Unabridged Thoughts: True Detective, Season Two
Continuing my meandering thread on Season One (see also my subsequent thoughts on Season Three), we pick up just one year later, in 2015. Much has changed for showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, who has shot from the margins of television writing into the limelight, at the helm of a show that many consider a new industry benchmark. However, while expectations and scrutiny are now high, one person doing all the writing certainly isn’t going to be any easier. Furthermore, Pizzolatto has lost an important creative partner. Cary Joji Fukanaga, who directed all eight episodes of the first season (and who almost certainly deserves a lot of the credit for the visual and tonal consistency of that season’s episodes, as well as its strong, nuanced performances), has moved on to greener pastures. Under pressure from HBO to turn around a second season to be released a mere 15 months after the finale of the first season, Pizzolatto will ultimately compromise on both of these unusual qualities from Season One. Once the chips are down, Pizzolatto will share writing credit with Scott Lasser, and the season’s eight episodes will employ six different directors.
Viewed coldly from well into its future, we can point to various places this locomotive might have jumped the tracks, causing the season’s awkward pileup of freight cars. It’s impossible to talk about Season Two without constant comparison to Season One, which is unfair to its many new faces. The resulting season of television probably never had a chance of catching lightning in a bottle a second time, but living in the prior shadow’s season tends to obscure it as a work in its own right. So what, exactly, is this season all about?
Forget It, Antigone. It’s Vinci.
As noted in the previous review, each season of True Detective belongs to a different genre, mining a different vein of cultural tropes. The show’s tendency to appropriate, to remix, and to riff on genre tropes was a strength in Season One because mythos fiction gives such strategies pride of place - they are expected, even required, of their genre staples. Season Two, by contrast, is very decidedly not mythos fiction. Instead, it is unambiguously a neo-noir.
Noir is a strange genre, an insect trapped in amber. By most metrics, it consists only of films between 1940 and 1960, drawing inspiration from short stories and novels that begin being published in the prohibition era. Since most people agree that boundary between film noir and neo-noir lies somewhere in the 1960s, neo-noir has now been around much longer than film noir ever was. Because of its constant harkening to a two-decade window of time that ended over 60 years ago, neo-noir has become a genre in tension, needing at once to be reinvented while also recycling a fairly small pool of narrative conceits. It’s precisely because these footpaths have been worn bare by fellow travelers over many decades that films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and The Big Lebowski (1998) can perfectly recreate the narrative structure of a noir conspiracy, even as they turn the genre on its head for comedic effect.
Neo-noir stories, as a rule of thumb, are characterized by three qualities: (1) an oppressive world of undemocratic hierarchies and moral ambiguities, (2) dubious or compromised protagonists who the reader is not meant to identify with fully, and (3) systemic injustices and perversities acting as the true antagonists of the narrative, more so than individual villains with meaningful agency. Given these qualities, it’s not hard to map a scheme for translating between mythos fiction and neo-noir: Both have an element of horror at threats that are “too big” for heroism to overcome, and both posit a kind of corrosive darkness that tarnishes those who come into contact with it, even those with respectable values.
This mapping also helps to explain how neo-noir stories tend, as a rule, to reflect conservative (if not reactionary) values. This runs deeper than merely pointing out that any genre living in its own past will appeal to a more conservative crowd - neo-noir usually takes as a foundational premise that the rigid structure of society, however unpleasant it may be, is also natural and unavoidable. It’s a genre that tends to root for the cops even as it recognizes that the cops are just as corrupt as everyone else, because it considers a chain of boots standing on necks to be preferable to anarchy. It is a genre that does not meaningfully distinguish between justice and violence because it presumes that the rule of law and due process are myths for rubes. It’s a genre that delights in subverting gender roles only as a spicy seasoning atop a heaping serving of heteronormativity; as such, it is also typically obsessed with sex and ‘sexual deviancy’ from a prudishly anti-sex perspective.
In its heart of heart, Season Two dreams that it might achieve the cultural caché of Chinatown (1974), a movie directed by a monster that is so deeply cynical about civic corruption that it leans into much more visceral shock value to land its punches. That said, Season Two owes much more of its structure to L.A. Confidential (1997), a masterfully made movie based on a novel written by a conservative asshole.
L.A. Confidential performs several magic tricks that, in my opinion, make it the single best neo-noir film of the last 60 years. It tells a story with three POV protagonists, all of whom act independently for long stretches of the narrative and who are often in direct conflict with one another. While doing so, it provides the clear outline of a criminal conspiracy that ties together a half-dozen seemingly disparate threads. These first two qualities are present in the novel as well, and is par for the course for the genre. What elevates the movie adaptation above its peers is that it does all this in less than 140 minutes. The pace is brisk; the film never drags its feet or leaves the audience confused about anyone’s motivations. To accomplish this, director Curtis Hanson tells the story without any wasted scenes or frivolous dialogue. His cowriter on the screenplay, Brian Helgeland, recalls that they had to “remove every scene from the book that didn’t have the three main cops in it, and then to work from those scenes out.” The script for this 138 minute movie took two years to write, and was redrafted at least seven times.
