Hey Wisecrack, Jared here to gaze into the abyss once more with everyone’s favorite
arts and crafts show.
After it was seemingly cancelled in 2015 when season 2 bombed, True Detective is back for
a third season and as you might guess, we’re watching closely.
The first season was one of the most philosophically rich shows on TV and it has had a big influence
the crime genre over the last 6 years.
As countless articles have noted, the philosophy of pessimism is at the core of True Detective.
And while philosophical themes are plastered all over media as of late:
“Time is a flat circle”
True Detective is the only one brave enough to respond:
"What is that?
Nietzsche?
Shut the fuck up.”
But the pessimism of True Detective extends beyond just the ramblings of Rust Cohle.
It permeates the very fabric of the show, woven into its aesthetic, it’s many references
to other works, and even its missteps.
So join us on this dismal journey through eternity as you realize that you will watch
this video over and over again.And, of course, spoilers ahead for seasons one and two - but
who are we kidding?
This episode is 95% season 1.
First, a quick recap.
Season 1 follows detectives Rustin Cohle, a man broken by the death of his daughter
with a rather bleak outlook on life:
“It’s all one ghetto man.
One giant gutter in outer space.”
and Martin Hart a man trying to do the right thing in all the wrong ways
They track down a brutal killer with a penchant for creepy iconography
and uncover a massive statewide conspiracy to abduct kids.
In season 2, the show relocates to an industrial desert town in California and introduces a
few too many new characters, including Vince Vaughan as the living embodiment of every
gangster cliche.
Like season one, these three cops and ‘independent businessman’ are set on the trail of a killer
who murdered a corrupt city manager- causing all sort of chaos around the state.
What both seasons achieve, though not equally, is creating an atmosphere of Pessimism.
“In philosophical terms, I’m what’s called a Pessimist.”
Pessimism has many different flavors, but philosopher Eugene Thacker describes it, as
being marked “by an unwillingness to move beyond ‘the worst.”
“The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s
what the preacher sells, same as a shrink."
This is a school of thought that believes not that the glass is half empty but that
the glass is broken, the drink has ruined your carpet, and the shards have cut your
hands.
Whereas an optimist might postulate that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the
pessimist would agree, but respond that this is the essence of the problem, since this
is the best the universe has to offer.
"Fuck this, fuck this world, nice hook, Marty."
The feeling of dread and doom in each episode is as palpable as the memory of eating month-old
Domino’s.
But how does it manage this?
Let’s look at three of the best methods True Detective uses to make one of the most
pessimistic shows on television.
Method one: Style.
One thing True Detective masterfully accomplishes is creating an atmosphere of pessimism.
Now, part of that is the visuals, and we’ll get there, but much of the show’s pessimist
aesthetic was inspired by literature.Before he made True Detective, creator and writer
Nic Pizzolatto was a novelist (Galveston, Scribner’s 2010) and as such, drew heavily
from other novelists like Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Thomas Liggotti and more.
Cormac McCarthy’s novels, like The Road and Child of God, explore the degradation
of the landscape alongside the characters morality and reveal the worst inclinations
of human beings - something explored in True Detective.
“This place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading.
It’s like there was never anything here but jungle.”
McCarthy’s narrators and characters often speak in dark monologues and make crass asides
similar to Cohle’s.
"All the dick swagger you roll, you can't spot crazy pussy?"
The show also seems to draw inspiration from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, sometimes
called the original Southern Gothic novel.
Southern Gothic is a genre that’s typically set in southern states with grotesque characters,
gallows humor, and transgressive behavior with elements of horror and the unexplained.
Sanctuary is set in the same rural parts of Louisiana as season one of True Detective
and is a story of rape, attempted kidnapping and the wrong man being lynched and burned.
But one of Pizzolatto’s biggest influences was horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s nonfiction
work ‘Conspiracy Against the Human Race,’so much so that Pizzolatto was accused of plagiarizing
it.
Whether it’s Faulkner telling us about the realities of Southern justice:
“You’re not being tried by common sense, you’re being tried by a jury”
“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread … they rode over his
face like veils … their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them"
Or Ligotti’s violent references to the cosmos:
“I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror”
"Rust?
He'd pick a fight with a sky because he didn't like it's shade of blue."
These books feature the same grim poetry that paints humanity as little more than a cesspool.
But Pizzolatto’s biggest literary influences on True Detective, are arguably James Lee
Burke for season one and James Ellroy for season two.
Despite both being called James and writing hard-boiled, detective noir fiction, their
stories differ greatly, which is also reflected in the differences between the seasons of
the show.
The show often uses the same dismal poetics to describe the characters or the setting
"I see propensity for obesity, poverty, a yearn for fairytales."
