Form and void: Why True Detective is essential viewing

In the late sixties, American cinema underwent a bit of a facelift. Attendance was down, mainstream fare had grown stiff and monotonous, and the values of Hollywood films were slipping out of touch with the surrounding cultural climate. Emerging out of this shifting mood was the New Hollywood movement; a sensibility that embraced anxiety and nihilism rather than glossing over it, slackened rigid censorship to offer violence and sex and drugs without gloss, and focussed heavily on complex, human characters.

***Caution, spoilers follow***

I suppose it might seem that in referencing this in a piece about HBO’s True Detective, I’m probably ramping up to the suggestion that cable television is the modern equivalent of this revolution. After all, critics and viewers alike have been pronouncing a “Golden Age” for the era of the serialised cable drama for some time now, and while Marvel multiplex fare still remains pretty healthy at the box-office, the popularity, quality and accessibility of shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men or Game of Thrones really do feel like tailored answers to voids inherent in the repetitive blockbuster monotony. But to me, it’s not really all that relevant. What is relevant is celebrating works, or new sensibilities, rooted in ongoing conversation with the state of cinema, and finding new ways to resuscitate what is weary.

Furthermore, it really feels cinematic. HBO in particular have been upping the ante with production value increasingly over recent years (see Game of Thrones or Boardwalk Empire for some benchmarks), and between the hauntingly-lensed Louisiana backdrop, the elaborate labyrinth of set–designer Joshua Walsh’s Carcosa and the staggering technical exercise of that now iconic six-minute tracking-shot, True Detective can immediately join the ranks of some of the slickest, immaculately realised works not reserved for a cinema screen. Add two certified movie-stars into the mix (one of which is in the midst of an Oscar-nabbing, A-list career revival) and an accomplished film director, and it might seem like an assembly of too high a calibre to premiere from your living room every week.

But I guess it’s the freedom to patiently explore a narrative world that continues to attract such talent to the medium, and having that room to excavate popular genre elements and explore their undersides is indeed where this relationship becomes so compelling. In terms of plot trajectory,True Detective is hardly novel – a familiar cop thriller following the hunt of a sadistic serial killer by two mismatched detectives – but most of that inevitably proves to be backdrop. For at least ¾ of proceedings, it’s one step forward and three steps inward; the opening of an existential abyss beneath the central mystery that constantly threatens to swallow it whole, to render it insignificant.

One of the most terrifying images from the entire season was not visual, but theoretical; McConaughey’s Cohle describing time as an infinite circle, in which every atrocity resolved is doomed to repeat itself for eternity.

It’s a story about evil and the cyclical, ceaseless human capacity for it; and between the bleak, drunken ramblings of one lead (affectionately referred to by fans as “the McConologues”) and the troubling patriarchal ideologies of the other, Pizzolatto seems more concerned with the confrontation of personal monsters as he does external ones. References to The King in Yellow surface throughout – a collection of short stories penned by American author Robert W Chambers, whose title refers to a forbidden play that drives whoever reads it insane – and while these allusions might have just been red herrings set up to drive the internet mad, it seems like an intended bid at kinship with Chambers’ brand of existential horror, warding off kneejerk associations with generic police procedurals and opening up a frightening spectrum of possibilities for the show’s outcome.

Pizzolatto’s embrace of bleak, dread–soaked philosophy occasionally comes close to removing the show’s axis altogether, instead drifting us through an unending parade of corrupted souls, but the season was always so mesmerizingly, moodily wrought in its darkness, I’m not sure I would have minded had the killer’s identity been abandoned altogether and justice remained intangible.

In this case, perhaps True Detective’s greatest feat is successfully returning to course. A steady accumulation of clues begins to accelerate plot in the final two episodes, and while eventually the brooding characterisation is buried slightly in favour of gratifying narrative resolution, I’m not sure I was expecting its denouement to be so emotionally satisfying (or satisfying at all for that matter).

The season concludes with a relatively on-the-nose metaphor about light and dark, but it’s within this distinction that True Detective grasps at a weirdly hopeful resolve, in spite of the unabashed nihilism characterising it previously. One of the most terrifying images from the entire season was not visual, but theoretical; McConaughey’s Cohle describing time as an infinite circle, in which every atrocity resolved is doomed to repeat itself for eternity. But in an undeniably affecting closing scene, Pizzolatto offered a simple dichotomy life-affirming by contrast.

There’s a chilling montage in the final stretch – the camera’s ghostly glide toward the rundown homes of killers and the lonely, haunted stains of their works – but the images now linger in the memory re-contextualised, no longer just locations for horrendous, meaningless acts of evil, but moral and ideological sites of struggle; battlegrounds for both light and dark. Even as Pizzolatto seemed to garner a certain sense of relish throughout from describing us all as insignificant “biological puppets” trapped on a carousel of suffering, there’s the assertion that our moral position or redemption isimportant, that we do have the ability to barricade the cruelty of the universe from consuming us, and it’s here that what might have been another run-of-the-mill cop show obtained a philosophical dimension one is more likely to discover in literature than on television.

For those who I may have just convinced that this is all insufferable, pretentious wankery, the season also features some of the most tense, exhilarating action sequences of recent memory (the one you’ve probably heard about is like a mission from Grand Theft Auto as directed by Alfonso Cuaron) and incredible, layered performances from Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey that thicken in complexity every week.

No doubt there’s some fundamental flaws to iron out – the tendency to lean on incestuous redneck trailer-trash types for the most villainous figures is lazy, and many have been quick to point out Pizzolatto’s neglect for developed women, which he has hinted might be corrected by female leads in the subsequent season – but there’s something far denser and more perceptive here than the majority of its peers; an inversion of familiar tropes, an exploration of the psychological infection of such proximity to evil, and a lens held against our own fascination with darkness.

I guess I could probably wield all of this into a compelling argument on the “Golden Age”, or how television is the new cinema, but I guess the point is as long as stories this rich, this mystifying and this rewarding are still being told, I could care less where and how I see them.