A hundred years from now, when this decade is not even a memory, someone may well appreciate HBO's second season of True Detective as a highly stylized, operatic work of art -- a kind of opera seria, contrived according to a set of formulae as strict as those governing the composition of Petrarchan sonnet. For viewers in the future, unconcerned about what it was like to live in the year 2015, this glossy and expensively produced (and immensely pretentious) TV show may possess the charisma associated with certain aspects of the baroque -- abstracted from anything like truth, the show proceeds through a series of morose encounters, each staged with maximum portentousness, interrupted every hour or so by an aria of pointless and extravagant violence. The show is totally predictable, conventional in every way, although all genre conventions are inflated to the point that they are no longer means to narrative or thematic ends, but ends in themselves. Consider, for instance, the helicopter shot dragging a Steadi-cam over convoluted freeway intersections -- cop shows (and True Detective is a cop show) use this image as punctuation, a way of suggesting that are a million stories in the Naked City, as filler something like the blank space between non-enjambed stanzas of a poem. In True Detective, these gliding eye-in-the-sky whirlybird explorations of the freeway and its interchanges take on a life their own -- it's as if the director didn't know why he was using these images, but had the budget to produce them on a grandiose scale and, so, simply inserts these sequences to afford the show an expensive-looking visual flair. Like much of the scenery in True Detective, it's impossible to know what the shots are supposed to mean -- and, this, I think, is because they don't mean anything at all.
The problem with True Detective is the adjective. There's nothing "true" about the show. Police procedurals are successful to the extent that the film (or show) conveys a plausible account of how law enforcement manages criminal investigations -- even garbage like Adam 12 had a certain gravitas because, it seemed, to be about how real police might work. But True Detective, a show devised around the broad conventions of this genre bears about as the same relationship to the police procedural as Aida bears to Egyptian archaeology -- the people in True Detective are nominally cops, but, in fact, they are like the demi-gods and heroes in Handel's operas, quasi-mythical figures with certain characteristic and tragic defects who have superhuman qualities when it comes to suffering and inflicting violence on others. The first series of True Detective was a master-class in competitive acting, a duel to the death on screen between two exemplars of masculine narcissism, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConnaughey, both in full diva mode. As such the show was a success since both actors are intrinsically larger than life and their flagrantly over-the-top melodramatics were compulsively watchable. Unfortunately, the second series of True Detective doesn't have the aura of hand to hand combat between preening stars that inflated the 2014 show beyond its questionable nihilistic pretentions and allowed the viewer to overlook a plot that became increasingly predictable and conventional with each episode. In the 2015 series, the viewer's attention is divided between four central characters, all of them based on ancient clichés -- Colin Farrell sulks and moons around as the conventional brutish, and alcoholic ethnic-Irish copper; Vince Vaughn plays a mobster whose efforts at going straight are thwarted by a Vladimir Putin-esque (I kid you not) Russian gangster; Rachel McAdams who looks disconcertingly like a bedraggled big-eyed Keane painting is a sexually conflicted lady police officer, good with her fists and a knife; Taylor Kitsch is a tormented CHIPS cop, bisexual, apparently, but masquerading as straight (the show is so profoundly and archaically conventional as to suggest that his sexual orientation may be the result of having for his mother Lolita Davidovich, playing an erotically ravenous middle-aged bimbo.) No member of this quartet is sufficiently interesting to power the show and, when the main characters, get together periodically to hole-up in motel rooms or have sex or prepare for shoot-outs they mostly speak in tough-guy epigrams that would have embarrassed Mickey Spillane, little bits of guttural poetry interspersed by long silences and significant glances. The plot is just an excuse for ridiculously excessive violence or scenes in which one or the other of the tough guy heroes is forced to exhibit emotion -- a rigid jaw trembles and eyes well up with tears and, then, the actor trembling with emotion shows us the true price of being hard as nails and tough as leather, a torrent of feelings that is supposed to reveal his (or her) secret suffering self behind the façade of brutish cruelty and indifference. Since the tough-guy/tough-gal façade gets ruptured about every episode for every character, the ultimate effect is the opposite of that designed by writer -- instead of tough guys concealing their wounded vulnerability, the show seems to be about effusive, histrionic weaklings periodically pretending to be cynical two-fisted hard-asses. But the chief problem with the show is that it is flagrantly and idiotically unrealistic -- do wealthy land entrepreneurs really cavort naked at parties staffed by hundreds of sexually compliant beauties from Bulgaria and the Ukraine? Does everyone continuously insult everyone else or make repeated threats of grotesque violence? Are casinos really full of gorgeous women and well-dressed young men huddled glamorously over baccarat and roulette tables? (I've been in casinos in Minnesota, South Dakota, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City and have never seen anything other than sad elderly women wearing out their elbows at slot machines.) Do all confrontations between good guys and bad guys take place in picturesque urban wastelands? Diagnostic as to the problem with this show are two scenes: in one, Vince Vaughn tortures an associate and, then, shoots him in the intestines, pouring a drink as he impassively watches the man bleed to death. Vaughn's gorgeous, demi-hooker, girlfriend, enters the room where this amusing interlude is underway, casts a brief glance at the villain writhing on the floor, and, then, stares soulfully into her lover's eyes to show him that she endorses his actions and will stand by him to the bitter end. It's utterly ridiculous and you long for the woman to say, like Oliver Hardy to the hapless Stan Laurel, "Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into!" In another showy sequence, repeated about every two episodes, Vaughn and Colin Ferrel get together to morosely slug down booze in a sepulchral tavern featuring a waifish folk singer crooning about death and fate while a waitress with a conspicuously scarred face, now and then, pontificates on the encounter -- the scene might as well be staged on blasted heath or feature the weird sisters or Wagner's norns. (True Detective seems based on Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, the movie version of one of James Ellroy's books -- both series have the same two-part structure: that is, a crime seems to be solved in a violent confrontation half-way through the show, but, then, the purported solution turns out to be a mere diversion from deeper, more pervasive corruption motivating the initial crime. The second season, in particular, with its quartet of protagonists is similar in structure to the group of several cops acting either against one another, or in uneasy alliance, in Hanson's .... film.)
Despite these criticisms, I continue to watch the show -- it's reasonably entertaining so long as you regard the show as typical HBO entertainment: beautiful naked women every forty minutes or so, lurid sex scenes, protracted gunfights staged with all the firepower of the landing on Omaha Beach, and absurdly impressive displays of caricatured evil: a rich Texas money-bags who gropes our heroine and earns a knife-thrust in the testicles for his villainy, various sexual perverts, a corrupt mayor who "tears a cat" with villainy that would have looked cartoonish in a silent film, a savage Mexican lowrider who gets his teeth extracted one by one by Vince Vaughn using a needle-nose pliers. (This scene is also indicative of the series' idiocy: an honest approach to this material would have had Vaughn pull out one tooth for a good measure or, in the alternative, rip them all out in real time on screen so that the audience and onlookers could protest the sheer stupidity of the gesture and its tedium -- amateur dentistry, after all, isn't all that compelling. But the show portrays this with a quick shot of Vaughn yanking out a couple teeth with the plier that just happens to be conveniently available...do most gangsters walk around with needle nose pliers in their pinstriped suits? ...and, then, a later shot that implies that Vaughn did indeed denude the guy of his entire grill. Well, if that's the case, I want to see every tooth pulled-out while the extras and supernumeraries in the scene sit around yawning and muttering "enough is enough!") It's sort of fun in a ridiculous way but, notwithstanding the great and sinister theme music by Leonard Cohen, you can't confuse this nonsense with art.
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