True Detective on HBO was one of the most awesome television
projects I’ve ever scene. It stars Matthew McConaughey
as Det. Rustin Cohle and Woody Harrelson as Det. Marty Hart. Some episodes are
stronger than others. But all of the writing is strong by former UNC ChapelHill professor and novelist Nic Pizzolatto. I want to take a look at my favorite,
including the extra deleted scene from my DVD copy.
The first thing that I could possibly say is that the actor
in the second scene of Episode
3: The Locked Room, Shea
Whigham, nails the part of the independent evangelical minister. Having
heard all too many of these people speak, I can assure you his speech, cadence,
and movements are spot on. There is a difference in the content, however. Some
parts fit perfectly with traditional evangelical doctrine, other parts are
lock-sync with the show’s theme and particularly with Cohle’s (McConaughey’s)
references. I think it’s probably one of the best sermons I have ever heard,
what with it’s acknowledgment of frailty, of anger, of doubt, and the
minister’s perspective rooted in almost philosophical
skepticism, albeit perhaps more of a Kantian
kind.
Rev. Theriot (actor
Shea Whigham) at Revival Meeting:
You were as blind to
Him as your footprints in the ashes, but He saw you. Beneath every disguise,
every gesture, false or true, every silent resentment. He saw you in those dark
corners. He heard you, O my brothers…He heard those thoughts. Now, I’m here
today to talk to you about reality. I’m here to tell you about what you already
know! That this, [kicks stage monitor] all this, is not real! It is merely the
limitation of our senses, which are meager devices. Your angers and your griefs
and your separations, are a fevered hallucination, once suffered by us all, we
prisoners of light and matter. And there we all are, our faces pressed to the
bars, looking out, looking up, asking the question, begging the question, “Are
you there?” Would that we had ears to hear, because every moment, every now, is
an answer. Every beat of every heart, every second of every minute, every
minute of every hour, every hour of every day is an answer. And the answer is,
“Yes!” “Yes!” Listen... Your sorrows pin you to this place. They divide you
from what your heart knows. And there are a lot of good hearts out there. I’m
looking out there, I’m seeing a lot of good hearts out there. I see a lot of
joy out there. And we bandage our soft selves, in hardness, in anger! You are a
stranger to yourself, and yeah, He knows you. And when your heard heart made
you like unto the stone, and broke you from His body, which is the stars, and
the wind between the stars, He knew you! He knew you, yet and forever. Because
I ask you, how could a father forget his children? How could the world forget
itself? Doesn’t matter that the children do not understand what they are. Doesn’t
matter that the world thinks it is many different things rather than one! Him!
Doesn’t matter. My sad, and joyous, and frightened and courageous brothers, I
want you to do something for me. I want you to… I want you to close your eyes.
I want you to close your eyes, and let your chest swell as His lungs, feel His
pulsing in us, in each other. Every single one of you sitting here today, each
other. And I want you to listen for that answer. If ever your sorrow becomes
such a burden, that you forget yourself, forget this world, I want you to
remember this truth, this is indelible, as the sun and sky and the ground
beneath your feet. This world is a veil, and the face you wear is not your own.
The shape of our true face is not yet known to us. And so I press my eyes to
the bars and I look out, and I look up, and I ask the question… No, I beg the
question [voice breaking], Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ! Your arms opened and
close. The echoes of my life could never contain a single truth about You! You
move the feather in the ash. You touch the leaf with its flame. You lit your
soul to an infinity of a time of creation, and of it, I am less than a drop in
the ocean. So, how then, can I know sorrow? How then, can I know despair? Does
the rain know sorrow? Does the grass, and the mountains, the beautiful
mountains, know despair? Such is not His province, and so not be our purpose.
Be in Him, of Him, and then, know peace. That is His gift to us. Our
birthright. In the end, we will find ourselves at the beginning. And will at
last, know ourselves, and our true faces will weep in His light. And those
tears… Those tears will feel like a warm rain. Amen. Amen. Amen! Amen!
Behind Minister Theriot is the inscription upon the tent
canvas of Proverbs 3:5, as follows:
Proverbs 3:5 - Trust
in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all
your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
The characters of Hart and Cohle stand at the back of the
tent during Theriot’s sermon, having a discussion. I will present Cohle’s
comments only.
Cohle (at Revival
Meeting):
-What do you think the
average IQ of this group is, huh?
-[About the
congregants]: Just observation and
deduction. I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales.
Folks putting what few bucks they do have into little wicker baskets being
passed around. I think it’s safe to say that nobody here’s gonna be splitting
the atom, Marty.
-Yeah, but if the
common good’s got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.
-[What people
would do if they didn’t believe]: The
exact same thing they do now, just out in the open… If the only thing keeping a
person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person
is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as
possible.
-What’s it say about
life? Hm? You got to get together, tell yourselves stories, that violate every
law of the universe, just to get through the goddamn day? No. What’s that say
about your reality?
-Transference of fear
and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. He absorbs their
dread with his narrative. Because of this, he’s effective in proportion to the
amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that
religion is a language virus
that rewrites pathways in the brain, dulls critical thinking.
Cohle and Hart’s
Discussion in the Car:
Marty: “Think a man
can love two women at once, I mean, be in love with them?”
