Rust is a heretic with a heart of gold. He’s our fetish object—the cop who keeps digging when everyone ignores the truth, the action hero who rescues children in the midst of violent chaos, the outsider with painful secrets and harsh truths and nice arms. McConaughey gives an exciting performance (in Grantland, Andy Greenwald aptly called him “a rubber band wrapped tight around a razor blade”), but his rap is premium baloney. And everyone around these cops, male or female, is a dark-drama cliché, from the coked-up dealers and the sinister preachers to that curvy corpse in her antlers. True Detective has some tangy dialogue (“You are the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch”) and Fukunaga’s direction whips up an ominous atmosphere, rippling with psychedelia, but these strengths finally dissipate, because the show is so solipsistically focused on the phony duet.
Meanwhile, Marty’s wife, Maggie—played by Michelle Monaghan, she is the only prominent female character on the show—is an utter nothing-burger, all fuming prettiness with zero insides. Stand her next to the other, far more richly portrayed betrayed wives of television—like Mellie, on Scandal; or Alicia, on The Good Wife; or Cersei, on Game of Thrones; or even Claire, on House of Cards—and Maggie disappears. Last week, Maggie finally got her own episode, in which she is interrogated by the cops. She lies to them, with noir composure, as the visuals reveal a predictable twist: Maggie has had revenge sex with Rust. That sex is filmed as gasp-worthy, though it lasts thirty seconds. We see Monaghan’s butt, plus the thrusting cheeks of McConaughey. But the betrayal carries no weight, since the love triangle is missing a side.
An earlier sex scene is even more absurd and features still another slice of strange: a lusty, anal-sex-offering, sext-happy ex-hooker. She seduces Marty with her own philosophical sweet nothings (“There is nothing wrong with the way he made us”), and, since she’s a gorgeous unknown, we get to see her ride Harrelson like a bronco, as ceramic angels and devil dolls look on from the dresser.
I’m certain that, if you’re a fan of the series, this analysis irritates you. It’s no fun to be a killjoy when people are yelling “Best show ever”; this is the kind of debate that tends to turn both sides into scolds, each accusing the other of being prudes or suckers. A few months ago, a similar debate erupted about Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that inspired its advocates to rage that those who didn’t “get it” just needed to get laid. There were more nuanced arguments out there, though: In the Times, A. O. Scott argued that, while the film did a fine job sending up the corruption of the grifter Jordan Belfort, there was little distinction, visually, between Belfort’s misogyny and the film’s own display. Cool Girl that I am, I didn’t entirely agree: Like True Detective, Wolf unfolds in flashback, through voice-over, but its outrageous images ripple to reflect Belfort’s own mania. With the exception of a few shots—like one of a stewardess, whose assault the movie treats as a joke in a way that made me twitch—the nudity, nasty as it is, makes sense.
On True Detective, however, we’re not watching the distorted testimony of an addict, punctured by flashes of accidental self-revelation. The scenes we see are supposed to be what really happened. And when a mystery show is about interchangeable female corpses, and the living women are eye candy, it’s a drag. Whatever the length of the show’s much-admired tracking shot (six minutes, uncut!), it feels less hardboiled than softheaded. Which might be okay if True Detective were dumb fun, but, good God, it’s not; the show has got so much gravitas it could run for president.
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It’s possible that my crankiness derives from having watched so many recent, better crime series, telling similar stories in far more original ways, getting much less attention in the media. Most notable were Jane Campion’s soaring Top of the Lake on Sundance, and Allan Cubitt’s nightmare-inducing BBC series The Fall. In Top of the Lake, Campion jolts the viewer with what qualifies as a legitimately taboo use of nudity, transgressive because it’s genuinely rare for television. She films the saggy bodies of middle-aged women, the members of a female self-help encampment, without either judgment or celebration. Then she combines this subplot—in which she satirizes the cult of feminist victimhood—with a small-town mystery about sex crimes against teenage girls, who are filmed with comparative discretion. Like True Detective, Campion’s miniseries is a moody, pastoral rape-and-murder drama. But it’s all about torquing viewer expectations, not providing titillation—it’s about how communities agree to treat crimes against women as if they were bad dreams. Both shows feature mystery plots about pedophilic conspiracies among powerful men. The difference is that, while Top of the Lake is about survivors, True Detective is about witnesses. In Top of the Lake, the girls’ experiences matter. In True Detective, the crimes are just symbols of the universe’s awesome Lovecraftian horror.
