Wonders of the Invisible World

Nicely done, though I think the critique of the ending is in its own was as too-neat as the ending itself, or simply recapitulates or re-extends the, of course, finally imponderable matters of whether light or dark, or form or void, is “winning,” and whether the “detective’s curse” is something we can live without, among other problems. To insist that the light is certainly not winning returns you to Rust-Cohle-ist unhappy consciousness, of the always implicitly self-contradictory statement of belief in the irredeemable mistakenness of life itself. In this respect a resort to value presumptions, which may not be wholly unrelated or in themselves wrong, and which may even have been uppermost in the mind of the auteur – I’m referring to the recognizably leftist-feminist critique – seems overly convenient and prejudicial.

I like that the text of the show was played straight, and that the subtext is so immensely rich – Henry really nailed that. I also liked how it gently proposed the idea that we end up surrendering to sense-making, by letting Rust the straight shooter wobble on his relentless anti-spirituality. Love, purpose and forgiveness is the human condition. The irony of suggesting that the light is winning in almost complete darkness was also a nice touch. I think that the structural sexism was particularly well done, as it showed how it damages everyone, and that everybody are worse off from it. It is probably the most feminist show I’ve seen for a long time. It has been suggested that it was a bromance at heart, but if anything it was an unmasking of the idea of bromance, and an unflinching look on how trauma substitutes for emotions in male relationships. Rust and Marty may not care for each other, but at least they now share the same trauma.

Since some of the the show’s ur-lovecraftianism seemed similar enough to Alan Moore’s fairly recent “Neonomicon” to the point of possibly being inspired by it, and i could be wrong about the similarities having only watched the odd episode , i wondered if it was headed towards a similar conclusion. But they seem to have gone gothic instead.

Ah, that’s interesting. So then Moore should be throwing a tantrum in 5, 4, 3 …

I like that “the show’s organizing tensions.”

We each have those, too?

@ Straightwood. There is something to what you say. But it is too crude. Take the sex scenes. There were four. Marty and the ‘crazy mistress.’ Marty and his wife. Marty and the young ex-prostitute whose life he turned round. And Rust and Marty’s wife. None of these were meretricious. Each was fraught with psychological complexity and redolent with moral opprobrium.

I see the show’s organising tensions rather differently than Henry. Rust and Marty are realists or ‘detectivists’ about the facts. But they also know that the truth outstrips the evidence they can provide for what Rust calls the sprawl.

They also have a keen sense of the the judicial and legal system is cumbersome and unlikely to achieve justice. (One of the unsatisfactory features of the wrap up, is that it simply repeats the earlier loop in the story, when they kill a villain, but don’t really clear up the whole sprawl. In the end, the more powerful and respectable villains, go scot free.)

But both protagonists also have an unshakeable conviction about natural justice, which justifies in their view unlawful killings, violence, threats, deception. In Rust this sometimes fold over into vindictive acts, like telling the mother who killed her child to consider taking her own life, (although he might have just seen this as which might be good prudential advice.)

In short they are both moralists of slightly different kinds. But in Rust’s case – and as the most complex and interesting character, one presumes that if anyone does, Rust speaks for the author, at least in some moods – his moralism cannot be squared at all with his theoretical outlook on the world – disquisitions about the meaninglessness of existence, the quasi Nietzschean-Schopenhauerian thesis that morality is just a comforting illusion etc. etc. (Rust says that people don’t forgive, they just have short memories and other stuff.) No moral realism there – if anything – though he does not know this – he’s a projectivist. Anyway, his moral convictions don’t appear to be shaken by his – apparently sincerely held – theoretical beliefs, but he cleaves to them anyway.

H. P. Lovecraft was more than just an author, he created an entire genre. So it would obviously be unfair to criticize True Detective as just being a Lovecraft rip-off, that’s just the genre it belongs to. It’s bit less clear to me that “derivative of an Alan Moore/Grant Morrison derivative of Lovecraft” has similarly become an entire genre in its own right, but maybe it has.

But in any case, Alan Moore can be a bit problematic at times (see earlier CT thread on Alan Moore), and you could extend those concerns to many of his imitators. So I have a certain amount of sympathy for Straightwood above.

What position does it put us in, that we like watching this stuff? Does even watching the fiction make us a little bit complicit in the ritual sacrifice of the (fictional) victim?

Oh, and @12: one approach Lovecraftian horror fiction can take is that the protagonists’ fear of unspeakable alien horror lets them justify to themselves their doing all kinds of bad stuff, until the reader realises that the protagonists have become worse than the supernatural horrors they are trying to defeat. (c.f. also Slavoj Zizek on religious or Hegelian self-justification). At this point, the Lovecraftian tradition is for the characters to end up in an insane asylum, or devoured by alien horrors.

