‘True Detective,’ Season 1, Episode 1, ‘The Long Bright Dark’: TV Recap
By MARSHALL CROOK


You get a nice feeling when you watch the first episode of a good show like “True Detective.”
Actually, it’s a mélange of emotions. My immediate, selfish reaction was “Great, I get to write about a show that is competent and sophisticated and not, you know, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’” The second was “I would like for this whole series to work.” Then, of course, “I may need for this whole series to work.” And finally, “What if it doesn’t work?”

At first glance “True Detective” could easily not work. Its abundance of murder mystery tropes, when listed, might warn off viewers sensing character clichés and predictable plot twists. I’ll keep it short, but here are a few: A dead girl in the wilderness surrounded by spooky symbols signaling the occult. A mismatched pair of detectives one of which is a restless family man, the other is an aloof loner born to be a cop.

You’ve got a lazy professional bureaucracy of overweight and slothful investigators, plus a truck-stop prostitute with maybe not a heart of gold, but certainly a willingness to help cops score drugs. Encroaching special interests? Check. A detective’s wife struggling to connect with her husband? Check. A horrendous crime scene the likes of which nobody has ever seen before? Of course check.


So why, after twice watching tonight’s pilot, “The Long Bright Dark,” am I ready to sit through it a third time with my wife?

Because tropes are tropes for a reason and because good acting, smart writing and lush cinematography are the most significant variables. Based on this first episode, “True Detective” appears to have nailed them all.

It’s a cruel opening to a series: A cobalt blue sky, a torch, and a burning crop of sugar cane. In the ashes a dead woman is found lashed to a tree in penitence. On her head a crown made from deer antlers. A spiral symbol has been painted on her back and surrounding her corpse is a flight of twisted wicker a-frame sculptures. The girl is Dora Lange and finding her killer is now the task of detectives Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) of Louisiana’s Criminal Investigation Division.

Det. Hart moves like a man on the cusp of middle age. He walks with extra effort, as though he’s putting on weight and is not used to it. He occasionally checks his hair to make sure it is still there. He’s pragmatic about his work and compares its “burden of authority” to fatherhood. Hart has two daughters and is married to Maggie (Michelle Monaghan).

And, most importantly, Hart does not know what to make of his new partner, Cohle.

McConaughey plays Cohle like a man desperate to maintain control. He keeps a rigid posture and a sparse, monastic lifestyle in a studio apartment with nothing but criminology books and a crucifix. Called “The Taxman” by the other detectives, Cohle brings a large leger to the Dora Lange murder scene, sketching her body in his book. McConaughey’s face is gaunt (not “Dallas Buyers Club” thin, but close) and smoothed over with makeup which ages him down by several years. Cohle doesn’t speak about much beyond work. When he does, to Hart’s dismay, it is a cascade of misanthropic despair. He’s a brilliant investigator with no faith in people. He had a wife once. And they had a daughter who passed away.

The murder investigation takes place in 1995, but Hart and Cohle are telling the audience this story in the year 2012. They’re each giving depositions to a pair of detectives looking for insight into the Dora Lange murder. This structure immediately makes the show more interesting than a standard procedural. The 1995 scenes weave in and out of each man’s recollections, so everything we see has been filtered through their memories and prejudices. It’s hard to tell at any given moment whose side of the story we’re watching. While in a small Louisiana town to see a coroner, Cohle comments that the collection of empty stores and whitewashed signs is someone’s fading memory of a town. The show feels that way. It is a memory piece.

By 2012, whatever happened in 1995, both Cohle and Hart are handling it in their own ways. Cohle is a committed alcoholic with a mangy ponytail and handlebar moustache. Any control he had before is gone and when he chugs a beer you know it is medicine. Hart wears a sharp suit and has gone bald. He owns a security firm and keeps working, fearing his “idle hands.” We learn that Hart and Cohle had a falling out in 2002 and have not seen each other since. In 2012, Hart no longer wears a wedding ring and we remember, back in 1995, when that pretty judge’s assistant came by the office with files and the two slipped into a conference room alone.

By the end of “The Long Bright Night,” we know that, in 2012, another woman has been murdered in the style of Dora Lang. But, as we also learn, Hart and Cohle “got the guy” back in ’95. Unless they didn’t get the right guy and, consequently, both men have spent 17 years grappling with the consequences.

