True Detective: Unity in Opposites

I had heard many people speak of the greatness of True Detective before I ever got around to watching the show. In fact, Matthew McConnaughey as a main actor was a real turn off to me. Despite his beautifully quaffed blonde hair, chiseled jaw, rippling pectorals, and bursting biceps that I would love to lick and wrap my hands around (Whoa, that fantasy just got way too real.), I am not a big fan of McConnaughey’s acting. Fool’s Gold? Failure to Launch? How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days? No thank you. For all I cared of Matthew McConnaughey’s acting, I would have preferred to see six hours of his naked bongo playing interspersed with clips of pelvic gyrations from Magic Mike over any combination of his other movies. Of course, that was all before Dallas Buyers Club. If you have read movie reviews, watched the Oscars, talked to people, or simply been alive in the past few months, you are well aware that this movie was phenomenal and that McConaughey made the performance of his career as Ronald Woodruff. (The review in the New Yorker is my favorite of those I have read. Check it out here. You need a subscription to read the full text.) So, when a career-affirming performance by McConaughey paired with my undying love for Woody Harrelson (How can you not love Kingpin?), I decided to give True Detective a fair shot.

            From the moment the first episode begins, you know this is a show that is going to make you think. The cinematography is beautiful. It pulls you in with a juxtaposition of beauty and emptiness; pastoral landscapes meet seemingly abandoned ghost towns; My Antonia meets Walking Dead. This juxtaposition becomes a theme for the show that is explored within each of the main characters and externally through their interactions as character opposites.

            At first it is easy to look at Rust (McConaughey) and Marty (Harrelson), as cliché buddy cop stereotypes, the brain (McConaughey) and the brawn (Harrelson). In many ways, they are that, but they aren’t just that. This show dives much more deeply into what it is to be a man, that there are never just brains or brawn, that every man just wants to be loved, and that every man is afraid of something that he can’t admit to. But we aren’t quite introduced to these deep, character-driven struggles in the first episode. A lot of time is spent explaining the character dichotomy that the rest of the show fleshes out quite well through actions and dialogue.

Rust is confident of mind, an intellectual, but he is intellectual almost to the point of insanity. First appearing to be a man of few words, Rust’s lengthy end-of-the-world, glass is half empty speeches quickly pull us to the side of Marty, who, we are well aware, wants to punch Rust in the face if he doesn’t shut up. While he doesn’t do that, Marty does tell Rust to shut up, that the car is quiet time from now on, and, if you are anything like me as a viewer, you are saying “yes” and pulling in a fist to yourself in victory as he does this. But, we all get over Rust’s textbook Philosophy 101, and see something deep down in Rust that we love. If nothing else, Rust knows who he is, and he isn’t afraid to be that person. He wouldn’t punch somebody in the face without a good reason.

Marty appears, at least initially, as a more simple character. He is confident of body. He is explosive. Harrelson’s crazy blue eyes and boxy face paired with his ornery smile are the perfect embodiment of a man with anger that lurks just beneath his seemingly perfect surface. He looks like a boxer. He doesn’t hold back and then make dramatic speeches; he just says what he means and does what he wants. Of course, this type of character is more loveable initially because we have nothing to fear, we know what we’re getting, but there is something burning inside of Marty. From the outside, he has it all – a beautiful wife, loving daughters, and respect at his job – but inside, he is a bit of a lost soul. Unlike Rust, he doesn’t know exactly who he is or what he wants. (Maybe this is because the option of family was taken from Rust by tragedy. Marty actually has options but seems to be making the wrong decisions.) Marty claims to want a family, but his adulterous actions prove otherwise. The opposing traits of the two main characters are played with throughout the show in a manner that makes both of the characters lovable through vulnerability and fears, and hateable through thick layers of ego and stubbornness.

