True Detective.

[Kevin D]

Spoilers, obviously.

 

 

 

http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/true-detective-creator-nic-pizzolatto-looks-back-on-season-1/1

 

Earlier tonight, "True Detective" concluded its first season — and, with it, the stories of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart. I reviewed the finale here, and as a bookend to a conversation we had before the season started, I spoke with the show's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, about the finale and the season as a whole (along with a vague but intriguing hint about season 2, which hasn't been officially ordered yet, but only because I suspect HBO is waiting until they've signed the actors they want before announcing). That's coming up just as soon as I strike you as more of a talker than a doer...

The structure of the series means you could have done anything with the ending, up to and including killing the two leads, because you get a clean slate with the next season. Why did you choose this particular way to end the story?  

Nic Pizzolatto: This is a story that began with its ending in mind, that Cohle would be articulating, without sentimentality or illusion, an actual kind of optimism. That line, you ask me, the light's winning, that was one of the key pieces of dialogue that existed at the very beginning of the series' conception. For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to kill one or both of these guys. I even had an idea where something more mysterious happened to them, where they vanished into the unknown and Gilbough and Papania had to clean up the mess and nobody knows what happens to them. Or it could have gone full blown supernatural. But I think both of those things would have been easy, and they would have denied the sort of realist questions the show had been asking all along. To retreat to the supernatural, or to take the easy dramatic route of killing a character in order to achieve an emotional response from the audience, I thought would have been a disservice to the story. What was more interesting to me is that both these men are left in a place of deliverance, a place where even Cohle might be able to acknowledge the possibility of grace in the world. Because one way both men were alike in their failures was that neither man could admit the possibility of grace. I don't mean that in a religious sense. Where we leave Cohle, this man hasn't made a 180 change or anything like that. He's moved maybe 5 degrees on the meter, but the optimistic metaphor he makes at the end, it's not sentimental; it's purely based on physics. Considering what these characters had been through, it seemed hard to me to work out a way where they both live and they both exit the show to live better lives beyond the boundaries of these eight episodes. Now they are going to go on and live forever beyond the margins of the show, and our sense, at least, is they haven't changed in any black to white way, but there is a sense that they have been delivered from the heart of darkness. They did not avert their eyes, whatever their failings as men. And that when they exit, they are in a different place.

About the epiphany Cohle has at the end, this is a show that has dealt an awful lot with the abuses that can sometimes come from organized religion, and half of it's been told from the point of view of a man who believes in no faith and is very eloquent and passionate in the way in which he describes the meaningless of our existence. 

Nic Pizzolatto: And yet he protests too much. I think he does. I would refrain from some of the questions about some of Cohle's psychology and beliefs. And this is a necessary part of the format, but it felt that chapters of a book are being reviewed before the whole book has been revealed. I don't think Cohle is ever lying. I just think he wants that ultimate nullity to be true in the way that a born again Christian might want the transubstantiation of Christ to be true, right? It's the kind of thing where if you know this, then you don't have to go around saying it all the time, do you?
 

 

You gave Cohle a lot of opportunities, especially in the first five episodes, to express a lot of his belief system. Reading much of the commentary on the show, there were some people who were really impressed by what Cohle had to say and some who were thinking the entire time that he's full of crap, and some people insisting the show thinks he's brilliant and others feeling that the show is well aware that he's full of crap. How did you want people to take all of the things Cohle was saying to us?   

Nic Pizzolatto: I don't want to restrict an audience by telling them that "this means this" and "this means this." My intentions are the inalterable definition of things. For people who thought Cohle's philosophy was simply hogwash, be aware that you're calling Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche hogwash. Just be aware of that. That is not, in fact, a college freshman stoned eating a pizza talking about life; that's Arthur Schopenhauer's thoughts on life. But I thought that was part of the tension within Cohle. It might not all fall into relief until you've watched all eight episodes, but yes, these things are eloquently stated, and they do make sense, and they are no more or less true than the story Preacher Theriot is telling you during the tent revival service. Somebody asked me, "Well, what does this all mean?" Obviously, as an artist, I hate questions like that, but I could tell they were asking for a governing theme that could encompass everything else that happened. And so I had to think about it. And to me, if there's one governing thing in "True Detective" that encompasses everything that is happening in "True Detective," and that the show is telling you — constantly, the show keeps telling you — is that everything is a story. Cohle tells you that who you think you are, your identity, is a story you tell yourself. He tells us that religion and philosophy are stories we tell ourselves. Cohle describes them as cathartic narratives, but in confession he's so good at getting confessions from suspects because he gives them room to create a cathartic narrative. Hart says an investigation is the act of trying to put together a story after the fact, and when he goes over his story in episode 5, you can tell that Hart used to tell himself one story and now he tells himself another story. The show was never concerned with the supernatural, but it was concerned with supernatural thought, and it was concerned with supernatural thinking to the degree that it was concerned with storytelling. So if there was one overarching theme to "True Detective," I would say it was that as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

