Into the void: True Detective’s (completely necessary) ridiculousness
True Detective’s first season is an attempt to solve for a void. It contemplates a conundrum with so little hope of being answered that anything not sitting on the plane of the problem is flattened out until it approaches nothingness. You’ve perhaps heard the theory that objects pulled into a black hole flatten out into dim streaks of what they once were, collections of atoms spread out into things that were but no longer are. That’s how the central mystery on True Detective acts for its two main characters: They stare at it so long and race toward it so quickly that they are unable to perceive the atoms that make up anybody or anything else. They’re constantly being sucked into a space between spaces.
In both its best and worst moments, the first season of True Detective was an earnest paean to the things that exist in that negative space. It often felt as if the series took this tack thanks to the direction of Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed all eight of the season’s episodes. Like a diligent student of the horror genre, Fukunaga was fond of filling the screen with things that weren’t seen, with darkness or emptiness that might contain the monsters at the end of the book, but, more likely than not, were simply the normal, non-supernatural darkness we find ourselves in every night. The season was always at its best when giving rise to possibility, to ideas of elemental corruption that proved more potent than the things that actually arrived. Perhaps, that is why so many cried foul on Twitter when the series’ central boogeyman was revealed to be simply some guy with a lawn mower and an ancestral estate that seemed to consist of nothing but negative space.
There were times when True Detective bit off more than it could chew in its first season, but it did so in the way overambitious first-season shows that don’t always know their own limitations often do. Particularly in the season’s lackluster sixth and seventh episodes—when creator and writer of all eight episodes Nic Pizzolatto dropped the mesmerizing framing device that held the first five episodes together and allowed for many a moment of unreliable narration—the show seemed to be solving its central mystery because it felt it had to, not because it had any particular desire to. It hinted and suggested at grand, overarching explanations for everything that happened, then, again, boiled down largely to one guy (albeit a terrifying guy). This sometimes created the sense that the show was two different stories on two different tracks, a surface one where everything was explainable and a deeper one, where everything was terrifyingly inexplicable. Everything about the show—its mystery, its storytelling technique, its approach to character development—was an iceberg, and it could have felt unsatisfying to have the heroes catch only its tip.
The most frequent criticism about this season has been its lack of “well-defined” female characters. This is a misleading statement. That there are no “well-defined” female characters on True Detective is the point. Both Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) are so trapped in a mire of dead bodies and snuffed-out lives that they are unable to see outside of themselves long enough to realize that the other people in their midst—male and female alike—that are living, breathing human beings who still need them. (This is particularly true when it comes to Marty and his wife and daughters.) Think, again, of that black hole. The closer Marty and Rust get to it, the more everybody else they know is a dim smear they can barely see for lack of light.