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Devil-nets of clues: True Detective and the search for meaning
Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen
Abstract
This article examines the first season of the hit television series True Detective
(2014) with respect to the claim that it deliberately adopted a form fitting the new
world of digital television. The article argues that this embrace is less than
complete: the show seeks an immersive, novelistic experience rather than
something entirely new. It further argues that this immersive experience is
supported by the series’ richly detailed background and by its invocation of
various aspects of weird fiction. The article also discusses some of the institutional
factors shaping the series: the availability of the puzzle film genre as an
interpretive framework, the existence of an audience interested in assuming the
attitude of what Jason Mittell has called the forensic fan, and the choice of a
traditional, one-episode-per-week release schedule. Finally, the article discusses the
show’s ending and the disappointed reactions of critics and fans, arguing that the
idea that the show intended to exploit digitization by adopting a more game-like
approach, offering clues that could only be found using digital tools, is undercut by
the many loose ends left unresolved by the finale. The article concludes that the
density and detail of the series’ background, inviting viewers to explore, should be
regarded not as providing pieces of a puzzle to be solved, but as an opportunity to
deepen viewer engagement.
Keywords
1
complex TV
digital distribution
Cary Joji Fukunaga
H. P. Lovecraft
Nic Pizzolatto
puzzle films
True Detective
weird fiction
2
Digital distribution allows TV viewers to watch and engage with drama series in
new ways: binge-watching, for instance, or viewing episodes over and over again to
examine details with the aid of digital video recorders, streaming services, or both.
But has this influenced drama series’ narrative designs or other aesthetic features?
I will examine a series that was described by several critics as having
deliberately adopted a form fitting the new world of digital television: the first
season of the crime series True Detective (2014). It was much lauded during its
highly successful, eight-episode, nine-week run from 12 January to 9 March 2014
(no episode was shown on 2 February, Superbowl Sunday), and it has already
made its way into the pantheon of post-Twin Peaks quality TV, as evidenced by its
inclusion in the lavish coffee-table book Taschen’s Favorite TV Shows: The Top
Shows of the Last 25 Years (Haubner 2015) and the planned publication of an academic
anthology devoted entirely to it (see Wysocki and Graves 2015). James S. Murphy, a
commentator on aesthetics in the digital age, argued in a suggestive article in Vanity
Fair that the True Detective was ‘the first true cop show of the digital age, or rather,
the first cop show to reckon with and exploit the effects of digitization’ (2014,
original emphasis).
True Detective achieves this, Murphy says, by presenting many more clues than
more traditional police procedurals, but giving them markedly less narrative
emphasis. This encourages viewers to re-view episodes repeatedly, scrutinizing
individual images with frame-grabbing software, and discussing their theories on
the Internet. In other words, if this claim is accurate, the series was designed to
appeal to and elicit the viewer attitude television scholar Jason Mittell has called
‘forensic fandom’ (2009: 128, see also 2015: 52). To be a forensic fan, explains
Mittell, is ‘to embrace a detective mentality, seeking out clues, charting patterns
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and assembling evidence into narrative hypotheses and theories’ (2009: 128–29).
The claim that True Detective was designed to promote clue-seeking was echoed by
other commentators in articles with titles like ‘How “True Detective” turned its
fans into Internet detectives’ (Schroeder 2014) and ‘Does modern TV fandom actually
make it harder to understand TV shows?’ (Franich 2014).
This will not be a study of fans, however, but of the series’ design, in the broad
sense of narrative structure, look, feel, and overall artistic conception – a study of
artistic practice. My approach assumes what David Bordwell has called ‘a rational
agent model of creativity’:
This follows from the idea that the film-maker selects among
constructional options or creates new choices. Our task becomes that of
reconstructing, on the basis of whatever historical data one can find, the
creative situation that the filmmaker confronts. […] Filmmakers have
reflected, to various degrees of detail, upon their creative choices, and this
literature offers a rich legacy of insights into practices. (2008: 28, original
emphasis)
Interviews with film-makers should be treated with circumspection, but as
Bordwell says, they frequently offer an opportunity to learn more about how the
film-makers see their creative choices, even if their reflections may be coloured by ego,
hindsight and other kinds of personal investment.
To the rational agent model, Bordwell continues, must be added a ‘second,
institutional dimension of practice’, which ‘forms the horizon of what is permitted
and encouraged at particular moments’ (2008: 28, original emphasis). Genre,
technology, distribution formats, and production company policies and brand
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identities are just some of the institutional factors which had an important impact
on the first season of True Detective turning out the way it did.
In the first section, I will look at a few of these institutional factors: the
availability of the puzzle film genre as an interpretive framework, the existence of
an audience interested in assuming the attitude of the forensic fan – without it, it
would not make much sense to design the series to appeal to frame-grabbing
sleuths – and the choice of a traditional, one-episode-per-week release schedule.
