True Detective Season 1

I started watching Lanterns recently, and it is about as adequate as you’d expect one of these things to be at this point. The era of superhero movies/tv doing anything interesting is over, at least for a little bit, and while experiencing this methadone hit,^[1] I figured I might as well rewatch the original drug – True Detective Season 1. I also hadn’t watched any of the later seasons, so I’m going to take the opportunity, now that I’m done with the first season, to watch the rest, at least till they hold my attention.

I watched True Detective Season 1 way back when it came out, and I had a chip on my shoulder about the show. It borrowed a lot of its philosophical embellishment from Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker and Alan Moore, and at the time, it felt like borderline plagiarism.^[2] I remember enjoying it, but not enough to forgive what I saw as its trespasses, and I was in a bit of a snit that the originators of these ideas were not as well-known as their echo was (though one could argue on that count re: Moore).

Watching it again, so many years later, I find it easier to be kind. It’s not a perfect show – there are plot threads oddly abandoned, holes that could’ve easily been filled, and some of the dialogue slides into schmaltz – but I could appreciate this time what Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction brought to the table, T Bone Burnett’s amazing soundtrack (both his selection of songs and the original score), and what Pizzolatto was trying to do with the story of these two broken men trying to transcend their limitations.^[3]

At its core, the thesis to me seems to be “What will you make of your life?” These people’s lives take place in the minutiae – in the slices that are, in the show, put together out of order – and they seem to make one kind of sense when experienced that way, one moment at a time. But there is another way to look at it, if you believe that “time is a flat circle”. In that view, your entire life is a single four-dimensional object – a unified work – and while it’s easy to get lost in individual choices, your larger purpose inexorably calls to you, and it is up to you to answer.

This is true not just for the two leads, but for everyone in the show. They all get mired in the small stuff, in individual stimuli and their responses to them, but the show contends that there is something big being formed out of all of this, and it has its own nature, whether you like it or not.

Rust Cohle espouses a semi-nihilistic, aggressively existential view of life, and considers himself a “bad” man, but remains singularly obsessed with making justice occur – something entirely at odds with his seeming worldview. Marty Hart, on the other hand, insists he is a Christian whose family is the most important thing in his life, but he lives life impulsively, ping-ponging from bad choice to bad choice, consistently contradicting his image of himself. Both these men are lost in linear time, but the future is set, the object is unchanging, unchangeable.

I’m not 100% sure Pizzolatto entirely understood the philosophical trappings that he almost certainly tinkered with in order to add spice to a neo-noir, but this time around, I felt that most of what he’s using – the antinatalism, the existentialism, and even Moore’s eternalism – largely fits where it’s placed.

The one thing that I continue to think doesn’t fit is his near-line-by-line plagiarism from Top Ten, i.e. the final scene about the fight between the dark and the light. At the end of the show, I feel he had the shape of the sliver of hope he wanted to allow into Cohle’s nihilism, but he didn’t have the specifics, and he took them from Moore. But here, they don’t fit. It’s a clunky scene, Hart suddenly bringing up Cohle’s childhood imagination instead of something that’s been better seeded through the series, and Cohle projecting into his past a hope he is only now blundering into.

But, here’s the thing – it’s just five minutes. The last five minutes of an otherwise ambitious show that does some amazing things over its eight-hour runtime. I’m not going to dislike eight hours of good stuff because it stumbled in the last five minutes.

It’s good stuff, and if you’ve found yourself either enjoying Lanterns or feeling dissatisfied with it, it might be worth checking out the real deal.