Let’s Talk About the Writing on TRUE DETECTIVE

I promise this one is nicer. But don’t read if you haven’t seen the whole thing.

Last post, I wrote mainly about the struggle between being angry at a piece of work and just deciding that thing is not for you. In doing that, I also shared my honest feelings about HBO’s True Detective, and that’s mainly what people responded to. At that point there were still two episodes left. Now, having seen the thing in its entirety, I thought it’d be nice — and fair — to give a broader consideration to True Detective.

1. There were probably a lot of half-read copies of The King in Yellow lying around Monday morning. References to key names and images from Robert W. Chambers’ 19th century short story collection had a lot of viewers suddenly interested in short stories. Which is great! In the end, though, True Detective revealed itself to be ultimately more about telling a pretty standard serial-killer story, and with exploring the psyches of its two leads, than with creating whatever people thought they were getting.

This is fair. No one asked viewers to start swamping Facebook with “WHO IS THE YELLOW KING??!!” posts, though that’s indeed what they did. And that’s where we need to pay attention to where we’re getting our fiction. In this case, it’s TV, the medium that plastered the Internet with Who Killed Rosie Larsen? content to promote a show that wasn’t going to answer that question in one season. (True Detective writer/creator Nic Pazzolatto worked on The Killing.) Because it turned out all the Yellow King/Carcosa stuff was, y’know, references. Allusions. Like you have in a lot of writing, where it’s main purpose is to let you know where the writer’s head is at. Kind of like when you visit someone and the first thing they show you is their record collection. Or how every episode of Cougar Town is named for a Tom Petty song. Does that mean Cougar Town is building a rich, multilayered Tom Petty mythology? (It may yet be.)

2. But maybe the show does bear some responsibility. If it does, it’s probably because the thing was so fucking self-serious 110% of the time, all YOUR SOUL IS A SPIRAL WITH DARKNESS AT THE BEGINNING AND DARKNESS AT THE END AND OH BY THE WAY THERE IS NO BEGINNING AND END ONLY DARKNESS DAAAAARKNESS.

That, by the way, is what I meant by “True Detective is the visual equivalent of Nine Inch Nails,” which is now a meaner-sounding line than I’d intended. I liked The Downward Spiral, and there are things I like about True Detective.

And by ending on a note of optimism for Hart and Cohle — hell, out-and-out spiritual revelation, Mitch Albom-style, for the latter — True Detective felt like it’d hit all the bases, like it’d made a necessary shift. But while this was a necessary resolution for the character of Rust Cohle — and I get that through Cohl True Detective was probably poking at the self-fulfilling prophecy created by black-and-white thinking —  it was a little like Pazzolatto had it in mind the whole time but then didn’t feel the need to ever really marry it to character. He just had Cohle playing the same notes — dark and darker — over and over, so that when he finally played a new one it was surprising and a little exciting. But a day after having watched it, it also feels cheap.

This is not unlike how we learn Rust has hallucinations from his undercover drug days. I don’t remember if we first saw this in episode one or two, but it doesn’t really matter, because the show forgot, too, or neglected to remember, until the last fifteen minutes of the finale.

I guess, for me, this is a little like seasons one and two of GIRLS, where that show feels free to dick around for nine episodes, as long as it remembers to do it big in the last episode, so that it feels like it’s done the work. But writing that does this hasn’t really done the work. It’s the story equivalent of test-cramming.

3. We only ever cared about Hart and Cohle. That’s a problem. A main complaint with The Killing, which Pazzolatto has said taught him how not to end a season, was that with Rosie Larsen dead at the outset, we never got the chance to know her. Thus, while the Larsen family is shown in endless scenes of dark-roomed grief, and while the detectives are apparently the only ones who want to find the real killer, we — the viewers — never get the chance to care about Rosie. Because we never knew her.

Meanwhile, at least I can name her. I can’t name one of the True Detective victims. Someone’s name is Lang, I remember that. (Whoops, just looked it up: Dora Kelly Lange. No memory of the middle name.) I don’t remember anyone else’s name, because the show doesn’t really care.