The second and third sections will examine some aspects of the show particularly
important for assessing the claim that the show provides a plethora of hidden clues
that only the true detectives among viewers would discover: in the second section,
the show’s attention to detail and its thematic foregrounding of this; in the third,
the way True Detective draws on the American tradition of weird fiction. The final
section will discuss the show’s ending and some of the disappointed reactions to it.
I shall argue that the idea that the show intended to exploit digitization by offering
clues only frame-grabbers would find is undercut by the many loose ends left
unresolved by the finale. This did not mean that the show’s makers embraced a
snobbishly cynical nihilism, dismissing the search for meaning as an exercise in
futility. On the contrary: the many layers of clues appear designed to reward deep
engagement with the series.
Critical forensics
In a thoughtful blog article, David Bordwell has described some of the ‘historical
factors that impel fans to dig ever deeper into the movies they love’ (2013). Among
these historical factors, Bordwell emphasizes ‘the rise of the puzzle film’ (2013).
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Barbara Klinger, as part of her study of repeat viewings of favourite films, has
provided a good outline of the characteristics of puzzle films:
Puzzle films typically display several of the following characteristics:
mature subject matter; a complex, atypical, multilayered narrative (that
experiments with temporal order, for example); a confusion of objective
and subjective realms; a visually dense style; an ending that depends on a
reversal or surprise that makes viewers reevaluate their experience with
the text; and the presence of an initially occult meaning that requires re-
viewing to uncover the text’s mysteries. (2006: 157)
True Detective very clearly possesses a number of these characteristics. Its
portrayal of a world of pervasive vice and degradation with a cult dedicated to the
ritualistic sex murder of young girls at its dark heart is clearly ‘mature subject
matter’. It exemplifies complex, multi-layered narrative with its double timeline
following both the 1995 investigation of the strange ritualistic murder of a young
woman named Dora Lange, conducted by Louisiana homicide cops Marty Hart
(Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), and, in parallel,
their interrogation about new, similar crimes in 2012. Rust Cohle’s hallucinations,
an after-effect of his drug use as an undercover cop, allows for the repeated
blurring of objective and subjective realms. On the other hand, the ending did not
really contain a surprising twist (though many commentators apparently expected
it and were disappointed).
Finally, while True Detective is densely layered, the idea of the ‘presence’ of an
‘initially occult meaning’ is problematic if one accepts David Bordwell’s position
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that films, television series, and other artworks are not ‘containers’ of meaning.
Meanings are constructed by the critic or spectator on the basis of cues contained
in the artwork, but they are not ‘present’ in some hidden box:
The critic does not burrow into the text, probe it, get behind its façade, dig
to reveal its hidden meanings; the surface/depth metaphor does not
capture the inferential process of interpretation. On the constructivist
account, the critic starts with aspects of the film (‘cues’) to which certain
meanings are ascribed. (Bordwell 1989: 13)
I agree completely with Bordwell’s account, but both the show’s makers and the
show itself speak explicitly of ‘occult meanings’ using surface/depth metaphors.
For instance, in the first of the five-minute ‘Inside the Episode’ videos HBO
would post on their website and on YouTube right after each episode – containing
talking-head commentary from writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga
interspersed with clips – Pizzolatto says (over images of the strange pyramidal
stick sculptures we learn are called devil-nets): ‘A lot of those symbols, they carry
historical and anthropological significance beyond what is on the surface of our
narrative’ (HBO 2014b, 01:24–01:31, emphasis added). As the concluding line of
both the first trailer for the show, released on 8 September 2013, and of the
promotional behind-the-scenes video ‘About True Detective’, released on 2
December 2013, we have Cohle replying to a question about what has been found
(the question is ‘Just what is it you think we found?’ but it has been recut in the
first trailer to ‘What is it you found?’) with the reply, ‘Something deep and dark,
detectives – something deep and dark’ (HBO 2013a). The puzzle film genre was
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thus available as a framework for approaching True Detective. The series Lost
(2004–2010) had of course established ‘puzzle TV’ as a viable option (see Mittell 2009;
Ludvigsen 2011; Brücks and Wedel 2013).
If we look at the online response to the first season of True Detective, it seems
clear that many critics and fans approached it as a puzzle; one retrospective
commentator has written of the ‘intense, now verging on obsessive, debate among
fans’ (Haubner 2015: 739). During True Detective’s initial run, I tried to keep up
with important discussions through repeated Google searches and the systematic
checking of top TV review sites like slate.com, hitfix.com, vulture.com,
theatlantic.com, and the news site indiewire.com, supplementing my browsing with
very simple forms of automatic capture, set up with the IFTTT web service. I
would follow links to other sites and use the Evernote program and its Web
Clipper feature to archive the material. In this way, I gathered some 75 interviews
with writer Nic Pizzolatto, director Cary Joji Fukunaga, and other participants, as
well as assembling an archive of some 275 review articles and opinion pieces,
dating from mid-January to late May 2014. Since the discussions quite often
referred to ancillary material like previews, I have also gone through all the extras
on the HBO website and the HBO YouTube channel, nearly 60 videos of varying
lengths.
