"After You've Gone" Is True Detective at its Most Straightforward and Least Compelling
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I have not seen any episodes of True Detective outside of its first season but I know that things are getting ugly in the world of True Detective fandom because of the flagrant jackassery of Nic Pizzolatto.
Pizzolatto, the acclaimed author of True Detective’s first season, has been behaving like a messy bitch on social media and sending all manner of shade in the direction of True Detective: Night County, the show’s fourth season.
The optics are not good: a rich, famous, and powerful white heterosexual man throwing a hissy fit because girls had the audacity to turn his beautiful baby into the television equivalent of a chick flick, where the gals spend some of the time solving mysteries and the rest of the time crushing on cute boys, having slumber parties and going on shopping sprees.
This, Pizzolatto felt, clashed with his dark, auteurist vision of life as a brutal realm of misery and despair, with death as the only release. He didn’t like the makeover montages set to fun pop songs that fill True Detective: Night Country or the fact that there’s a major crossover with Barbie in the final episode. I won’t say what it is, but it turns out that Ryan Gosling’s Ken is the killer.
This isn’t making me dislike the fourth girl-powered fourth season of True Detective. That sounds awesome. I think it’s cool that every scene in season four is set to “Spice Up Your Life.”
He also reportedly objected to his famous line being recycled when one of the fun-loving gals says, “Time is a flat circle. Now let’s eat some Ben & Jerry’s and watch Legally Blonde! Girl power!”
Rustin writing in his burn book.
Pizzolatto’s immature, asinine response to the ladies getting all up in his show and ruining it with a fun new soft pink aesthetic he apparently finds distasteful just makes me dislike him and think less of the first season of True Detective.
Pizzolatto deserves much of the credit for the first season of True Detective but it begins stronger than it ends. The first season of True Detective has the same fatal flaw as Twin Peaks: beyond all the style and weirdness, atmosphere, and art, they’re both detective shows about handsome men solving crimes.
That, friends, is the least interesting element of the show to me and also for everyone else. As True Detective sped to a close the police procedural aspect of the show eclipsed its more esoteric elements.
In “After You’ve Gone”, the seventh and second to last episode in True Detective’s much mythologized first season, Rustin, after a long, dreary stint in Alaska working on boats and in bars, returns to Texas convinced that a serial killer is wreaking havoc throughout Louisiana.
Rustin seeks his old partner enemy and sorta friend Marty (Woody Harrelson) to help him put the pieces together and finish what they started decades earlier. Marty has left the force and settled for a soft, lazy life.
He no longer has his pick of gorgeous women. Instead, he eats Hungry Man dinners in front of his television and looks for someone to alleviate his loneliness on match.com
Incidentally, I would watch a spin-off focused exclusively on Marty dating in his fifties. These scenes humanize Marty, as does his reaction to being shown a videotape of a brutal sacrifice.
It’s called marijuana and it’s very fun to smoke in a cigarette or cigar!
We only see the beginning of the tape, before things get bleak. We then feel the impact and the evil intensity of the fuzzy, degraded images through Harrelson’s horrified expression.
As dramatic responses to horrifying tableaus go, this falls somewhere between Nicolas Cage freaking out at a snuff film in 8 MM and George C. Scott breaking down upon seeing his innocent daughter in a porno in Hardcore.
Marty is horrified by what he sees and Rustin keeps reminding Marty that he owes him a debt on account of he didn’t snitch to his bosses when Marty lost his temper and killed an unarmed man.
This is a form of blackmail but it’s effective, partly because Rustin appeals to Marty’s sense of morality.
Rustin uncovers a distinctly Q-style conspiracy involving powerful people abusing their power to subject the children in their care to horrific sexual and physical abuse. It’s connected to a religious dynasty with more skeletons than it has clients and a mysterious scarred man.
True Detective plays with Carcosa, a conceit introduced as a mythic city in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” Other similarly spooky writers, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, became enamored of the word and the general idea and incorporated it into their work.
In True Detective, evil looks monstrous and inhuman but also soft, complacent, and respectable. Christianity is one of its preeminent hiding places, in True Detective and elsewhere.
In this episode Rustin and Marty do what mismatched cops always do: they put aside their differences and their very different lifestyles and core philosophies for the sake of cracking the case and bringing the bad guy to justice.
And that, dear reader, is not what I want from True Detective. I want weirdness. I want decay. I want long, extended monologues from McConaughey while he sucks on a cigarette like it’s the only thing that’s keeping him alive.
I want art. I want pretension. I want a show that tackles head-on the most important of existential queries: what is the meaning of life, and why is life such an unbearable gauntlet of suffering and sadness?
I want True Detective, to be more than just a detective show, and “After You’ve Gone” is unmistakably a detective show. It’s an artful, exceedingly well-made detective show, but it’s a detective show and not, you know, a show about everything.
Will the next episode finally deliver and reveal the meaning of life or document the heroes solving the crime? I don’t want to disappoint you, but we may have to wait until True Detective: He-Man Woman Haters Club: No Girls Allowed!, which Pizzolatto is currently prepping for the ultimate answer to everything.
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