True Detective, the Finale, and the Deceitful Nature of Story
Since the series began, creator Nic Pizzolatto has made it clear, in interview after interview, that True Detective is at its core a story about stories. So for a show that so fetishizes the act of storytelling, the central thesis is surprisingly cynical. In the world of True Detective, stories never reveal the truth, they're most often used explicitly to deceive, and even the storytellers themselves get duped by the fantasies they create.
From crafting characters that are aware they are in a tv show, meta-commenting on how they're forever stuck repeating the same actions (“time is a flat circle,” etc.), to cameoing in a strip club as a bartender who Marty asks “why are you making me say all this stuff?”, Pizzalatto clearly delights in pointing out the role of the author in shaping a story. Even the formatting of the first two thirds of the series (the police interrogations) serves as a commentary on the biased nature of storytelling and how stories are less often a retelling of fact and more often a tool for crafting a version of fact beneficial to the storyteller.
The show also deconstructs the entire crime story genre by paring down the specifics of the case to such a base level that the story operates as a kind of ur-story. Why do we never see Dora Lange’s face at that first crime scene? Because she is supposed to stand in for the universal victim in these types of stories. Why does Reggie Ladeux have dozens of tattoos spanning the entire gamut of crazy person philosophies? Because he’s supposed to stand in for the universal killer in these types of stories. Pizzolatto has repeatedly said that he doesn’t really care about the specifics of the crime story, because they don't actually matter. The crime story is wielded a tool to explore the consequences for the detectives that have to continually investigate these heinous crimes.
And this is where Pizzolatto takes the theme out of the abstract and interjects it into the characterization of our two protagonists. Rust and Marty, faced with grim realities day in and day out, use storytelling as a coping mechanism. They wrote stories that they wore as identities, and their character arcs aren’t about them becoming someone new, but rather are about the dismantling of their fabricated identities and their eventual ownership of their true personalities.
Most of Marty’s problems come from the fact that he paints himself as a devoted family man and moral arbiter, but this leaves him unable to actually grapple with his darker and less morally upright impulses lying right beneath the surface. Marty gets angry when he feels like Rust is judging him because the judgement is often pointed at the gaps between the man Marty pretends to be and the man Marty is. His arc culminates in the final moment with his family in the hospital, where he wavers back and forth between the story he’s been telling for years “I’m fine,” and the new truth “I will be fine.”
And for all of Rust’s hard worn cynicism, it too, was just an identity he was assuming to avoid confronting painful realities. Childress’ final line to Rust was “take off the mask,” and after their confrontation, we see what seems like an entirely new Rust in the hospital parking lot. He tells Marty that in the void of near death, instead of the nothingness he expected, he felt his daughters love and the avowed atheist seemed to suggest that there might be some kind of afterlife.
But this newfound optimism is not a new character trait born out of the trauma of a near death experience, but rather it was Rust’s latent personality manifesting itself after he stripped off the belabored nihilist worldview that he had sold himself on to ease the pain of his daughter’s death. A senseless death like his daughter’s is a lot less crushing in a world where consciousness is a mistake and everything is meaningless. In the aftermath of a great tragedy, he sold himself on a story of the world that would ease the pain, just like the church tent revivalists he so openly mocked at the beginning of the series.
In the world of a True Detective, be careful whose stories you believe, especially if they're your own.
The first shirt in his new line was so successful, McConaughey is moving ahead with a second series of shirts based on his other projects, including How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, True Detective, and A Time to Kill.
New video from Horse + Horse video (starring the wonderful Dru Johnston)
MAN VS GYM VS MORNINGS - The greatest enemy to working out in the morning is you. Also what’s the point? Go back to bed.
I wrote/directed this one and I told myself I would go to the gym this morning. At around 7 AM I laughed at the idea and instead continued a wonderful dream I had where I was helping a fellow NASA Astronaut pick the right sample at Costco.
1) DCM 12 Five Dudes. Gethard was left on stage alone to do a scene by himself for, oh, five minutes.
2) DCM 11 SuperCagematch. Roo Roo vs. Kaploosh. Roo Roo's entire set took place on the holodeck of Star Terk's USS Enterprise. Gelman played Snarf who got into the program by mistake.
3) Every Code Duello Hamilton & Burr
4) DCM 10 Wicked Fuckin Queeyah. Derek Jeter saved the earth by eating an asteroid made entirely of dicks. Only Derek Jeter could have eaten that many dicks.
5) DCM 14 Batmanprov. Joe Wengert changed the world that night.
The old adage is true—writing is rewriting. But it takes a kind of courage to confront your own awfulness (and you will be awful) and realize that, if you sleep on it, you can come back and bang at the thing some more, and it will be less awful. And then you sleep again, and bang even more, and you have something middling. Then you sleep some more, and bang, and you get something that is actually coherent. Hopefully when you are done you have a piece that reasonably approximates the music in your head. And some day, having done that for years, perhaps you will get something that is even better than the music in your head. Becoming a better writer means becoming a re-writer. But that first phase is so awful that most people don’t want any part.
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