While I occasionally followed leads on fan discussion sites like reddit.com, the
material I collected consists primarily of responses by critics, both professional
and non-professional. Of course, many prominent TV critics are also fans and are
active in online fan communities, and the overwhelming and intense response of
fans to True Detective is a recurring theme in a great deal of this commentary;
some of it simply reports on the ongoing speculations of fans, producing articles
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with titles like ‘An up-to-date guide to Internet theories about “True Detective”’
(Dean 2014). The fascination with the mysteries of True Detective reached the point
where it was spoofed by The Simpsons (see Seikaly 2014), as good an indicator as any
that something has become a cultural event.
When I present generalizations about the reactions of fans and critics, they are
based on this material. It is ample enough to get a solid sense of what a variety of
sophisticated and committed viewers perceived Pizzolatto’s and Fukunaga’s design
goals to be. It is evident that a lot of people approached True Detective as detectives
trying to solve a puzzle.
The puzzle-solving approach was facilitated by the release of the show in the
traditional broadcast manner, with one episode per week, allowed fans time to
speculate and develop their ideas. Director Cary Fukunaga spoke of this as the ‘old
fashioned kind of way of sort of the anti-Netflix model’ (Mather 2014). The Netflix
model refers, of course, to the release of an entire season of a series at once,
allowing premiere-day binge-watching. Netflix’ streaming-based release model has
been widely described as the way of the future: ‘This is where TV is headed –
where the linear schedule exists just for people who do not want to control their
own lives’ (Dorr 2014).
But True Detective followed the old pattern, and the interest it generated was
intense enough that a relatively large community of fans awaited the broadcast of
each episode with eager impatience, bringing down HBO Go, HBO’s streaming
service in the United States, for three hours when the final episode was released
(Wallenstein 2014). We are thus faced with the somewhat paradoxical situation of
a show that attracted massive amounts of attention from fans on the Internet
because it did not adopt the on-demand release model supposedly most in tune
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with the brave new world of online distribution. When we look at the design of the
series, we encounter a similar paradox. As I shall argue further on, the makers of
True Detective had not really aimed for or expected the puzzle-oriented response,
but there were nevertheless many elements of the show that encouraged this
approach.
The little details
We have already seen how HBO’s publicity for the series contained suggestions
that viewers ought to pay attention to details. In the series itself, the dialogue
contains a number of discussions about how to solve crimes. In Episode 1, Cohle
tells his interrogators:
I’ve always taken a lot of notes.
I mean, you never know what the thing’s gonna be, do you? A little detail
somewhere way down the line makes you say, ‘Ohh!’ – breaks the case.
This kind of talk clearly encourages viewers to start looking for further clues.
One place to begin might be the title sequence. However, in an important
article on title sequences, Matthew Soar cautions against giving too much
interpretive weight to them: a title sequence may be ‘at odds with the specific
details of the movie it is designed to support’, since they are usually produced by
specialized designers (2007: 8). The designers may inadvertently introduce elements at
odds with the main work, leading viewers astray if they interpret them as pieces of
one coherent puzzle. A specialized design studio, Elastic, did in fact produce the
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title sequence for True Detective. Here we have evidence that the title sequence,
rather than a set of clues, is itself a sort of interpretation of the series.
The trade website www.artofthetitle.com, where the leading designers of film
and TV title sequences showcase their work, has published an interview with the
director of the title sequence, Patrick Clair. The interview is profusely illustrated
and includes, fascinatingly, 47 slides from Clair’s original pitch of the title
sequence. The third slide lists what the title designers have taken to be ‘the
fundamentals at the center of the story’; in essence, it is a thematic interpretation
of the series scripts as they appeared at the time. The slide identifies four key
elements:
Petrochemical America: A polluted landscape, a wasteland of unfulfilled
hopes and material exploitation. This is the physical location of the show,
and reflects the lives of its inhabitants.
Symbolism: A hunger for meaning. Be it existential symbolism, religion,
family or just belonging. The characters are haunted by a desperate need
to understand their place in relation to the people and world around us.
Vice: Human failings, vice and temptation. This world is inhabited by
people that traffic in sexual and chemical gratification. These are people
making compromises where they feel they must, just to sustain their
survival.
Internal Division: Broken men, struggling to be good, struggling to be
whole. (Perkins 2014)
11
As an interpretation of True Detective, this seems quite convincing. The phrase
‘Petrochemical America’ refers to the title of a book and exhibition project by the
photographer Richard Misrach, a 2012 continuation of ‘Picturing the South:
Cancer Alley’, a series of photographs Misrach took in Louisiana in 1998 along the
stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans where great
numbers of chemical and petrochemical plants are concentrated (Shaheen 2012).