Maybe I’m as pessimistic as Cohle, but I prefer mysteries like this one, where heroism is compromised by human frailty and there are toxins in the atmosphere. In such stories nothing ever goes well and, in a world where a young woman is “drugged, bound, tortured, strangled and posed,” maybe it can’t. But in these stories the protagonists push against such bleakness despite – or maybe because of – their own weaknesses. And the whodunit part of the puzzle becomes less meaningful than the characters that grope about in the dark.

A final, quick kudos to director Cary Joji Fukanaga, who also directed the features “Sin Nombre” and “Jane Eyre.” I enjoyed both more for the cinematography than the drama, and Fukanaga has filmed “True Detective” with the same elegance. The opening shots are beautiful, as are his aerials of Louisiana backcountry and his ground-level compositions of cluttered and messy poverty.

‘True Detective,’ Season 1, Episode 2, ‘Seeing Things’: TV Recap
By MARSHALL CROOK


Being the official WSJ Speakeasy re-capper for “True Detective” means I get to watch the first four episodes early on DVD. A benefit of DVD is the Pause button. So, this week, as Det. Rust Cohle rifled through the diary of murder victim Dora Lange, I hit Pause. On its pages Dora had scribbled a portion of the stanzas above, along with the name “The Yellow King.”

“The King in Yellow” is a horror anthology written by Robert W. Chambers and published in 1895. The supernatural stories, and the characters within, are linked by a mysterious play, “The King in Yellow.” Chambers only hints at the content of the play but when a character reads it he or she is driven insane with visions of a King in Yellow.

Permeating each of Chambers’ stories is the sublime dread of un-seeable and un-knowable terror. By reading “The King in Yellow,” a person glimpses some unspeakable truth behind existence, one that the human mind can’t process. It is no surprise, then, that “The King in Yellow” influenced horror writer H.P. Lovecraft whose “cosmic horror” mythology explores similar themes of humanity adrift in an ancient, disinterested and incomprehensible gulf.


Rust Cohle likely wouldn’t argue with Chambers’ take on things. By 2012, Cohle has determined that life is “a thresher,” and the death of his daughter – which, we learn, was from a car accident – might just be a bizarre act of cosmic good will.

That she was spared the toil of having to survive. We also learn that, while in Texas, Cohle spent time working deep undercover in narcotics. The resulting neurological damage from four years of sanctioned drug use means he suffers “chemical flashbacks” that spark hallucinations. One transforms a late-night drive into a Stanley Kubrick light show. In another a flock of birds arranges itself into the dark spiral drawn on Dora Lange’s back. He’s either a burnt out former druggie, or he’s tapped in to some sort of simmering Louisiana energy.

“Seeing Things” starts with another parent grappling with the death of their child. Cohle and Hart visit Dora Lange’s mother and inform her of her daughter’s death. Ms. Lange weeps before doubling over in pain, and rocks her head in scorched hands. Her fingers and brain, she says, have been corroded by twenty years of working in dry cleaning. In the Lange home we also see a porcelain Madonna and an ominous photo of a blonde child – possibly Dora – surrounded by men on horseback in black Klan hoods.

As the Dora Lange case moves forward with few leads, Cohle and Hart grapple with department pressure to get it solved and solved fast.

Nipping at their heels is a newly formed state detective task force investigating crimes with “anti-Christian overtones.”

Both detectives deal with the anxiety of their job in his own way: Cohle scores Quaaludes from the prostitute he met in the previous episode, and Hart carries on an affair with Lisa from the judge’s office. In his 2012 interview, Hart articulates his reasoning for his affair without overtly admitting it: That as a detective it is his responsibility to not bring home his work and infect his family. That quick sexual release from someone other than his wife helps him recalibrate his psyche before returning home. But his affair is breeding a distance between he and his wife, Maggie. She expects that he be a present husband and engaged father, he demands a home life of easy harmony.

While on the case, Cohle and Hart speak to a friend of Dora’s who reveals that she had recently “found a church” but that, the last time she had seen Dora, something was wrong in her eyes. And as the detectives hunt for a backwoods harem near Spanish Lake, Cohle beats its location out of two stalling truck stop mechanics. He is aloof and thin and intellectual, but Cohle is capable of extreme and efficient violence. At the compound Cohle and Hart discover Dora’s diary and her references to “The King in Yellow,” as well as a yellow flyer advertising a church.

By episode’s end, Cohle and Hart find the burnt husk of the church and inside it, hidden behind a curtain of weeds and vines, is a dark mural of a woman with a crown of antlers.

