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Feb. 20th, 2014 11:32 amIntended this to not (potentially) spoil future episodes, rather than those so far, but it almost certainly does both. So basically don't read it:
Trying to determine if there's anything unfair about the handling of the medium in True Detective - which I now officially love, mostly because it's letting me try to determine things.
Specifically, does it commit The Usual Suspects' sin of not letting us know whether a scene we're watching is footage requisitioned from the infallible Recording Angel, a filmic reenactment of the possibly mistaken memory of a character, or something a character is making another character envision. And worse, does it commit the Sixth Sense's (and Wild Things', if anyone cares about that movie) sin of not having the presentation of relevant facts follow an implied set of rules. An implicit contract about what a movie is, really.
For True Detective, the initial contract between presenter and viewer would seem to be as follows: for everything discussed in two 2012 accounts of what happened in 1995, the true versions will be shown. This presumably works as some partial justification of the show's title, but more importantly it allows quite a bit of leeway for acceptable twists. At times, though, the connection seems to be thematic, such that we're wondering if the speaking character is supposed to be remembering something that he isn't saying, some association brought to mind while overhearing himself. And since presumably the character doesn't fall silent while being overwhelmed by several minutes of cinematic recall, the scene is more of a shorthand for what the character either enduringly knows or more briefly calls to mind. But in that case shouldn't we get shorthand for all other (relevant) things the character knows? One reason to think this is that the show presents itself as though we are getting that, or that we will at least get to each bit in its proper place in the 2012 account of the investigation. It takes a while before you realize that's not quite what's happening.
Contractually, we can't simply be given a story that tells us everything we need to know to solve a mystery except those things that would give it away at once. That's what mystery stories have to virtually do, but they always need some other reason for information to just happen to be limited in that fashion - mere teasing can never be the overt procedure. The most usual method of limitation is to trail an investigator, give the audience only the clues provided to him. The method of a lying or otherwise misleading narrator is the next most common; there, information can plausibly be limited because a character plausibly wants it to be. This setup combines elements of both, but at the end of the day there has to be a hierarchy.
Perhaps you can argue that while putting their stories together the interviewees have to suppress certain facts even from themselves. Some sorts of memories and knowledges intrude viscerally, others, having been more carefully prepared against, are successfully kept out of consciousness. The two are vulnerable to sideways ironies but not their most important secrets.
That lies they told superiors, including ones that would get them in legal trouble, are corrected in their memories is one possible problem with this. While you could say that what's suppressed is even more crucial for them to conceal than facts that could get them jailed, it's less clear how they could pursue their own agenda of planting certain bits of information in their interrogators while gleaning others without their at least occasionally thinking about why they're doing so.
For a while I wondered if what we were seeing was a sort of hybrid: their shared knowledge of those things that occurred during their partnership. But this clearly isn't true - we've seen many things neither would tell the other. The suppression thing is the only possible justification, and it's pretty iffy.
I guess you could use the initial investigation of the crime scene itself as cutoff, making the rule this: anything relevant that happened between that examination and the dissolution of their partnership relevant to either their 2012 answers or thoughts while answering will be shown fully. It's possible that the occurrences both parties are keeping secret were all prior to that moment. But is that rule really justifiable? Conceivably it is as a sort of guiding principle each adopts - you want to know about that investigation? Oh, I'll tell you about THAT (mostly). But either lie or give prepared semantic statements about what went before, refusing to allow myself to picture any of it.
Trying to determine if there's anything unfair about the handling of the medium in True Detective - which I now officially love, mostly because it's letting me try to determine things.
Specifically, does it commit The Usual Suspects' sin of not letting us know whether a scene we're watching is footage requisitioned from the infallible Recording Angel, a filmic reenactment of the possibly mistaken memory of a character, or something a character is making another character envision. And worse, does it commit the Sixth Sense's (and Wild Things', if anyone cares about that movie) sin of not having the presentation of relevant facts follow an implied set of rules. An implicit contract about what a movie is, really.
For True Detective, the initial contract between presenter and viewer would seem to be as follows: for everything discussed in two 2012 accounts of what happened in 1995, the true versions will be shown. This presumably works as some partial justification of the show's title, but more importantly it allows quite a bit of leeway for acceptable twists. At times, though, the connection seems to be thematic, such that we're wondering if the speaking character is supposed to be remembering something that he isn't saying, some association brought to mind while overhearing himself. And since presumably the character doesn't fall silent while being overwhelmed by several minutes of cinematic recall, the scene is more of a shorthand for what the character either enduringly knows or more briefly calls to mind. But in that case shouldn't we get shorthand for all other (relevant) things the character knows? One reason to think this is that the show presents itself as though we are getting that, or that we will at least get to each bit in its proper place in the 2012 account of the investigation. It takes a while before you realize that's not quite what's happening.
Contractually, we can't simply be given a story that tells us everything we need to know to solve a mystery except those things that would give it away at once. That's what mystery stories have to virtually do, but they always need some other reason for information to just happen to be limited in that fashion - mere teasing can never be the overt procedure. The most usual method of limitation is to trail an investigator, give the audience only the clues provided to him. The method of a lying or otherwise misleading narrator is the next most common; there, information can plausibly be limited because a character plausibly wants it to be. This setup combines elements of both, but at the end of the day there has to be a hierarchy.
Perhaps you can argue that while putting their stories together the interviewees have to suppress certain facts even from themselves. Some sorts of memories and knowledges intrude viscerally, others, having been more carefully prepared against, are successfully kept out of consciousness. The two are vulnerable to sideways ironies but not their most important secrets.
That lies they told superiors, including ones that would get them in legal trouble, are corrected in their memories is one possible problem with this. While you could say that what's suppressed is even more crucial for them to conceal than facts that could get them jailed, it's less clear how they could pursue their own agenda of planting certain bits of information in their interrogators while gleaning others without their at least occasionally thinking about why they're doing so.
For a while I wondered if what we were seeing was a sort of hybrid: their shared knowledge of those things that occurred during their partnership. But this clearly isn't true - we've seen many things neither would tell the other. The suppression thing is the only possible justification, and it's pretty iffy.
I guess you could use the initial investigation of the crime scene itself as cutoff, making the rule this: anything relevant that happened between that examination and the dissolution of their partnership relevant to either their 2012 answers or thoughts while answering will be shown fully. It's possible that the occurrences both parties are keeping secret were all prior to that moment. But is that rule really justifiable? Conceivably it is as a sort of guiding principle each adopts - you want to know about that investigation? Oh, I'll tell you about THAT (mostly). But either lie or give prepared semantic statements about what went before, refusing to allow myself to picture any of it.