Pizzolatto and Fukunaga gave Eclair, the title sequence director, Misrach’s photographs
to work from (Marchant 2014), and several of them appear as part of the title sequence
itself.
Considering the importance of the landscape to the show’s atmosphere, it is
interesting to note in passing that the story was originally not set in Louisiana at
all, but in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, when HBO bought the show in April
2012 (it was sold as a package on the basis of the screenplays for the first two
episodes with Fukunaga, McConaughey and Harrelson already attached to the
project (see Andreeva 2012)). However, HBO wanted to shoot in a ‘subsidy state’, and
Louisiana was chosen (Steele 2014a). The show’s makers were able to turn this change
in locale into an aesthetic advantage as well, not just because they could find inspiration
in Misrach to create images that resonated with the show’s themes, but also because the
landscape was also the landscape of Pizzolatto’s own childhood: ‘The refineries were a
huge presence in my life. I look at this book that we used for part of our art
department’s research called “Petrochemical America”. […] Where I grew up is right in
the deepest red center of cancer alley, carcinogen city’ (Walker 2013).
Returning to the context of puzzles and hidden clues, the theme of symbolism
and ‘the hunger for meaning’ is evidently significant. Importantly, the series is
about this hunger – but that does not mean it necessarily will satisfy it. However, as
12
far as I can judge, the forensic fans overwhelmingly devoted their efforts to solving
the mystery of True Detective, playing detectives rather than offering
interpretations. The clues discovered were overwhelmingly enlisted in support of
theories about who was involved in the murder of Dora Lange.
One clue that received considerable attention and which James S. Murphy
uses in his article to exemplify the kind of clue available only if you pause the
programme to examine it in detail, is a photograph appearing in Episode 2: in the
home of the mother of Dora Lange, Cohle looks at a photograph of five costumed
horsemen, four of whom wear long pointy headpieces. Thanks to digital
technology, Murphy points out, fans were able to freeze the image and scrutinize
it. Many suspected the horsemen were members of the Ku Klux Klan, spinning
suppositions about white supremacists. This suspicion was laid to rest in Episode 7
when Cohle talked about the area where the sinister Tuttle family comes from,
linking the costumes to a festival celebrated there called Courir de Mardi Gras:
COHLE: Had a very rural sense of Mardi Gras, uh, you know, the men on
horses, animals masks, such.
HART: Courir de Mardi Gras.
The mention of ‘men on horses’ must be intended to call the photograph to mind.
But some fans, knowledgeable about Louisiana customs, had pointed out the link
with the Courir de Mardi Gras festival immediately, as Murphy notes, and could
take satisfaction in having their observations confirmed.
Episode 7 also contained a few glimpses of a horrifying but blurry videotape
showing a little girl enduring an unspeakable fate at the hands of a group of five
13
masked men. They might well be the horsemen in the photograph, and the link
between the horsemen and the Tuttle family seemed to confirm the suspicions of
those who had surmised that the unctuous Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, who first
appeared in Episode 1, was behind an evil cult directly involved with the crimes.
Further confirmation of that the horsemen were indeed the same as the cultists in
the videotape came from an enterprising Internet sleuth who took the names of
members of True Detective’s cast and crew from IMDb and then trawled through
Instagram and Facebook accounts, looking for pictures that might have been taken
during the shooting of the series – and finding quite a few (Hawks 2014). Two of
them show the extras playing the costumed horsemen, and one gives a good view of
the man not wearing a tall pointy headpiece. Instead, he wears a costume of reeds
with a thick, wide reed collar and a mask topped with leaves or feathers, which
looks somewhat owl-like. Because the Instagram picture shows the costume much
more clearly than the photo of the five horsemen in the second episode, it is easier
to compare with the blurry video, and there is little doubt that the central figure in
the video wears the same owl-man costume.
However, it seems unlikely that the Instagram picture was intended as a clue.
There is nothing to indicate that it was deliberately left on the Internet for sleuths
to find. So, rather than being an example of a new way of distributing clues, it is
better understood as evidence of the considerable care the makers of True
Detective took over even seemingly incidental details in the series. They strove to
create what David Bordwell has called a ‘richly realized world’, an environment
where even small details, invisible to casual observation, have been chosen or
designed to be part of a coherent, deliberately textured universe (2013). To take
just one example of this kind of world-making: all the crime scene photos in all the
14
old files we see Cohle thumbing through were made for the series. In ‘Making True
Detective’, a featurette released by HBO three weeks before the series premiere, we
learn that people from the art department arranged murder scenes and
photographed them, using period-appropriate equipment: no digital photographs
in files from the early 1990s (HBO 2013b).
