Rachel McAdams as Antigone “Ani” Bezzerides in HBO's 'True Detective'
With the recent spate of police-related controversies and abuses, along with how these incidents have taken a foothold in the public consciousness, it's interesting to think about the public perception of law enforcement, especially in pop culture. True crime fiction has spanned from comic-books to hardcover best-sellers like
Helter Skelter and
In Cold Blood. The police procedural and cop show have been staples of television for almost as long as the medium has existed, whether it be cowboys dispensing justice on the frontier or the many, many iterations of Law & Order leading the audience through a crime. And a good chunk of action movies are predicated on a protagonist who's a lone cop that will save everything from disaster.
On the one hand, even today, there's an appeal to a romantic idea of someone protecting the innocent from bad men who would tear it apart. After the September 11 attacks, police officers and firefighters became symbols of heroism and public service. The same people who thought patriotism could be measured by the size of their flag lapel pin usually thought they should augment it with an NYPD or NYFD cap. However, like a lot of the feelings in the wake of 9/11, the public mood didn't hold over the long-run, and reverted to largely what it was before. While the cop tends to be the protagonist the audience roots for, most fictional depictions of police over the past 30 years are also deeply cynical about the system they represent and their role within the larger culture. For example, The Wire presents the Baltimore police department as bureaucrats concerned with advancement and (faked) arrest numbers more than safety and tangible results. In most cop stories, characters are by and large morally muddled, deeply flawed, willing to bend the rules to achieve what they think is a just result, since the system itself is defined by it inequities and failures.
The first season of Nic Pizzolatto's True Detective became a hit and was considered one of the best shows on television during 2014 through memorable performances from Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, mixed with Cary Fukunaga's distinctive direction. While this sophomore outing returns to similar themes, a lot of what made the show work so well is literally gone and back to square one with the anthology format. The King in Yellow references are replaced by Greek mythology, the Louisiana bayous give way to California freeways, and instead of McConaughey and Harrelson the quartet of Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell are our eyes into this particular world. The result is a lot of grim cop tropes and a series that wallows in them to the point of absurdity at times.
Continue below the fold for more.
There was more than a bit of backlash to the first season of True Detective when the story reached its conclusion and, instead of Cthulhu, an incestuous redneck was the ultimate end boss Marty (Woody Harrelson) and Rust (Matthew McConaughey) face. However, the first season was never really about the killer or the murders that are at the center of the story. It's an important part of the story, but the series was really an examination of the friendship of two characters that have a yin-yang relationship to each other and how the circumstances of the investigation filters through their worldviews, flaws, and affects everyone around them. In fact, it was more about the character's personal lives and ideas about what it means to be a husband, a father and a man contemplated alongside nihilism, whether hope is a delusion, and time a flat circle. If anything made True Detective interesting and different, it wasn't the mystery, but how those themes were handled in the hands of McConaughey and Harrelson.
Many of these same themes are present in season 2, but they just don't work as well and drown in a storm of cliches and overwritten dialogue.
"Shhh."
From Erik Adams at the
A.V. Club:
HBO’s Brand New Sunday Night is doomed to suffer from comparisons. Ballers must answer to the crimes of Entourage; The Brink moves into territory, subject matter, and settings previously occupied by Veep, but doesn’t speak the same, tart language. True Detective season two, meanwhile, has the looming shadow of a big brother cast upon. How looming? After reading the words “looming shadow,” you already have the heralding cry of Detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart galloping through your head.
The unloading zone of a public school is the perfect place for “The Western Book Of The Dead” to begin, because “The Western Book Of The Dead” feels like a kid starting classes at a school where an older sibling’s reputation precedes them. Big brother was popular with the brains and the jocks alike, an effortless charmer who also had a bit of philosophical mystique to him. He left cryptic scribblings in his notebook margins and gave a stoned pronouncement about the human condition as his yearbook quote, yet he was still crowned prom king.
