The current “Golden Age of Television” is not so much a revelation that TV can actually be good, but that stories are often more impactful when told the long way. Plot arcs develop on a slow burn, and the audience has time to form intense emotional attachments to even minor characters. On the flip side, even a great television show will spend its initial few hours building up to that magic, pivotal moment that justifies the hype. The Sopranos first breaks out of its shell and becomes a harrowing nocturne in “College,” (season 1, episode 5,) and Breaking Bad clicked during the wrenching intervention scene in “Grey Matter” (also season 1, episode 5.) So a part of me can’t fully dismiss True Detective only after the first episode, even if I feel like I spent an hour of my life watching the unholy union of Twin Peaks and a dick measuring contest.
Dominick Nero at The Gothamist, and other besides, have already pointed out a striking similarities between Twin Peaks and True Detective here—(but watch out, there are spoilers in it. I try to remain spoiler free below.) Nero writes, “Rust Cohle and Marty Hart are arguably the 2014 equivalent of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and his gruff buddy, Sheriff Harry S. Truman. The dreamer and the lawman, the weirdo and the straight guy—Lynch made this detective dichotomy a primetime staple over 20 years ago. And although Nic Pizzolatto is by no means a Lynchian storyteller, True Detective owes a lot to the short-lived ’90s series. Themes of existentialism, pagan naturalism, and the futility of old-fashioned Americana (in the north or the south) pervade both shows, making Pizzolatto’s efforts largely indebted to the elusive David Lynch.” In both shows, a young woman’s corpse is discovered, bearing ritualistic, sadomasochistic markings. It turns out she was a prostitute, and involved in some heavy shit. Wacky lawman pays attention to strange details and throws out high-falutin anthropological language, while straight-shooting lawman quietly bemoans the end of human decency.
I couldn’t read Nero’s case in full, because I don’t want to know the ending of True Detective yet. He articulates the stylistic differences between these shows, but perhaps gives too much credit to the post-Katrina nihilism that Rust Cohle and the show are meant to embody. In episode one, Cohle struggles to say anything that the Nietzchean teenager in Little Miss Sunshine wouldn’t have. The Laura Palmer-counterpart is named Dorothea Lange, a fact made even hokier by the show’s bristling self-importance. Twin Peaks is goofy and over the top in many ways, but the over-cooked, baroque Americana of True Detective’s opening sequence takes the cake. It’s like someone watched the first five minutes of True Blood and was like, “This, but darker! And with more strippers!”
Not to mention the first episode’s Frank Miller-esque issues with women. Twin Peaks had the decency to star lots of fascinating women, make Laura Palmer a character, and dramatize the bizarre, domestic fall-out from her death from episode one. Here we have Madonna and Whores, prostitutes and the melodramatic staple of the good-wife back home. And a sassy black secretary, who so far has only been a sounding board for Hart’s even sassier joke. This does not bode well, but there are seven more hours to go. I’ll return with an update upon episode five, and then the finale. It just might take me a few months to get there.
Having watched both Twin Peaks (both seasons and the movie) and True Detective, I sincerely challenge anyone who says the latter has more misogyny than the former.
I really enjoyed both shows, but the sexualization of what we were told to believe were “high school” girls was horrific. Not to mention the disgusting and awful way incest was depicted in the movie (it was only hinted at in the show).
It only seems like True Detective is worse in that regard because its so much more graphic.
Give up now. I, this week, finished up the series, after being pretty tepid on the first two episodes when they were first shown. I regret sticking around for even the 8 hours of my life this show took up. I thought it would go somewhere or be somehow interesting, but, no, it did not and was not.
It is cliched, the main characters are all assholes, the mystery is stupid, and, no, it never gets better about the women. They are all flat stereotypes or dead or both.
I thought the incest in Fire Walk With Me was actually depicted as horrific; that is, you were supposed to be horrified, and it was actually horrifying. In fact, the horror of the film seemed largely like a metaphorical depiction of incest; the thing that was wrong, or horrible in Twin Peaks was the incest. The sexualization of the high school girls was also presented as wrong and evil and really uncomfortable.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and Lynch’s attitudes towards women are certainly mixed…I guess I’d be interested to hear you explain further what you’re reasoning is, Christa? It just seems like Fire Walk With Me is really on the side of the victims pretty much throughout….
I agree that the series ends on a really bad note. You could say it substitutes Cooper’s optimism for Rust’s pessimism in a narrative bait and switch. And it’s true the women characters are flat, but so are all the other characters that aren’t Rust and Marty. Maybe the villain has a little more character depth to him, too. It shares a lot with Paul Thomas Anderson’s last few films where he writes a couple of really good characters, but all his sides exist as little more than props. (A similar charge of sexism was thrown at The Master, for example.) Obviously one can’t focus on every single character, but each should suggest an inner life and back story that the audience would want to follow if given the chance. I’d say that’s what’s great about certain old Hollywood films and their use of charismatic character actors, which are practically nonexistent these days. Lynch is one of the exceptions in this regard.
