A Euphemism for Conspiracy

This
seemed to be the week for souring on True Detective. One complaint
against Episode Six concerns its redundancy: Character beats were repeated, and
blanks were filled in exactly as predicted. The heavily foreshadowed cause of
Rust and Marty’s split in 2002, and of Rust’s quitting the force, was confirmed
(Maggie had of course strayed with Rust).

One thing at least was not redundant. As the
partnership cracks up, Episode Six gives us a fuller sense of why the plot may
require Rust and Marty to reunite—as they do at the episode’s end—and of why it
may be important that neither is employed by the official police force in 2012.

The partners’ symbiosis comes into new focus
here. Vintage-2002 Rust is an acknowledged genius who alienates his colleagues,
while Marty, a middling intellect but a good old boy, prevents the rest of the
force from killing Rust. In Episode Six, Rust is not merely unsociable; he is a
thorough prima donna. He disparages Marty as merely his secretary and
chronicler: “Type the report, man. That’s how we do—I get people to talk, you
write the stats. . . . Without me, there is no you.”

But perhaps the dependence goes both ways. Marty
notes ominously that “I am the only one [who] ever took up for you—ever.”
(Later, when Rust is suspended for insubordination, Marty will protest the
decision as “over-the-top.”) Their boss, Salter, warns that Marty is “the only
pal you have.” Marty is Rust’s handler, running interference for a rebarbative
genius.

And perhaps tethering him to reality. As a
prima-donna detective of the Victorian Age once said to the companion who typed
his reports: “I am lost without my Boswell.” The DNA of the Rust-Marty
partnership incorporates, as all fictional detective partnerships do, the
Holmes-Watson pairing—which incorporated the Romantic idea that the man of
genius really depends on his mediocre sidekick.

John le Carre represents Holmes’s need for
Watson in terms that foreshadow Rust and his foibles: “Holmes—mercurial,
brilliant, complex, turbulent Holmes—is not safe out there alone. . . . He can
dissemble, go underground, disguise himself to the point where his own mother
wouldn’t know him, he can act dead or dying, trawl opium dens”—but left to
himself, Holmes will probably overdose on cocaine or find some other means of
destroying himself. (The recent spate of Sherlock Holmes updates tend to
emphasize Holmes’s instability and his dependence on Watson. CBS’s Elementary even
has Watson in the role of “sober companion.”)

Mileage varies in the Rust-Marty partnership,
but the Holmesian influence encourages us to expect that the detectives’
reunion will have been a necessary condition for Rust’s wrapping up the Dora
Lange case. Marty may be nothing without Rust—we see he is no longer a cop at
all—but since 2002 Rust may have gone too far “underground.” His ten years “out
there alone” are a lost decade, in the sense that they are recuperable (as
television narrative, perhaps as actionable detective work) only now that the
partnership is back on. Rust is lost without his Boswell.

2012 will be unlike old times, however, in this
sense: Neither Rust nor Marty is on the force anymore. Marty, then, will no
longer be interfacing for Rust with the police bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has
been an overlooked theme in True Detective, and it is accentuated
in Episode Six, where Rust seems to consider it a euphemism for “conspiracy.”

When the retired minister Theriot explains in
2002 why he had left a Tuttle-affiliated seminary—“Bureaucracy.
Politics”—Rust prods and gets what he came for: whispers of a conspiracy to
shield a senior minister suspected of possessing child pornography. But if Rust
can switch out “bureaucracy” for “conspiracy,” the substitution may work the
other way round as well.

Rust’s dot-connecting strikes Salter as
paranoid. Rust: “Nobody puts it together.” Salter: “Puts what together, Cohle?”
Rust: “I can’t decide if it’s a coverup or the garden-variety incompetence.”
Women and children go missing in the Bayou, from places near the
Tuttle-affiliated schools, and the local police never solve the cases. “Yeah—think
about it.” Tuttle’s organization is a major donor to the state policemen’s
charity. And remember Tuttle’s attempt to interfere, through his task force, in
the 1995 investigation? “We’re in a muddy swamp here, man.”

Salter diagnoses Rust with “mental exhaustion.”
Where Rust sees conspiracy, other reasonable people might see the pitfalls of
bureaucracy. Individuals and agencies, connected but imperfectly coordinated,
will fail on occasion to “put it together.” In a bureaucracy, corruption and
“the detective’s curse” (inattention) can look alike.

Worse, bureaucratic structure may
institutionalize the detective’s curse. A detective combing the remotest parts
of the Bayou, gleaning unique knowledge of his case, takes his orders from a
man behind a desk. What is obvious and urgent to Rust on the ground may be
neither obvious nor urgent to Salter in his office. We may think of this
impasse in terms of genius vs. mediocrity—or, more pertinently, in terms of
attentiveness vs. bureaucratic distance.

Rust’s disaffection from the police bureaucracy
illuminates his penchant for going undercover, and eventually going rogue. Rust
has a history of flying under the radar, of being virtually a freelancer even
while on the force. Isolation from the chain of command seems congenial to him.
Recall how comfortable he was with Marty’s killing of Ledoux and with the task
of covering it up. The crisis demanded what Rust called “commitment”: since
they could neither “call it in” nor “hand it off,” knowledge and responsibility
were concentrated entirely in the two free agents. So Rust congratulated Marty
the jolly bureaucrat for “finally committ[ing] to something.”

When Rust finally quits the force, he does so
for the expected reason; his rendezvous with Maggie, we feel, was a long time
coming. But equally, his defection from bureaucracy was a long time coming. By
going rogue, he liberates himself from complicity in institutional agendas and
from the epistemological handicaps enthroned by officialdom. Outside these
compromises, he and his partner may finally commit to what they had left
undone.

Julia Yost is a Ph.D candidate in English at Yale University.