In contrast, The Fall (which is available on Netflix) has even more conventional nudity than True Detective. It, too, tells a story about a team of detectives who are hunting for a rapist-murderer obsessed with symbolism. The Fall features pervy stalker shots, along with sick-making imagery of female corpses in bondage, photographed as keepsakes. Some critics have called the show misogynistic, or torture porn: By turning viewers on, it’s taking a rapist’s-eye view. And that’s true. But in the case of The Fall, the technique is deliberate. The show reveals the murderer right away and then forces us to empathize, seeing the world through his eyes. Then, episode by episode, it tears that identification apart.
Just like Rust Cohle in True Detective, The Fall’s rapist speaks in an elaborate pseudo-intellectual lingo, full of Nietzsche quotes. But an icy female cop, played by Gillian Anderson, sees right through him—and, in the finale, she shreds his pretensions with one smart speech: “You think you’re some kind of artist, but you’re not….You try to dignify what you do. But it’s just misogyny. Age-old male violence against women.” Anderson’s character aside, The Fall overflows with richly conceived female characters, who include not merely the killer’s victims but their families, the murderer’s wife, his daughter, and his mistress. As beautiful as The Fall looks, it’s much harder to watch than True Detective, because there is a soul inside each body we ogle. When women suffer, their pain isn’t purely decorative.
True Detective isn’t over, of course; like any mystery, it can’t be fully judged before the finale—it might yet complete that mystical time loop Rust keeps ranting about. There are hints of the supernatural, with endless references to the “Yellow King” and the “Lost City of Carcosa”: Maybe the show will reveal that it was Cthulhu all along, in the library, with the candlestick. But for now I’m an unbeliever. Bring me some unpretentious pulp, like Cinemax’s Banshee, or an intelligent thriller, like FX’s The Americans, which is beginning its second season later this month and has fresh things to say about the existential slipperiness of human identity. If you’re going to gaze into the abyss, find one that’s worth the look.
LAST GIRL IN LARCHMONT
The Legacy of Joan Rivers
The New Yorker, February 23 & March 2, 2015
My original pitch to my editor was for an essay drawing links between Joan Rivers—who had died months earlier—and the Real Housewives reality series. That idea went straight out the window, since Rivers is a fascinating enough figure for twelve essays. Due credit to my husband, who during one late-night brainstorm, made the brilliant point to me that Helen Gurley Brown was Machiavelli to Joan Rivers’s Hobbes.
Six months before Joan Rivers died, last year, she went on The Howard Stern Show: Two old friends, serial offenders, knocking down targets. They talked about Mayor Bill de Blasio. (“Rich against the poor!” she sneered.) Stern asked her opinion of Woody Allen, with whom Rivers had come up in the club scene, in the early sixties. “I think he’s brilliant. What Woody does in his private life is his private life. You want to be a pedophile, be a pedophile. I like…what’s her name? Ping-Pong. The wife. She wears yellow too much. Too match
y-matchy.”