In a similar way to Burke: “Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum”
A lot of time is spent in both the show and Burke’s writing on establishing the landscapes
to mirror the tone of the works- adding to the sense of smallness and futility the characters
feel in the face of what they confront.
Both seasons reflect the pessimistic decay of the individual with the rotting civilization
around them, best exemplified in the opening credit sequences.
The books make heavy use of internal imagery and metaphor to reminds characters of the
horrors they face, but on TV this is represented literally, be itin Cohle’s visions or the
recurring shape of Caspere’s burned out eyes.
Taking its cue from the work of Burke and Ellroy, the show is able to reconstitute their
approach to create a visual atmosphere and a set of aesthetic principles that compliments
the dark, pessimistic themes.
Method two: Intertextuality, or as I like to call it: dank references.
A lot of people poured over the shows references to classics of the cosmic horror genre, philosophy,
and physics.
It shouts out Lovecraftian ideas like the psychosphere
"Got a bad taste in my mouth out here.
Aluminum.
Ash.
Like you can ... smell the psychosphere."
and specific Elder Gods.
But it’s Robert Chamber’s short story collection from 1895 ‘The King in Yellow’
that gets the most screentime.
‘The King in Yellow’ is a play featured in each short story that drives all who read
it mad.
The snippets of the play available in the book talk about a character called the Stranger
being told to ‘unmask’ and a lost city called Carcosa.
Both of which are explicitly referenced in season one:
“Take off your mask!”
“You’re in Carcosa now”
These references are never explained but simply put there to give the impression of something
menacing yet intangible behind the mystery.
Veiled, barely understood allusions to an unknowable terror is the cornerstone of cosmic
horror, which is why it’s no surprise cosmic horror guru HP Lovecraft also references Chambers
in his story ‘Whisperer in the Darkness.’
This has the cool effect of Chambers, Lovecraft and Pizzolatto all being in conversation about
the same deliberately intangible, cosmic lore.
But that’s not even the end of it.
THEY are all referencing an 1885 story by Ambrose Bierce called ‘An Inhabitant of
Carcosa’ where a man finds his own grave amongst the ruins of a lost city.
Now, on top of THAT Pizzolatto makes veiled references to James Lee Burke’s stories
by sending Rust and Marty to Iberia in episode 7.
"He's from Iberia originally.
After CID he went home.
He's the sheriff of Iberia parish."
Which is where Burke’s Robicheaux character is based.
Then, Pizzolatto references his OWN novel in the show:
"Met my mother on leave in Galveston"
We might even view Cohle’s investigative method as intertextual.
This well read detective draws connections between:
Freud: "We'd encountered a meta-psychotic."
Nietzsche: "Someone once told me time is a flat circle."
and Physicist Edward Witten: "You ever hear of something called M-brane
theory?"
to help solve the mystery.
And what do you get when you put all these obscure references together…?
Well… as it turns out, not a lot.
And that’s kind of the point.When True Detective aired, the internet was abuzz with figuring
out its many cryptic references: trying to solve the mystery of the killer while also
looking for a grander meaning to the show.
And when many of those threads and clues amounted to nothing, people were pissed.
But we can better understand this by looking at something called weird fiction.
Weird fiction is a genre that defines authors like Lovecraft, Bierce, and Chambers.
According to authors Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman in “A Feeling of Wrongness,”
weird fiction is uniquely qualified to convey a pessimist philosophy, one that invites people
to “come for the scares, stay for the lingering sense of life’s wrongness.”
Weird fiction focuses on the weird and the horrors of the unexplained.
It has a tendency to end abruptly, with no clear ending, and stands in contrast to the
optimistic view that things happen for a purpose, that life has meaning, and that humans can
come to understand that meaning.
True Detective uses these references for similar purpose.
Much like Lovecraft’s Old Ones reduce human life to insignificance through their terrifying
and unintelligible grandeur, True Detective reduces the significance of
its own narrative by alluding to a mythos that is much larger than anything that happens
on screen.
The references send readers on a futile quest to decode the Yellow King and the letters
of Telios de Lorca:
"I knocked over a very old volume.
The letters of Telios de Lorca."
only to be frustrated by a dead end.
And while you might have been mad, what better can we ask from a show inspired by a guy who
would later write “pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes
- the crime of not pretending it’s all for a reason.”
By making its story about the vast, unknowable horrors of the universe
that references other stories about the vast, unknowable horrors of the universe, it creates
its own vast, unknowable universe.
And aside from the intertextuality, the show is littered with loose ends, as noted by Packer
and Stoneman.
Why did Marty’s daughter make this disturbing doll scene?
What became of the grander Tuttle conspiracy to abduct children?
Why does this preacher guy do the cross thing funny?
And just like in real life, we desperately search for clues as to a definitive meaning
behind it, only for it to totally reject any meaning at all.
