{"id":1645,"date":"2014-03-11T15:09:58","date_gmt":"2014-03-11T19:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=1645"},"modified":"2014-03-11T15:09:58","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T19:09:58","slug":"lets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/lets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective\/","title":{"rendered":"Let&#8217;s Talk About the Writing on TRUE DETECTIVE"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1645\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective%2F&amp;text=Let%26%238217%3Bs%20Talk%20About%20the%20Writing%20on%20TRUE%20DETECTIVE&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/lets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p>I promise this one is nicer. But <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> read if you haven&#8217;t seen the whole thing.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s <em>True Detective<\/em>, and that&#8217;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&#8217;d be nice &#8212; and fair &#8212; to give a broader consideration to <em>True Detective<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. There were probably a lot of half-read copies of <em>The King in Yellow<\/em> lying around Monday morning.<\/strong> References to key names and images from Robert W. Chambers&#8217; 19th century short story collection had a lot of viewers suddenly interested in short stories. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Book-Right-Wrong-Matt-Debenham-ebook\/dp\/B003WQBIMI\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1394553828&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=matt+debenham\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Which is great<\/span><\/a>! In the end, though, <em>True Detective<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>This is fair. No one asked viewers to start swamping Facebook with &#8220;WHO IS THE YELLOW KING??!!&#8221; posts, though that&#8217;s indeed what they did. And that&#8217;s where we need to pay attention to <em>where<\/em> we&#8217;re getting our fiction. In this case, it&#8217;s TV, the medium that plastered the Internet with <strong>Who Killed Rosie Larsen?<\/strong> content to promote a show that wasn&#8217;t going to answer that question in one season. (<em>True Detective<\/em> writer\/creator Nic Pazzolatto worked on <em>The Killing<\/em>.) Because it turned out all the Yellow King\/Carcosa stuff was, y&#8217;know, <em>references<\/em>. Allusions. Like you have in a lot of writing, where it&#8217;s main purpose is to let you know where the writer&#8217;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 <em>Cougar Town<\/em> is named for a Tom Petty song. Does that mean <em>Cougar Town<\/em> is building a rich, multilayered Tom Petty mythology? (It may yet be.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. But maybe the show does bear <em>some<\/em> responsibility.<\/strong>\u00a0If it does, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>That, by the way, is what I meant by &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/proving-the-negative-true-detective-and-remembering-when-this-is-not-my-thing\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>True Detective<\/em> is the visual equivalent of Nine Inch Nails<\/span><\/a>,&#8221; which is now a meaner-sounding line than I&#8217;d intended. I liked <em>The Downward Spiral<\/em>, and there are things I like about True Detective.<\/p>\n<p>And by ending on a note of optimism for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ibfJsyx6N_U\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Hart and Cohle<\/span><\/a> &#8212; hell, out-and-out spiritual\u00a0<em>revelation<\/em>, Mitch Albom-style,\u00a0for the latter &#8212; <em>True Detective<\/em> felt like it&#8217;d hit all the bases, like it&#8217;d made a necessary shift. But while this <em>was<\/em> a necessary resolution for the character of Rust Cohle &#8212; and I get that through Cohl <em>True Detective<\/em> was probably poking at the self-fulfilling prophecy created by black-and-white thinking &#8212; \u00a0it was a little like Pazzolatto had it in mind the whole time but then didn&#8217;t feel the need to ever really marry it to character. He just had Cohle playing the same notes &#8212; dark and darker &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n<p>This is not unlike how we learn Rust has hallucinations from his undercover drug days. I don&#8217;t remember if we first saw this in episode one or two, but it doesn&#8217;t really matter, because the <em>show<\/em> forgot, too, or neglected to remember, until the last fifteen minutes of the finale.<\/p>\n<p>I guess, for me, this is a little like seasons one and two of <em>GIRLS<\/em>, 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 <em>feels<\/em> like it&#8217;s done the work. But writing that does this hasn&#8217;t really <em>done the work<\/em>. It&#8217;s the story equivalent of test-cramming.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3<\/strong><strong>. We only ever cared about Hart and Cohle.<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>That&#8217;s a problem.<\/strong> A main complaint with <em>The Killing<\/em>, which Pazzolatto has said taught him how <em>not<\/em> 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 &#8212; the viewers &#8212; never get the chance to <em>care<\/em> about Rosie. Because we never knew her.