I think the pre-conversion Rust actually provides pretty good analyses of what pessimism is (can’t remember much of it from Little Miss Sunshine, but Pizzolatto borrowed from Thomas Ligotti’s highly entertaining and most excellent A Conspiracy Against the Human Race). And I was pleasantly surprised when I originally thought the show was going to be a critique of the myths of family, work, religion and whatever else we use to paper over the existential void, but it completely cops out at the end. Once again we’re assured it’s the best of all possible worlds.
(I’m not sure Twin Peaks actually doesn’t ultimately undermine Cooper’s metaphysical view, contrary to what Pizzolato tries to sell in the final episode, but that would probably take a bit of time to formulate.)
But, yeah, the show is basically a cop buddy procedural set somewhere between Twin Peaks and Cthulhu.
What Charles said.
Also, I was a bit pissed off when I realized that final dialogue topping off the already lame ending (with Rust’s conversion to optimism by meanss of NDE) was acually copied word for word from Alan Moore. Everybody says it’s an “hommage” but I don’t see it.
“Copied word for word” is a bit of an overstatement, at least according to the transcriptions here: http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/true-detective-finale-comics-alan-moore-homage.html
Reece! Ligotti/Brassier. I’m glad you’ve read that book.
I hope you’ve read Nihil Unbound, too. Ray is a hell of a scholar.
Oh right, True Detective. I corroborate all charges. Cliched, treatment of women is pretty garbage, ending is a cop out. There’s a slightly more interesting interpretation of the ending as a sneering indictment of the perceived ending, but, I’ll talk about that later or elsewhere, I think.
I’ll be glad if it gets more people to read Ligotti, though. Good on Pizzolatto for bringing some of the new generation of ultranihilists to the mainstream.
Haven’t read that yet, but Brassier is definitely in the circle of thinkers that I’m most interested in. He’s a bit more of scientific reductionist than Bryant, Harman and the like, right?
Nailed it. He’s the best among ’em. Also, Reza. But that’s another story.
The Cyclonopedia is on my reading list, too.
http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_mortiloquist.php
Laura Palmer is highly fetishized in Fire Walk With Me. The incest in the movie bothered me b/c I felt like Lynch was doing it for the shock and horror. To reduce abuse like that is simply distasteful at best. There is a scene of incest in True Detective, and while it was gross (and totally unecessary IMHO), the fact that it was incest was not apparent in the scene. Incest between siblings carries different power dynamics and is not necessarily abuse. Its disturbing, but I didn’t find it offensive on the same level.
But again, I really enjoyed both shows despite the issues I had with their presentation of gender.
“I felt like Lynch was doing it for the shock and horror. ”
I guess I can see that. I think it’s tricky; is the horror of the film about the incest, or is the incest there to make the horror seem horrible? I guess I felt like it was more the first; you really do sympathize with Laura, it seemed like to me, and Leland is a terrifying figure because of what he’s done. But I could see how you could read it the other way too.
Derek: Granted, maybe not “word for word”, but all essential elements of that dialogue are verbatim Moore, with no hint to where they were taken from. Plus, in Top Ten it made much more sense in context with the giant chess piece.
I’m with Noah on the Twin Peaks thing. I still can’t see that actor (who plays Leland) in other tv/films without being a little weirded out and expecting him to suddenly have this horrible look on his face, and part of that is the power of the horror via the sympathy with Laura.
However that last line of TD was derived, it’s one of the worst in TV history.
I’m not really understanding what’s so bad or different about using incest for horror or to make the horror seem horrible. Also, Leland was possessed by an alien force, so it’s questionable whether the rape of his daughter was done by him and is therefore actually incest. I guess it gets down to whether the viewer requires intent for responsibility. Nevertheless, the rape is supposed to be truly horrible, it’s the basis for the horror, and I think Lynch succeeds in conveying that — so successful, in fact, that even the Palmer household objects are filled with dread. Fire Walk With Me is one of my favorite horror films.
I didn’t have an issue with incest’s use in TD, either, but if FWWM is problematic because it’s being used for entertainment or whatever, then the former would seem even more troubling. The incest is thrown into one episode to make the villain seem really icky.
(As an aside: Isn’t incest really only icky if the incestuous couple are themselves somewhat gross? No one was particularly grossed out when Penelope Cruz made out with her sister in their brother’s video, or when Angelina Jolie sucked on her lookalike brother’s lips in public. But put 2 slovenly VHS collecting siblings together and you get an abomination against God. Incest is okay for Gods and the more divine creatures among us, cf. the Greek myths — at least, it’s not physically repellant.)
