Well, fallout is being a bit dramatic. Rather, it was a kind of non-reaction in general that seemed to hover around the conversations and internet chatter after the finale aired. There were some that praised it, others that said it disappointed, but the majority, it would seem, just felt, well, lukewarm. There was no big reveal, so the speak -- indeed, we knew the identity of the killer in the final moments of the previous episode. And as far as I was concerned, there was no final plunge into depravity like many expected. Marty didn't turn out to be "in on it." Nor was Rust involved in the Lake Charles murder, after-all. Though the "love scenes" between Errol and his half-sister were especially icky, I don't think we saw anything that "topped" some of the more horrific imagery of the series. So while many cannot articulate just what it was about True Detective that didn't quite do it for them (the general sentiment on my Facebook feed the follow morning was "Weird, but interesting"), one can't help but feel like it didn't meet certain expectations.
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| The "climax of action" occurs with 20 minutes remaining in the episode. |
I propose that it has a lot less to do with the structure (and, of course, the ending) of True Detective, but rather a way in which we are subconsciously reading the show and projecting our desires in the process. From the very start, True Detective was praised for its duplicitous nature -- literary in scope, but utilizing the conventions of hard pulp. As readers and viewers of the 20th and 21st centuries, we are in love with anything that tries to take seriously what was never intended to be taken too seriously. And the best examples of these step beyond ironic re-appropriation and utilize something like genre tropes and archetypes in a way through which we see them overlaid with their counterpart figures rendered with a sense of realism. For example, here we have Rustin Cohle: a man with an almost superhuman sense of perception, who, in fact, experiences episodes of insightful synesthesia which boarder on the supernatural, and who appears also to have superhuman strength (he's never defeated in hand to hand combat except when he wants to be, he's been shot in the chest at least 3 times, and was later ripped open by an 8-inch blade). And yet we know that he is realistically tortured in the way that any subject of a realist novel would be after the death of his daughter and the collapse of his marriage. He has vices and, in his own words, fucks-up regularly. His airtight philosophical stance has just enough cracks to remind of us of our own spiritual doubts. In many ways, he reminds us of us.
True Detective is among these best examples, and may indeed be the best of the new wave of "literary television." It's so seamless in its insistence on a singularity built from the realist and genre "others" that we feel we are watching something entirely unique. Not quite television and not quite film, not quite paperback pulp and not quite literature. But as these kinds of hybrids become more and more common in literary conversations, I think it only makes sense to approach True Detective with the same mindset that we would have going into a reading of a film, novel, or poem. The major difference as it relates to the way we interpret (read: accept) the ending is that we typically afford works we can fit comfortably in the category of Capital-L Literature a certain kind of agency that we don't give to different forms of entertainment, either consciously or (more likely) unconsciously. We tend to read things in terms of their selves when approaching literary works, in that we are willing to more seriously contemplate how an unexpected change of pace (for example) works to retroactively change the way we perceive the work as a whole. I don't think we are quite as willing to do the same for a television series.
Sure, we all praised True Detective for its uncanny ability to transform the hard-boiled detective and procedural conventions into something intellectually engaging. It's intertextual, philosophical, and visually handled with more prowess than many big-budget Hollywood pictures. But I believe that unconsciously we weren't entirely willing to let True Detective grow beyond the rather rigid expectations we have for televised entertainment. We want catharsis. We want a twist. We want something explosively convoluted like Lost, or to see Walter White rigging a homemade automated machine-gun to kill a bunch of Neo Nazis, or the Governor sawing off Herschel's head. The point is, we feel we're owed excitement that tops every other minute of the show simply because of the way we are conditioned to read and interpret the experience of television. So when something as quiet as the ending of True Detective happens, we (again, mostly unconsciously) have a hard time just letting it be what it wants to be. We wanted True Detective to be more than the average T.V. show, but at the same time we didn't. We liked the idea that Rust Cohle was human, but when Nic Pizzolatto showed us in the final moments of the series just how human Rust is, and allowed that to be the moment that seals the series, we felt let down.
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But have no illusions: at no moment during the series was Pizzolatto not entirely in control of the narrative, and in the end, he decided to show us what True Detective was all along: a story about two men who change places, and, to an extent, exchange identities. The murder-mystery aspect of the show, no matter how engrossing, was only the backdrop to the larger, more human narrative. It provided the frame, but was never the boundary. "There's just one story," Rust says. And in many ways, that sums up the point of the show from both a philosophical perspective and the standpoint of a determined story teller.
It was always this, no matter how much you thought it was that.
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