The care lavished on such small details invite fans to explore them carefully, but as
the show was coming to an end, the makers seem to have begun to worry that fans
were reading too much into details, which were designed to be atmospheric but not
narratively significant. A number of contributors to the series – the costume
designer, the set designer, the actress playing Hart’s daughter Audrey – were
made available for interviews: ‘Like a sports team hitting the showers, the creative
personnel behind “True Detective” have been dispatched far and wide for post-
finale interviewers’, remarked one commentator (Adams 2014). A recurring theme
in these interviews was the serendipitous character of many details; many elements
were delegated, and not everything was part of a master plan (Stern 2014b; Martin
2014a, 2014c). The costume designer Jenny Eagan said: ‘People were always
looking for clues. But a lot of times, the costumes just ended up being ironic
coincidences’ (Hess 2014).
The failure of the conclusion to bring together all the many atmospheric
details on which the fans had fixated into a vast, intricate, and super-conspiratorial
pattern did produce disappointment. If you approach a series like True Detective as
a puzzle, it creates a desire to have your narrative hypotheses clearly confirmed or
disconfirmed, and for many of the details of True Detective, the show left this
desire unsatisfied.
15
We never get any explicit account of who was wearing the owl-man costume,
for instance; nor do we learn how the photo and the video might be linked, or any
other details of the conspiracy protecting the main villain. The lack of an explicit
summing-up denied fans the satisfaction either of knowing that they had made the
right guesses about the mystery or of understanding how they had been misled.
This was, as we shall see in the last section of the article, widely held to be a serious
flaw. Among the other plot elements for which True Detective did not give an
explicit explanation, none loomed larger in online discussions than the mysterious
phantom that had haunted most of the series: the Yellow King.
Pulp pessimism
The name of the Yellow King was introduced in the preview for Episode 2, which
was released online immediately after the broadcast of the first episode (HBO
2014a). The first shot of the preview shows Cohle saying, ‘This is her diary’,
immediately followed by a close-up of Dora Lange’s diary. The words ‘Yellow
King’ are clearly visible, and with the use of the pause button, it is possible to see
more, including the word ‘Carcosa’.
Connoisseurs of American weird fiction recognized that these enigmatic
phrases derived from an 1895 short story collection by Robert W. Chambers
(1865–1933) called The King in Yellow, a volume strongly influenced by the
decadent aestheticism then in fashion (Chambers later became famous as writer of
historical romances, including the story and screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s 1924
Revolutionary War epic America). The King in Yellow is the title of a book, a play,
that appears in four otherwise unconnected stories in the collection; anyone who
reads the play is driven mad, so disturbing are the insights that it grants. Apart
16
from a poem, ‘Cassilda’s Song’, purportedly drawn from the play, Chambers only
hints at the contents of The King in Yellow (although the King seems to be a
character):
This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black
stars hang in the heavens; where the shadow of men’s thoughts lengthen in
the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali; and my mind
will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. (2000: 9)
Several of these elements recur in True Detective. Carcosa is mentioned in the
dialogue. Dora Lange’s diary, a careful scrutiny of frozen frames reveals, quotes
the first two verses from ‘Cassilda’s Song’, referring to twin suns sinking and
black stars rising. When, in Episode 2’s final shot, the camera pans away from the
burnt-out church with the antlered wall-painting, we see the afternoon sun reflected in a
still lake, creating a twin-sun effect (see Anon. 2014c). Those catching the connections
may speculate if the gleaming but inhospitable towers of the ominous refinery
visible in the distance are meant to evoke the dread city of Carcosa.
Fans googling ‘Carcosa’ would discover all sorts of links, not just to Chambers
(who borrowed the name from ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’, a dreamy fantastic tale
by Ambrose Bierce), but to the American tradition of weird fiction, a labyrinthine
mine of strangeness to explore. A key figure is H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who
delighted in incorporating strange names from and veiled references to other
writers, particularly fellow contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, while
also encouraging them to name-drop the sinister alien beings and madness-
inducing books he invented. Robert Chambers was one of the writers whose work
17
Lovecraft drew his storyworld by inserting names like ‘Carcosa’ and ‘The King in
Yellow’ into his own stories (for more on the Lovecraft–Chambers connection, see
the introduction to Chambers 2000). This allowed for all kinds of in-jokes and
meta-effects, but the recurrence of names, books and entities in stories by different
authors also helps create the sense of an overarching mythology, a seemingly
consistent network of whispered, horrid secrets. Allowing the name of the Yellow
King to haunt True Detective provided a link to the very extensive and suggestive
Lovecraftian mythology or storyworld that fans could explore almost endlessly:
At this point, the show was no longer producing armchair Sherlocks. It
had started turning viewers meta-detectives and metaphysical explorers,
giving people license to discuss outrageous theories on Reddit and beyond.
No deep end was too deep to jump into. (Fear 2014)
A lot of this speculation focused on who or what the Yellow King was, particularly
after the horror writer Michael M. Hughes published an online essay detailing the
elements the show had borrowed from Chambers (Hughes 2014); less than a week
later, Chambers’ The King in Yellow (a book from 1895, available for free!) had
become a runaway bestseller on Amazon, apparently reaching number four on
Amazon.com’s list of bestselling books (Stewart 2014); when I checked on 20
February, it was at number seven. Even those fans who devoted themselves to
crafting funny send-ups of the show tended to focus on figure of the Yellow King
(see Seikaly 2014; Sidorov et al. 2014). Yet the Chambers material also resonated in
significant ways with other important aspects of True Detective.