Then, abruptly, Rivers changed the subject, to a topic more divisive than class warfare or Woody Allen: Lena Dunham’s body. “Let me ask you something!” she said. “Lena Dunham. Who I think is, again, terrific. How can she wear dresses above the knee?” Stern said that what he loved about Dunham was that “she doesn’t give a shit.” “Oh, she has to,” Rivers insisted. “Every woman gives a shit.” When Stern and his co-host described funny scenes from Girls of Dunham in a bikini, Rivers nearly sputtered: “But that’s wrong! You’re sending a message out to people saying, ‘It’s okay, stay fat, get diabetes, everybody die, lose your fingers.’ ” In a passionate rasp, she made her case. Dunham was a hypocrite for doing Vogue, she said, because it showed that she cared about being pretty. Stern was another hypocrite, for his “tits and ass” jokes, for his hot second wife—would he have married Dunham? Stern said that he thought Rivers would “rejoice” in the younger woman’s freedom. “But don’t make yourself, physically—don’t let them laugh at you physically,” Rivers pleaded, sounding adrift. “Don’t say it’s okay that other girls can look like this. Try to look better!”
The discussion felt poignant: Joan Rivers’s reflexive emphasis on marriage and weight, her hard-bitten advice for surviving in a man’s world, seemed almost naive in the context of Dunham’s fourth-wave-feminist exhibitionism. (Why would Dunham want to marry Stern?) The Girls creator was violating the rules that Rivers built her life on—was hemmed in by, protested, and enforced, often all at the same time. From the 1960s on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh realpolitik, one based on her experience: Looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money—and from men as the route to money—you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn’t cross over.
A devotee of rude candor, Joan Rivers had always blown a raspberry at the concept of “too soon.” After her husband, Edgar, committed suicide, she said she’d scattered his ashes at Neiman Marcus, so she could visit five times a week. Days after the Twin Towers fell, she called her friend Jonathan Van Meter and invited him to “Windows on the Ground.” According to the loving profile he wrote of her in New York, she had a pillow that read “Don’t Expect Praise Without Envy Until You Are Dead.” And for decades Rivers proclaimed (sometimes bitterly, but also proudly) that when she died she’d be sanctified, like her hero, Lenny Bruce. That prophecy has come true; since her death in September, at eighty-one, she’s been celebrated as a trailblazer, a pioneer for female comics. The 2010 documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work cast a glow over Rivers’s later years, emphasizing her fantastic work ethic and how, after a series of devastating losses—when Johnny Carson blackballed her, her talk show was canceled, and Edgar died—she’d stubbornly refused to fold, taking any gig she could get, high or low. (In one of the best scenes, Rivers riffles through her zingers, thousands of which are stored in silver file drawers with labels such as “Pets” and “Politically Incorrect,” “New York” and “No Self Worth.”)
That admiring portrait was true, but it obscured a more complicated reality: In A Piece of Work, there are plenty of Holocaust jokes, and some hilarious elder-sex bits, but not a single fat joke, although for many decades jokes about female bodies were Rivers’s specialty. There is no “Fashion Police,” and no red-carpet routine, no mention of the night Rivers said, when the twenty-two-year-old Kate Winslet was up for an Academy Award, that the actress’s fat arms had sunk the Titanic. Was that a joke or an insult? A message to Winslet or to other girls watching? (Try to look better!) This was the harder-to-handle part of Rivers’s legacy, her powerful alloy of girl talk and woman hate, her instinct for how misogyny can double as female bonding. In many ways, Joan Rivers was the first Real Housewife: She was brazen, unapologetically materialistic, a glamorous warrior in an all-female battleground—a gladiator. To honor her, as both a role model and a cautionary tale, you can’t airbrush that out.
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When I first noticed Joan Rivers, she looked like the enemy. This was in the early eighties, at the height of her fame. She was Johnny Carson’s permanent guest host at the time—warm to his cold; abrasive yet charismatic; with a brash engagement with the audience. (Her trademark line: “Can we talk?”) I was a teenage comedy nerd, into SCTV and Tom Lehrer, obsessed with Woody Allen and David Letterman. I was eager for female role models, of whom there were only a handful, other than Gilda Radner and the mysterious Elaine May, no longer on the scene. Yet Rivers terrified me. Glamorous in her Oscar de la Renta dresses and her pouf of blond hair, she was the body cop who circled the flaws on every other powerful woman—she announced who was fat, who had no chin, who was hot but, because she was hot, was a slut or dim. She made it clear that if you rose to fame, the world would use your body to cut you down. The fact that she was funny made her more scary, not less: “What’s Liz Taylor’s blood type? Ragú!” I laughed, then hated myself for laughing.