Which brings us back, finally, to True Detective, Season Two (hereafter, TDs2). Like most neo-noir stories, the characters investigate a mystery that quickly reveals itself to be a quagmire. Themes of civic corruption on an enormous scale are revealed, intertwined with blackmail plots and sexual exploitation. Like most such stories, the protagonists enter our story on the back foot to some degree, weary participants in a corrupt world who are each limping along trying to make their way. And like most such stories, all who grapple with these corrupt systems have the scales fall from their eyes, but come away tarnished and diminished in the process.
Tracing A Star On The Yarnwall
I judge it likely that, following the praise Pizzolatto received for Season One’s inventive non-linear storytelling, he felt that the show’s “brand” required him to continue to push narrative envelopes. That said, Season One’s zigzagging over a 22 year span was part and parcel with its notion of events as seen from outside of time, of time being a ‘flat circle.’ Neo-noir is poorly served by such a structure, as audience needs to keep careful track of each clue as it is uncovered, to avoid getting lost in the plot. For all its timeless and sprawling darkness, the conspiracy in Season One was vague and left mostly in the shadows. To tell a neo-noir mystery is to bring everything into the light, so TDs2 only has time for a flashback or two, relying almost exclusively on characters telling stories to one another to uncover the past.
Instead, Pizzolatto seems to have chosen to leapfrog Hanson’s accomplishment and go from telling a story with three protagonists to telling one with five(ish). Perhaps his attitude was that TDs2 had 8 hours and change to tell a story, so surely it could handle five characters if L.A. Confidential could handle three. In retrospect, this seems to have been overly ambitious.
Let’s meet the five unlucky arms of our black star. We have Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), a derelict cop whose self-loathing only seems to embolden how crooked he is, and who surely would not still be alive were it not for his son, the only person left in his emotional world. We have Antigone Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), a self-righteous and stonefaced cop made entirely of emotional armor and fighting knives. We have Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a retired soldier of fortune in miserable denial about his sexuality and struggling to make his way in a civilian world. We have Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), a career criminal who, at the start of the season, is looking to buy his way into legitimate land-owning wealth. And, finally, the fifth wheel on our Landrover, we have Jordan Semyon (Kelly Reilly), Frank’s wife and partner in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Credit where it’s due: These actors do what they can with the writing and direction they are being given. Woodrugh is believably portrayed as a frustrated stoic whose emotional insight is left stunted by a trouble childhood and the horrors of war, but Kitsch is never really given the opportunity to show us anything else. He has moments of vulnerability in which his guard comes down, we are told, but they occur off camera because TDs2 is (in typical fashion for the genre) as uncomfortable with sexual intimacy as it is obsessed with sexual deviancy. Reilly also gives a strong performance, portraying a women of modest origins who has had to survive in a world of criminals. Nevertheless, the maternal-yet-vampish Mrs. Semyon is the short leg on the TDs2 polygon, being defined only in relation to Frank, to whom she is entirely loyal despite being insightful enough to call him on his bullshit. Structurally, her function is mostly to serve as Frank’s interlocutor, the mirror who shows him his true face, and this squanders a lot of the character’s potential. The bulk of the dramatic opportunities are left to rest of the actors.
Of these, Farrell’s performance as Velcoro covers the widest range of mental and emotional states. At his emotional bottom, Velcoro’s moral and emotional weakness is genuinely pitiful, a stark contrast to the beatific state of dereliction in which we find Rust Cohle during TDs1’s 2012. In a show full of characters we are encouraged to see as human garbage, Velcoro is one of the few characters who knows that he is garbage, without any doubt. What limits Velcoro’s appeal is that his immense self-pity is not an insight we see him earn - he knows what he is at the start of the show, and does not meaningfully improve as a person. Instead, he simply finds himself drifting, quite by accident, into the orbit of slightly less terrible people, and finds himself compelled to do better only after the world conspires, beyond his control, to leave him no other avenues.
Bezzerides has a more graceful arc. She starts the show rigid and unlikeable, but also loyal and principled. Gradually, the extremity of her circumstances helps her to open up a bit to a small subset of people, and she remains the moral center of the investigation throughout the season. That said, it’s a testament to how deeply gendered the season is that its male leads are all poster children of self-destructive toxic masculinity who rely on its female leads for moral wisdom. It’s frustrating that the narrative gives Bezzerides so many opportunities to do the right thing, and then either punishes her for missing that opportunity (maybe don’t be a jerk to your sister) or punishes her for actually taking such risks (how stupid of you to try to find a missing person). It’s not that these outcomes, individually, are inconsistent or inappropriate, but that collectively they reaffirm that this is a world in which you shouldn’t try, you should just escape.
