True Detective: Too Good to be True?

Did the world need another TV show about police officers investigating a serial killer? Especially one where a woman is killed with antlers on her head? Did we need another beautiful, tortured man with a dark past who can see into the soul of a monster, maybe a little too well?  Say it in the voice of Butters from South Park--Hannibal did it!

Obviously my answer would normally be NO. I have been pretty open about my frustration with the way TV finds a formula that works and then drives it into the ground, especially with regard to the anti-hero protagonist, and the proliferation of America's serial killer fetish in popular media. Despite all those caveats, I still love HBO's show True Detective. So far, anyway.

As you can see in the pictures below, the surface parallels between Hannibal  and True Detective are rather obvious: the antlers, the tree ornaments, the serial killers, the tortured protagonist who doesn't get along with anyone, has odd insights and hallucinations, etc. However, at its heart, Hannibal is a visually stylish (and food porny) police procedural, with a Monster of the Week, extreme gross outs, and its frustratingly horrifying relationships between Hannibal and, well, everybody. True Detective is nothing like that. If Hannibal is a dark fantasy, then True Detective is gritty, post-modern noir. I wonder if the creators of True Detective shook their fists at the TV and shouted NOOOOOOOOOO! when they saw Hannibal. I know I would have. But no matter. True Detective and Hannibal really don't have much in common beyond some eerily similar images. 

Don't worry about this review containing spoilers. Two episodes in, there's really nothing much to spoil. Ostensibly, the show is about an investigation into a serial killing that takes place in rural Louisiana in 1995, The premise of the show is that detectives in 2012 are interviewing the two leads from the case in 1995, for reasons still unknown. The victim is a prostitute who has antlers tied to her head and a spiral symbol drawn on her back. There are strange little sculptures made of sticks at the scene of the crime. We can see that there is a monster lurking behind all the little clues and hints in the narrative. It's like a horror movie where you just see the end of a tail slithering around a corner or into a closet, or hear the clicking of claws in the darkness.  The brilliance of True Detective lies with the fact that it is not really a story about police work. The surface plot is just a stage setting for an exploration of the horror that lies inside its two leads. Even a cursory glance at the detective characters hints at the fact that this is meant to be a meta-narrative: their names are Rustin Cohle and Martin Hart.

Cohle is the aforementioned beautiful man with a horrible past who is using his police work as a way to exorcise his own demons. Yawn, right? His partner, Hart, is the self-described "regular type guy with the big-ass dick." It's a buddy cop show then, the odd couple trope trotted out once again. Nope, and that's all down the the excellent writing by Nic Pizzolatto, and the nuanced, intricate performances by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

McConaughey's Cohle is a sensitive philosopher mystic who isn't afraid to beat the crap out of an informant, slap a rude co-worker, call out the religious hypocrisy of the police Major, or buy downers from a prostitute.  Everyone is constantly telling him to shut up. Harrelson's Hart, who knows how to play the police work game, is freaked out by Cohle's nihilistic pronouncements. But it is these very pronouncements that make me love Cohle. In Episode 2, he says that choosing to have a child, "to yank a soul of non-existence into this meat," is the ultimate act of selfishness, and that the best thing the human race could do is just opt out of reproducing and do the world a favor. I think I have used almost identical words when discussing the plight of our overpopulated world. It's eerie how often I heard things coming out of Cohle's mouth that I have thought or said about the human race. So it's impossible for me not to fall a little bit in love with him, which I imagine is the intention of Pizzolatto

Rustin Cohle reminds me of nobody so much as Darl Bundren of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Darl and Rust share a hallucinatory, shamanistic hyper-awareness of the world. They have the same penchant for perceiving underlying truths about people and the world, and the obnoxious tendency to say aloud what lies inside other people's secret hearts (Harts?). People hate that, and it is a source of friction between Cohle and just about everyone. Though he's a brilliant detective, Cohle's job is perpetually in jeopardy. He sees it all and can't keep quiet about it. There is no room inside him for such repression, coping as he is with deep personal loss and trauma. The man doesn't sleep. He only dreams, unless he drugs those dreams into submission. By 2012, he silences his own voice with alcohol and is a shambling ruin of a man. 

The modern day Hart looks much the same as the 1995 version (though with less hair), and alludes to a falling out between him and Cohle. In retrospect, Hart states that he respected Cohle because he was smart and knew how to work a case: real police, as McNulty from The Wire would say. But the way Cohle punctures his rationalizations and denial drives him to ecstasies of rage, because for all Hart's protests about being a regular guy, he's got his own demons. The job takes its toll on him and it undermines everything he claims to love about his life. Ain't that always the way? 

What I find so interesting about this show is how McConaughey and Harrelson have transformed themselves for these roles. I have been following Matthew McConaughey's career since Wooderson in Dazed and Confused in 1993, though the cheesy rom-com/leading man wasteland of the early Aughts, and I can honestly say I have never found him attractive. Before you ask me, no, not even as Dallas in Magic Mike. But I do find him attractive in True Detective, because he doesn't look like the cartoon of himself that he'd become. Yes, it's McConaughey, but there's something about the hair, the make up, the way he holds his face, and his voice, that is entirely different from anything I've seen him in before. All of his previous works have relied on the sly smile, the implied wink and flamboyant, sleazy charm. Not this one. Without it, I barely recognize him. He looks more like a young Robert Mitchum  than a Lincoln lawyer. His performance as Cohle is tightly controlled, coiled, and reflective. The man smoulders. A star turn if ever I saw one.

On the other hand, I have had a thing for Woody Harrelson since Natural Born Killers in 1994. He has come a long way since he played Woody on Cheers, that's for sure. Interestingly, he and McConaughey have had parallel career issues. They both burst out strong early in their careers only to fall into lame movie purgatory for about a decade. Now, mid-career, they are finding their legs as character actors in roles where they aren't afraid to be dark. As Martin Hart, Harrelson affects this toothy voice and bluff manner that make him a good ole boy incarnate. But the job gets to him, and his rage is simmering under the surface, which is where he wants to keep it. He even says something about his father, who fought in the Korean War, and the fact that he never talked about it, because back then men did not talk about their pain. This is apparently a virtue to him, but it's awfully hard for him to repress his feelings when he has someone like Cohle throwing them in his face. Just as the viewer knows that this murder case is headed towards a major confrontation, so we feel the tension between Cohle and Hart winding tight as a spring.

Of course, the ending of a show makes or breaks it for me. I have denounced shows with which I was previously obsessed for years on the basis of a lame, contrived, fan service ending. I don't want to be pandered to. I want to be genuinely surprised, but most of all, I want to be satisfied that the characters I've come to love get to be who they are right up to the bitter end, no matter where that takes them. I sincerely hope that True Detective's ending justifies my love. So often, characters are shoehorned into behavior and choices that are not true to their natures. Pizzolatto has privileged character over plot, a choice of which I approve when the characters are as captivating as these. It takes courage to let the characters dictate the ending and not the plot. We'll see how true these detectives really are.