True Detective: The Audacity of Hope, The Haters & that Damned Spiralling Yellow Brick Road
Hard to know where to begin with this.
I know that many hardcore fans felt betrayed/cheated by the ending - particularly Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker (well okay, actually she wasn't a fan) and Ross Douthat in The NY Times - and, in a way, I totally get that. In terms of plot, True Detective certainly ended its run with quite a few unfilled [and/or unfillable] holes.
But to be fair, creator Nick Pizzolatto stated from the outset he was using the detective genre as a vehicle to tell the story of those two men. So, I think the takeaway is this wasn’t meant to be a thriller, which frankly I wouldn’t have particularly enjoyed anyway, but a character study. Less genre fiction and more literary fiction, if you will.
As for me, I’ve never been particularly interested in big complicated plots, so I didn’t really give two fucks about all that. I’m 100% a character person - as a reader and a viewer. Probably why I’ve always had so much trouble with genre fiction and action/thriller films. It’s extremely common to see writers of sci/fi, fantasy, thrillers, and mysteries get hung up on a lot of minutiae that just doesn’t interest me in the least, while leaving their two-dimensional characters flapping impotently [and uninterestingly] in the breeze. So yeah, the fact that the entire Yellow King/Carcosa thing amounted to little more than a MacGuffin suited me just fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macguffin
And the whole woman issue? I’m not even going to touch that. I mean similar complaints were leveled against Thelma and Louise and Waiting to Exhale with all their two-dimensional male characters, which has led me to conclude that each writer has his/her own story to tell and shouldn’t feel compelled to water down their narrative or pack it with superfluous characters in the name of inclusiveness. I mean, why isn’t Emily Nussbaum attacking Philip Roth for being a misogynist dick? Ah well, who knows? Maybe she has.
But I digress.
My personal view is that True Detective is a quest story of sorts. In a piece for The Guardian British author Robert Irwin defines a quest narrative:
"… a journey in the course of which one advances spiritually and mentally, as well as physically travelling miles. The quester leaves the familiar for the unknown. The nature of the goal may not be clear at first and may only become fully apparent at the end of the quest.”
Notice he doesn't specify exactly who the "nature of the goal" might be unclear to? Just as the quester may not be aware of the true “nature of the goal,” so too the reader/viewer may not be made aware of it by the writer. Meaning that all those online sleuths were probably just asking the “wrong fucking questions.”
Impressive bit of sleight of hand, I'd say.
Call me crazy, but a mindful viewing of the entire series has put me in mind that, throughout, Pizzolatto might have been deliberately referencing one of the most beloved and well-known quest narratives of modern times, The Wizard of Oz.
I know, I know - kooky, right?
But think about it…Rustin Cohle is a motherless child who found solace from the boredom of his rural upbringing gazing at the sky. Instead of rainbows, Rust makes up stories about the faraway stars.
As a supremely unhappy adult he attempts to right the wrongs in his life by following the trail of the “Yellow” King to a mythical city and mysterious cultish figure with “Emerald” green ears in an isolated fortress wherein he spills buckets of his own “Ruby” red blood (okay, so I realize I’m bending the narrative a bit here to fit with my own conclusions) and when he wakes from a coma finds hidden depths of familial love that had been buried inside him all along.
Oh, and his travelling companion(s)? Rather than three, he only has one - country bumpkin Martin Hart, who, during the course of their journey, reconnects with his own humanity - not to mention fully realizing his brains, courage and, yes…his big ol' heart.
And what of all those spirals? Remember the beginning of Dorothy’s journey on that yellow brick road? And that weird vortex thingie Cohle hallucinates at the Altar in Carcosa? Looked just a teeny bit like a tornado, no?
So basically, yeah I loved it. Funny thing is, when I was in the thick of the detective work with all the other members of the internet “True Detective Collective” after Episode Five, I was 100% certain I would re-watch the entire series once it was over just to find all the hidden “clues” I was sure director Cary Fukunaga had cleverly embedded into every scene. Now, despite the fact that it would be a pointless exercise to look for those kind of clues, I still find myself re-watching each episode searching for something different and, oddly, more interesting and meaningful - hints that reveal each character’s true self and the evolution of their unusual bond.
In an earlier post I noted that if you said their names three times fast, “Hart and Cohle, Hart and Cohle, Hart and Cohle,” it starts to sound like “Hot and Cold.” Certainly seemed fitting early on in the series. Marty was fiery and lusty while Rust was cool and detached. But I also posited that maybe it was meant to echo the term “Heart and Soul,” even though it seemed highly unlikely, not to mention downright corny. Now it's so obvious that it was entirely deliberate.
Can’t wait for the BluRay and, what I hope will be, a plethora of deleted scenes to sate my TD jones.
Sorry if you hated it. Oh, and sorry about Stanley. I really am.