BLACK STATIC #41

by Andy Cox

  TRUE DETECTIVE

  HINTERLAND

  WEIRD DETECTIVES

  The relationship between crime and horror, at least as it is represented in crime fiction, seems both clear and straightforward. Police or private investigators occasionally stray into darklands inhabited by men who epitomise all that is inhuman – the sociopathic monster, alienated or aloof from society, heedless of its conventions, intent on acting out rituals that subvert and mock its norms. Think Hannibal Lecter, or any other of the countless serial killers whose complex fantasies finally come undone when faced with reason and the – sometimes flawed – morality of the protagonists. Reason wins out because crime fiction draws back from direct engagement with the supernatural. What might have seemed supernatural is explained and transformed into something mundane by the methodical interpretation of evidence. Evil is rationalised – and nullified – as psychosis, and not as, somehow, inexplicable.

  Genre horror – the horror that is birthed in the irrational and atavistic, that utilises the tropes of the supernatural and embraces the idea of chaos – exists in some other place. Television drama, and more specifically, crime drama, has rarely if ever, ventured into this terrain.

  Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Fukunaga, the writer and director of HBO’s TRUE DETECTIVE (DVD/Blu-ray, 9 June), have gone a long way towards challenging such genre conservatism. Consider, for example, these words, spoken by detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) in response to partner Martin Hart’s (Woody Harrelson) question about belief:

  I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labour under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

  Readers familiar with the work of Thomas Ligotti – The Nightmare Factory, Teatro Grottesco – will recognise such bleak pessimism. Though laced with dark, absurdist humour, Ligotti’s worldview expresses the same nihilist, antinatalist sentiments as Cohle. Pizzolatto has himself acknowledged Ligotti’s influence, citing the latter’s non-fiction work The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, stating in an interview that “nobody I’ve read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than … Ligotti.” He has also acknowledged the influence of other contemporary horror writers like Stephen King and Laird Barron, as well as old masters of weird fiction like Poe, Lovecraft, and most explicitly Robert W. Chambers, references to whose late 19th century collection The King in Yellow are deeply embedded in True Detective’s narrative. Southern Gothic is another influence, with the show’s creator, himself a novelist, praising the power of William Faulkner’s writing, and of Cormac McCarthy. Pizzolatto is a writer steeped in the history and traditions of the fantastic, and he is blessed with the intelligence to use them not just to blur the lines between literary art and genre, but to blow them out of the water.

  True Detective, while maintaining the guise of a conventional crime mystery – evident in its reliance on genre tropes – the serial killer, the flawed, antagonistic detectives, the scepticism of their bosses – refuses to shy away from the supernatural. Cohle’s nihilist musings and the manner in which references to the Yellow King and Carcosa are woven into the text, suggest a desire to question our assumptions about the very nature of being and mortality. The key point about the fictional play The King in Yellow, brief extracts from which are included within four of the stories in Chambers’ collection, is that within the confines of the stories, those who read or watch beyond that first act, are driven insane by what is revealed. In True Detective, the unseen play serves not only as a metaphor for the mystery the detectives are trying to unravel, but also for the unknown horrors – past and present – that haunt Cohle. Talking about his daughter, killed in a car accident, Cohle speculates:

  Trouble with dying later is you’ve already grown up, the damage is done too late. I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this. Force a life into this thresher. As for my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father.

  The damage of ‘growing up’ is apparent in both Cohle and Hart in the present day scenes, where the physical and psychical toil can be seen in their circumstances and faces. Neither works for the police; Hart is divorced, putting on weight, and still lying to himself. Cohle is…well, a man obsessed by his inability to reconcile his nihilism with the moral debt he owes over his failings in the original murder case. There is too, the overwhelming sense of isolation, of loneliness, that haunts him, which drives him to reach out once more to his ex-partner. Writer Michael Calla has suggested that “existence itself is the culprit in the show’s central crime, which is not necessarily the murder of Dora Lange, but the tragedy of humanity.”

  Pizzolatto and Fukunaga aren’t afraid of horror movie clichés – indeed they seem to relish the opportunity to use them – yet the effect seems different somehow, transformative, perhaps because of the abundance of allusions to other genre works and the manner in which they are deployed: as crucial elements in the narrative rather than to show off (think Tarantino). It’s a risky and provocative enterprise, to be sure, but the gamble pays off. The show’s self-consciousness about genre, its willingness to acknowledge its influences, clearly demonstrates its literary sensibility and ambition. Not only does it question our expectations of the function and value of genre, it seeks to erode what critic Russell Smith called “the barriers between intellectual art and art of comforting entertainment.”

  While True Detective bristles with ideas and ambition, it never loses sight of its primary purpose, which is to entertain, although the way in which it entertains is far from comforting. Its title harks back to the pulp crime magazine that ran from the 1920s and published stories by Hammett and Jim Thompson among others. The show has moments of nail-biting tension and stunningly executed set pieces, as in the drug heist towards the end of episode four, and the climactic confrontation with their nemesis in the final episode. Just as crucial are those scenes of portent that contribute towards the sense of dread that pervades the series. The long shot of the machete wielding Reggie LeDoux in underpants and gas mask that closes the third episode, for example, or the scene in which Cohle watches starlings fill the sky in a spiral pattern reminiscent of the spiral carved into the back of murder victim Dora Lange. Or the moment when, in the present day, Cohle challenges the rational assumptions of the detectives questioning him about his part in the original crime investigation, he calls life “a dream you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams … there’s a monster at the end of it.” Although he is alluding to the king in Carcosa – the serial killer – the more specific reference is to the potential monstrosity we harbour inside ourselves.

  Both McConaughey and Harrelson’s performances are outstanding, particularly given the weighty dialogue. It takes exceptional skills to render such intense and portentous lines without coming across as pretentious but McConaughey pulls it off emphatically, convincing us that he has indeed stared into the abyss. I like the way too, that Harrelson counters Cohle’s bleak worldview with his deadpan humour, and the manner in which this defence-mechanism is gradually worn down and Marty’s hypocrisy exposed. Michael Potts and Tory Kittles are fine as the two present day detectives investigating Cohle and Hart, while Michelle Monaghan is compelling in a somewhat underwritten and conflicted role.

  A final key aspect to the show’s success was its setting. From the wide, empty landscape in which Dora Lange’s body is discovered, to the isolated, ramshackle hamlets scattered through the bayou, the show presents us with a startling and vividly portrayed contemporary Louisiana. Its burned-out churches, backw
ater bars, desolate factories, abandoned warehouses, and crumbling motels are inhabited by a curious and compelling mix of outsiders, losers and grotesques that, by association, speak to us not only of the gothic, but also reveal something about the coarsening effect of place, climate and industry on human consciousness.

  A similar effect can be seen in the BBC’s four-part thriller HINTERLAND (DVD, 26 May), where Aberystwyth and the west coast of Wales provided the backdrop for the Ed Thomas/Ed Taflan created police procedural. The sublime and foreboding landscapes of Ceredigion provide an appropriately bleak setting for this Welsh noir. Richard Harrington is an intense and troubled DCI Tom Mathias, his face as inscrutable as the mountains, his manner as unforgiving. The storylines are not new, but they are lean and tautly scripted, filmed in a muted, wintry palette that conveys a real sense of isolation and insularity, and they are populated by believable characters imbued with the hardness and vulnerability of the locale and its history.