Re Straightwood’s thesis:
Just taking a break from another thread which has consumed far too much energy, and I haven’t watched any television for over 6 years now, but I do know a little about art and literature. And this seems to center there.
There’s a trajectory in the visual arts that pretty easy to see, as one might expect. It explodes in the 20th century. Like a real explosion it’s hard to define the particulars, but you can see the rapid violent dis-integration of narrative and realism. Hyphen because it’s not so much a deteriorating as an actual process of loss of integrating connection. Much lamented at each step. With consequent partisanship and rallying etc.
But no getting around the inevitability of it, it’s as logically consistent as a machine.
So in the little world of TV, wouldn’t you expect a steady move from the kind of fairy-tale dramas of past decades moving from early days replication of theater, toward an increasing “realism”? Then hyper-realism, toward something like the essence of raw sensory stimulation?
And since the mercantile drive is gratification, wouldn’t you expect the steady increase in a requirement of something like true horror, in crime shows? That staple of early days TV, Because the people want it. Oh and it works pretty good at directing cultural moral flows too.
The breaking of taboos as selling point, by a process that creates and confirms taboos in its audience to begin with.
That self-justifying near-absurdity kept showing up in the 70’s when the data started indicating Americans were actually getting a little dumber as time went on, and people were pointing at the TV, because kids were spending more time watching that than with their families or at school.
And the TV said “Oh no. We’re just giving people what they want.”
Seemed kind of recursive, that.
An exegesis of progressively more depraved violence for for progressively more jaded voyeurs. Because it sells.

SusanC@13 – “So it would obviously be unfair to criticize True Detective as just being a Lovecraft rip-off,”

Actually, the criticism of the show is that it doesn’t have the courage of its Lovecraftian convictions since it uses Lovecraft merely for atmosphere and internet meme-generation. If the plot has to talk of “carcosa” etc then Cthulu really should show up at some point … that’s how David Lynch would do it.

Not sure where anyone gets the idea that the show had “Lovecraftian convictions.” Though Pizzolato had openly admitted to using horror fiction material, the central reference is, obviously, to TRUE DETECTIVE, not WEIRD TALES. The killer-cult might believe in evil spirits or black magic or some such, but nothing ever happens in the show pointing to anything other than the a naturalistic explanation of events. The moment that Rust is briefly distracted by something that looks possibly otherworldly is the moment that he’s caught off guard and stabbed. The rules of the TD genre are pretty clearly set, including frequent exploitation of the weird and or the other kind of “mystery,” but never a final reliance on it.

Well, no, 20/Nine – the central reference is 100% frontsight, bein as how the title of the show is “True Detective.” The TD structure is, as you describe, and, speaking very generally, the opposite of the Weird Tales. The TD finds the explanation that may skirt along the edges of the other kind of “mystery,” and may well turn out to be “stranger than fiction.” The WT, or the genre-typical WT, includes a search for a reasonable answer, and discovers that it lies beyond non-weird reason.

A Cthulhu ending for the show would have been the equivalent of McConaughey or Harrelson or Pizzolato interrupts the action and gives some Straightwood or roy belmont rap about how it’s all pointless garbage anyway so they’ve decided not even to wrap it up – the kind of non-solution solution or genre-betrayal that probably wouldn’t set well with the premium cable audience or be good for the show’s prospects. Maybe they’ll try it in Season 5, but I doubt it. In any event the “widespread speculation” was never well justified in my opinion, but it increased the fun a little, opening a window of doubt even for those of us confident that there wouldn’t be any unforgivable rule-breaking.

@14 & 12. Well yes and no. The whole story of True Detective is heavily character driven. It is not an Agatha Christie whodunnit, but a story of two characters undergoing an important journey through life. Marty’s character includes his hypocritical sexual ethics. Family is the most important thing to him, but he destroys it, mainly through persistent infidelity. (This is :noted by Marty as an example of the detective’s curse neglect of the obvious, because it is obvious.) He is licentious but punishes his daughter for being a ‘slut’ and beats up two boys who had consenting but underage and illicit sex with his daughter. There is large hint that one of his daughters was sexually abused. His partner, Rust, observes, and dislikes Marty’s hypocrisy on this score, which is a growing source of tension between them. So Marty’s sexual indiscretions are integral to that story, and not to see that story as a central part of the mystery is a mistake. That said, I agree your main point that True Detective exemplifies the basic recipe of sex, violence and killing the baddies characteristic of most Hollywood crime films. But there are better and worse versions of this and this is one of the better ones.