Unabridged Thoughts: True Detective, Season One
(Big exhale) OK, let’s do this. Below: Season One. Elsewhere, Season Two and Season Three.
In its structure and superficies, True Detective is a crime drama developed in an anthology format. While later seasons very occasionally make callbacks to earlier seasons, each season is effectively an independent narrative. This independence runs deep: If a critic gently excises the murder mystery that functions as the beating heart of the show’s three seasons to date, we discover that each seasons belongs to a different genre.
At the center of this web is Nic Pizzolatto, showrunner and (in theory) sole writer for all three seasons. To speak further about this season of television and its creative choices, we need to acknowledge how deeply unusual it is for high-budget prestige drama television to get penned by a single writer, even more so for someone with a little experience as Pizzolatto had when the first season was greenlit.
Two reasons why this is rare: (1) A season of television is a huge amount of writing. If we use the script for the pilot episode as a yardstick, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that the 8-episode first season weighs in at around 100,000 words of script (if we include both dialog and descriptive text). Purely on a volume basis, that’s a lot of writing, but it’s even more intimidating when coupled with the responsibilities of acting as showrunner. (2) Authors who need to write huge volumes of prose on a deadline tend to lean into an authorial voice they find comfortable, and this often slips past the target of “immaculate vibes” into “pervasive sameyness.” Characters all start to sound like one another, even when coming from different walks of life. More broadly, volume writers usually end up giving us a tour of the inside of their heads, to one degree or another. Clues as to what they’ve been reading, or thinking about, or find anxiety-provoking, can leak out onto the page, and without a writer’s room, the results can looks a little like plagiarism, even when everything is formally above board.
As the show progresses, Pizzolatto will become something of a cautionary tale in both respects.
Circling Around The Work
Beneath the cheap suit and rumpled tie of its cop show seeming, Season One of True Detective (hereafter, TDs1), which aired in 2014, belongs to the genre of “mythos fiction.” Fiction that “belongs to the mythos” is connected, by a mixture of textual reference and community agreement, to other such works, constituting a form of communal mythopoeia. While H. P. Lovecraft and his fictional deity Cthulhu are the names most often associated with this genre, neither is relevant to understanding TDs1. In practice, Lovecraft was merely a somewhat prolific author whose work in this genre has been better preserved than many of his contemporaries - his actual influence at the time was small, and his influence even today is overstated. Within that writing community, however, writers were reading one anothers’ work and enthusiastically borrowing when they wrote. This context is important because TDs1 is not mythopoeic in its own right (the way, say, The Gods of Pegana (1905) or The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) tried to be when they created their respective new mythologies), but rather hitches its wagon to the existing mythos. This makes TDs1 the most successful piece of mythos fiction in recent memory, by a wide margin, at exploiting mythos fiction’s greatest trick: clout chasing.
Consider, for a moment, the entertainment value of conspiracy theories. The conspiratorial mindset not only exhibits syncretism, but delights in it: It’s legitimately fun to see that Thing A has some unseen connection to Thing B, and ‘discovering’ such connections makes the reader feel smart and privileged, even when the ‘truth’ being uncovered echoes the reader’s darkest fears back at them. Additional feelings of validation can be achieved by linking (or merely by making leaps between) multiple conspiracies. If Thing A is true, it’s a such a big deal, and if Thing B is connected and is also true, the deal is that much bigger! You guys, this is such a big deal! Why is no one talking about this? Etc.