Season 2 is a Los Angeles detective story centered (mostly) around the murder of a city manager with mob ties in fictional Vinci, California, and how the case spreads to encompass much, much more. Colin Farrell is detective Ray Velcoro, who's drunk, crooked and not exactly a father of the year candidate to his ginger son, Chad. Velcoro is trying to deal with blowback from an upcoming newspaper expose on corruption in Vinci, since he has a long history with and does work for Vince Vaughn’s Frank Semyon, a crime boss trying to go straight. And since every Los Angeles noir detective story, from
Chinatown to
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, needs to be connected to a battle over resources or a public works project, Semyon's path to legitimacy is trying to push through a high-speed-rail line, with the murder of the city manager screwing up the plan. Rachel McAdams's county sheriff Ani Bezzerides is a tough female cop who carries a lot of knives, and catches the case at a difficult junction of her personal life. Ani's sister is doing porn, her father is a quasi-cultist that takes no responsibility for any of his actions, and her no nonsense attitude is a function of rebelling against her hippie upbringing along with a lot of daddy issues. Taylor Kitsch's CHP officer Paul Woodrugh is the damaged veteran who finds the city manager's desecrated body on the side of the highway. Woodrugh is suspended after he's accused of pulling over an actress and propositioning her for a blowjob in order to get out of a speeding ticket, and his dysfunction and mental scars run deep. These different forces converge on the case, each with differing perspectives and selfish ends to accomplish, and it blows up in their faces.
Now, if all of this dramatized corruption and exploration of character personal flaws sounds interesting, too bad if you turned in to watch the premiere last night. Because the story doesn't get around to its main narrative until 58 minutes into an hour show, and it's mostly a boring slog of prologue getting there. Before that point, the episode is concerned with getting the audience introduced to these four characters and setting up the pieces for the mystery. But the problem is that these characters and the circumstance too often comes off as caricatures and a collection of cop and criminal tropes spouting ridiculous lines (e.g., "Never do anything out of hunger. Not even eating."). It's not that any of the actors are giving terrible performances in their roles, but some are better than others. Farrell's Velcoro is both the most cliched and interesting of the four. Vaughn's Semyon is probably the weakest in not coming off either particularly intimidating or as philosophical as the lines and visual subtext tries to suggest. And Kitsch is basically playing his Friday Night Lights Tim Riggins role, if Tim Riggins ended up a motorcycle cop in Southern California after getting screwed up in Iraq. One of the most ridiculous moments of the premiere is a scene where we're supposed to see the depths of Woodrugh's scars when his girlfriend performs oral sex. He requires Viagra to get it going and is totally uninterested in the act. I would bet dollars to donuts Pizzolatto thought this scene would be a great dramatic moment, and instead it's laughable.
Taylor Kitsch's blowjob face
Like Marty and Rust from season 1, each of these characters think they understand what life is, but there's a lot of self-deception and searching for something better. Also, like last season, these perspectives are based around the destruction from parent-child relationships, sexual dysfunction, and a hyper-masculinity that breeds despair. However, there's just no subtlety to any of the action or internalized conflicts. Every feeling, emotion, and thought has to be told to us instead of shown, like the audience is a bunch of idiots that wouldn't get it otherwise. The most obvious example of this is a scene where Velcoro and Semyon sit in a bar where the singer-songwriter onstage with her guitar
sings the emotion we're supposed to feel about it (e.g., "This is my least favorite life"). And while the directors brought in for season 2, starting with
Fast & Furious director Justin Lin for Sunday's episode, retaining the show's use of setting to instill a mood, the visuals aren't as dynamic or as good at getting across theme as Fukunaga's in season 1. The Los Angeles area never feels quite as much of a "character" within this story as Louisiana was last year.
At its core, True Detective wants to be a show that uses the cop drama edifice as a means to discuss power, or the lack thereof, and the flawed people and the larger societies which get caught in the wake of the struggle to understand it. But what keeps the show from fully clicking this season is an empty feeling of a story wallowing in its darkness without really saying anything new or distinctive.
- Nevermind: The show replaces the theme song from season 1, "Far from Any Road" by the Handsome Family, with Leonard Cohen's "Nevermind."
From Lindsay Zoladz at
Vulture:
On the surface, “Nevermind” sounds terribly bleak, echoing the show’s flirtations with nihilism and theories about the meaningless of existence: “There’s truth that lives/ And truth that dies/ I don’t know which/ So nevermind.” (It is the sort of song I can imagine Matthew McConaughey listening to on repeat in his Lincoln.) The song has been condensed for the credits, but on the album it’s more apparent that it is about the aftermath of a war, most likely in the Middle East. (In the longer version, kirtan singer Donna DeLory repeatedly sings the word salaam in the background.) Their contrasting vocal stylings, and languages, echo the duality that Cohen contemplates in the lyrics.
But taken in the context of Cohen’s life and career, the song is more complex than a brooding, noir-ish downer. Book of Longing was, notably, the first work that Cohen published after becoming an ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk; he spent five years in the mid to late ’90s living in seclusion in a monastery outside of L.A. Considered with Cohen’s Zen practice in mind, the refrain of nevermind starts to feel less like a declaration of Rust Cohle–esque nihilism and more like an embrace of Buddhist non-attachment and the surrender of the self: “I had to leave/ My life behind/ I had a name/ But nevermind.” In the monastery, Cohen took the name “Jikan,” which roughly translates to “silent one” — a particularly ironic moniker for someone who, in the outside world, had made his name as a famous singer.