18
By their suggestions that behind our seemingly stable, everyday world lurk
unfathomable, sanity-blasting horrors, Chambers and Lovecraft offer a
particularly bleak vision of the universe. In a book-length essay entitled The
Conspiracy against the Human Race, a work of radical, unremitting pessimism, the
American cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti describes the ‘baleful agencies’ of
these horror writers as a clear analogy with ‘that pernicious something the
pessimist senses behind the scenes of life’ (2010: 55); they give inklings of the true
nature of existence: endless, entirely meaningless suffering and death. We live in ‘a
MALIGNANTLY USELESS world’, Ligotti concludes (2010: 181, original
emphasis).
One of the most striking elements of True Detective is the pessimistic
philosophy of Rust Cohle. He espouses an extravagantly dark and nihilistic world-
view that goes beyond mere world-weariness or depression to evoke an existential
dread unusual in a cop show. Cohle’s views are very similar to those found in
Ligotti’s book, so similar, in fact, that Pizzolatto has been accused of plagiarizing
them (see Davis 2014), even though he has freely admitted his debt to Ligotti in
interviews:
Anyhow: there was a clear line to me from Chambers to Lovecraft to
Ligotti, and their fictional visions of cosmic despair were articulating the
same things as certain nihilist and pessimist philosophers, but with more
poetry and art and vision. And then I found that this level of bleakness
went arm-in-arm with the genre of noir, and that aspects of the weird
fiction I loved could be used to puncture and punctuate aspects of the noir
genre that I loved. (Steele 2014b)
19
The suggestions of bleakness and despair gave the Yellow King material an
important thematic function in True Detective, but following up on the references
did not make any difference with respect to figuring out the murder plot, leaving
some fans who had done a lot of homework feeling duped and dismissing it as just
one big red herring:
All the references, all the philosophical subtext, all the weirdness – turns out it
was topping after topping […] The writer once read a story that had the word
Carcosa in it but since his cat was already named Chuckles he used it in a TV
script. (Anon. 2014b)
Such objections could be thought to gain some support from the draft
screenplays of the first two episodes that were leaked online during the series’ run
(the scripts were probably the ones circulated in April 2012 to set off the bidding
war among the cable companies). They contain no references to any Chambers
elements; instead, Dora Lange’s diary invokes Saint Michael. The Reddit post
linking to the leaked scripts concluded: ‘I think the imagery used throughout is
just a distraction. Doesn’t seem significant. Nic Pizzolatto essentially had angels
and stuff and then replaced it with Yellow King’ (Anon. 2014a). But this mistakes
the artistic significance of the material entirely, in my view.
As I have noted, the Yellow King references create a connection between
Cohle’s bleak pessimism and the horrors he must confront; at the same time, it
avoids the overused cliché of the almost telepathically sensitive detective mind-
melding with the serial killer. The weird fiction elements also create an uncertainty
20
about some of the things we see: might they have a supernatural explanation?
When Cohle sees a flock of birds form a spiral sign in Episode 2, is that just a
hallucination? Has he ‘lost it’? Or is he, as he says himself, ‘mainlining the secret
truth of the universe’? Pizzolatto has emphasized in interviews that everything can
be explained naturalistically: ‘Cohle’s visions are accounted for by his neural
damage, probably guided in some part by his unconscious associations. There’s no
evidence to suggest that the things we’ve seen are the result of anything supernatural’
(Steele 2014a). Nonetheless, the suggestion is powerful enough to create an intensely
ominous atmosphere more typical of horror than of regular cop shows. It comes to
a triumphant conclusion with Cohle’s vision of the whirling chaos at the heart of
the universe in the last episode. The hallucination – if that is what it is – is not only
evocative of passages in both Chambers and Bierce (see Romano 2014); it shows
that this fairly naturalistic-seeming police procedural is both willing and able to
carry off the feat of presenting us with a visionary image of awe-inspiring
strangeness and cosmic grandeur: we get to see the black stars rise.
A world where nothing is solved?
Cohle’s hallucinations have a very clear functional role. They motivate the
subjective flavour we saw was characteristic of the puzzle film, and they allow for
the ambiguity characteristic of the fantastic, in the sense Tzvetan Todorov used the
word: stories where we are left unsure whether we are dealing with natural or
supernatural events; a non-supernatural explanation may be offered for
everything, but we still cannot help wondering (1975: 25). The fantastic genre as
well as Lovecraftian horror needs ambiguity. Without it, the fantastic is no longer
the fantastic, and Lovecraftian horror tends to lose its effectiveness if one tries to
21
describe and explicate the alien entities and mythological underpinnings in detail.