I keep thinking back to the interview we did before the season, and the moment when I was asking you about comparisons to other serial killer shows, and you said that you couldn't care less about serial killers. How seriously were we ultimately meant to take the actual Dora Lange investigation, and how much of it was just a line to hang the character examination on? 

Nic Pizzolatto: I don't think it was an empty vehicle, is what I guess I would say there. I don't think it could have been just anything that these guys were working on. I think it's relevant that the person they're chasing is both the victim of an historical evil and the perpetrator of an historical evil. The killer in that way is a physical articulation of cultural aspects that have sat behind the scenes, even informing that polluted landscape that provides so much of the background. If you go from the idea of something being in its natural state and then being perverted, and that this particular villain, for lack of a better word, is a killer of women and children, and his methodology is intimately tied to a mythology of belief — I do think if you want to go back and watch 7 and 8, there's enough given in the fragments that everyone states, there's enough that you can actually piece together historically, how Sam Tuttle in the early '30s led to Errol Childress in the first decade of the new millennium. I would say it wasn't an empty vehicle at all. I think the killer, his methodology and his actual crimes were endemic, not only to our characters, but to the world we were dealing with. It wouldn't have worked to have a robbery that didn't get solved properly in 1995. There's almost a way that Cohle, Hart and Errol, these men are in some ways the creations of their fathers, if you pay attention to their backstories.

All of the things that, in the previous episode, Cohle was telling Marty that he had uncovered, and what we saw on the videotape, pointed to a larger group of men working on these things. But we get to the end, and it's just Errol left, along with his father in the shed. How many other people were involved in the specific things that Cohle and Hart were investigating?

Nic Pizzolatto: There's the men in the video, and there's about 10 of them. Then you can begin to look at that as if that cult began to disintegrate shortly afterwards, and then there were always revenants existing on a local level. If you track the name Childress, you realize Sheriff Childress was the sheriff when Marie Fontenot disappeared, an Officer Childress was attending to Guy Francis in 2002 when he committed suicide. The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have  a conspiracy. I think it would have rang false to have Hart and Cohle suddenly clean up 50 years of the culture history that led to Errol Childress, or to get all the men in that video. It's important to me, I think, that Cohle says, "We didn't get em all, Marty," and Marty says, "We ain't going to. This isn't that kind of world." This isn't the kind of world where you mop up everything. We discharged our duty, but of course there are levels and wheels and historical contexts to what happened that we'll never be able to touch. 
 

 

Early in the episode, we see Errol come into the big house, "North by Northwest" is playing and he starts doing a James Mason voice. Then he slips into a number of other accents. What was behind that? 

Nic Pizzolatto: That was part of his creation as a character. There was this idea that when he talks in his real voice, it's very slurred because of the scarring. My background for him was that he learned how to enunciate properly through watching all these old VCR movies. And that brings us back to the idea of storytelling, right? At one minute he can affect this Andy Griffith good ol' boy voice, the next he can sound like James Mason, and when he wants to use his real voice, he sounds like something wounded and damaged. And then when Cohle is in Carcosa, he sounds like something entirely different.

This has been the story of these two guys, and we get to know them incredibly well. None of the other characters really exist as anything but mirrors to reflect some aspect of Rust or Marty. How challenging is it to populate a world in which the only two characters who really matter are these two guys? 

