by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

True Detective: Season 1
A 10 Year Anniversary Piece
Created by Nic Pizzolatto
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan
All episodes now streaming on Max

“So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective broke the proverbial sound barrier with its premiere a decade ago: a highwater mark of narrative excellence, shot as elegantly as it was written. A humid and heavy octet of episodes, the pacing is as languorous as it is tense, skillfully subverting the stranglehold of linearity, and instead opting for a speculative approach to time-telling and timekeeping. “Time is a flat circle,” we are told, but from the viewer’s standpoint it's a sphere.

The inaugural season of True Detective was, rightfully, critically acclaimed. The show, itself, was nominated for a slew of awards, and so, too, actor Matthew McConaughey for his performance as Rustin “Rust” Cohle: a nihilistic, even anti-natalist, philosopher co-opted into the bureaucratic spider web of detective work. Cohle’s obsession, Cohle’s vision, Cohle’s intuition make him as much the aspirant and acolyte as he is the antagonist of the insidious cult of Pizzolatto’s Carcosa. It is Cohle’s iconoclastic character which synthesizes the myriad threads of the show into a remarkable work of narrative genius, a work of narrative genius which problematizes any self-congratulatory smugness on the part of the viewer.

Cohle’s diatribes are often obtuse, but always poetic, and his drawling delivery makes them stick to your skin like the bayous the show’s characters haunt. Cohle, as a character, cannot work, cannot resonate with such spectacular ingenuity, without the foil of Woody Harrelson’s Martin “Marty” Hart. Hart is written razor-sharp, incisive, and frank. It is the abrasive earnestness of his sarcasm, the quality in which he so deeply believes his own lies—his own self-identification with ideals that he cannot act upon—which allows Cohle’s weirding ways to add depth, and not just present as a symptom of the writers’ own intellectual masturbation. There is a robust reality to Hart—he makes himself and he undoes himself, over and over again during the seventeen years the show spans. Hart carries the slings and arrows of the “everyman” with a frustrating truth.

On its surface, the first season of True Detective seems like a relatively generic story: two homicide detectives in (predominantly) rural Louisiana investigating the death of a former sex worker whose dead body was dumped in a ritualistic manner, meant to be discovered by the cops. The plot does not become tremendously more groundbreaking, but borrows from the established pastiche of the police thriller: now there is a shadowy occult group of nefarious, human-sacrificing men. Of course, some of them are men of conservative religious influence, of course some of them are apparently “backwoods” or “inbred,” are politicians or otherwise. It is not the plot of True Detective which characterizes its brilliance; it is the subversion of genre, it is its playfulness with established tropes, it is the tender, human yearning toward hope after being confronted with unimaginable darkness.

Neo-Noir. Southern Gothic. Cosmic Horror. True Detective’s first season slips between genre classification, curating and capturing equal parts detective thriller alongside a Southern, bucolic folk-horror. But dispersed throughout the pastoral scenes of swamps, of agricultural crops spread in long swatches across an impossibly flat landscape, of backwoods biker bars and brothels, of innumerable dimly lit bars packed with cigarette smoke or shiny new neon, there remains the pallor of plausibility. It’s easy to say that the story feels real, but more than real, it feels plausible. Revisiting this series for its tenth anniversary felt like coming home to a message in a bottle, a strange police procedural pythia: the monsters hide in plain sight, they hurt in plain sight—in your churches, in your courthouses, in your police stations, in your capitol buildings. It was a bold and audaciously brazen show, foreshadowing a litany of conspiracies, exposés, and leaked casefiles which would inundate our media since the show first aired.

The plausibility, the miraculous mundanity of the show, allows for the supernatural horror of it to feel just as bleak, just as realized. In the sparse, expertly paced moments where we become privy to Cohle’s strange seership, it is done with such a subtlety and grace that the viewer is inclined to take it for face value. Sure, there were likely audience members who assumed it was a sign of Cohle’s insanity, but the majority agreed this was some preternatural ability he had, this capacity to see the unseeable, to recognize the clues in strange swirling augurs of birds, to blur the perimeter of reality in a way which never deviated from it—only deepened it.

In the final episode Cohle is suspended and stunned before the altar of the Yellow King in the infamous Carcosa. He glimpses—and so we, too, bear witness—to the ecstatic churning starry maw of the void, of the universe re-spiraling itself into the horizon of possibility, and we know this to be a true experience. We know that Cohle is, as Errol Childress chides him, the “little priest,” the receiver of these strange mysteries. Is the Yellow King—adapted from Chambers’ The King in Yellow—the errant evil who demands the sacrifice and sadistic tortures of young children? Or is the Yellow King the witness to men’s evil? Pizzolatto does what many great cosmic horror writers before him have done: allows you to decide for yourself.

Upon Cohle and Hart’s reunion, joining forces to finally resolve, in whatever way necessary, the cult of Carcosa and its unvindicated casualties, the former homicide partners, wax philosophical about “choice.” Cohle drives a hardline: “everybody’s got a choice.” This inverts the mirror of conversation in earlier episodes, where Cohle and Hart discuss what it means to be “bad men.” There are many bad men—and there are many choices. Cohle is most memorable for the ways in which he chooses to do good, while being predisposed to being bad. Hart is most memorable for the ways in which he chooses to do bad, while proclaiming to value being good. The men find redemption in each other’s choices, by their willingness to lie their own bodies down at the altar of the Yellow King.

For all the self-proclaimed pessimism of Rustin Cohle, for all his Schopenhauer and Neitzsche and all his Sartre and Foucault, it’s hard to take him at his word. The show itself is mired in misery, in intersecting oppressions and intergenerational despair. And yet, hope pulses and thrums through the main artery of the narrative, uninterrupted and ineluctable. The content of the story, the personalities of its characters, are steeped in grief and injustice. And yet, redemption comes for even those abandoned. Not an all-inclusive, totalizing redemption. Not a redemption which eclipses the evil inflicted. But as Cohle encounters in the “nothingness,” and in the darkness even deeper than that darkness, there is love.

When I set about this re-watch, and began writing this restrospective, I did not understand how necessarily medicinal this message of hope, of vindication, of beleaguered but enduring conviction, would be. As we stare down the face of four more years of bad men getting away with doing bad things, Cohle and Hart remind us that the fight toward hope is not in vain. It is appropriate that the show ends on this quality of love, on this note of hope. Cohle and Hart save each other's lives, literally, and it’s hard to not feel like they save each other’s souls a little, too.

I wanted to share this final piece of dialogue between Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, because it feels especially meaningful right now, and it bears revisiting:

Rust: “I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.”
Marty: “What’s that?”
Rust: “Light versus dark.”
Marty: “Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
Rust: “Yeah, you’re right about that.”
Rust: “You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.”
Marty: “How’s that?”
Rust: “Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”

There is a lot of dark in the world right now. There has always been a lot of dark, a lot of darkness, in the world. But Pizzolatto chose to take a character embroiled in his unresolved trauma and bitterness and who, when met with the cruelly ambivalent heart of the universe, a conspiracy of criminally murderous cultists, and his own approximation of death in his endeavor to do right, finishes his story reborn in hope, reborn in his belief in the light. Even when set adrift in the vast dark mouth of the world, and its people and their choices, we must remember: “the light is winning.”