What mythos fiction accomplishes is the emotional shape of conspiratorial epiphany without connecting back to the factual world. In 1886, author Ambrose Bierce writes a spooky story entitled “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” which also mentions a philosopher named Hali. In 1891, Bierce mentions that “Hastur” is a benevolent god of shepherds. In 1895, author Robert Chambers publishes a short story collection entitled The King in Yellow, and in multiple stories therein, the names Carcosa, Hali, and Hastur are used, seemingly only because the authors suspects they may feel familiar, tickling that conspiratorial part of the brain. Hastur and Hali (now the name of a lake) are then name-dropped by Lovecraft as examples of “the most hideous connections.” So when Pizzolatto has an old lady say, “You know Carcosa?” he is casting back to a short story published almost 130 years earlier through a referential daisy-chain, and it is the extent of this chain that serves to make all the works therein feel more real than they would otherwise. In short, mythos fiction traffics in a sort of counterfeit verisimilitude, less a cinematic universe than a collection of familiar licks and riffs that help the reader feel like an insider, and help to heighten the sense of conspiratorial dread that the authors are looking to cultivate. It’s the old trick of alluding to the classics (the Bible, the Iliad, the Canterbury Tales, etc.) in your writing to seem sophisticated, but using new “classics” that don’t actually exist and that don’t require your reader to have read anything outside the genre.
(This likely also contributes to why mythos fiction is popular among both the conspiratorially minded and bigots. While it’s certainly true that Lovecraft’s politics were reflexively and incoherently reactionary for most of his life, the deeper proclivity toward syncretism and “decoding” that we see in mythos fiction, as well as recurring fixations on secret cults, global conspiracies, and various forms of “degeneracy,” should motivate us to examine the genre and its tropes with a thoughtful, critical eye. Tracing the threads that connect back to the word “Carcosa” is all well and good, but I do so fully understanding that the real world is not a literary scavenger hunt, and that art is not necessarily harmless)
This very long tangent is important to my thesis because it is difficult to delimit precisely where the edge of TDs1, as a work, begins. Because mythos fiction leverages its clout-chasing syncretism in pursuit of vibes, one can draw broadly from various mythologies or myth-like subcultures. Furthermore, when Pizzolatto plays the hits, he does so without attribution; this, too, is normal in mythos fiction. By the time the genre rebuilt itself in the 70s and 80s and achieved durable (if niche) cultural relevance in the 90s, all of its most famous authors were dead, so it was normal to co-opt names, places, and ideas from other works without much thought to copyright or intellectual property. As Pizzolatto takes on a 100,000 word tour of some stuff he’s been thinking about for the few years prior to writing the show, we see a lot of borrowing, sometimes so subtle that it feels like it’s something we’re reading into too much, sometimes so blatant that it feels like it’s not in good faith.
Much has been made, for example, of how much Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) appears to echo sentiments expressed by horror author Thomas Ligotti, particularly in the Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010). The resemblance was so strong that Pizzolatto ultimately admitted that he had been influenced in interviews. Like many horror writers, Ligotti has dabbled in mythos fiction (although he has avoided making doing so part of his brand), but he is not the extent of Pizzolatto’s reading list.
Much less discussed is the influence of comics writer and wizard Alan Moore, whose fingerprints are evident in several key moments of TDs1. The most famous of Rust’s monologues from TDs1, regarding how human live appears to being who live outside of time, echoes sentiments expressed in Moore’s highly controversial Neonomicon (2010-2011). Even more striking, the final words exchanged between Rust and Martin Hart (played by Woody Harrelson) at the end of the season are paraphrased pretty brazenly from Moore’s fairly light-hearted and excellent superhero/cop satire Top 10 (1999-2001).
I suspect that many, many other such creative flourishes made it into the writing, if only as little authorial jokes. Is Marie Fontenot, the young girl whose disappearance comes up early in the first episode, named for Karl Fontenot, whose wrongful conviction was alleged by Mayer’s The Dreams of Ada (1987) and Grisham’s The Innocent Man (2006)? Or perhaps the name was drawn from the rogue’s gallery of those arrested in connection with child abuse allegations in the Hosanna Church scandal that some allege was an inspiration for the season? Or was it simply a name Pizzolatto felt had the right regional/class flavor? As with any conspiratorial spiral, it’s not clear when one should stop digging; after all, there is no truth at the bottom (the mythos is, by design, ad hoc and inconsistent, so even the nerd’s refuge of “canon” is unavailable). Since writers do not always perfectly recall their inspirations, some of these connections may simultaneously be real and accidental, so even Pizzolatto may not be able to account for each choice in the script.
