Good morning, beloved.
Long-haul air travel is different in the age of bingewatching and digital “box sets.” Provided only that you’re not in any particular need of sleep, the eleven or sixteen dim-cabin hours of a transcontinental flight seem oddly suited to siphoning down entire series. They’re time in abeyance. What else are you going to do with them?
On the flight back from Hong Kong I watched the entire first season of True Detective. By chaining eight episodes back-to-back, I just about managed to burn down the long arc across Central Asia, putting the last to bed right as we entered Heathrow’s landing pattern.
Anchored by two actors I find pretty close to unwatchable, rooted in a decidedly male perspective, marred by a nonsensical mid-season diversion into mayhem that felt lifted from another series entirely, and ultimately undone by allusions to Carcosa and The King in Yellow that it was unable to sustain, there is nonetheless a good deal to like about True Detective.
There’s the coastal Louisiana setting — a part of America not often shown on screen, which fuses the uncanny but familiar landscapes of Southern gothic to the sacrifice zones of petrochemical infrastructure. Thanks to American treasure T Bone Burnett, there’s a note-perfect soundtrack, heavy with longtime favorites of mine Dr. C.J. Johnson and the McIntosh County Shouters, but extending to the Melvins and BDP. There’s the nifty credit sequence, scored to an edit of Handsome Family’s “Far From Any Road” that cuts the somewhat ambling and directionless original down to something tauter and more haunting. And, for the first few episodes at least, there’s the writing: one of the protagonists voices sentiments I’d never before heard outside of one particularly arcane orbit.
How arcane? Well, consider these lines from Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle:
I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat, force a life into this…thresher.
Or:
The only honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing and march hand-in-hand into extinction.
These articulations of Cohle’s thinking might have made no impact on you at all, or they might have struck you as ever-so-slightly-sharper-than-usual dialogue. But unless you’ve wandered down some of the same perverse alleys of thought I have in the past few years, you may not have recognized them for the dog whistle they were. They’re a shoutout to the radically reductionist take on neurobiology and sentience I first tripped over in Tor Nørretranders’ The User Illusion (and espoused in fiction by Peter Watts and Scott Bakker), and beyond that to the contemporary philosophical tendency that subtends black metal theory and the neonihilism of Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier. Yeah: a character on American TV, perturbed because he can “smell the psychosphere” of no-hope trailer parks and stripmalls, riffing on the horror of knowing you’re little more than a marionette for blind evolution, the utter futility and meaninglessness of existence, and the inexcusable, primordial sin of bringing into the world life-destined-to-suffer. Made me prick up my ears, anyway.
I see that True Detective’s creator and sole writer, Nic Pizzolato, has been taken to task by a legion of Internet nerdlings for the supposed sin of plagiarizing these lines. Now, the charge of plagiarism is something I’m more than usually sensitive to, but I just don’t think it applies here. Though it would certainly have been nice had Pizzolato done a better and more forthright job of identifying his inspirations in early interviews, a TV show can hardly be expected to furnish dialogue with footnotes. What’s more, though I suppose it’s not cricket to point this out, his (cough) paraphrases of Ligotti, William Burroughs and others actually generally improve on the source material, and not merely metrically.
Anyway, the main charge I want to lodge against Pizzolato isn’t plagiarism, but cowardice. After having presented these solid, provocative nihilist credentials, True Detective shirks every last thing implied by them. There is a single shot in the final episode’s culminating showdown, lasting no more than two seconds, that suggests what it is like to be seen by Leviathan, pinned without pity in its lightless gaze. It’s a moment of galactic chill and great majesty, and it says a good deal about what True Detective could have been. But then the show retreats to a far more conventional notion of evil, unfurls tropes as old as Deliverance and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the overwhelming sense of missed opportunities and unexplored paths is something awful. (What’s worse to me is that this dynamic is something the show actually enacts twice over the course of its first season: the framing of its central conspiracy nods in the direction of the pagan uncanny, and an updating of The Wicker Man for the age of Katrina, but here again Pizzolato leaves every avenue opened up completely untraveled.)
So. Points for Pizzolato for daring to write a screenplay that alludes to some pretty bracing currents of thought…immediately deducted for lacking the courage to follow through on them. I’m grateful to True Detective for occupying the nontime of a long flight, and for encouraging me to eventually further elaborate a strain of thought that I might call black quietism, if that’s not too pretentious. But otherwise, make no mistake about it: it’s just TV, and not even great TV.
That’s a whole lot of words to say “meh,” isn’t it? Let me get back into the swing of things hereabouts, back to my writing/gym/caffeination/pub routine, and I’m sure I’ll recover my wits shortly. I wanna talk to you about human culture, persistent archives and the dark side of the Moon, and the usual sundry other things.
In the meantime be kind to yourself, and take care of the ones around you,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 9 of Sunday, 25 January 2015, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