Two weeks ago, I published a critical article about HBO’s “True Detective” in which I argued that, as stylish and as well acted as the series was, it had a hollow center. Beneath its auteurist trappings, the show boiled down to bickering cops hunting a sinister “rape club”—a plot that has been done to death, so to speak, on many better shows. “True Detective” also had a funky gender problem: it was about the evil of men who treat women as lurid props, but the show treated women as lurid props. And, though the dialogue was deeply, sometimes deadly serious, those layers of Lovecraft and nihilism just felt like red herrings.
Well, as of the finale, I’ve changed my mind about one thing, at least: Rust Cohle’s monologues weren’t window dressing. They were the whole point—but I don’t mean that in a good way. In the finale, we discovered that the Spaghetti Man—a.k.a. the lawnmower man, a.k.a. the hulking guy with scars—was indeed our serial killer. A perverted mastermind with a cave full of skulls and thorns, he was diddling his disabled sister inside their Grey Gardens wreck of a mansion; he also had some serious elder abuse going on, a plot that gave me flashbacks to the hilarious movie “Cold Comfort Farm” (“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!”). I relished this surreal, sick, and frankly nasty opening sequence, which led deep into the territory of the notorious “X-Files” episode “Home,” but after that everything went downhill.
To summarize: Our boys intimidated a corrupt cop with a videotape (he howled upon seeing the un-seeable, then screamed “Chain of command!”). They Googled documents and visited witnesses and had Sherlockian insights about green paint. There was a meeting with one of the African-American cops, who turned out to be the good cop. There were endless conversations in the car, about issues like whether Rust held back in that fistfight, and about Rust’s argument that Marty should be blamed for “pushing a good woman to the point where she had to use me.” (Of course, Maggie couldn’t have actually wanted to screw Rust, out of revenge or because the man had been flexing his arms at her for years; that would mean she had desires beyond being a plot device.)
About two-thirds of the way into the hour, there was an extended game of Marco Polo in the ruins, a truly ridiculous head butt, two stabbings, and a gunshot. No involvement of Marty’s father-in-law; no payoff on the goth daughter angle; no payoff on a lot of things, actually, like that mysterious convict who died in his cell. “Errol” was behind all the show’s central crimes: he’d participated in drugging a prostitute and decorating her in antlers; he’d helped organize the “Eyes Wide Shut” club with the girls in blindfolds; he was behind the kiddie-porn preschool molestation in the school basement; and then, of course, there was that ancient incestuous family to tend. He also got solid ratings as a housepainter. The masked figures behind the larger conspiracy went free, including the powerful Tuttle family—although I haven’t entirely sorted out the details, maybe because so many of them didn’t make any sense.
There was a hospital scene between Marty and his wife and kids that was so abstract, it might as well have featured a silent-movie card reading “Forgiven!” And, over the show’s last twenty minutes, as in the finale of “Lost,” the series became a meditation on how our heroes healed from their psychic wounds and became buddies again. Marty was “fine, just fine,” recovered from years of Match Personals and TV dinners. Rust had a touching dream about his dead daughter, in which he glimpsed light beneath the darkness. They were able to move on, to forgive themselves for their own mistakes (Marty) or find optimism in their nihilism (Rust).
I am certain there are people who found all this experimental and profound. To me, it was a near-total wash. And what was most striking was that every one of show’s gross-out victims—the dead “prosts,” the raped little girls with the blindfolds, the genderqueer hooker who had been raped as a boy and filmed for porn movies, Marty’s own screwed-up daughter—were just there to ease our heroes into these epiphanies. After all that talk about how the two men hadn’t “averted their eyes” to evil, the show did just that. And it ends with stories told in the stars? We’re in Successories territory here, and even great actors can’t pull that off.
As I said in the review, it’s no fun to pan a show that people love (pleasure is an argument for itself, after all). But I’ll certainly be relieved when this series stops blocking people’s view of the other television that’s out there, including the mysteries I touched on in my piece, like “Top of the Lake” and “The Fall,” as well as “Broadchurch,” “Spiral,” “The Returned,” and the terrific new season of “The Americans”—varied and excellent thrillers that got far less press than “True Detective,” in part because they didn’t have the imprimatur of HBO and manly movie stars. The second season of “Orange Is the New Black” is on its way, and so is “Game of Thrones.” Fingers crossed that there’s some other drama in my pile of screeners to show me fresh possibilities! Just spare me anything atmospheric: I’ve had enough hot air.