The mystery genre, on the other hand, is seen by many as requiring the resolution
of all ambiguity, the solving of the puzzle. Much of the criticism directed at True
Detective is based on the implicit or explicit assumption that its conclusion failed to
fulfil the obligations a mystery or detective story has to its audience.
Many commentators expressed disappointment with the final episode;
television scholar Jason Mittell, for instance, wrote a blog post entitled ‘True
disappointment’, complaining that ‘sloppy plotting’ made it ‘completely incoherent how
all the pieces connected’ (2014). Other influential commentators expressed similar
sentiments in titles like ‘The disappointing finale of True Detective’ (Nussbaum 2014),
repeating the complaint that too many pieces of the narrative puzzle were left
unexplained. John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine and former
speechwriter to George W. Bush, put it most pithily:
Like the patsies and suckers we all are, we fell for it again. ‘True
Detective’ just screwed us […] For the umpteenth time, a serialized
television melodrama featuring an elaborate mystery involving a
diabolical conspiracy simply refused to follow the elementary rule of
mysteries: It left us hanging. It didn’t solve the puzzle. (2014)
Many loose ends were undeniably left hanging. When an interviewer asked
Fukunaga to say something about the finale right before it was broadcast, he
admitted that it contained ‘A lot of loose ends… I don’t know if they ever get
addressed. (Laughs)’ (Stern 2014a). The show’s creators, it appears, had mapped out
the details of the conspiracy and could have explained how all the pieces fit together;
22
even so, Pizzolatto said in an interview, they decided not to do so: ‘a lot of things are
left in fragments for the viewer to piece together about how we arrived at where we
arrive’ (Jensen 2014).
This decision goes against the norms of the mystery genre, succinctly set out by
crime literature historian Leroy Panek, whose works provide a historical poetics of
the genre with particular attention to plot construction: ‘The detective novel has as
its first responsibility to prove guilt in a quasi-legal manner, to show opportunity
and motive. This part of the formula never varies’ (1979: 205). In True Detective,
there is abundant proof of the guilt of the main villain, but his motives are more
obscure, and his opportunities – his earlier movements and activities, the
infrastructure of the evil cult – even more so. Probably, Pizzolatto and Fukunaga
believed that having the detective(s) present the details of the solution near the end
would have been too much of a cliché and also difficult to stage in a manner that
worked dramatically. After the climactic battle in the evil shrine in Episode 8,
Marty gets a visit in hospital from Papania and Gilbaugh, the cops conducting the
2012 investigation, and one can imagine them pulling out a case file and starting to
draw lines on the Tuttle family tree; but that would most likely have stopped the
episode dead in its tracks. Having Marty instead tell them that he doesn’t want to
hear about it seems a way of telling the viewer: this doesn’t matter, almost as when
Hitchcock famously covered up the whole explanation of the villains’ plot in his
North by Northwest (1959) with jet engine noise (and that very film is playing in the
background of an earlier scene of the same episode).
This indicates that Pizzolatto and Fukunaga did not primarily see the series as
a ‘reader–writer game’ – or, in this case, an audience–showrunner game. Various
remarks made by Pizzolatto bear this out, notably in a much-discussed interview
23
with BuzzFeed, published during the last week of the series’ run when expectation
and speculation about what the last episode would bring was reaching a fever
pitch. Here, Pizzolatto comes down hard on speculations that either of the two
heroes might be the killer, and somewhat ungenerously needles weird fiction fans
of the show hoping for a supernatural revelation at the end as ‘a specific section of
the audience’ who ‘read their own obsessions into it’ (Arthur 2014).
Such interventions, where Pizzolatto in the deft words of Evan Kindley ‘took it
upon himself to shut down certain lines of inquiry like a local sheriff putting the
kibosh on a compromising investigation’ (Kindley 2014), would suggest that the
creator of True Detective had not envisaged or sought the kind of Lost-like forensic
fandom it had acquired. Pizzolatto went out of his way to say that mysteries and
their resolution was not his primary concern: ‘We use the procedural case as a sort
of clothesline on which to hang the real meat of the show, the character
relationships and interactions’ (Dinsmore 2014). Fukunaga too occasionally
seemed ambivalent about forensic fans, making the point that True Detective’s
appeal to them hinged importantly on its format and the manner of its release:
The general chatter around those things is great, but it’s probably the
kind of chatter that wouldn’t have happened had all those episodes been
released at once. The anticipation-speculation that comes with a weekly
schedule is a double-edged sword. Because people have more time to talk
about things, some crazy ideas get a lot of attention. (Martin 2014b)
The ‘novelistic sensibility’ Pizzolatto has described as informing his work (Dekel
2014), as well as Fukunaga’s previously quoted remark about the weekly release
24
model being ‘old fashioned’ (Mather 2014) suggest that the viewers they had in
mind when they made the show were not really forensic fans but rather binge-
streamers or box-set watchers who would go through the whole narrative before
they started to explore atmospheric details or allusions to weird fiction
mythologies. The detailed fictional world and the weird allusions were not
designed to provide clues to the mystery, but to make the fictional experience feel
richer and more textured.