In my last write-up, I said that I liked bleak mysteries. If “True Detective” is aligning itself with guys like Chambers and, by proximity, Lovecraft, then that is about as bleak as it gets. We don’t yet know what “The Yellow King” meant to Dora Lange, but reading “The King in Yellow” made more aware of the very specific tone of the show.

It feels like at any moment the Louisiana landscape might awaken and swallow our heroes. To be clear: I don’t expect the show to end with tentacle space monsters from out of time. From the poison wrecking the brain of Dora’s mother, to the geographic infection of the Klu Klux Klan, to the endless swamps hugging the narrow country highways, to the ominous backdrop of oil refinery smokestacks, and, finally, to the omnipresence of religion in its endless shapes, this environment is crammed with enormous and ungovernable forces bigger than one killer with one motive.

It is enough to drive a person insane.

A few final notes:

I noticed two symmetrical moments this episode. First, as noted above, Dora wrote “strange is the night where black stars rise” into her diary. The young woman who tipped-off Hard and Cohle about Dora’s church had black stars tattooed on her neck.

Also, Hart’s daughters arrange their dolls in a mock crime scene in their bedroom. As Hart walks in we hear them say “it was a car accident.”

At the beginning of the episode, Cohle revealed his daughter died in a car accident.

This is probably a subject for its own essay, but there was heavy emphasis on parents and parenthood this episode. But, with the swath of parents was imagery of unmoored children. In particular the young girls smoking by the road and, in a very literal metaphor, Hart’s two daughters floating alone in a wobbly boat.


My side note: notice the yellow king in her diary and the yellow flyer for the church they come across and follow up on in the next episode.

‘True Detective,’ Season 1, Episode 3, ‘The Locked Room’: TV Recap
By MARSHALL CROOK


The “Chekov’s Gun” dramatic principle formulates that there can be no unnecessary elements in a story. If a gun appears in Act I, it must be fired at some point in Act II or Act III. Louisiana spiritual leader Billy Lee Tuttle is the unfired gun of “True Detective.” He was introduced in “The Long Bright Dark” and we know that not only is Tuttle related to the governor of Louisiana, he is deeply concerned with the murder of Dora Lange and its religious implications. The Tuttle Gun wasn’t fired in tonight’s episode of “True Detective,” “The Locked Room,” but the hammer may have been cocked.

In the opening act of “The Locked Room,” Hart and Cohle track down the roaming congregation once attended by Dora Lange. There they discover that she came to services accompanied by a “tall man with a shiny face.”

Hart and Cohle also learn that the pompadour’d and side burn’d revival preacher was enrolled at Billy Lee Tuttle’s university for a few years.

This meeting leads to a fruitless roundup and interrogation of local miscreants and “B&E men” with similar features. When this doesn’t work, Cohle raids the department’s case files and rifles through photo after photo of dead women and girls. He eventually stumbles on the case of Reanne Olivier, a woman who supposedly drowned, but whose body was discovered with severe abdominal lacerations, meth and LSD in her blood, and a familiar spiral scribbled on her back. Reanne Oliver may be the progenitor of Dora Lange.


The detectives interview Reanne’s grandfather, Henry Olivier, and are given the name of boyfriend, Reggie Ledoux.

They also learn that in high school Reanne was a student at Light of the Way Christian Academy, a school funded by Billy Lee Tuttle’s ministry.

The episode ends with Hart and Cohle barreling down the highway, blue light blazing.

They’re off to interrogate Dora’s husband, Charlie Lange, about former cellmate Reggie Ledoux who, we learn, was once busted in connection to a meth and LSD lab. But the momentum and thrill of pursuit is hobbled when, in 2012, both Hart and Colhe solemnly allude to a “fire fight.”

What follows is the slow, dreamy revelation of a strange compound deep in the bayou. Walking through the compound – to synthesizer music out of an early ‘80’s John Carpenter movie – is a nightmarish tattooed man brandishing a machete and wearing nothing but white underwear and a gas mask.

That, more or less, is the plot of “The Locked Room.” Essential clues have revealed themselves: Preacher, Tall Man, Reggie Ledoux, Gas Mask Man and, finally, the fingers of Billy Lee Tuttle worming their way in and out of the corners of the investigation. That’s the plot, but the particulars of this murder mystery continue to prove incidental to the greater story of what happened to these two men, Hart and Cohle, in the intervening years.

“You are a stranger to yourself,” says the preacher. “The world is a veil. The face you wear is not your own.”