- The Western Book Of The Dead: The episode's title is a reference to a 1970 New-Age manuscript which posits humanity evolved from simple matter, found God, art, sex, pleasure, and everything else in-between, and has abandoned all of this enlightenment to become a “meaningless, enigmatic, machine-like piece of MATTER" in the current world.
- Women in a violent world of violent men: One of the biggest knocks against True Detective in its first season was what many argued was a lack of depth and focus on female characters. Emily Nussbaum criticized the series for having male characters that can expound on the ideas of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and Thomas Ligotti, but Pizzolatto populates his world with "paper-thin" women who are "wives and sluts and daughters." The flip-side of Nussbaum's argument is True Detective is a show told mainly from a male perspective, with masculinity one of the main themes. Expecting it to focus on the interior-life of women is not realistic, because that's not what this show really cares about. In this new season, McAdams' Ani seem to be both a direct response to those criticisms, but also reinforces this fictional universe is a very male one. Ani has discarded much of her femininity to endure, and tells Velcoro in an upcoming episode the "fundamental difference between the sexes is one can kill the other with his bare hands." So Ani becomes as much a commentary on masculinity as any of the male characters.
- Vinci is a stand-in for Vernon, California: The corruption and circumstances of fictional Vinci, California mirror the problems in Vernon: a small number of residents living in an area with a lot of commercial interests, which have no problem doling out graft and redoing regulations to get things done their way.
From Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic:
In 2010, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about the city of Vernon, home of approximately 90 people and 1,800 businesses. “Vernon a tightly controlled fortress,” read the headline, and the article detailed how the tiny industrial town had become a hotbed of alleged corruption, with city officials earning huge salaries, participating in shady commercial deals, and setting residency rules that amounted to vote rigging. Some of those officials lived, according to the The Times, “in tidy, wood-frame homes with green lawns tucked hard in a world of gray smokestacks, meat packers, heavy industry, power plants, and transmission lines.”
- Oedipus: Who in the hell names their daughter Antigone? This season's The King in Yellow references are replaced by a lot of tidbits from Greek myth. McAdams' Ani is named after Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Antigone's ultimate fate is not a happy one. Ani's sister is Athena, which her hippie father (David Morse) wrongly calls the "goddess of love" (i.e., Athena was the goddess of a lot of things, but love wasn't one of them). Dad states his pessimism by saying "this is how we must live now, in the final age of man," while holding court at the Panticapaeum Institute. Panticapaeum was an ancient Greek city on the eastern shore of Crimea where Mithridates VI committed suicide after leading a series of wars against the Roman Republic. One other note about Ani's name. Her last name is Bezzerides. A.I. Bezzerides was a writer responsible for three classic film noirs: Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949), Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952) and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
- Perfect for Father's Day: The only part of this episode that I felt really worked well and piqued my interest was Velcoro's relationship with his son, Chad. That entire situation is odd, informed by the disturbing ties between Velcoro and Semyon, and filled with tension and uncomfortable moments. The first scene of season 2 is Velcoro taking Chad to school, and it couldn't be any more awkward. There's an affection and a desire to connect with his son, but there's also something else below the surface. Chad's mother was raped, and beyond the ginger hair it's implied Chad might not be Velcoro's, hence the reason he gets apprehensive when his lawyer suggests a DNA test. However, to me, the best and most ridiculous scene of the episode is when Velcoro confronts his son's bully. It perfectly encapsulates Velcoro's wanting to protect his kid, using position and status, and doing it in the worst way possible. But Colin Farrell barking "you ever bully or hurt anybody again, I’ll come back and butt-fuck your father with your mom’s headless corpse on this goddamn lawn" at a tween boy who's watching his dad get pummeled was more ridiculous than the serious dramatic moment that I think Pizzolatto intended.
What I am definitely unsold on is the idea that a self-identified police officer could brutalize a middle-class homeowner on his very own doorstep, without a disguise and in front of a witness, and not face serious repercussions. I don’t care how corrupt Vinci is. It was tough enough to swallow Ray’s masked beating of (and theft from) a newspaper journalist—which would, of course, be bigger news than anything else the poor guy was going to write. But I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for shots as good as Ray’s finger-to-the-mouth shushing (which you mentioned, Spencer), and the way the violence that ensued was conveyed by the merest fluttering of the bedroom blinds.