True Detective Review
February 5, 2014 1:15 pm | Leave your thoughts
Let’s just get my basic opinion about HBO’s “True Detective” out on the table right now: It’s a Tupperware. But it’s also an interesting-yet-strange companion, and someone — um, something — you won’t mind spending time with. Sort of like someone you meet at a party whom you find engaging but are not entirely certain whether you want to become fast friends with, either. Cohle’s viewpoint, at least three episodes into the season’s eight entries, is the prevailing one on the show, illustrated by scenes of Hart’s swaggering braggadocio faltering before the skepticism posited by his partner, but we will talk more about Cohle later. Woody Harrelson’s Martin Hart spends as much of his time trying to figure out his partner as he does his case. It is a credit to Harrelson that he spends most of his time onscreen with his innate charisma turned off. Hart is a study in denial. The type of man that Rust tolerates because he is predictable. We learn in “True Detective” that the murder victim, Dora Lange, had said she had met a “king,” and that she kept a diary in which she mentioned “the Yellow King” and “Carcosa.” These come from Robert Chambers’ 1895 collection of weird stories, “The King in Yellow,” in which several of the stories are connected by a fictional play, about the titular ruler, which drives to insanity whoever reads it. Chambers’ writing inspired Lovecraft’s work on what came to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Lovecraft even co-opted parts of Chambers’ mythology to include in his monstrous pantheon of “gods” and otherworldly locations. This Lovecraftian influence alone should be enough for any horror fan to give this series a try.
Under a spreading tree in a vast Louisiana sugar cane field, Dora’s body is discovered and signs point to a ritualistic murder. When Det. Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) arrive the next morning, Cohle suspects a serial killer. “Her body is a paraphilic love map,” he says. “I guarantee you, this wasn’t his first.” Working their first case together, Cohle and Hart are not quite sure what to make of each other either. Hart regards his strange partner with suspicion: “Baby, trust me,” he tells his wife, Maggie (Michelle Monaghan). “You don’t want to pick this man’s brain.”
Then … fast-forward 17 years to the present day. Cohle and Hart are leading different lives outside of the force. They are also — separately — being debriefed by two cops about the long-ago murder. This eight-parter was written and created by Nic Pizzolatto. “True Detective” is a straight-ahead cop story with a twist, and a compelling one: It’s often more about the cops than the murder they’re investigating. Like a pair of boxers, they circle each other, looking not for an advantage as much as mutual understanding. Each is a cipher to the other, with a vast gulf in sensibility and life experience separating them.
The real pleasure of this series is watching them peel away the layers to this particular onion, often on long car drives across a vast, wet, undifferentiated Louisiana landscape. Cohle is played with haunted precision by Matthew McConaughey, who is on a hot streak after Dallas Buyer’s Club, Wolf of Wall Street, and now True Detective. He muses about the meaningless of existence and the futility of humanity while Hart, with his own closetful of secrets and delusions, never quite figures out that Cohle is really talking about him. Bit by bit, Cohle reveals the depth of his own physical and psychic damage. Unlike Hart, he’s aware that he is not quite right, but he accepts the way he is. When he tells the present-day cops that he was married once and had another serious relationship that didn’t work out, he adds: “It’s not good for them to be around me. I wear ’em down. They get unhappy.”“I think the job does that to a lot of guys, changes you. Some guys just notice it,” one of the other detectives says. “I can’t say the job made me this way. More like me being this way made me right for the job,” Cohle says. “Now, I live in a little room behind a bar, work four nights a week, in between I drink and there ain’t nobody there to stop me. I know who I am. After all these years, there’s a victory in that.” If it is a victory, it’s hollow at best. Then, he describes what he calls “chemical flashbacks, neural damage” from his time in the drug trafficking division. He explains that after his daughter’s death, he transferred from robbery to narcotics. “Somewhere in the glare of that, somewhere in there, I emptied a 9 into a crankhead for injecting his infant daughter with crystal.” State’s attorney gave him a chance to stay out of jail by going deep under cover, and he stayed there for four years. Then, in 1993, he killed members of a drug cartel and ended up in a mental hospital. He was offered a “psych pension,” but declined and asked for homicide “and Louisiana is what they had.” We are treated to some far-out examples of his hallucinations: a brilliant sunset swiftly moving across the sky and streetlights turning into streaming, swirling beams. It’s clear that being inside Cohle’s head is a dangerous, depressing place to be. “Most of the time I was convinced that I’d lost it…,” Cohle notes at one point. “There were other times I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe.”
True Detective is on HBO Sunday nights at 9pm eastern/ 8pm central. The secret truth is this. Walking Dead, you are gonna have to wait on the old DVR. I’m seeing someone else on Sunday night.
Yours Truly,
domesticateddave@gmail.com
Categorised in: Random Reviews & News, Television Reviews
This post was written by David Griffin
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