Which brings us to Frank Semyon, the nucleus of the show’s identity crisis. TDs2 marks a turning point in Vince Vaughn’s career: Almost all of his roles before it are comedic, and almost all his roles after it are dramatic (with a heavy emphasis on neo-noir specifically). Pizzolatto writes Frank as a restless intellectual in a knee-breaker’s world, a man who’s all nerves but never nervous, with a GRE vocabulary and careful enunciation but a movie mobster’s understanding of grammar. He’s Boyd Crowder cosplaying as Bill the Butcher. Vaughn is given a lot of screen time, partly because showing what the “detective” role looks like on the criminal side of the table offers new storytelling opportunities, and partly because Frank is the only leading role who is verbose by nature. Without the “interview” conceit that served TDs1 so well, characters who are naturally reserved have much less motivation to convey exposition, so most of the season’s philosophizing is done by Frank. Sadly, these proclamations includes some the season’s worst writing. So while I must admit that I felt Vaughn exceeded my expectations and surprised me with his dramatic range, I also regularly rolled my eyes at Pizzolatto for the words he was putting in Frank’s mouth.
Lately I’m Not Feeling Like Myself
The overwhelming themes of TDs2 is counterfeits. While the events of the story take place up and down California, the locality of central interest is the fiction city of Vinci, a breakaway from Los Angeles County that consists of sprawling industrial zones with almost no legal residents. Vinci is a clear stand-in for Vernon, California, continuing Pizzolatto’s habit of stitching narrative quilts from existing materials. With fewer than 100 registered residents and a cartoonishly corrupt civil structure, Vinci is a counterfeit city, and where better than this Potemkin village in which to tell our tale?
TDs2 is marked by a dramatic shift in its use of high-altitude b-roll. Season One, as I noted in my previous review, seemed to make consistent use of the imagery of oil refineries as unsettling alien structures seen from afar amid the green of the Gulf coast. In TDs2, by contrast, our transition footage brings us into the belly of the beast with constant and disorienting footage of endless industrial zones and sterile highway cloverleafs, filmed from lower altitudes. As the story rapidly flips between its many, many points of view, the use of aerial transition shots feels more than oppressive - it feels excessive and disorienting.
Populating our city-that-is-not-city are our protagonists, all of whom are in one way or another fake. Velcoro seems to be a cop, but is actually just a gopher and a thug for an array of corrupt bosses. He wants desperately to be a good father, but he simply isn’t, and even the fact of his fatherhood is undermined by suspicion that his son was instead fathered by a rapist. Woodrugh seems to be a war hero but is actually just a self-hating queer (self-derogatory) who is so deeply wedded to his caricature of masculinity that this is enough to be destroying him from the inside. It is also implied that Woodrugh is not a ‘real’ veteran because he committed crimes against humanity as a mercenary, while working for a contractor who is is clear a stand-in for Constellis née Academi née Xe Services née Blackwater, but the season seems indifferent to implications and instead is really preoccupied by how sexually conflicted Woodrugh feels. The Semyons appear to be an up-and-coming power couple connecting the rich and powerful, but they’re actually just a gangster and his moll who are teetering on the edge of falling back to their prior station. As the season progresses and they are downgraded back to mobster-and-missus-mobster, they live in the shadow of their own modest roots and wield power less to assure a bright future than to prevent a return to poverty. It is also heavily implied that Jordan will be unable to have children despite wanting to be a mother. Finally, while Bezzerides seems to be a no-nonsense cop made of iron and vinegar, she is actually just a cult survivor who has never been able to stem the outpouring of rage from the traumas of her past.
I use “actually just” in each of the above descriptions to emphasize that the show frames all of these characters as diminished by their circumstances, while also being confined by their beliefs about themselves. If (calling back to Season One) Carcosa is a pernicious state of mind, the hollowing out of a person by the dark cruelty of the world until what’s left seems like barely a person at all, then all of our leads begin TDs2 squarely in Carcosa and cannot yet imagine any other way to live. A few will shake off the restraints of their self-concepts by the end of the season, but most won’t.