Nic Pizzolatto: That was really challenging. That was one of the most challenging things. Had this been an ensemble, that would have made it much much easier. In an ensemble, you can always cut to someone else's story. You have at least half a dozen characters going through individual problems. But this was very much about tracking two personalities and two points of view. The significant change in the final scene is that a point of view has shifted. After we've been told via Hart that there's no such thing as absolute justice — that's a story we tell ourselves, the real guilty don't get punished. It was very hard. If someone were, I think, to read my prose, they would find it populated with rich female characters. My challenge was, if somebody only exists in relation to Cohle and Hart, so they're only going to get one or two lines, they need to become vivid and imply a history and dimensionality in one or two lines.

I don't know where you are in working on season 2, but has any of the reaction to this season informed what you're doing with the next? 

Nic Pizzolatto: It's informed exactly one thing. It's that I realize I need to keep being strange. Don't play the next one straight.

Can you tell me anything at all about season 2? 

Nic Pizzolatto: Okay. This is really early, but I'll tell you (it's about) hard women, bad men and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system.

Finally, you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways? 

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.

 

[Dr Nowt]

Miles behind on this, so only just watched Episode 3 and seen Eli giving a sermon.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Good interview that. I often find interviews with people talking about their work pretentious they want you to marvel at their talent, you can tell afterwards with many they add more meaning to it after the fact. He comes across like the themes that present themselves genuinely were intended from the begining and anything else people read into it well that's on them.

[Mendoza]

[Kevin D]

Good interview that. I often find interviews with people talking about their work pretentious they want you to marvel at their talent, you can tell afterwards with many they add more meaning to it after the fact. He comes across like the themes that present themselves genuinely were intended from the begining and anything else people read into it well that's on them.

I reckon he is pretentious, but I also think grand storytelling is inherently pretentious.

 

I've read a number of his interviews and, obviously, watched those videos and I'm always impressed by him. He's handled all the criticism deftly and articulated his vision for the show with real clarity. I didn't particularly like episode 6, but after hearing Pizzolatto talk about it, I softened my stance, as it came across as a natural evolution.

 

He is extremely talented and the real deal, in my opinion.

[Bobby Hundreds]

I reckon he is pretentious, but I also think grand storytelling is inherently pretentious.

I've read a number of his interviews and, obviously, watched those videos and I'm always impressed by him. He's handled all the criticism deftly and articulated his vision for the show with real clarity. I didn't particularly like episode 6, but after hearing Pizzolatto talk about it, I softened my stance, as it came across as a natural evolution.

He is extremely talented and the real deal, in my opinion.

But that's why I don't find him pretentious. He clearly had a defined idea of what he wanted to do and he achieved it. What I find pretentious are artists like Tracy emin who shit the bed and then tell you why its art and then if you give your opinion they take ownership of that too. Winging it and when they hear someone else's trumped up opinion they claim that was what they had in mind in the first place. I don't think story telling is inherently pretentious just some people are. Take richard Ashcroft he writes songs but listen to some interviews by him and you'd think he had god on speed dial and its a fucking privilege to be sharing this planet with him.

[Duff Man]

Could someone PM me a location for ep 5, cheers.

[The Golden Eel]

Started watching last night finally. Watched first two. Fuck me, that arse. I was gutted my missus waste in control of the remote and deleted the episode after watching or I'd have been "forgetting" to delete it

[Ted]

I'd like to state that the last twenty minutes of Episode 4 are legitimately the best twenty minutes of telly I've ever seen. I think.

 

If not the best, certainly the most ambitious. Absolutely incredbile stuff, from an incredible show.

[skend04]

I'd like to state that the last twenty minutes of Episode 4 are legitimately the best twenty minutes of telly I've ever seen. I think.

 

If not the best, certainly the most ambitious. Absolutely incredbile stuff, from an incredible show.

From a pure technical view one of the best tracking shots ever on any medium. T'was badass!

[stringvest]

Pictures do not do it justice: http://player.ooyala.com/iframe.html#pbid=79fab52488bf4a33ae0a73141928157f&ec=B1bHQ4azoKDjEntyirolV-eeCPO_3MS7&docUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mstarz.com%2Farticles%2F25224%2F20140123%2Falexandra-daddario-nude-true-detective-scene-woody-harrelson-goes-viral-watch-starlet-completely-naked-new-hbo-show-twitter-fans-offer-marriage-proposals.htm

 

She is absolutely fucking incredible. Up there with Amelia Clarke and Addison Timlin in the greatest TV nude scenes. CHEBS!