Where each of these intrusions from outside sources belong on a spectrum from homage to allusion to reinterpretation to plagiarism is pretty murky, and probably inevitable when you’ve got one writer doing all the writing. We are, as noted above, living in this writer’s head for eight hours - we’re going to see some clutter. That said, the greediness of conspiratorial thinking, the desire to squeeze more blood from that stone, feels appropriate to the genre and to the themes of the show. So, all told, I think the show is actually artistically stronger for its liberal repurposing of existing writing. If nothing else, it feels very deliberate that Pizzolatto has built the walls and roof of his story from a shoal of red herrings.
Crossing The Threshold
To uncover the narrative backbone of TDs1 I think we need to dig deeper into its reliance on a particular neighborhood of mythos fiction, which revolves around The King In Yellow (1895). As an author, Robert Chambers is awash in the currents of horror’s evolution as a genre. He’s a fine example of the generation that bridges the gothic horror of Poe before him, and Lovecraft’s cosmic horror to come soon after. However, his short story anthology really only has one killer idea: a play that drives you mad. In his stories, various unstable characters become obsessed with a play named The King In Yellow as part of their descent into madness, and a handful of details (a name, a few sung lyrics, an event) are mentioned without any clear synopsis of the play (which makes its contents all the more daunting). This is solid horror storytelling: Chambers is “not showing the Alien” over 80 years before Ridley Scott. But as Chambers passed into legend as one of the forebears of mythos fiction, a submythos grew around The King In Yellow specifically. This has variously been called the Hastur Mythos, or the Carcosa Mythos, but like everything else in mythos fiction, there’s no “center,” no agreed upon truth. There are merely vibes, licks, and riffs that authors can deploy and that readers are savvy to, and everything else is aesthetic.
Various attempts have been made to codify this corner of mythos fiction, to varying success. The most influential has probably been “More Light” (1970) by James Blish, which provides a synopsis for the play itself. However, I contend that Pizzolatto’s inspiration for Carcosa as a literary device is not found in written fiction per se, but rather in tabletop roleplaying; specifically, in Call of Cthulhu, and even more specifically, in Delta Green: Countdown (1999), a CoC sourcebook from Pagan Publishing that breaks dramatically from the ‘party line’ put forward by Chaosium’s material up to that time.
In a chapter entitled “The Hastur Mythos,” author John Tynes lays out an elaborate theory on the metaphysics of Hastur, Carcosa, and the King in Yellow, why the play is a dangerous object that drives people to madness, and what sorts of threats and themes this interpretation provides. The chapter is brief (a mere 20 pages), and concerns itself with how one builds stories around these ideas. In short, it’s a writing manual, and given Pizzolatto’s documented appetite for the nerdier side of horror, it feels very plausible as a possible source of inspiration.
Tynes imagines Hastur as an expression of entropy, a sort of cosmic nadir into which people are drawn and trapped. Carcosa and the King In Yellow are merely manifestations of that force. In the play, Carcosa is a sort of city of the dead and the damned that appears “across the lake” from some still-living city in decline. Its appearance spurs paranoia and reckless action, and as the fragile social order breaks down, the living city is subsumed by Carcosa; when Carcosa disappears from the shore of the lake it takes the city it has eaten with it. The “King’s arrival” in your city is a sign that it’s already too late: Once you’re in the King’s domain, you’re already in Carcosa, a place/state from which there is no escape because it is the bottom of the world. That said, Carcosa isn’t only a city that eats cities - it is also a kind of pall that can fall over a person, a banality that drains them of their humanity, that uses people up and leaves them as shades of their former selves. The play merely accelerates this process by turning the reader’s mind toward the sort of cosmic nihilism that calls to Carcosa from across the stars and drags everyone nearby down into its gravitational well.
