicted collection
of cop/noir/spiritual detective tics and mannerisms than fully cohesive human
being. The tension that comes from his
state of being, and the fulfillment he finds in his partnership with Ricardo
Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) is compelling stuff, a broad commentary on male bravado.
That same quality is what makes Farrell such a hypnotic presence as
Ray, a man who has seemingly lost all hope for life. Rust Cohle may have bottomed out, but he was
enjoying his time running from the pain of the case that got away. Ray is wallowing in his own worst instincts,
and in the bleak ravages that time and misfortune visit upon so many. A bitter alcoholic, a cop in servitude to
corrupt forces of all stripes, a failed father prone to irredeemable acts of
violence (including assaulting the father of one of his son’s classmates, while
forcing the son to watch and promising the infliction of even more graphic harm
in the future)….he’s a crushed, hollowed out shell of humanity in every
possible way. There’s a palpable
brutalism to his character, with nary a romantic notion of gumshoe intrigue to
be had. (As his ex-wife spits at him in
the second episode “You were fine as long as everything else was fine. And then something happened, and you weren’t
strong enough…”) And there’s that stare
of his, the one that Farrell is proving to wield with mastery. Several times in the first two episodes, the
camera focuses on a first person POV of Ray…and then allows him to stare back
with a blankness, an emptiness that is uncomfortable on several levels. McConaughey’s glare always carries with it a
hint of dreamy sexuality. Farrell’s heavy
brow creates a visage in which his eyes sink back into darkness, eradicating
any appeal in favor of a deep stare into the unknown.
The long stare seems to be a signature shot of this second season, as
one of the most memorable scenes in “Night Finds You”, the second episode,
features a haunted Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) gazing at a rorschach blot of a
water stain on his ceiling, those old 3am insecurities leading him to tell his
wife the tale of his childhood entrapment in his basement (a protective measure
by his alcoholic father). The creeping
despair that eats away at his cool exterior (“What if I’m still in that
basement…in the dark? What if I died
there?”) is ballsy material for classic life of the party Vaughn to embrace;
it’s all played in another single first person POV shot, one which requires him
to unleash his sadness in unforgiving detail.
But in a way, Vaughn is as perfect for this role as Farrell is for
Ray. Both men have enjoyed the Hollywood
high life in their time, and the physical toll of those good times has created
weathered complexions well-suited for the portrayal of two beaten down
characters. Look back at Swingers-era Vince Vaughn and you see a
guy who likes his women and drink, but whose rakish charm is ably abetted by a
rail thin physique. Over the years, that
body has become bloated by time and habit, heavy bags settling under his
eyes. This Vaughn is what is needed for
reformed sleaze merchant Frank and the world-weariness he mixes with his
salesman’s magnetism (“Behold, what once was a man” as he dryly jokes to his
wife.)
Physicality seems to play a large role in all three of the male leads, as
Taylor Kitsch attests to in his portrayal of exiled motorcycle cop Paul
Woodrugh. Kitsch has also had his time
in leading man training, but his flatness of affect sometimes makes Farrell
look like Jim Carrey. That and the
almost blank slate quality of his looks.
He’s handsome, but more in the manner of a porn star or a soldier than a
Hollywood star. Which makes him an ideal
vessel for Paul, the former Black Mountain (see Blackwater) mercenary turned
wandering motorbike samurai by way of Electra
Glide in Blue. He might not carry
the nasty mojo that Ray packs in every day, but Paul’s tortured psyche can be
seen in his sub-Oedipal relationship with his mother (Lolita Davidovich), in
the mysterious scars that tattoo the left side of his body, in the midnight
ride of doom he takes, hurtling along the Pacific Coast Highway toward death
(which he unexpectedly finds in the emptied out corpse of Ben Caspere.)
Paul might hint at Oedipal mythology, but Rachel McAdams’s Antigone Bezzerides
goes full blown old school in this respect.
The daughter of New Age guru Eliot Bezzerides (whose Panticapaeum
Institute pays tribute to a prominent ancient Greek center of commerce), she’s
trapped in a world in which her younger sister (and recovering addict) Athena
works as an online porn star, and in which, much like Sophocles’s heroine of
the same name, she rails against the actions of her godlike elder. As Creon’s sister Jocasta killed herself
following Oedipus’s moment of Anagnorisis, so too does this Antigone’s mother
drown herself shortly after Eliot’s spiritual conversion, his refusal to guide
her away from her fate a major bone of contention for his daughter (there’s
also a hint of deeper sleaziness in Eliot’s moral relativism, especially in
regards to Athena’s new job.)
