Episode Seven of HBO’s True Detective depicts our chastened heroes in a chastened style. Gone is the murky intercutting among the 1995 flashbacks, the 2002 flashbacks, and the parallel interviews of 2012—the formal deviousness that caused us to doubt not only what the truth might be in this case, but whether “truth” even existed in the series. Approaching its finale, True Detective has arrived at a simpler form, and with its unitary narrative it offers now a unitary sense of “truth.” For the first time since the series began, we feel confident in expecting finality from the finale. Next week we will indeed learn whodunnit.
If the hermeneutics of the series have become
less murky, so have the ethics. Rust will not again be seen stealing cocaine,
snorting cocaine, participating in violent raids on stash-houses, or otherwise
becoming what he beholds. The nearest approach to the mimetic criminality of
his past career is a flashback to his recent break-in at a Tuttle mansion.
That sequence is shot in the style of a heist
film, replete with safe-cracking skills and smooth cat-burglar moves. Rust’s
ninja getup is incongruous, worlds apart from the perfect disguise he assumed
so painfully in Episode Four. The daffiness of the break-in sequence (Rust, in
a humorous voiceover: “I was aware that I might have lost my mind”) discourages
our inquiring into its ethical complexities. Our heroes, bless their hearts,
have become simply heroes.
(Series creator Nic Pizzolatto has said in an interview that Rust and Marty are not anti-heroes but
heroes. Now it can be told.)
They are simply heroes with an ultra-simple
code: They will find and punish the men who rape and murder women and children.
Episode Seven propounds this code rather overbearingly. Marty’s big moment, as
he rages against the violation of Marie Fontenot, is tellingly overacted by
Woody Harrelson: “No! God! Jesus!” [Slams the table three times.]
“[Expletive]! [Expletive]!” and on from there.
And on and on. Episode Seven has Marty and Rust
affirm repeatedly their horror of rape and murder. Regrettably, it seems
that True Detective is unsure how to present its heroes now
that they have emerged from the murk and become clear in their minds,
unconflicted, pure. It tends to overperform their ethical clarity.
The detectives have been simplified
existentially, as well. Now both Rust and Marty are living only for this last
case. Neither has a family, close friends, or a proper job; all earthly
commitments, attachments, and visions of satisfaction have been purged. The
purgation follows out the ascetic strain that always inflected Rust’s approach
to detective work. Rust suffered for his undercover work, which required
discipline, self-denial, and physical sacrifice—quite consistently for a man
who slept beneath a crucifix on the floor of a bare room.
Marty now takes up Rust’s ascetic style. Like
Rust’s grim apartment, Marty’s place of business is spartan, with an icon on
the wall. Paying work had dried up for Marty, and his personal life had been
emptied out, even before Rust’s return. Give or take a farewell visit to his
ex-wife, the decks had already been cleared for this last case.
Now Marty and Rust can crystallize their
detective-selves in pure form. Ascesis may be understood in part as a
self-fashioning that purges whatever is circumstantial in the ascetic’s
identity; its upshot is the precipitation of a truer self. The purged self is
both ethically true (good and right) and existentially true (authentic). In
Episode Seven, Rust seems concerned, like a good ascetic, with the ethical
significance of self-formation in view of vocation: “Life’s barely long enough
to get good at one thing. … So be careful what you get good at.” At last,
the true detectives?
Contrast our “trued” detectives, in their
singleness of purpose and identity, with the metamorphosing Tuttle clan who
have emerged as our villains. In a “saturnalian” country-style Mardi Gras
tradition, the Tuttle men don animal masks for the ritual violation of
children. Their shape-shifting is described by one of their victims, now grown
up and turning tricks in New Orleans: “They had animal faces. That’s why I decided
it had to be a dream. They had animal faces—well, had to be a dream.”
The prostitute reporting these “animal faces” is
a transvestite answering to “Johnny Joanie.” The impulse to metamorphosis has
befallen him, we take it, because of his exposure to the Tuttles’ ritual.
Shape-shifting is no longer a tactic deployed by our hero Rust; it is a mark of
what is neither authentic nor good nor right.
Our villains appear in masks and murk. They are
seen through the drugged semi-memories of Johnny Joanie (“Memory be f***ed”),
the semi-senility of Miss Dolores, the grainy footage of the Fontenot tape—and
last week, the catatonic psyche of Kelly Rider. The murk is concentrated now
around the evildoers, setting them apart from our heroes. This fact may be read
as a promise that true detection will dispel all murk in the finale.
Pizzolatto affirms that
he is not trying to trick us (now it can be told), and he marvels at the
pointless cleverness of the internet in anticipating twist endings and
plot-treachery. And he begins to deliver clarity and finality at the end of the
penultimate episode. On another lawn, as two more detectives walk away from the
man on the mower (“the detective’s curse” again), we finally see the telltale
scars.
Of course Miss Dolores, a Tuttle-addled fanatic,
has promised (threatened?) that there will be no finality and no finale for anyone:
“Rejoice! Death is not the end! Rejoice!” Out of earshot, Rust remarks to
Marty: “Sure hope that old lady was wrong about death not being the end of it.”
This is not a gratuitous Rust-ism. Rust has been busy crystallizing himself in
the final form he views as true (authentic, good, and right). As he has said to
Marty, “My life’s been a circle of violence and degradation. . . . I’m ready
to tie it off.” Let’s have no afterlife untying it again.
