"I can see your soul in the edges of your eyes. It's corrosive. Like acid."
"In eternity where there is no time, nothing can grow, nothing can become, nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill."
EPISODE 5: "The Secret Fate of All Life"
Marty is starting to talk like Rust, and Rust is starting to talk like Reggie Ledoux. Rust gives the two present-day cops the same "time is a flat circle" bit that Reggie gave him shortly before Marty put a bullet in his brain. That the show wants you to see the connection there is pretty obvious. But Marty also references something in this episode that Rust said previously. In one of Rust and Marty's increasingly beloved car discussions, Marty is trying to rationalize the fact that he's cheating on his wife by asking Rust if he thinks a man can love two women at once. Rust's response is, "I don't think that man can love, at least not the way that he means. The inadequacies of reality always set in." In this episode, when asked what happened to the doctor who Rust was in a brief relationship with, Marty's reply is, "Same thing that always happens between a man and a woman: reality." "The Secret Fate of All Life" is an episode of transition. We're transitioning from perpetually bouncing back between 1995 and present day into a new act that takes place in 2002, and meanwhile the characters that we think we know are undergoing their own transitions.
The first part of the episode makes plain a lot of things that we'd had bits and pieces of without having the complete picture to this point. Rust and Marty did find Reggie Ledoux at his backwoods compound, he had other people held captive there, he sure as hell seemed like he's enough into the occult ("I see you in my dreams! You're in Carcosa now!") to be the killer, and they shot him dead. What's also made plain after having been heavily implied is that Rust and Marty have not been telling the complete truth to their interrogators whatsoever. Rust had already deftly sidestepped explaining anything about joining a biker gang to do steal a drug stash in the last episode, and now we know that there was not a chaotic life or death shootout with "high velocity" rifles that split trees in half, but rather Marty killed Reggie while he was cuffed having seen that he had children captive, one of which was already dead. We know that Rust and Marty have coordinated their stories together pretty well, because they're treated as hero cops by the entire force after the fact, and its only in the present day timeline that their story is really starting to come into question by the two stoic internal affairs guys and their digital camera, and their entire focus is on Rust.
That brings us to the other big reveal of the episode that you could also see coming ahead of time but that still hits hard when it happens: The whole reason for this massive inquiry 17 years after the fact, is that the internal affairs cops suspect Rust of murder. My best guess was that he'd be suspected of a new crime as a copycat killer,--a "you like with dogs, you get fleas" sort of thing--but they suspect him as being the killer from the beginning, and having orchestrated the case to move in a certain direction. Knowing this, Rust doesn't really do himself any favors under questioning. He's already established his nearly nihilist perspective on life, and in this episode, when asks about his interrogation technique, he tells the cops that, "Look, everybody knows that there's something wrong with 'em. They just don't know what it is. Everybody wants confession." In the 2002 setting we establish that this theory that Reggie Ledoux is not the killer is not a new one, and a drug addict that Rust is pressing for a double murder confession sets Rust off when he mentions that he knows about "the Yellow King."
But Rust being the real killer seems far too clear-cut for a show that's already established and then cast doubt on one seemingly perfect-fitting suspect, and lest we focus too much on him, we get a bunch of new development with Marty as well. Maggie eventually takes Marty back, and we get a quick snapshot of Marty trying to figure out why their now teenage daughter Audrey is starting to dress in a vaguely goth get-up, and then get a longer scene later where she's caught having sex in a car with two legally adult men. Maybe this could just be chalked up to teenage rebellion against her controlling, alpha-male father, but we've already seen her making sexualized drawings as a much younger girl, and surely that has a relevance that has yet to be revealed. Is Audrey's story just a mechanism to weigh on Marty's character, or does it more directly tie into the larger story in ways that we don't understand yet?
We've seen imagines of spirals or circles throughout "True Detective," and in this episode circles, both actual and symbolic are as prominent as they've ever been. Reggie tells Rust, and us, that "time is a flat circle." And while Rust plays it off as nothing at the time and tells him to shut the fuck up, it clearly stuck with him to the point where he now has a half-baked theory involving higher dimensions about how we're doomed to live the same lives over and over again but can't remember them. Marty is getting his life back together with Maggie after getting sober, but he wonders privately if he's really changed, and thus that maybe the same cycle of martial strife might perpetuate itself in a circle. Rust circles back to where he and Marty started, the crime scene underneath the tree, looks into a literal circle made of branches there, and then eventually circles back to the abandoned school that seemed like a dead end to find a new clue in the form of another one of those wooden arts-and-crafts projects. In the first four episodes, we've jumped around the perimeter of a circle formed by the 1995 and present day timelines, and now we seem to be spiraling towards some key, not yet understood, point in the center around 2002. And since Marty is now talking like Rust and Rust is now talking like Reggie, maybe everything is also spiraling downwards, towards some dark fate. The secret fate of all life.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
True Detective: Season 1, Episode 4
"You know the detective's curse? Solution was right under my nose, but I was paying attention to the wrong clues?"