Conclusion
Can True Detective through its aesthetic design be said ‘to embrace the digital
age’? I have argued that it does not, at least if we assume that embracing the
digital age means to make fictions that are more game-like or puzzle-like, the way
some classical detective novels were. We cannot say that this is something True
Detective does. The rejection of the game-like is evident in the equivocal reactions
of Pizzolatto and Fukunaga to the elaborate narrative hypotheses of many forensic
fans, the way the ending left many plot threads hanging, and Pizzolatto’s insistence
that his main interest was the characters, not the mystery. It is also worth
remarking that True Detective was shot entirely on 35mm film (Anon. 2013; Radish
2014). The deliberate decision to not use digital cameras indicates that the show’s
makers had at least in some ways chosen to reject the digital age.
That being said, there were many aspects of the show that encouraged the
online exploration of its background: the richness of detail, the connections to
Lovecraftian mythology, and the rich evocation of a fallen world, a place where
‘the apocalypse already happened’, in Pizzolatto’s words (Arthur 2014). Many
fans, even some who have been strongly critical of the show’s finale, seem to have
25
found this activity very rewarding. For instance, TV critic Dustin Rowles, despite
his frustration over the many loose ends left hanging at the end, urged Pizzolatto to
continue in this vein when writing the show’s second season:
For seven episodes of True Detective, I’ve rarely had more fun
experiencing a television show. I learned so much about Robert Chambers,
The King in Yellow, about H.P. Lovecraft, and Cthulhu. I learned about
satanic cults, and I learned about the culture of Louisiana […]. Like many
on the Internet, I might have gotten carried away, but in getting carried
away, I learned more about literature, and movies, Louisiana, and
filmmaking, that it didn’t matter in the end that I was a little disappointed
in the finale. […] Instead of watching television, we get to experience it
now. We engage with it. (2014, original emphasis)
The ability to engage spectators in this rewarding way is one of the outstanding
qualities of the first season of True Detective, and it would not have worked in the
same way before the Internet. Richly realized worlds and elaborate and weird pop-
culture allusions certainly existed before the emergence of present-day digital
culture, but while they do not depend on it, digital culture has made this kind of
artistic practice easier to appreciate.
A lot of the criticism against the first season of True Detective seems to have
fallen into the trap that David Bordwell cautions us against: the trap of seeing
criticism in terms of the surface/depth metaphor, of detecting the true meaning
hidden beneath the images and sounds we watch and hear. This raises an issue that
is beyond the scope of this article to address: are there aspects of forensic fandom
26
that are intolerant of ambiguity, that insist that there must be one and only one
right answer to every question? – with the nihilistic corollary that if the questions
raised by artworks do not have right answers, if meaning is constructed the way
Bordwell says, then everything must be meaningless.
Whether or not such views are widespread among forensic fans, James S.
Murphy points in that direction when he concludes, rather bleakly (but
presciently, since he was writing before the last episode’s broadcast dashed the
expectation that all would be explained): ‘The intention of True Detective is surely
to bring us to the same conclusion about the endlessness, if not futility, of the
search for a solution’ (2014). To say this is to say that True Detective embraces the
radical pessimism of Thomas Ligotti: the world is malignantly useless and the
search for meaning a conspiratorial illusion. Yet this is not, as I see it, the lesson of
the show.
It is true that True Detective does not provide a full solution to its mysteries,
but merely gestures at a criminality too pervasive and protean for everything to be
resolved. The upbeat ending, however, explicitly rejects radical pessimism: Cohle,
who has been its voice, has changed his tune. Even if the darkness is pervasive, the
investigations of Cohle and Hart have brought a little more light with them, and
for that reason those investigations are deeply meaningful, even if they are unable
to uncover the entire conspiracy: ‘That ain’t what kind of world it is, but we got
ours’, as Hart (perhaps too explicitly) states in the final episode. In much the same
way, the fans got theirs: their search for meaning is not made futile because the
show does not have a single true meaning to be uncovered. The search, the
experience, has meaning in itself.
27
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Contributor details
Casper Tybjerg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of
Copenhagen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1998. His current research interests
include film historiography, the history of film style, and the relation between
Danish and German film-making in the silent period. He has written extensively on
Carl Th. Dreyer and Danish and Scandinavian silent cinema. He has helped
restore Dreyer’s films Once Upon a Time and Love One Another, and he has
recorded DVD audio commentaries for three of Dreyer’s films as well as Benjamin
Christensen’s Witchcraft through the Ages and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom
Carriage. He sits on the advisory boards for the Danish film archive and the
Danish radio and television archive, and he has been a co-editor of Journal of
39
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