Two small children set out on their bicycles at dusk in a small, impoverished Arkansas village. The children don't return. Police find one of the children murdered and left in ceremonial repose in a rock fissure in a place called Devil's Den. Two detectives, one of them Black and the other White, are assigned the case. Various horrors ensue and the detectives become entangled in tragic mysteries that contort and deform their lives. The criminal investigation extends across the professional careers of both men and the mystery is finally solved only when they are old and frail -- indeed, the crime is solved too late for the Black detective: he is suffering from dementia with short-term memory loss and can't recall that he has crowned his life's work by establishing the truth about the children's disappearance. Instead, he is left within a labyrinth of painful uncertainty: images trigger torturous memories for him but they no longer coalesce into any sort of meaningful pattern. He is trapped within painful, interminable cycles of cruel recollection and self-recrimination. At the end of the 8 episode HBO series, we see two small kids on bikes, this time the hero's grandchildren, setting off into the dusk. Then, the old man remembers his time in Vietnam, shown as a flashback of the detective as a young man walking fearfully through a dense tropical jungle in the failing light at the end of the day. This summarizes Nick Pizzolatto's True Detective (Third Series), a maddening, frustrating program that is, nonetheless, far better than it seems for most of the time that you are watching.
True Detective (3) is so dark, dismal, and sordid that, at times, it seems a parody of itself. The characters are, mostly, poor White trash from a disrespected and squalid rural county in Arkansas -- everyone seems addicted to drugs or booze, sexually promiscuous, hateful and racist, desperately poor and hopeless. The White cop is a little man with a chip on his shoulder who takes solace in bar fights and torturing suspects -- he's well-played by Stephen Dorff as a diminutive bully with a whiskey-raw voice, wearing leathery-looking leisure suits, highly intelligent, sardonic, a loner who ends up isolated, drunk, and caring for stray dogs. The Black detective is acted by Mahershala Ali, playing the part in such a vein of miserable, depressed funk that much of the show is half-risible. The Black cop is damaged goods when the show begins, suffering from a first-class case of repressed PTSD due to his time in Vietnam -- he was some kind of lone reconnaissance assassin. Ali speaks in a guttural mumble about two octaves below ordinary human speech -- he's too miserable to articulate his words clearly and half of what he says is completely unintelligible. The series is too long, repetitive, and defeated by its own structure: the action takes place at three points in time -- the early seventies, 1980, and the present. As is often the case, the old age make-up for the principals isn't particularly persuasive -- it's more Kabuki-like than realistic. The show's system of complex flashbacks -- an image will trigger a flashback or flashforward -- convolutes the narrative, delays action, and, generally, frustrates the viewer. Just when events in one time plane threaten to congeal into meaning, the show will cut forward or backward. It's a typical cable series ploy, a long, long delay to keep the balls in the air for 8 episodes when the story really could be told in half that time. As is characteristic for these shows, everyone acts up a storm and the individual scenes are effective and compelling. When the show starts to flag, about the third or fourth episode, the program delivers a big gun battle with machine guns and claymore mines (an Indian Vietnam veteran is under attack by heavily armed local rednecks) with a high body-count. After this flare of violence, the show settles back to periodic beating and torture scenes, ghastly marital squabbles, and constant bitching between the two cops who quarrel like an old married couple. The detectives intimidate their suspects (really their victims) with threats of prison rape and torture people -- of course, this isn't a very effective way to advance an investigation and their methods only result in most of the viable suspects and informants ending up dead, often by suicide. The cops are portrayed a loner psychopaths, obsessed with solving the crime, and ruining their own lives, and the lives of those around them, in the process. Everything is authentically gritty except that, of course, the world isn't as dark and bloody a place as the show posits and, so, ultimately, the whole thing, notwithstanding its surface verisimilitude, is fundamentally untruthful and mannered -- it looks authentic and smells authentic, but the portrait painted by the show is flawed. The malodorous gloom just continues and continues and continues.
And, yet, if you are patient, the program's annoying sub-Proustian structure of nasty madelines and flashbacks, actually, pays off. There is a spectacular misdirection in the penultimate episode, a reference to the first season of True Detective, the now-famous narrative with Matthew McConnaughy and Woody Harrelson confronting a cabal of powerful child molesters. This misdirection suggests that we are going down that sordid path again -- the missing girl will have been trafficked by a conspiracy involving a wealthy child rapist. But, in fact, the solution presented in the third series is a lot stranger, more interesting, and, in some ways, less savage and terrible. And, in fact, there is even an intimation of a happy ending, an alternative solution to the mystery narrated by a ghost or angel, a denouement that just might be true. The problem is that the old man to whom the secret is told is too demented to remember it for more than a few blissful minutes. The last ninety minutes of the show is excellent -- the question for the viewer is whether it is worth enduring all the grim horrors of the first six or seven hours to get to that point.
In the first series of True Detective, Office Rustin Cohle paraphrases Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence of the same -- "time" he says, "is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do, we will do over and over and over again forever." I don't know if this is true or not in general. But it is certainly true in the world of this TV series: the same motifs and themes repeat over and over and over again: powerful men abuse children, junkies commit suicide, children are irretrievably lost in one way or another, the cops will brutalize witnesses and suspects, everyone is concealing a dirty, sordid secret. In the first series, the concept of time as a flat circle of eternal recurrence was described but not dramatized. It's in the nature of a TV series, however, for time to have this characteristic -- Lucy remains whacky, funny, helpless across a 100 episodes; Gilligan is always obtusely stupid; Perry Mason always wins his cases; the friends on Friends always confront the same humorous situations over and over again; Barney Fife remains Barney Fife; Mary Tyler Moore is forever exuberantly tossing her hat in the air. The detectives on True Detective confront human evil and become, in some respects, the terrible things that they see. It's the nature of TV.
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