EPISODE 4: "Who Goes There"
I'm pretty much a sucker for anything related to detective fiction, and as such I've been all over "True Detective" since it started in January. Put together a checklist of tropes for the genre, and you can check off most of them in any given episode: Mismatched partners trying to work a case together, a detective becoming obsessed with a case and getting into too deep, a growing sense of fatalism. All of that stuff goes back to Raymond Chandler, and earlier, and all of that is stuff that I absolutely eat up.
It seems nearly universally agreed upon that Woody Harrelson's performance in "True Detective" is great, that Matthew McConaughey's performance is a just-give-him-all-of-the-awards-now level of great, and that the show is smartly written and beautifully shot. Still, I think that three episodes in, somebody less high over heels for noir and detective fiction than somebody like me could plausibly put together an argument that, as well executed as the show may be, that it doesn't offer enough new to be considered a truly great show. Martin Hart's alpha male machismo is a lot like something that's been done in a bunch of different Scorsese movies, the occult-themed murder mystery is stuff we've seen in movies like Seven, and Rust Cohle's descent from narc officer to substance abuser has been done before, if maybe not quite like this. Again, for me, I'll gladly take a thousand more entries into this genre, but I wouldn't begrudge someone asking what's in "True Detective" that's all that groundbreaking, three episodes in. After episode four, I think any sort of skepticism about how great the show is, has to go out the window.
The first three "Detective" episodes are very conversational, and all of the tension is anticipatory. We know that Cohle and Hart wouldn't be brought in 17 years later to talk about the case open-and-shut had it been solved without incident, but we don't know exactly how and when everything is going to go wrong yet. "Who Goes There," raises the immediate stakes in a way that we haven't seen at any point yet. For the first time, Martin and Rust have a solid lead to investigate in the form of the meth-cooking Reggie Ledoux, and Rust's plan to get to him involves going through the biker gang that he cooks for exclusively. Rust knows them from his narc team days, and figures that he can talk their leader, the bug-eyed Ginger, into setting up a meeting with Reggie. By the time Rust is stealing coke from the police evidence locker and making fake needle tracks on his harm, you're pretty sure that this is a bad idea. By the time Ginger is daring Rust to man up and help them rob drug dealers in the projects, you're wondering how bad of an idea this is going to be.
And yet, the show pretty brilliantly keeps you guessing as to exactly what's going to be the catalyst for everything unraveling. Is Marty going to blow their cover when he lamely tries to circumvent the bouncer at the biker bar while looking about as out of place as possible? Is Ginger going to poke holes in Rust's account of where he's been since they last saw each other? Is Rust going to out himself by explaining how they have to act more cop-like if their plan to pose as cops is going to work? Or is he going to act too cop-like as he does a sweep of every room of the house with mechanical precision while the bikers clear out the safe? You could almost be fooled into thinking that Rust is somehow going to pull this off without a hitch, but the pulsing, guttural music, and the drowned out color scheme keeps a sick feeling in your stomach.
Of course, it all goes to hell, as the bikers lose their nerve and start shooting once the guys standing outside the house figure out that they're not cops and start breaking windows. The final scene is an uninterrupted six minute long shot that follows Rust as he fights off the local gang-bangers who have no reason to believe that he's not still with the Iron Crusaders, while keeping Ginger subdued, while dodging still the cops, and eventually making into Marty's sedan. All the while, the scene still keeping the larger gunfight going in the background, and there's a brief pan into the room of a nearby house where more guys are loading guns to show that things are continuing to escalate. The only thing I've ever seen that I think comes anywhere close to this is the opening shot of Touch of Evil, which is amazing for its time, but this scene is on an entirely different level of tension and coordination. At times, it looks like gameplay footage of some weird version of Metal Gear Solid, as Rust crouches his way around walls and through bushes to stay out of sight of every next person new on the scene, except these are real people always entering the shot at exactly the right place at the right time.