But, if Rivers was chilling to me, I was a prig about her. Among other things, I didn’t understand much about the forces that shaped her—or that, during her own ascent, she hadn’t been an insult comic at all but part of a new wave of sixties experimental stand-ups. Born in 1933, Joan Molinsky was the child of a doctor and his status-obsessed wife, who bought a fancy house in Larchmont as a “picture frame” for their two daughters. (The kitchen was painted pink to be more flattering when they brought boys home.) In the early fifties, when Rivers was a chubby freshman at Connecticut College, that mating ground for WASPs (she later transferred to artsy Barnard), a blind date picked her up at her dorm. When she came downstairs, her date turned to his friend and said, in disgust, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Such rejections seared into Rivers a lifelong identity as a “meeskite”—an ugly girl—even after she slimmed down, bobbed her nose, and became, in society’s terms, attractive. Later, in 1973, she turned the anecdote into a TV movie, The Girl Most Likely To…, in which a former fat girl murders the men who rejected her.
In her gritty first memoir, Enter Talking, published in 1986, she describes her path as a Pilgrim’s Progress of heartbreak and ambition. She dumped her first love, a poet, for an early marriage—to the “right” kind of guy—that failed. She lived at home through her twenties, commuting into Manhattan in a beat-up Buick, dreaming of being a serious actress, “J. Sondra Meredith.” Instead, she took sleazy gigs as a strip club emcee, Pepper January: Comedy with Spice. She bombed, twice, on The Jack Paar Tonight Show. She stole other comics’ routines; agents shunned her. Once, after a promising gig, her parents encouraged her to perform at their Westchester country club. She flopped so aggressively that the Molinskys sneaked out through the kitchen. Her father called her a “tramp”; Rivers ran away. For months, she was homeless; with the help of her Brooklyn boyfriend, she shacked up at midtown hotels, ducking the bill, fixing her face at Grand Central. Eventually, exhausted, she slunk back to her teenage bedroom.
Then, when she was nearly thirty, Rivers’s act finally began to click, creatively. During a stint at Second City in Chicago in 1961, she introduced a character named Rita, a desperate, needy, aging single girl. Back in Greenwich Village, in dingy clubs like The Duplex, she experimented with this autobiographical material, raw stories of bad dates and shame about her body. She dished about birth control, her affair with a married man, and her gay friend, Mr. Phyllis. Her closing line was “My name is Joan Rivers and I put out.” When she saw a Lenny Bruce performance, she was electrified, struck by a routine in which he called the audience “niggers” and “kikes”; outrageousness, she thought, might be “healthy and cleansing.” One night, when Rivers bombed, Bruce sent her a note: “You’re righ
t, they’re wrong.” She tucked it into her bra as a talisman, until she made her debut with Carson in 1965, her big break at last.
In those early years, her act was self-loathing, in the tradition of older female comics—she’d blow up her cheeks and hold out her arms, mocking herself as fat—but it also had an edge of empowerment. “The whole society is not for single girls, you know that?” she shouted in 1967 on The Ed Sullivan Show. “A girl can’t call. Girl, you have to wait for the phone to ring, right? And when you finally go on the date, the girl has to be well-dressed, the face has to look nice, the hair has to be in shape. The girl has to be the one that’s bright and pretty, intellig— A good sport. ‘Howard Johnson’s again! Hooray, hooray.’ ” She waggled her arms in fake enthusiasm, as if repulsed by her phoniness. “I’m from a little town called Larchmont, where if you’re not married, and you’re a girl, and you’re over twenty-one, you’re better off dead. It’s that simple, you know? And I was”—her voice became a growl—“The. Last. Girl. In. Larchmont. Do you know how that feels?…Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-four.”
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