 

Oh, and the first two episodes were very good indeed.

 

I cannot rep, Woo, but I've just doffed my cap.  Jeepers creepers.  

[melons]

I finally got to the last episode last night, I've no idea how they could top that with a second series.
 
There was a few bits that I would have liked tied up but not having a clue with the NSFW link is now I'll not go on about it. 

 

Cracking show. 

[stringvest]

there was at least one end tied up within those tags Sherry.

[melons]

there was at least one end tied up within those tags Sherry.

 

 

Something has just gone right over my head and you're sat there laughing, aren't you? 

[Ted]

The ending wasn't what I was expecting at all, and I think it made me appreciate it more. Got a bit choked up when they were talking outside the hospital, if I'm honest.

[Reckoner]

http://www.couchtuner.eu/watch-true-detective-online/

 

served me well

[Kevin D]

Good read with spoilers. 

 

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Revisit True Detective one last time, armed with Dante and prepared to find heaven and hell.

In the middle of the journey of their lives, two men find themselves in a cane field, where the straight way is lost. One is prone to oracular statements; the other is dealing with the ramifications of his attraction to younger women. They travel to unexpected places, some spiraling deep underground, and learn just how much evil humanity can create and allow to fester. By the end, they come to a greater understanding of each other and the power of redemption.

This is not to say that Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy holds all the keys to understanding True Detective; for one, it wasn’t all that hard to understand in the end, and for another, the time for that sort of wild-eyed pronouncement was three long weeks ago. Rather, both the epic poem and the television show are ultimately about how we sin and how we get saved. Dante organized both his Inferno and Purgatorio by categories of sin, which seems redundant until you realize that it’s one of the most important aspects of the whole epic poem. Hell is for the unrepentant; Purgatory is for sinners who are willing to be redeemed by suffering. Within each, souls exist in circles and terraces specific to their most important crimes against humanity and God.

Initially, Rust and Marty’s primary sins are pride and lust, respectively, which are also Dante’s big two. (Wrath is up there as well.) While Rust doesn’t much acknowledge his shortcomings, Marty categorizes himself in 2012 as a sinner of inattention. It isn’t one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it underlies several of them; more important, his admission is the first step towards redemption.

For the unredeemable in both the poem and the show, the worst sins are those of treachery and betrayal:

Treachery Against Family

Treachery Against the State

Treachery Against God

While Dante’s entire medieval Catholic concept of sin hinges on individual free will, True Detective’s is a murkier, more complicated notion that “sort of pump into a much larger system,” as director Cary Fukunaga put it in a recent interview. People may “always have a choice,” as Rust says in the final episode, but those choices are shaped by structures that may be invisible to them. The bad men who keep other bad men from the door are part of those structures as well, and it isn’t always as simple as doing what’s right or virtuous. Reggie Ledoux deserved to have his head blown half off, even if it did complicate the case something awful, and Joel Theriot tried to do what was right regarding those pictures but may have just driven the Tuttles into further secrecy. While Dante has faith that the problem with human structures—the Church, Florentine politics, and families—can be addressed by purging them of their sinful elements, Rust and Marty are some of those sinful elements.

Unlike most other detectives in crime fiction, they redeem themselves not by solving the crime and making up for their previous shortcomings with loved ones by proxy (hi, Mikael Blomkvist!) but by their actions along the way. Both Marty and Rust have learned by increasingly painful experience that they cannot go it alone. In life and in detective work, they need one another, as partners and friends. Granted, it took them seventeen years to figure it out, but given that a medieval Spanish theologian once calculated the average stay in Purgatory to be a thousand to two thousand years, they aren’t doing so badly overall.