But there are other victims in True Detective, and they all may as well be named Jane Doe. And then there’s a whole conspiracy in the middle of this, which is partly what I think led people down the whole Yellow King path, but it kind of never amounts to much in the end.

At the center of the swirling labyrinth there’s a Green Eared Spaghetti Monster, not a Yellow King. While that may be a comment on real-world evil vs. symbolic evil (a “flying spaghetti monster,” after all, is one of those burden-of-proof examples used to challenge theists), it also means most of the other murders are necessarily solved or even avenged, since we don’t really know how many killings Errol Childress personally committed. But also, what did it matter, since he was a mentally impaired murder-savant living with his sister-wife in a parody of hillbilly hoarder squalor? (Who nonetheless is capable of fine detail work like his murder-tableaus and the upkeep of the stick-vortex Carcosa?)

4. It could have used another pass. This is a shitty thing to say, I realize, and I’m cringing as I type it. But given the way it ended up, I think it’s also fair. True Detective, in full, feels like an especially good draft. Certainly not a first draft, but maybe not the last, best draft, either. There was a Tweet in my timeline Monday morning that said (and I’m paraphrasing): “Finding movies harder to measure up in the wake of TV like True Detective.” But that, for me, makes a point its author maybe hadn’t intended. Movies and TV are very different, as different as novels and short stories. Movies and short stories depend on compression. They’re really, ultimately, focused on The Time A Huge Thing Happened, and filling in varying degrees of event and story around that. Novels and TV, on the other hand, have room to tell the main story and other stories, to create characters that will feel full and real.

True Detective feels, to me, like time got away from Pazzolatto. Like around hour five or six of Rust’s nihilistic monologues and Marty’s affairs, he realized, “Shit! Gotta wrap this up!” That’s what I mean by it feeling like a draft. You can argue that it was just taking its time, creating the atmosphere and character moments that would pay off later, but I will argue that if you watch the last three episodes you will see that is probably not what happened to this story. What it did was fall a little in love with the taste of its own bathwater. Which, to be fair, was probably super-great bathwater, probably with some Lush product in it. I always want to eat the Lush soaps.

I just made the mistake of reading comments on an Entertainment Weekly post about the show, and there’s a heady, academic argument brewing there about questions-not-being-answered-you-jerks vs. shut-up-retard-I-like-not-having-all-the-answers. My ultimate quibble with the show has less to do with what the finale did or didn’t answer, but rather: What even were the questions of True Detective? And were they ever as important as the show pretended? Or were they, like the King In Yellow stuff, mostly there to add the feeling of weight and depth?

5. Every writer should be grateful for True Detective. Wait, what? But I mean this. Whether you loved it, hated it, or it just wasn’t your thing, it got people interested in a story. Not in just coming back week-to-week to see their favorite characters — though that has a value I think is massively under-appreciated — but truly invested in what happened next in this limited-run, novelistic show. Yes, the acting was great* and yes, the direction had a real style and a signature. But what people were ultimately responding to was the writing, and that’s pretty cool. Did I love the Rust Cohle monologues that kept popping up on my Facebook wall? I did not. (I very much like the people who posted them!) But how cool is that to see people paying such close attention to words?

* except for everyone’s reaction to the VHS tape. Which was just like the one in The Ring, only instead of killing its viewers in seven days, it immediately took away their ability to not act like a middle-school hambone: “Gahh. Noooooooo!”

6. Go read David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. Seriously, it’s great. I should’ve recommended it last post, when I still thought the ultimate conspiracy was going to end up being a little more wide-ranging on True Detective. Even though the book series takes place in Manchester, England, I think you’ll see the thematic similarities pretty quickly, and it may even enhance your enjoyment of True Detective.

7. I will totally watch True Detective Season Two. True! As annoyed as I was by Pazzolatto’s gimmickry and his not-great approach to women, I think he’s a good writer with a terrific feel for images and moments that stick in the viewer’s brain. And I’m excited to see what he’ll do with two main female characters, as has been announced, since I don’t think his crappy streak with women in season one necessarily means he can’t write women. It means his attentions were probably elsewhere. (On that warm, delicious bathwater.)