Last week’s True Detective premiere was primarily concerned with introducing us to the desolate mindscape of McConaughey’s Rustin Cohle. This
week does provide us some more of his depressing, violent origin story,
and new wrinkles about his psychedelic-flashback souvenirs from his
time as a narco mole. That’s a touch that should be silly and
over-the-top, but is handled with such matter-of-fact beauty that I once
again go with it. But “Seeing
Things” is much more about digging further into Martin Hart’s psyche,
and all the things that he doesn’t (or simply won’t) see there. Cohle
is definitely still the defining force of the show’s personality, but
he wears his damage on his sleeve, in both 1995 and 2012. His
partner, meanwhile, has reserves of anger and ugliness that he does his
best to keep hidden even from himself, and so the show has to take its
time peeling back his surfaces.
“I think part of Rust’s problem was there was
things he needed, that he couldn’t admit to,” Hart offers to the
interviewing detectives. But I
have this theory that if you want someone to tell you what their own
biggest problem is, you could do worse than to point at someone else and
ask them what they suppose that guy’s deal is. Hart clearly has desires and resentments that he won’t acknowledge. He is jealous of how his young girlfriend (who it must be said, has one of the most ri-goddamn-diculous
bodies in even the storied history of pay cable T&A) spends her
time away from him, but has to couch it in paternal protectiveness. He will sit in the car while his partner roughs up some hillbillies for directions, but offer neither help nor criticism. And
he refuses to meet his wife’s complaints head on, using the job and her
brittle relationship with her mother to deflect the argument away from
anything he doesn’t want to talk about.
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To be fair, she did sleep with Chook Chutney
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He also has reserves of anger hidden very close to
the good ol’ boy surface, as he explodes at Cohle’s mild observation
that he isn’t hiding the affair well. He
even tries to warp that confrontation into a defense of his wife’s
honor, not that Rust is entertaining that fiction, or remotely afraid of
a middle-aged detective after what we learn he’s done before. He tells
the 2012 detectives “I know who I am. And after all these years,
there’s a victory in that.” But
he doesn’t look victorious, with the cigarette constantly smoldering
and that wispy wig and droopy moustache, drinking alone on nights off
from working presumably at a bar.
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“Whoa, why would you just assume that?”
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Marty still does not seem to know who he is in
2012, as even in hindsight he justifies his drinking and adultery as for
the good of the family, allowing him to exorcise some of those generic
cop show demons and be a better overall family man when he does get
around to coming home (to his daughters setting up gang-rape tableaus
with their Barbies, in the episode’s most unsettling beat). I think he actually does believe that, or at least did in 1995; we haven’t heard any mention of his current family situation in those interview segments. The
girls would presumably be grown and gone in any case, but at this point
I’d hazard a guess that while he may be married, it’s not to Michelle
Monaghan.
I feel like I should probably mention the actual case progress at some point, but there isn’t a ton going on there. The
guys get threatened with losing the case to the new occult task force,
but mostly just do basic legwork. What they find out about the victim
could probably have been guessed by anyone who has seen a fair amount of
serial killer fiction and/or CSI: childhood defined
by poverty and abuse, drug problems, fell into prostitution, met a
mysterious new man shortly before being killed. What makes True Detective
distinctive thus far is not the content of those beats, but the
stylistic way they are depicted: the quiet despair of the rural
settings, the subtle hallucinatory touches, and the simmering tension
between the two men walking these familiar beats. I
am only mildly interested in whether they catch the real killer in the
“present day”, but I’ll tune in next week to see how these guys manage
to continue to share those long car rides through the bayou back in the
90’s (apropos of nothing, I’m eagerly waiting for the moment when Woody
turns on the radio to relieve one of those awkward silences and is
greeting with an endless, period-appropriate loop of Alanis
Morrissette’s “You Oughta Know”).
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Never forget how this man trampled our collective heart, America
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