“…the one supported the other with his shoulder,” Purgatorio, Canto XIII, line 59

But as with Dante’s repentant sinners in Purgatory, there are sacrifices that must be made. Marty may be reconciled with his family, but Mr. Sawyer still dropped them off at his hospital door, and goddamn but that’s a big rock Maggie’s sporting there. (One last wedding ring shot! Dreadful shortage of dick references, though.) Rust has poured fifteen years of his life, what little sobriety he may have ever had, and nearly all of the blood in his body into this case, but his father and daughter are still dead. Despite all my snarking at the midpoint of the show, he has indeed reintegrated into domesticity, but only through a near-death experience. He hasn’t found God—this is a determinedly realistic show, despite all the occult hints that got the Internet going like Beth on bourbon at the Fox and Hound—but he has done something almost as unbelievable: remembered what it was to love. The potential for sappiness was vast, as even this unsentimental empiricist would ordinarily be more likely to interpret Rust’s epiphany as boring ol’ hypoxia. Nevertheless, I bought it because Rust did (and because McConaughey sold it so perfectly)

“As a cross-bow shot with too great a strain breaks the cord and bow and the shaft touches the mark with less force, so I broke down under that heavy charge, pouring forth tears and sighs, and my voice failed in its passage,” Purgatorio, Canto XXXI, lines 16-21

An essential part of Dante’s concept of salvation is that it can come through earthly love and passion, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning his muse Beatrice into a woman who exists solely to improve the life of a man, either as an artistic inspiration or as a heavenly travel guide. Plenty of critics complained about True Detective doing something similar with wives, daughters, and murder victims, but the finale provided an unexpected angle. Rust found not only his daughter Sophia in that warm place, but his father as well. Given all the show’s pointed criticisms of failed fatherhood and Rust’s own earlier comments about the two of them “not really liking each other,” the notion that his pop would be a source of reassurance and comfort was at least as much of a twist as, say, Audrey being the Yellow King.

In the end, both the Divine Comedy and True Detective are getting at the same basic truth, which is that the only way to combat the darkness within ourselves is to form connections with one another. It may not be as exciting as analyzing the depravity that human beings are capable of, which is why everyone reads the Inferno and hardly anyone gets through the Paradiso (well, that and medieval religious philosophy about virtue doesn’t age very well). It may not be the real reason why people pay for premium cable, either. But it’s true, and it’s been true for seven hundred years and more, and it’s at the core of some of humanity’s greatest art.

Oh, yeah, and the last word in each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy? “Stelle,” or “stars.”

 

[Rotpeter]

I honestly can't believe you've fallen for that pretentious garbage Kevin. First Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and now this. What next? True detective has the ass of Lopez, the boobs of Brooks and the beard of Alonso?

[Kevin D]

I honestly can't believe you've fallen for that pretentious garbage Kevin. First Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and now this. What next? True detective has the ass of Lopez, the boobs of Brooks and the beard of Alonso?

 

I don't understand, would you care to elaborate?

[Rotpeter]

I don't understand, would you care to elaborate?

The parallels between True Detective and The Divine Comedy are akin to those between Dante and Porridge.

 

No contrapasso. No just punishment of sin. No Virgil. No abandanon hope all ye ... etc.

 

Just like there is no "god is dead for we have killed him". No Übermensch. No beyond good and evil.

 

It's just lame marketing schtick offering up the illusion of non-existent depth and profundity.

 

I say.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Watched the first two episodes last night and really enjoyed it, gonna watch another two in a moment.

 

McConaughy used to be a complete joke of an actor, but he's been pretty fucking incredible in the last few things I've seen him in. Stealing the show so far.

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(Along with that birds knockers in episode two)

[Carvalho Diablo]

Just finished the entire series, and must say I absolutely loved it, even though

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I sussed The Yellow King in the early episode where Rust talks to him at the old school.

However, as a huge fan of Banshee, my favourite part of all was the part where Proctor's niece was on the phone with Marty,

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asking him to fuck her is the ass.

[Carvalho Diablo]

However, as a huge fan of Banshee, my favourite part of all was the part where Proctor's niece was on the phone with Marty,

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asking him to fuck her is the ass.

 

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"Aye, alright love, I'll just finish this bag of crisps and I'll be right with yer."

 

Women eh ?

[nando1000]

Just finished the series. Definitely one of the best ever, not sure how a second season with different actors would go though. Could be risky to fuck  with a classic

[Scott_M]

Brilliant ending. Ace show.