TDs1 has various clues that Pizzolatto is familiar with this very specific interpretation. Rust’s quips about “it’s all one ghetto, man, giant gutter in outer space” is consistent with this. Deeply damaged by his tragic backstory and his years undercover, we may interpret Rust as starting the show afflicted by this banality. He behaves as though he already has a foot outside of our reality and is seeing some darker, more ruthless version of the world. However, it’s not all in Rust’s head. When he comment that “this place is like somebody’s memory of a town,” that sure sounds like it fits, but it’s not just in his head: All the storefronts in the background of the shot are blank, as if the scene is being shot in a strip mall built for a movie that production didn’t have time to finish. So while Rust’s pessimism is not shared by those around him, the feeling that the world is not just falling apart but gradually fading is a textual reality that the show makes a point of depicting.
Another interesting aesthetic that I speculate is deliberate is the show’s use of oil refineries. Carcosa is, in its classical description, a daunting alien city that appears across the water, heralding doom to the civilization that witnesses it. And throughout the show, we see aerial shots of refineries, always glowing and smoking in the distance, always looking like places not well to enter. Lines like “this pipeline’s carving up the coast like a jigsaw” feels like an allusion to the refineries being a sort of visual stand-in for Carcosa as a city and a cultural force. Additionally, the one transition shot that implies a character is going to one of these structures takes place when Marty enters a club full of industrial stoners and abrasive music, as if that lawless, chaotic world is what lies on the other side of the threshold.
A detail that the show calls attention to is the idea of “black stars” as a recurring motif. In the tradition of the Hastur Mythos, it is always night in Carcosa, but the sky is the chromatic inverse of how it appears on Earth: a gray expanse dotted with black stars. That is, if you look up and see a gray sky dotted with black stars, you’re already in Carcosa and you’re never getting out. If this interpretation is correct, it has somewhat unsettling implications because black stars are everywhere in the show. In particular, background characters with black star tattoos regularly appear, including many side characters whose narrative function is only to answer a couple interview questions and who we may presume are innocent of any of the show’s grotesqueries. What I take from this is that the show uses black stars as a visual symbol to mark the sorts of people whose low social station (often through no fault of their own) dooms them to be chewed up, spit out, and forgotten. That is, the black stars are not means to mark the agents of Carcosa, but rather its citizens, the vast majority of which have come under Carcosa’s sway without any awareness of having done so, and gaining no power or advantage. Of course, one can both be for Carcosa and of it - the monstrous Reggie LeDoux, who speaks of the black stars out loud, is so marked (he carries other markings as well, in case the audience had even a glimmer of doubt that he’s one of the show’s monsters).
And, of course, in the final episode, Rust quite literally descends into a grim necropolis, and is told he is in Carcosa as he does so. We see the end-state of this banal force, a realm of the unhappily dead. We see a King In Yellow, not a character but an altar or effigy. There is talk of masks (a reference to the pallid mask worn by the King’s envoy, the Phantom of Truth, who famous and paradoxically wears no mask). I could keep going in this vein, but after a certain point, the Hastur Mythos is like pornography - you know it when you see it.
Importantly, Pizzolatto plays an extremely delicate game of always hinting that these forces have a supernatural element but never textually confirming it. Rust’s intuitions are often a little too good, but maybe that’s just a sign that his soul is stained by this same affliction as those he’s hunting. He has visions, but he also fried his brain doing drugs while undercover. The show’s monstrous final boss certainly adopts the trappings of having dark spiritual power, but he could just as easily be a megalomaniac who benefits from entirely terrestrial corruption and conspiracy.
This, in my opinion, is what elevates TDs1 above nearly all other mythos fiction in the 21st century: It dutifully and expertly pulls the levers of the genre but has the maturity to know that the story is much more unsettling if the only evil there really is in the world is the evil we bring about ourselves. A clear majority of mythos fiction I’ve encountered falls entirely apart in the final scenes, during which monsters that have been hinted at are at last revealed and the protagonist runs away. It’s unsatisfying to read in print and it’s almost always comical to watch on screen (although, in fairness, at least In The Mouth Of Madness (1994) appears to understand the joke). TDs1 ends on a different note: “Your contribution is a drop in the bucket. You’ll never get ‘em all, because they’re us.”
