In Its Second Episode, "Seeing Things", True Detective Continues to Be Weird, Pretentious and Great
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It has been my experience so far, based on the two episodes that I have seen, that True Detective mostly lives up to the hype that it is on a higher evolutionary plane than the rest of television, even of the prestige variety.
True Detective is every bit as cinematic and philosophical and moody and, brilliantly and audaciously acted and written and as I had been led to believe. It’s also pretentious but that’s not always a bad thing.
The 2014 sensation is also, however, very much a show about detectives in suits with badges and guns investigating a murder. That describes an awful lot of television shows throughout the decades as well.
But it also describes Twin Peaks. That was also about an eccentric detective investigating the death of a mysterious young woman and it enjoys such a sainted reputation that if a show has a substantial amount of weirdness and ambition it is invariably compared to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s brainchild.
True Detective is plenty ambitious and seriously strange but its similarities to Twin Peaks do not end there. Then again, the detective drama with men in suits with badges investigating the homicides of beautiful young women is a sturdy pop culture staple and it’s easier to inject staggering strangeness into a popular, ubiquitous genre than it is something more experimental and avant-garde.
“Seeing Things”, the second episode of the show’s wildly acclaimed first season, plunges deeper and deeper into the madness and sadness of Matthew McConaughey’s Rust “Rusty” Cohle, a deeply damaged shamus who gives off major serial killer vibes.
I get Frailty flashbacks watching McConaughey plumb the deep, dark depths of his psyche in order to convincingly inhabit the clammy skin and unwell mind of a figure of overwhelming despair.
We learn a lot about Rusty’s background this episode but it feels less like exposition than a troubled man unburdening himself of a lifetime of trauma and pain.
The first episode episode establishes the death of Rusty’s three year old daughter as the catalyst for Rusty’s bone-deep depression and existential confusion. He talks more about that heartbreak here and it is almost unbearably sad.
It’s hard to overstate the effect his daughter’s death and his marriage’s subsequent crumbling and dissolution had on Rusty’s already tortured psyche but he’d clearly be a twisted soul even if his daughter were alive and well.
Rusty has simply been through too much to ever be able to enjoy a moment of peace or contentment. His scars have scars and his demons demons of their own.
McConaughey very convincingly plays a man whose misery makes the people around him unhappy as well. Yet because he’s Matthew McConaughey we can’t take our eyes off him no matter how abominably he behaves.
True Detective knows that it can stick the camera in the ground and have McConaughey deliver pages of dialogue, a cigarette in his hand, a Lone Star beer can or flask keeping him properly soused, and not grow bored with him or his tremendous outpourings of verbose verbiage.
Rusty is unsurprisingly a former mental patient like myself. We’re a rare breed known far and wide for our wide variety of mental illnesses.
He spent four months in the loony bin but his pain and his agony did not end there. His job is an unending source of torment and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He’s working himself into an early grave though the sweet release of the grave seems to be all that he wants out of life other than cigarettes and alcohol.
Rusty picked up at least some of his many demons working deep undercover in the drug trade for four eventful years. You don’t recover quickly from something like that. Or at all.
If Rusty has no entanglements to distract him from stubborn pursuit of death through inebriation then his partner Marty (Woody Harrelson) has too many. He’s married to Maggie Hart, a woman who looks like Michelle Monaghan because she’s played by Michelle Monaghan and has beautiful daughters yet is cheating on his wife with Lisa Tragnetti (Alexandra Daddario).
Marty doesn’t see a conflict between his commitment to his wife and children and his need to have sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He has at least convinced himself that he is doing his beautiful ball and chain a favor by unleashing his wildness with his mistress so that he can come home to a domesticated life with his wife and daughters.
Rusty and Marty spend much of the episode attending to their compulsions but, in time-honored detective show fashion, they also spend a lot of time asking questions as they try to find out who murdered sex worker Dora Lange.
The investigation leads them to a rundown outdoor brothel where Marty loses his shit when he realizes that one of the sex workers is underage. He may be a philanderer with dubious ethics but he has a moral code and sees hurting young people as an unforgivable transgression.
Rusty has a brain full of razor blades but when talking doesn’t work, he isn’t above beating the shit out of lowlifes he does not respect in order to secure important information.
McConaughey’s man of constant sorrow has killed people. A not insubstantial number of people. He’s seemingly done every drug known to man, some even in the line of duty as a longtime narc.
He buys a bottle of Quaaludes (which is good thinking, as it’s impossible to get those now) from a zonked-out sex worker who tries to interest him in a little bump and grind without success.
There’s a great moment for McConaughey when the drug dealer flirtatiously tells him that he seems dangerous and he tells her, in a sinister, disconcertingly sexy purr, “Of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.”
It’s a great line that McConaughey delivers with great relish and no small amount of danger. Again, he really has a strong serial killer vibe. Something is very, very wrong with him. Life will never be alright, alright, alright.
That’s the thing about True Detective. It’s hushed in its quiet intensity but also incredibly flashy. The acting constantly calls attention to itself, as does the writing.
But that’s not a problem when the acting and writing calling attention to itself is legitimately great. I’m not just impressed by McConaughey here; I’m wowed by his performance. To put things in Tony the Tiger terms, it’s great!
Where is this headed? I don’t know but I’m guessing someplace even darker. As Rusty eloquently puts it, we’re not just investigating a murder here: we’re mainlining the secret truth of the universe.
Can you say that about Barney Miller? Yes, oddly enough, but in a less ostentatious way.
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