Like any neo-noir worth its salt, these characters are drawn together by a string of inquiries that ultimately weave together into a tapestry of crime, sex, corruption, and degradation. Many storytelling tropes are deployed in the weaving, but because these tropes have been rehashed for decades, few of them are surprising. W. Earl Brown plays a supporting role as a cop even more derelict and corrupt than Velcoro, a blurry admixture of Dick Stensland and Sid Hudgens from L.A. Confidential. We can immediately recognize the overall shape of the high-speed rail scheme that the Semyons are involved because we remember Judge Doom’s over-the-top monologuing about freeways. We intuit that the death of wealthy pervert Ben Caspere must somehow relate to blackmail because he’s a pervert and because we vaguely remember that Nic Cage was in 8mm (1999). The story is twisty, but the twists don’t usually feel surprising; those that do feel surprising don’t feel terribly meaningful.
This aesthetic of counterfeits is reinforced through a lot of flourishes in the first half of the season. Characters opine on Bezzerides’ e-cigarette in a way that suggests Pizzolatto does not consider it to be “real” (we will see her smoking “real” cigarettes by the end of the season). Cosmetic surgery, shell companies, police task forces working out of warehouses instead of offices, undocumented workers serving as a shadow off-the-books work force, even non-lethal shotgun rounds, everything is a half-assed facsimile and everybody knows it.
Probably the season’s worst sin is that in a world of hollow people, the characters seem wholly unclear on the singular value of a human life. Over the course of the season, a lot of people die, and the lead casts’ reaction to those deaths is wildly inconsistent. Faced with heaps of evidence about a conspiracy with enormous scope and on the run because of serious charges, Bezzerides cannot let go of the notion that she, Velcoro, and Woodrugh need to figure out who murdered Ben Caspere, as well as another couple who died in 1992. Those deaths are somehow morally essential to Our Heroes, even as their prospects get winnowed down. At the same time, heaps of extrajudicial killing takes place throughout the show. Frank, for example, clearly shook off any guilt about ending life a long time ago, and only ever seems to undertake in “detecting” anything in service of money, revenge, or both. Despite being the season’s most enthusiastic mouthpiece, it’s hard to say what Frank actually believes in beyond his loyalty to his wife. Velcoro is similarly untroubled by the lives he ends in the season finale, never really graduating from being an attack dog who relies on those around him for direction.
We are encouraged by the show to see almost everyone in the show as an NPC, another piece of the backdrop even less real that the show’s barely-human leads. Ultimately, the main vehicle by which the script can humanize those on screen is their suffering and their vulnerability, and because of that, all the harm that is meted out to and by the rest of the supporting cast cannot afford to show comparable suffering. For a season that depicts a lot of violence, it’s wild that almost every death that occurs on screen involves someone dropping like a marionette with cut strings. Antagonists who die almost always flop like rag dolls; most hardly even see their ends coming. Characters who “die badly” do so off screen, lest we form any sympathies for them. I see this as a fundamental misunderstanding on the season’s part about pain. Only pain, the season seems to say, makes our leads human, makes them real, and (as Velcoro quips) “pain is inexhaustible.” By that same token, the writers are so stingy with any other depictions of suffering that almost every sin we see on screen feels hollow, as devoid of moral weight as tipping over a glass.
Conclusions
As noted above, neo-noir tends to be a conservative genre. It presupposes hierarchies of power, is dismissive of civic reform, and is suspicious of social change. Films and shows that lean into those kinds of attitudes tend to be populated with miserable bastards who “get the job done” by torturing other people who we are encouraged to see as subhuman. America’s cultural low point for television of this kind is, of course 24 (2001-2010, 2014), a show Jon Bois describes as “a quasi-apocalyptic nightmare that reduced America to a cathedral of death worship,” but there are many other less extreme examples.
TDs2 is True Detective as its meanest, its most emotionally numb, and its most prudish. Its characters step into frame with an impossible balance sheet and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most are unable to break even by the end. Despite this (and I recognize that I’ve said many unkind things about this season of television), it is still well-made, well-cast, and well-performed. Behind this hollowed and stretched Xerox of better, shorter films is the silhouette of something more nuanced, more interesting, and more inventive than how this season turned out. Many scenes and sideplots could have been cut, and that time could have been used to give underutilized characters more agency. Indulgent plot elements “ripped from the headlines” could have morphed into something less derivative and more thematically coherent.
In other words, this isn’t a hollowed out shell of a neo-noir. It’s not True Detective as a show diminished; it’s True Detective as a show unfinished. Given the number of lead characters, the needless convolution of the conspiracy, and the need for coherent themes by which to understand our leads, this could have been a season of television as good as (but decidedly different from) Season One, if only Pizzolatto and HBO had taken years more time to write and rewrite it. Leave this one in the kiln a while longer, there are still impurities left to burn out.
I am pleased to report that this is precisely the lesson they appear to have learned, because they took their time with Season Three, and Season Three is every bit as good as Season Two ought to have been. I look forward to explaining why.