The third method the show uses to generate its bleak atmosphere is the most obvious:
its themes.
While plenty have talked about Cohle’s pessimism, we noticed fewer people talked about a specific
pessimist theme: anti-natalism.
Anti-Natalism is the belief that we should abstain from reproducing and that being born
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Sure that sounds horrible, but you’d be surprised how common an idea it is.
"I really believe anyone who is thinking of having a child in this world is coldly considering
an act of cruelty"
It’s also how you might feel everytime you watch a Elsa and Spiderman video.
Rust Cohle is clearly a fan of this philosophy too.
"I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming.
Stop reproducing."
It’s not just Rust’s monologues, as a lot of Marty’s shittiness is framed by his
relationship to his kids and wife.
His family is the center of his world, and creates the excuses for his most self-destructive
tendencies.
"You gotta decompress before you can go bein' a family man."
Meanwhile, the marriageless and childless Rust is something to be feared:
"Past a certain point a man without a family can be a bad thing"
Marty’s worst behaviors are usually triggered by the mistreatment of children.
After discovering the kids locked up at Ledoux’s place, he unceremoniously kills him,
an act that needs to later be covered up, being illegal and all.
He also beats the shit out of two prisoners because they slept with his daughter, also
super illegal.
Even Cohle can’t help but get a little extra-judicial from the mistreatment of kids:
"Somewhere in there I emptied a nine into a crank head for injecting his infant daughter
with crystal"
And when a woman poisons her kids, this happens:
"If you get the opportunity you should kill yourself."
And for Marty, being constantly confronted with the suffering children endure is what
makes him retire:
"Tweaker tried to dry the kid in a microwave"
Theorist David Benatar, author of the cheerily titled ‘Better Never to Have Been’, believed
that coming into existence harms everyone.
As he said:
There’s also a bit of fellow anti-natalist Lee Edelman in there, who, to condense extensively,
argued that the cultural obsession with the “figure of the child” was responsible
for many of the world’s atrocities.
Edelman as a result, entertained the idea that humanity should consider cutting out
the baby making and cruise into extinction.
One of Pizzolatto’s biggest influences is philosopher Eugene Thacker and his book “In
the Dust of this Planet.”
Thacker described a kind of cosmic pessimism that informs much of Cohle’s philosophy.
For Thacker, the kind of cosmic horror seen in the works of HP Lovecraft creates “ a
cosmological view ... understood not simply as the view from interstellar space, but as
the view of the world-without-us” This idea of a world-without-us, a universe and planet
of which we are not the center of informs much of Cohle’s rambling, the aforementioned
intertextuality, as well as the show’s aesthetic of the sad, decrepit vistas of Louisiana.
But, you might be the saying: the show’s not really pessimistic!
Cohle discovers the afterlife!
He even says this:
“Once there was only dark.
If you ask me, the Light's winnin.”
And while many fans felt let down by this about-face, Packer and Stoneman have a different
read.
They argue that society, in general, is deeply hostile to pessimism, but that works like
weird fiction and True Detective serve as a trojan horse for the revelation that everything
is actually terrible.
For Packer and Stoneman, we should consider the work of Leo Strauss, who suggested philosophers
like Plato and Maimonides added hidden layers to their work to avoid getting Socrates’ed
for telling the truth.
Strauss thought that several clues could help us discover these two-sided works, including
blatant contradiction:
“It’s all one ghetto man, giant gutter in outer space"
"Once there was only dark.
If you ask me, the Light's winnin."
Strauss believed one way that these authors hid their true beliefs was through “some
disreputable character”
"On my off days, I start drinking at noon."
So the authors could plausibly deny their unpopular beliefs when confronted by censors.
Which is why, as Strauss says "The GREATEST literature of the past [has] so many interesting
devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans and buffoons.”)
And while the government isn’t knocking down anyone’s door for quoting Schopenhauer,
there is a general cultural taboo for saying shit like this:
"We are creatures that should not exist" "Huh, that sounds god fuckin awful Rust."
In fact, the entire relationship between Rust and Marty puts the “normal” reaction to
pessimism front and center
"I wouldn't go around spoutin' that shit if I was you.
People around here don't think that way."
This is perhaps why season two was such a let down, as it had no cohesive central thesis,
no “mouthpiece,” and did its best to tie up all the loose ends in the finale.
This created the weird sensation of the second season having the same feel of the first
but with none of the philosophical underpinnings.
So was season one’s ending just a way for Pizzolatto to make the pessimist medicine
go down smoother?
Well, it’s impossible to say, but makes for an interesting reading regardless.
Combine all these elements of Pessimism, Anti-Natalism, Intertextuality and aesthetic and you get
a groundbreaking show that gets constantly requested by people like you.
As always, thanks for watching guys and hope you enjoy
season 3.