Form and Void in True Detective’s Finale

Admirers of
HBO’s True
Detective had been
expecting, in advance of its Finale, that Season One would stick its landing.
Being a self-contained story arc, the True Detective season had an opportunity to
avoid the hazards that beset other prestige dramas, which are conceived without
foreseen conclusions and tend to end awkwardly. The results here are equivocal.
This eighth and final episode arrives at a worthwhile insight about the nature
of stories and the purpose of storytelling—but only once it has honored the
same insight in the breach as well as the observance.

The house where lurks our villain, Errol Childress, is a mess—literally and
figuratively. Trash is everywhere. Equally rife are allusions to predecessor
villains. Like Psycho’s
Norman Bates, Errol lives in a towering gothic house and conceals a mummified parent,
speaking to the corpse as if it were sentient. In the arrangement of Billy
Childress’s corpse there is an echo, too, of one of Kevin Spacey’s crime scenes
in Se7en. In the hall, Errol watches North
by Northwest and mimics the
voice of James Mason as Vandamm. Of course he is in a sexual relationship with
his dim half-sister, in the tradition of numberless hillbilly villains before
him.

These references call back to nothing that preceded them in the series. They
answer no questions; they add no interest and no meaning. Being so numerous,
they cannot add up to anything.

Errol had been both strange and frightening in his earlier guise as a
somewhat-off Tuttle scion, neither claimed by the clan nor wholly disowned,
given nominal employment mowing lawns at schools and cemeteries—on the margins
and overlooked, so finding opportunities for evil.

In Errol the lawnmower man, True
Detective seemed to warn
against overlooking people on the margins. There seemed to emerge a social
version of the series’s epistemological theme (“the detective’s curse,” to
focus on the wrong things): People who are pushed out of sight may or may not
stay there. As Rust and Marty looked past Errol on his mower, and the 2012
detectives did likewise, and things happened in the Bayou that no one cared to
look into—so the socially liminal may destroy us.

This is compelling villainy and proper to True
Detective, which is so distinctively about the forgotten and forsaken
Louisiana backwoods. Errol embodies all of this—or did. In the Finale, he
embodies a jumble of pop references.

A more coherent use of iconography figures Rust as Jesus. Rust descends into
hell (the catacombs by the Childress house) and returns to life. As he is
revealed in his hospital bed, music swells. He is swathed in white and bathed
in light—and finally his long hair and mustache seem justified, thematically if
not aesthetically. His final scene is a resurrection scene: With his hospital
gown white and loose, he rises from his wheelchair, shedding his shroud. “I
don’t even belong here,” he tells Marty. Or, as One mightier put it: “Ye are of
this world; I am not of this world.”

The conversation in the final scene immediately struck observers as highly
significant. (Slate rushed a
transcript of it.)
Then the question arose: Had Rust, strident atheist, found God? Certainly he
has converted away from his “sentient meat” doctrine (reiterated in this
episode) and relatedly from his denial of an afterlife (reiterated in the
previous episode). Suddenly, selves and souls are not illusory—and his daughter
and his Pop are waiting for him on the other side. Pizzolatto says that Rust has not so much found God as
found a form of optimism “purely based on physics.” (Quite how “physics” can
teach that the souls of loved ones endure beyond death remains unclear.)

True Detective has not,
then, revealed itself to be a Christian or religious series; but insofar as we
are interested in whether it is an anti-Christian or anti-religious series, patently it is not. The
“anti-Christian” interpretation was always a shallow one. Rust’s nihilism was
always undercut, as philosophy, by its transparent psychological motivations.
As Pizzolatto says,
“he protests too much”—that is, Rust never quite believed his own angst. Now
his new philosophy and emotional state are marked as positive and transcendent
by Christian iconography.

We note, too, an interesting reversal: Now it is Marty who condescends to Rust
on these matters. To cheer him up, Marty encourages Rust to recall the stories
he used to make up about the stars—and viewers will recall Rust’s
characterization of religion as the “stories” people tell themselves “just to
get through the day.” Marty has adopted Rust’s old patronizing analysis, though
with a gentler purpose. For Marty, any consoling interpretation of the cosmos
is a pleasant fiction: “The dark has a lot more territory” than the light.

As in previous episodes (but with roles reversed), neither interlocutor may be
“right” in this matter, but the smug guy looks more wrong. And so we side with
Rust when he delivers his rebuttal: “Once there was only darkness. You ask me,
the light’s winning.” This line, and the episode title “Form and Void,” send us
back to Genesis 1: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep.” (Pizzolatto: “If someone needs a book to read
along with Season One of True
Detective, I would recommend the King James Old Testament.”) They send us
also to the New Testament: “A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
has not overcome it.”

As Rust says, everything boils down to “Just one story. The oldest. Light
versus dark.” In True
Detective there has been much
self-consciousness about stories. Characters have been terribly invested in the
stories they construct as heuristic or mythic tools, as ways of explaining
things—whether whodunnit or why we are here or where if anywhere we will go
after death. Characters have stigmatized others’ stories as unsophisticated or
unrighteous or what have you. But when Rust gets his Jesus makeover, the series
seems to concede that the story of “Light versus dark” was best told “In the
beginning,” and subsequent iterations are noise.

One wishes Pizzolatto had heeded his own insight instead of piling up allusions
and backstories in his construction of the Childress house, as if
pop-referentiality could make the story. Better late than never, though.
Finally Rust and True
Detective arrive at this
wisdom, that the truest story is the simplest and the oldest—indeed the
only—story ever told.

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