Regarding Detective, i would contend that very little was procedural before the final episode — which is what It made it such a let-down. Indeed, it was almost anti-procedural, parodically procedural.
Regarding Fire, it seems to me that the horror of what happens to Laura Palmer goes down a lot easier when you get to watch her topless, begartered, and (di)splayed for much of the film. Plus she gets to be an angel. So, win-win?
“I’m not really understanding what’s so bad or different about using incest for horror or to make the horror seem horrible. ”
It’s basically the same issue as using rape to make your work look serious, or sticking a dead girlfriend in a refrigerator as a means of showing that your comic deals with major adult issues and to give your hero a motivation. Using incest because its cool and tough and scary ends up using real people’s trauma to make yourself look awesome, which is fairly repulsive.
As I said, I don’t think that’s exactly what Lynch is doing; I agree that the horror seems to be tied to the incest; the movie (and I think the series) is really about the incest. And the doubling of Leland doesn’t make it *not* about incest; rather, it’s a comment on the experience of incest itself; the dad who is both loving and a monster. But incest is a tricky thing to deal with, so I don’t think it’s wrong to question what Lynch is doing or how he’s handling it.
I think Christa’s right that the issue is more about siblings vs. parent/child, rather than how people look. Adult’s consenting is less upsetting/uncomfortable than rape, which seems like how it should be.
Seems to me the issue is really just whether someone uses a heinous act in an artistically meaningful or fulfilling way versus failing to do so. Brad Meltzer was probably trying to do something serious with his story the same way Lynch was with his, but only one arguably succeeded (at least, according to responses to both works I’ve encountered — never read Identity Crisis myself). Keep in mind that no one’s trauma is being used in the stories. The trauma is fictional. Then again, all horror, if effective, ties into some real fear or sense of horror, seems to me, so if the use of a fictional heinous act works — makes you take it seriously while dealing with the particular work of horror — then you’re going to say such an act wasn’t merely used to make the art work seem serious. I mean, you really don’t have to create some artificial theory of authorial intent (“the devilish creator knew he was creating a shallow work, but threw in a shallow reference to some heinous act of violence to try and fool people into thinking he’s a really deep guy”). You can simply suss out whether it’s serious or not by simply gauging your own reaction to the work: did you have a serious reaction or not? Was the horror affective?
No disagreement about the metaphorical resonance of incest in FWWM.
Also, why not talk of all action films as repulsive? They use real world death for cheap entertainment? This just gets pretty silly, but I’m not a really caring Wertham-leftist sort of guy.
Yep, shooting people for entertainment can be morally problematic too, as I think I’ve discussed in various places.
“Keep in mind that no one’s trauma is being used in the stories. The trauma is fictional. ”
Well, it’s tricky, isn’t it? People actually experience incest; the story is using their experiences, grief, and horror in order to gain emotional resonance (or that can be what’s effectively happening). If there wasn’t anything real there, it wouldn’t be emotionally resonant in the first place.
Noah: I’m reminded of the incest in Left Hand of Darkness now. LeGuin I think made some good points about sibling incest being a much more fluid taboo across human cultures.
Not comics-related, but True Detective to me is like a blend of Twin Peaks and this British miniseries called Red Riding.
Red Riding is much less graphic but a million times more atmospheric. Both the books and the series are full of misogyny but I think Red Riding succeeds better in being *about* the misogyny than taking part in it. Its also meant to be semi-historical about how 1970’s and 80’s Yorkshire bred this real serial killer and how they all dealt with his crimes. So worth a watch if True Detective let you down on the procedural element.
In interviews with the Red Riding books’ author, he actually admits he feels bad for throwing child molestation into the story the way he did. Which is nice.
Plus, YORKSHIRE ACCENTS!
It struck me, after seeing True Detective, that the oft-mentioned problem of its pretentious script,
complete with wooden monologues and flat characters, versus its beautifully crafted
visuals, is a problem very familiar to me-from reading comics. And, as with comics,
it made me think about defining the show in terms of either its script or its surface, and it can’t, of course, be done.
When the visuals are doing (accomplishing) something that the script is not apparently
getting done-then those two facts, taken together as one, form the statement made by
its creators. That is the statement that should be under scrutiny.
This, i think, opens the show to a lot more ambiguity.
Twin peaks, let’s be honest, has too many episodes. At least True Detective is wound tighter.
And yes, Red Riding. Whoa.
“Twin peaks, let’s be honest, has too many episodes.”
Wild at Heart is the worst thing that ever happened to Twin Peaks.
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