When I was watching the first episode, all I could think about was ego, specifically male ego, as in, this show had way too much of it. Early on, the female characters are a bit of a wash – stereotypes of wives, mothers, and whores. Marty has no respect for his wife, and she doesn’t stand up to him when he acts like a generally shitty and neglectful human being. Early on, the only female character that gets a say and gets to stick it to Marty’s ego is the woman in charge of the Bunny Ranch in the second episode. She sees the insecurity that lurks beneath his brawny façade. Marty threatens to shut her down because she has an underage girl working there, but the woman in charge calls his bullshit: “You don’t like it because it means you don’t control it like you thought you did.” This is so true, and Marty proves it true by handing the girl money and telling her to do something else. He wants to take control from the Bunny Ranch manager and give it to himself, but no one wants to give the young girl control of herself. It becomes that societal cycle of abuse, where young women are abused by men and older women. The older women, once finally in a position to make a change for the younger women, for their collective gender, have been so bogged down by the abuse from men that they see it as a right of passage for the young women to be victims of it too. This is why so many feminist groups advocate for the idea that there must be male feminists in order for any real change to occur. And, Rust, in a way, seems to take on this role, but only after having made huge mistakes of machismo emotion burying in his past. When Marty and Rust are back in the car after leaving the Bunny Ranch, Rust says, “What is that? A down payment?” He sees right through Marty’s attempt to portray himself as the hero, the family man with a picture perfect life.

So, as is often the case with characters that seem, at first, to be stereotypes, Marty and Rust both require some time for the audience to warm up to them. We can’t decide if they are both deeply troubled or deeply enlightened. Maybe, in truth, they are each a mix of both. The relationship the two characters build with one another is what helps the audience to fall in love with both of them as they fall in a complicated friendship with one another.

The first episode uses a framing setup to flashback to the situation that is the true meat of the story. Marty and Rust are being interviewed, separately, about the Dora Lang case, and, as they speak in these interviews, it provides the perfect narrative break to go back in time to how Marty and Rust began their partnership with the Dora Lang case. We sense there is a tension, a complication, during these interviews. Both Marty and Rust seem overly nonchalant, so nonchalant, in fact, that they seem to be hiding something. As Marty leans back in his chair making one liners and Rust demands a 6-pack of Schlitz to continue the interview, the audience is made to realize that the questions Marty and Rust are being asked are not really about the Dora Lang case at all. They are about Rust, who, seems to be teetering on the edge of philosophical enlightenment and psychological breakdown (or maybe he just wants to appear that way).

The use of framing and flashback allows us to look at the characters now and then, how they have grown and changed as individuals and as partners. This provides a fascinating opportunity for exploring characters internally without the use of first person perspective. We also get to see beyond the characters’ current attitudes and static personality traits; we get to learn their individual narratives, their personal struggles, and their endearing strengths. Most importantly, in the first episode, we learn how Marty and Rust first became partnered together. As Marty puts it, “You can’t pick your parents, and you can’t pick your partners.” As the show develops, we get to see how their relationship develops, and we slowly fall in love with both of them, like our hot new best friends. Personally, by the third episode, I was hooked, and I just wanted to give Marty and Rust a hug and tell them that everything was going to be alright, but, if I did that, and they were completely stable, they probably wouldn’t get the job done, and we really wouldn’t have a show at all. The thing that turned me off to the show, the flat female characters, is reconciled by the end. This isn’t a show about a women. It is a show that explores male obsessions and male companionship in all of its complicated glory.

Marty and Rust will never write long letters of gratitude to one another like Emily Dickinson wrote to her dear friends who read her poetry. They will never like each others’ statuses and post words of encouragement on each other’s Facebook walls. But, we know that their bond is unshakeable, that they respect one another in that quiet, unspoken way. Marty respects Rust’s intelligence, his dedication to the job. We know this from the first scene when Rust sees through the Dora Lang case and makes detailed sketches in his notebook. Rust is less transparent, of course. He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but Marty offers him something very important – stability. Marty knows how to work the system. He knows how to create the appearance needed to keep something going in a public system, such as police work. He holds Rust up while Rust thinks, ponders, and does all of the leg work. And, eventually, as the season progresses, they teach each other a thing or two about how to be in the world. They end up as one another’s only companions. There is no better moment than when Marty wheels Rust out of the hospital in a wheelchair. They are looking at the stars. Rust recounts, openly, about nearing death, about feeling what it would have been like to die and be with his daughter in a warm, light, and glowing place. It is clear he wants nothing more than to be there, but he can’t. He is pulled back to earth where the Dora Lang case is the only thing on his mind, and Marty is the only thing saving him from being completely alone. Similarly, as the two tragically sit alone eating TV dinners, we learn just how important their friendship truly is. They are connected in their loneliness, in their inability to let love in, in their inability to appreciate what they have, what they could have had. The show is a perfect mélange of light and dark, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness; an exploration of opposites and how they must and do co-exist in this world both with harmony and with strife.