TL;DR rant about “True Detective” (spoiler alert!) : Digesting last nights episode, I’m struck by something that the show is tapping into in which certain basic contradictions about the narrative are also contradictions about masculinity itself: the imperative to protect the family and protect women and children is the putative reason why the case matters to Cohle and Marty, and its the yardstick by which we register their personal failures and the damage that piles up over time. This imperative and its standards of judgment are countered by the downward pull of the death drive that is lurking behind the shows darkly romantic / melancholic / nihilist / anti-natalist / macho trip, the urge to suggest that consciousness itself is a mistake, and to flatten time into a form in which ethics (and thus the claims of the family and the responsibilities and standards wielded by wives and girlfriends and angry daughters) have no meaning and thus can offer no critical leverage by which to judge these nihilistic man-children as simply selfish or simply pompous. Rust and Marty let the viewer have their cake and eat it too by letting you invest in the protect the women and children of this region from the bad guys rationale while also letting your macho freak flag of nothing matters, man fly too. So you can square the circle of the family man/rebel polarity. Going a bit further, the failure to secure or hold up actual marriages and partnerships is compensated for by the quixotic commitment to the case, a kind of abstracted form of reparations towards the women closer to home via this vicarious casework for someone elses daughter, someone elses wife. So the two halves are related on multiple levels and made to bleed/blur into each other. In doing so, the show thus massages certain contradictions or antinomies about contrary masculine ideals (caring father/bad-ass misanthropist rebel) and I think this having-it-both-ways dynamic is a big part of its appeal. I’m not convicting all others who like the show for liking it for this reason necessarily, just wondering out loud if this is what drives the appeal for some of its fanbase. The “darkness” is a big part of the appeal of the show for me- it lets rip with some really hateful and misanthropic feelings but somehow saddles them to people who are ultimately ethically motivated and doing something for admirable reasons. Alas, this is the narrative mainline toward standard vigilante clichés and means, sure enough, that these two are sanctioned to commit acts of violence- i.e. on behalf of justice they must exceed protocols of law, a big fat standard issue cliché that Id rather not admit is a part of something that I like, but, hey, there it is throughout this series, alongside the garden variety misogyny. So far, so noir. At the start of the series Marty as family man is aligned with one side of this distinction and Cohle as loner freak is aligned with the other side; the collaborative friendship of the two men is a working through of this contradiction- each can poke holes in the others pretensions and limits- so Marty can skewer Cohles vision as partial and sterile, and Cohle can skewer Martys vision as sanctimonious and fake. But by *both* failing at the marriage/family game, they have to find in the case some alternate means of showing fidelity to an ethical project. Following this, it seems to me like the exposure and judgment of the bad guys is a way of punishing people who actually live as if Cohles pronouncements were really true i.e. the rape/torture of children would be permitted by a truly meaningless / temporally flat universe insofar as there would be no ground from which to judge it as bad or good, its just more fodder for a leveled-down and meaningless cycle of endless repetition—which, finally, means that the Carcosa/occult ritual abuse” rationale is a kind of hypocritical narrative-level fig leaf for something that the plot is working through for other reasons. That is, there’s a kind of bad-faith about the ethics of nihilism that grinds in the gears as the show tries to dole out praise and blame, and it’s teasing us by blurring only to ultimately distinguish between Cohle’s “good” nihilism and the villains’ “bad” occultism. https://youtube/watch?v=p4zluA60hjs
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 01:55:26 +0000