An Isosceles Triangle
As a rule, mythos fiction is badly limited by its disinterest in writing characters. The idea that Carcosa is a sort of abstract end of history, that entropy will win and that our fate is not damnation but the erasure of everything we ever loved, isn’t a story you can get people to sit and watch for 8 hours. Most audiences want stories about people. In addition to being very solidly a work of mythos fiction (despite not technically having any concretely supernatural elements), TDs1 works as well as it does on the backs of actors giving great performances supported by solid writing.
The narrative focus is, of course, on Rust and Marty, our top-billed detectives. What makes their dynamic interesting is that, beyond a robust respect for one another as detectives, these characters fundamentally dislike each other. The only thing that brings them together is the job broadly, and the case specifically. Put another way: Every social fiber of these two men grates, they are not compatible, and in any sensible world each would fling the other away into other orbits. It is always, and only, the season’s central case that drags them back together.
The easy way to write this is to write two characters who hate each other, and certainly, they come to blows at the lowest point in their relationship. However, for most of the show, their mutual dislike is not hatred. Instead, each man’s unhappiness with or disrespect toward the other’s behavior feels like a reflection of their own narrowness as people. Rust and Marty both start the show as seriously flawed people. While they grow and improve somewhat during their first 7 years together, they then not only regress but end up in worse shape by the time the narrative reaches its “present day” of 2012. When we finally see the two getting along better in 2012, it’s not because their damage is reduced: It’s because they each tolerate the other’s damage more gracefully. So in a show about entropy, we watch our two lead characters actually decay as people under the weight of their charge. The case that draws them together, and forces their alliance when they are actively bad for each other, is itself a nadir, a Carcosa, that eats away at them over time and kills those in its orbit slowly and silently. (Not for nothing, the show is full of references to mysterious degenerative disease, further enforcing this theme of entropy).
The third leg of this triangle is Maggie, who unfortunately ends up playing third fiddle to the show’s two cops, despite a really strong performance by Michelle Monaghan. Maggie can feel that things are falling apart in some unspecified way, but has little agency to combat these forces head on. This is not to say she lacks agency: The hand Pizzolatto deals her is that her special move is to walk away. It’s a shame the show leans so heavily on its murder mystery framework that it can’t find as much for her to do, and the way in which she is written isn’t going to win any Bechdel test awards. A better season of television would make her a full participant in the show’s fundamental character triangle, and fortunately, we have that in Season 3.
Nevertheless, she provides an important perspective because she draws out Rust’s humanity (which he keeps concealed out of a combination of arrogance and self-protection) while also calling the superficially more likable Marty out on his bullshit. Maggies is the sounding board that reveals the depth of the other characters, while having well-defined interiority of her own. Also, it’s almost certainly not an accident that between her escape from the edge of the vortex in 2002 and her reappearance in 2012, she’s the only one of the three characters who looks like she’s doing better. This establishes an important, if subtle, detail about the corrosive force that permeates the world of TDs1: It’s not entropy that weighs on everyone, or at least, not equally, but rather it weighs on those who reside in the lower reaches of the show’s world. Rust and Marty have been used up by the world because they have lived to long in Carcosa’s radioactive halo; when Maggie escapes, it seems as though her lot improves. This small touch, when combined with the decidedly different tenor of the show’s final conversation (pay no attention to the 10 behind the curtain), is the show’s one truly hopeful accent. We are invited to hope that Rust and Marty will each be able to make something of the time they have left, now that they are finally free of the case that wrecked their lives.
Conclusions
When I first saw it, TDs1 immediately shot into the very highest echelon of my “seasons of television” rankings. It has various problems, some serious, but executes really masterfully on its premise and accomplishes much more than it has any right to in its 8-episode runtime. While the writing relies more than it probably should on the genre conventions of mythos fiction and crime drama, its script is at once tight and inventive (especially in its nonlinearity). One of the reasons I feel comfortable reading into what could be throwaway lines is that almost every scene feels like it has no more dialog than it needs. If you want to figure out how to write fiction on the scale of many tens of thousands of words (be it for television or in novel form), this is a really rich case study to take apart and reassemble. It is absolutely worth you time to take any scene you dislike and figure out what it’s trying to accomplish, because even though it makes mistakes, this season does nothing by accident.