(no subject)

[proximoception]

One of the odd things about True Detective is how it jumps the gun. Spoilin':

Noir tends to follow a revelation arc - some initial mystery becomes more sinister and convoluted, involves and endangers the investigator, is seen to connect to a grand, pervasive evil, political or psychological or both, leading to his reassessment of his world and how it can be lived in. Pulling the loose thread in the sweater ends up leaving us naked in the cold. Occasionally the investigator is kept mysterious enough that it's we who feel these things on his behalf, only to find he's known how to handle his reality all along - he's been modeling what we should change into.

Cohle has already completed this arc, has basically lived through a Chinatown and come out with a hardened code of conduct. Which he announces from the start.

Is the viewer supposed to just not believe him, but come to as the story progresses? That would be an interesting variation if so. And does seem to fit how Harrelson responds to him - he doesn't contradict him, he just says to keep those views to himself, that they're depressing, that no one else would understand, that faith and optimism help people live.

But Harrelson's rationalizings of the irrational are related by the show to the sweep things under the rug mindset of Southern whites that enables ongoing human and environmental damage. They fuck up his personal life, make him complicit in the white elites' fucking up of public life. At its halfway point the show's strongly hinting that the Louisiana powers that be are faking Satanic murders to keep the masses afraid, the herd docile and milkable. It may go somewhere else with that later, but it's at least leaving us contemplating how well that would fit.

So maybe the show's showing all of its cards at once, making us see one by one that their pictures fit the landscape. I'd be more interested if it could say something against Cohle, though. There's something tendentious about a narrative having a spokesperson all the way through. Crowned with all the various hero powers.

Comments

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

I suspect what they're banking on is the impression of Cohle as being too unstable, unlikable, and nihilistic to be that trustworthy as a narrator, including what looks like a misdirect as him as the killer. And this might have been a miscalculation on the show's part, in the sense that if you really like True Detective, there's a good chance that you're the kind of person who will overlook (or even celebrate) the aspects of Cohle's personality that are designed to make him uncomfortable for most people. Then again the show's made a big enough of a splash that maybe they've calculated correctly. Maybe there's a whole swath of people who have never thought Cohle's thoughts who are being forced to trust his take over Hart's.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yeah, good points.

There's some vague signs they might be undermining Cohle. Certainly something complex is happening with the counterpoint of Harrelson's advice to not bend the narrative and Cohle's own boast that he has the "negative capability" Keats saw in Shakespeare. May just mean that Harrelson's been trained to be lazy by a system that doesn't want everything investigated, such that he refuses to see the obvious. But of course if the murder or murders were actually committed by people like the governor's cousin Harrelson will be ironically vindicated.