I believe when the story ends we will see “The Locked Room” as the series’ skeleton key. Specifically, the integral spiritual debate between the detectives as they watch the praying masses at the outset.
As partners, Hart and Cohle are a paradox: They each wear a face to mask their elemental desires, but the exterior of one is the interior of the other.

It would be easy to believe Cohle’s faith in a meaningless universe and the aberration of humanity represents his “true nature.” But in “The Locked Room,” when Cohle passes judgment on the faithful, labeling them idiotic and sinful people who tell themselves stories “to get…through the day,” he doesn’t sound like he’s conversing with Hart. He sounds like he’s reciting. Cohle reminds me of how a young reader will regurgitate Frederic Nietzsche or Howard Zinn upon first exposure. He speaks like a man who has carefully selected and crafted his philosophy, but spits it back out into the world as though that is the only way he can be sure of what he believes. Hart senses this.

“You seem panicked,” he says. And that for a man who believes life is meaningless Cohle “frets about it an awful lot.”

Cohle’s frets because, like the men and women under the spell of the Preacher, he searches for answers. In the previous episode, Cohle wrapped up the death of his child in a tidy philosophical bow, insisting that her “painless” death was elegant. By dying, she saved him from “the sin of fatherhood” and herself from toiling in “the thresher” of the world. I believe 2012 Rust Cohle actually believes this. Whatever happened at the end of the Dora Lange case pushed him forever down the rabbit hole. But in 1995, I’m not so sure he’s a complete convert. Not unlike the congregants Cohle decries, he is ”cultivating his own illusion” to get through the day. If the universe is meaningless then losing a child, losing a wife, losing the chance to mow his own yard for for his own family are not losses worth mourning. But Cohle can’t help himself. He shows up to Hart’s house, mows Hart’s lawn, and visits with Hart’s wife and Hart’s children. He does not wish to steal them from Marty, but he desperately wants Marty’s life. So Cohle tricks himself with faith in nothingness because it is safer than starting all over again.

Up until “The Locked Room” it was easier for me to judge the artifice of Marty Hart’s life than Cohle’s. But it may be Mart’s is just easier to spot. Also, both narrators – not just Marty- are unreliable. And I wonder if the obviousness of Hart’s internal and external subterfuges is not its own dramatic trick to make us think that Cohle isn’t experiencing precisely the same existential turmoil as Marty Hart.
But, as he himself admits, Marty is “F#@%’d up.” He is a liar. He suppresses guilt. He is selfishly oblivious to how the Dora Lange case is ravaging his family. But Marty isn’t an idiot. At least he didn’t used to be. As Maggie reminds him: “You used to be so much smarter.”

Professionally he’s on autopilot and personally he is a disaster.
Probably Woody Harrelson’s best performance of the season so far was his clumsy attempt at getting Lisa to remain at the bar, utterly ignoring is wife a few tables away. Here’s a guy who wants to self-destruct as if to know what it feels like. Marty preaches “responsibility” – both parental and professional – like a necessary mantra for self-actualization. Cohle believes that life is meaningless and Hart believes in the even keel. That if he stays quiet and avoids holding grudges and self-recrimination then Hart can “have his cake and eat it too.” But when another man mows his lawn it reminds him that he is an absent husband and father. He knows something is wrong – with him, his wife, and his kids – and yet he still won’t turn off the basketball game to care for his child.

I think the tragedy of “True Detective” will be that both Marty Hart and Rust Cohle have the potential to heal one another by absorbing their respective strengths. You see it when Marty cuts down Maggie’s father, and Cohle fins something approximating peace while at the Hart household. By their own admission they are bad men keeping watch for worse men. But they can each be better but, as Maggie senses, neither will change on their own.

So what will happen? I don’t think there will be a “Fight Club” twist and I don’t think either Marty or Cohle is the killer. But, if the Tuttle connection is what I think it is, and the gun eventually goes off, then there are powerful forces at play that neither man neither man can combat. So whether the guy they catch in 1995 is the actual perpetrator, or just one tentacle of a much larger beast, by the state of things in 2012 it is evident that there was no closure. And now Cohle lives alone contemplating Time, Death and Futility, and Hart lives however he does, likely avoiding thinking about much of anything.
In 2012 both men sit there like characters in that old episode of the “Twilight Zone:” The masks they wore for so long became their faces.

Quick Notes:
Thanks to everyone for tweeting me with ideas and observations, particularly with regard to the Cajun Mardi Gras masks. I appreciate the conversation so please keep it coming!

My buddy Mike Calia and I filmed a brief discussion on some early “True Detective” theories. That can be seen here.