And Antigone’s last name hearkens back to a mythology of a very
different sort. A.I. “Buzz” Bezzerides
was a notable crime novelist and Noir screenwriter, most famously penning the
script for Robert Aldrich’s revisionist and harrowing Kiss Me Deadly. There’s a
lot of that film’s Mike Hammer in the character of Ray Velcoro, both men
serving as brutalist caricatures of the masculine imperative in the crime
milieu. When Ray and Antigone share a
car ride in Episode 2, it almost plays as a parody of those classic Hart/Cohle
voyages of the first season, Ray’s blunt and profane musings a far cry from the
existential poetry that Rust espouses. The
manner in which the film veers away from sanity and into an apocalyptic
crescendo of violence can also be seen in the general tone of Season 2,
especially in the abandonment of any vestige of charm from the first season
(much as Mike Hammer is stripped of his classic allure in Ralph Meeker’s
uber-misogynist take on the character.)
“Buzz” Bezzerides also worked as a communication engineer for the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power….and those words will arouse the morbid
passions of any Noir aficionado, so tightly are they forever connected to the
nightmare labyrinth of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. In teasing the development of Season 2,
Pizzolatto voiced his desire to explore the “psychosphere ambiance” of Southern
California, and it’s through this that he introduces the show’s uncredited lead
performer: the toxic hamlet of Vinci.
Based on the real life corrupt town of Vernon (read one L.A. Times
reporter’s testimony here), Vinci is less a physical space than the manifestation
of all that is rotten about the American/capitalist way of living, filled with
toxic waste and migrant workers who serve as pawns for the high-monied
machinations of would-be kings of industry.
It’s a spiritual sister to that classic Fitzgeraldian purgatory of The
Valley of Ashes, a way station where dreams go to die. Some of the most striking, haunting shots of
this second season are the aerial establishing ones of Vinci’s factories and
dead end-corners, the proto-industrial hum of the soundtrack evoking Eraserhead’s depiction of the 1970’s
Philadelphia of David Lynch’s nightmares.
As Ray tells Antogone’s partner when he asks what Vinci is, “a
city…supposedly.”
But Vinci can only exist as an extension of the great sprawl of Los
Angeles, and that’s the character which haunts all of these actions, and all of
these failed dreams. The long aerial
shots of the 405 and the maze of branches of that great quagmire of a freeway
system play like a penetrating gaze into the circulatory system of a cancer-ridden,
faded beauty. It’s the Los Angeles of
Noir fame, with shadowy forces as the puppetmasters controlling the lives of
the weak and disaffected. It’s also the
promise of the Los Angeles dream, with Frank and the three police officer leads
desperately trying to escape their pasts in a city founded on the allure of the
new day. As Thom Anderson wryly notes in
Los Angeles Plays Itself, his epic
testimony to the city on film (it’s on Netflix right now…you should really see if you already haven’t), the
dream image of the city so often centers on the downtown area, which is one of
the lesser visited and inhabited sections of the region. The Los Angeles of True Detective is much more representative of the city as a whole,
the distant neon glow a faint remedy for the often heartless hustle that
dominates survival in such a setting.
Which brings us back to the quote from The Western Book of the Dead
which opens this essay. That slim volume
from 1970 (which also gives Episode 1 its title) offers a quasi-Zen reading of
the history of mankind, one which concludes with about as fatalistic an
assessment of this thing we call human progress as you can find. This is the world that Rust Cohle preaches
about in Season 1, only to eventually dial back his rhetoric in favor of a
philosophy that acknowledges hope. But
Season 2 (at least so far) fully embraces this reading of existence, its
characters wandering through their lives as enigmatic machine-like pieces of
matter. Season 1 might tease the
presence of a Lovecraft monster at its heart, but the more reality-based
wasteland of dehumanization that Season 2 offers is more gut-wrenchingly
disturbing. To once again offer a nod to Polanski and Robert Towne, it hearkens
back to Noah Cross informing Jake Gittes that “most people never have to face
the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of
anything.” And so, we have the corpse of
Ben Caspere riding through the city all throughout the first episode, his
hidden life of sexual depravity now behind him as he rattle through the night
toward his date with the three officers.
And so, we have Frank’s bedtime speech about the world being as fragile
as papier-mache, his vision of the water stains on the ceiling crossfading into
the burned out eyes of Ben’s corpse, a fitting symbol for the emptied-out husks
of Ray, Antigone, and Paul. And so, we
have the mysterious man in the black bird’s mask seemingly murdering Ray via
shotgun at the end of the second episode.
Season 2’s full embrace of this nihilism can be daunting the first time
around. It took me a second viewing of
both episodes back to back to be sold on the whole thing. Like Lera Lynn, who plays the freak-folk,
narcopop songstress who serenades Frank and Ray with “This is My Least Favorite
Life” at the dive bar where they meet, the show has a siren’s dark allure in
the hypnotic vision it transmits from the ninth circle of Hell. Comfortable it ain’t. But sometimes crashing into the rocks can
still be redeemed by that intoxicating siren’s plea. And the dark journey through the California
nightmare makes True Detective as
enticing as any classic tug of war between Eros and Thanatos. Or a midnight motorcycle ride to oblivion.