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, at least I can name her. I can&#8217;t name one of the <em>True Detective<\/em> victims. Someone&#8217;s name is Lang, I remember that. (Whoops, just looked it up: Dora Kelly Lange. No memory of the middle name.) I don&#8217;t remember anyone else&#8217;s name, because the show doesn&#8217;t really care.<\/p>\n<p>But there are other victims in<em> True Detective<\/em>, and they all may as well be named Jane Doe. And then there&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>At the center of the swirling labyrinth there&#8217;s a Green Eared Spaghetti Monster, not a Yellow King. While that may be a comment on real-world evil vs. symbolic evil (a &#8220;flying spaghetti monster,&#8221; 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&#8217;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?)<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. It could have used another pass.<\/strong>\u00a0This is a shitty thing to say, I realize, and I&#8217;m cringing as I type it. But given the way it ended up, I think it&#8217;s also fair. <em>True Detective<\/em>, in full, feels like an especially good <em>draft<\/em>. 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&#8217;m paraphrasing): &#8220;Finding movies harder to measure up in the wake of TV like <em>True Detective<\/em>.&#8221; But that, for me, makes a point its author maybe hadn&#8217;t intended. Movies and TV are very different, as different as novels and short stories. Movies and short stories depend on compression. They&#8217;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 <em>and other stories<\/em>, to create characters that will feel full and real.<\/p>\n<p><em>True Detective<\/em> feels, to me, like time got away from Pazzolatto. Like around hour five or six of Rust&#8217;s nihilistic monologues and Marty&#8217;s affairs, he realized, &#8220;Shit! Gotta wrap this up!&#8221; That&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I just made the mistake of reading comments on an <em>Entertainment Weekly<\/em> post about the show, and there&#8217;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&#8217;t answer, but rather: What even\u00a0<em>were<\/em> the questions of <em>True Detective<\/em>? And were they ever as important as the show pretended? Or were they, like the <em>King In Yellow<\/em> stuff, mostly there to add the feeling of weight and depth?<\/p>\n<p><strong>5. Every writer should be grateful for <em>True Detective<\/em>.<\/strong>\u00a0Wait, what? But I mean this. Whether you loved it, hated it, or it just wasn&#8217;t your thing, it got people interested in a story. Not in just coming back week-to-week to see their favorite characters &#8212; though <em>that<\/em> has a value I think is <em>massively<\/em> under-appreciated &#8212; 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 <strong>writing<\/strong>, and that&#8217;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 <em>words<\/em>?<\/p>\n<h5>* except for everyone&#8217;s reaction to the VHS tape. Which was just like the one in <em>The Ring<\/em>, only instead of killing its viewers in seven days, it immediately took away their ability to <em>not<\/em> act like a middle-school hambone: &#8220;Gahh. Noooooooo!&#8221;<\/h5>\n<p><strong>6. Go read David Peace&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/David-Peace\/e\/B000APOC5Y\/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>Red Riding<\/em> quartet<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong> Seriously, it&#8217;s great. I should&#8217;ve recommended it last post, when I still thought the ultimate conspiracy was going to end up being a little more wide-ranging on <em>True Detective.\u00a0<\/em>Even though the book series takes place in Manchester, England, I think you&#8217;ll see the thematic similarities pretty quickly, and it may even enhance your enjoyment of <em>True Detective<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>7. I will totally watch <em>True Detective<\/em> Season Two<\/strong>. True! As annoyed as I was by Pazzolatto&#8217;s gimmickry and his not-great approach to women, I think he&#8217;s a good writer with a terrific feel for images and moments that stick in the viewer&#8217;s brain. And I&#8217;m excited to see what he&#8217;ll do with two main female characters, as has been announced, since I don&#8217;t think his crappy streak with women in season one necessarily means he can&#8217;t write women. It means his attentions were probably elsewhere. (On that warm, delicious bathwater.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1645\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective%2F&amp;text=Let%26%238217%3Bs%20Talk%20About%20the%20Writing%20on%20TRUE%20DETECTIVE&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flets-talk-about-the-writing-on-true-detective%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>TRUE DETECTIVE ended this week, and a whole lot of people were excited about its writing. But was it GOOD writing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-are-you-watching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1649,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions\/1649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}