If anyone's still wondering, "What does 'True Detective' have to offer me that's new if I don't really care about another murder mystery or another world-weary noir protagonist?", the climactic scene in "Who Goes There" is their answer. I've never seen a scene quite like that in either a TV show or in a movie, and I'm now more hyped for the remaining episodes of this show than I already was. See you next week.
--
Here's the opening shot of Touch of Evil:
EPISODE 4: "Who Goes There"
I'm pretty much a sucker for anything related to detective fiction, and as such I've been all over "True Detective" since it started in January. Put together a checklist of tropes for the genre, and you can check off most of them in any given episode: Mismatched partners trying to work a case together, a detective becoming obsessed with a case and getting into too deep, a growing sense of fatalism. All of that stuff goes back to Raymond Chandler, and earlier, and all of that is stuff that I absolutely eat up.
It seems nearly universally agreed upon that Woody Harrelson's performance in "True Detective" is great, that Matthew McConaughey's performance is a just-give-him-all-of-the-awards-now level of great, and that the show is smartly written and beautifully shot. Still, I think that three episodes in, somebody less high over heels for noir and detective fiction than somebody like me could plausibly put together an argument that, as well executed as the show may be, that it doesn't offer enough new to be considered a truly great show. Martin Hart's alpha male machismo is a lot like something that's been done in a bunch of different Scorsese movies, the occult-themed murder mystery is stuff we've seen in movies like Seven, and Rust Cohle's descent from narc officer to substance abuser has been done before, if maybe not quite like this. Again, for me, I'll gladly take a thousand more entries into this genre, but I wouldn't begrudge someone asking what's in "True Detective" that's all that groundbreaking, three episodes in. After episode four, I think any sort of skepticism about how great the show is, has to go out the window.
The first three "Detective" episodes are very conversational, and all of the tension is anticipatory. We know that Cohle and Hart wouldn't be brought in 17 years later to talk about the case open-and-shut had it been solved without incident, but we don't know exactly how and when everything is going to go wrong yet. "Who Goes There," raises the immediate stakes in a way that we haven't seen at any point yet. For the first time, Martin and Rust have a solid lead to investigate in the form of the meth-cooking Reggie Ledoux, and Rust's plan to get to him involves going through the biker gang that he cooks for exclusively. Rust knows them from his narc team days, and figures that he can talk their leader, the bug-eyed Ginger, into setting up a meeting with Reggie. By the time Rust is stealing coke from the police evidence locker and making fake needle tracks on his harm, you're pretty sure that this is a bad idea. By the time Ginger is daring Rust to man up and help them rob drug dealers in the projects, you're wondering how bad of an idea this is going to be.
And yet, the show pretty brilliantly keeps you guessing as to exactly what's going to be the catalyst for everything unraveling. Is Marty going to blow their cover when he lamely tries to circumvent the bouncer at the biker bar while looking about as out of place as possible? Is Ginger going to poke holes in Rust's account of where he's been since they last saw each other? Is Rust going to out himself by explaining how they have to act more cop-like if their plan to pose as cops is going to work? Or is he going to act too cop-like as he does a sweep of every room of the house with mechanical precision while the bikers clear out the safe? You could almost be fooled into thinking that Rust is somehow going to pull this off without a hitch, but the pulsing, guttural music, and the drowned out color scheme keeps a sick feeling in your stomach.
Of course, it all goes to hell, as the bikers lose their nerve and start shooting once the guys standing outside the house figure out that they're not cops and start breaking windows. The final scene is an uninterrupted six minute long shot that follows Rust as he fights off the local gang-bangers who have no reason to believe that he's not still with the Iron Crusaders, while keeping Ginger subdued, while dodging still the cops, and eventually making into Marty's sedan. All the while, the scene still keeping the larger gunfight going in the background, and there's a brief pan into the room of a nearby house where more guys are loading guns to show that things are continuing to escalate. The only thing I've ever seen that I think comes anywhere close to this is the opening shot of Touch of Evil, which is amazing for its time, but this scene is on an entirely different level of tension and coordination. At times, it looks like gameplay footage of some weird version of Metal Gear Solid, as Rust crouches his way around walls and through bushes to stay out of sight of every next person new on the scene, except these are real people always entering the shot at exactly the right place at the right time.
If anyone's still wondering, "What does 'True Detective' have to offer me that's new if I don't really care about another murder mystery or another world-weary noir protagonist?", the climactic scene in "Who Goes There" is their answer. I've never seen a scene quite like that in either a TV show or in a movie, and I'm now more hyped for the remaining episodes of this show than I already was. See you next week.
--
Here's the opening shot of Touch of Evil:
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