Rust: “I don’t think
that man can love, at least not the way that he means.
Inadequacies of
reality always set in.”
Marty: “Do you think–
Do you wonder ever if you’re a bad man?”
Rust: “No. I don’t
wonder, Marty. World needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.”
Despite his critique of Rev. Theriot, notice the similarity
in approach of the minister to Cohle’s interrogation technique.
Cohle’s
Interrogation:
I know son, I can read
this off you. You’re not bad. It’s not you. There’s a weight. And it’s got its
fishhooks in your heart and your soul. Now, what you did is not your fault.
It’s not. You was drug to the bottom by that same weight. The same weight that
won’t let you get along in a job, the same weight that wouldn’t let you get
along at school. The same weight that wouldn’t let you have a mom. I know these
things, Chris… Listen to me, son. You got one way out. And it’s through the
grace of God. You are only how the Lord made you. You are not flawed. We, you,
me, people, we don’t choose our feelings. There is grace in this world, and
there is forgiveness for all, but you have to ask for it.
Rustin Cohle (actor
Matthew McConaughey) in a video statement to Louisiana CID detectives:
Detective: You figure it’s all a scam, huh? All them folks.
Cohle: Um hm.
They’re just wrong?
Oh, yeah. Been that
way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, “He said for
you to give me your fucking share.” People are so goddamn frail they’d rather
put a coin in a wishing well than buy dinner.
See, we all got what I
call a life trap. A gene-deep certainty that things will be different. That
you’ll move to another city and meet the people that’ll be the friends for the
rest of your life, that you’ll fall in love and be fulfilled. Fucking
fulfillment. And closure. Whatever the fuck those two… Fucking empty jars to
hold this shit storm. Nothing’s ever fulfilled. Not until the very end. And
closure. No. No, no. Nothing is ever over.
The ontological
fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the
preacher sells. Same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your
capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck
to be had doing that. And it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it?
“Surely this is all for me. Me. Me, me… I… I’m so fucking important. I’m so
fucking important. Right? [voice cracking with emotion]” Fuck you.
Detective: Your assist record, man. That’s something else.
Any pointers?
Cohle: No, I never
really found it that hard. You just look at somebody and thing like they think.
Negative capability. I mean, I guess it’s a skill. But most times, you don’t
even need that. You know you just look them in the eyes, the whole story’s
right there. Everybody wears their hunger and their haunt, you know? You just
gotta be honest about what can go on up here [pointing to head with pocket
knife], a locked room. But then again, I’m terrible with cards.
Yeah. So while we were
grilling B and E jerk-offs and burn victims, I decided to put insomnia to good
use. People… I’ve seen the finale of thousands of lives man… young, old. Each
one is so sure of their realness, that their sensory experience constituted a
unique individual with purpose, meaning. So certain that they were more than a
biological puppet. Well, the truth wills out, and everybody sees once the
strings are cut, all fall down.
Each stilled body so
certain that they were more than the sum of their urges, all the useless
spinning, tired mind, collision of desire and ignorance. You asked about the
interrogations. You want to know the truth? I never been in a room more than 10
minutes I didn’t know whether the guy did it or not. How long does it take you?
Look. Me talking about
what happened back then, that ain’t gonna do you any good now. This is what I’m
talking about. This is what I mean when I’m talking about time, and death, and
futility. There are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a
society for our mutual illusions. Of 14 hours of staring at DBs, these are the
things you think of. You ever done that? Hmm? You look in their eyes, even in a
picture. Doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive. You can still read them, and
you know what you see? They welcomed it, mm-hmm, not at first, but right there
in the last instant. It an unmistakable relief, see, because they were afraid
and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go, and
they saw–In that last nanosecond, they saw what they were, that you, yourself,
this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and
dumb will and you could just let go finally now that you didn’t have to hold on
so tight to realize that all your life–you know, all your love, all your hate,
all your memory, all your pain– it was all the same thing. It was all the same
dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person…
And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.
Of course, in episode
one Cohle had already established his basic philosophical premise:
-I consider myself a
realist; in philosophical terms I’m a pessimist.
-I think human
consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware.
Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that
should not exist by natural law.
-We are things that
labor under the illusion of having a self. The secretion of sensory experience
and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody. When in
fact, everybody is nobody.
-I think the honorable
thing for us to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand
into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw
deal.
From the sermon, to Cohle’s diatribes later that “time is a
flat circle” echoing the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence, to
the final revelation of the killer and his insistence on “take off your mask”
there is a pervasive theme that not only does this world not matter, it doesn’t
exist in the first place—or it exists all at once. Whatever the true meaning,
and I think the best function of the show is to actually make you think about
some of these notions. If you reject this pessimism, why? On what grounds? Even
the minister explains that this world is not real and the face you wear is not
your own. Thus, the theology and the philosophy (as so rarely is the case)
agree on some central points. There are a lot of things to say about this
dialogue and the ideas it presents but I’m woefully under qualified and not at
all up to the task. However, I have found some excellent discussions on-line
that might be worth your follow through.
Perhaps for further reading: Cohle's "aphorisms" were revealed by series creator Pizzolatto as being strongly influenced by Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.
Well, I leave you with some interesting links that discuss
this in a much more erudite and lucid manner. Happy learning!
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