Rejoice, Carcosa!

the “true” in true detective

Any frustration I have with the loose ends in True Detective is completely misplaced. There’s no room for my anger in this universe.

Rust makes this clear when he communicates with Marty throughout the course of the series. The efforts Marty makes to construct a sensible ideology around Rust’s assertions, either about the boundaries of the case or about the nature of life or relationships or the universe in general, all hit a dead end. Over and over again. Consistently. Marty makes no headway.

To Rust, there are no killings or child rapings unless those killings and child rapings extend to every strata of the culture. The disease is in our blood and in our evolutionary legacy all the way back to when we were mud. The idea that there is some discreet network of evil, some cancer at the heart of that civilization that can be yanked out, is, over and over again, quashed by Rust’s explanations of the futility of just that kind of neat, tidy solution. Nobody listens to him. He doesn’t even listen to himself.

His inability to accept those limits, boundaries, and tidy solutions is his biggest strength as a cop and his biggest failing as a functional human being.

Who is the Yellow King?

Let’s talk about that question in the context of the work of literature, The King in Yellow, that the series references so insistently. What is the significance of The King in Yellow? What does it mean? What is its final message?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_king_in_yellow#The_play_called_The_King_in_Yellow

We never find out, because Robert Chambers refuses to describe the last half of the play. It doesn’t exist anywhere. Nobody knows. The only hint we get is that anyone that reads it goes mad.

So how is this connected to True Detective? Did Nic Pizzolato pick it as a symbolic palette just because it’s super creepy? Is that the only reason?

The show is tightly focused on the experience of two individuals: Martin Eric Hart and Rustin Spencer Cohle. It’s an intimate sketch of the loves, fears, strengths, and weaknesses of these two men. The other characters in the drama exist in relation to their actions, their stories, their ethics.

Over and over again, during the course of the murder investigation, the personal identities, boundaries, and definitions of these two men are tested, stretched, and collided-with by the unfolding narrative of the murders, and of their partnership. We have, really, a relatively straightforward buddy-cop drama— but it’s punctuated by a variety of bizarre things.

It’s punctuated by Rustin’s piercing observations about existential ontology; often seeming non-sequitors. It’s punctuated by long, soul-draining pans over the antediluvian southern landscape, shots so alien in their emotional energy that they might as well be filmed in hell or on the surface of the moon. They’re filled with green life, but it is malevolent life, the horrific static backdrop in front of which men eat each other like animals.

The only light in this landscape is consciousness, choice, and the decision of these two men to work against their cultural and biological programming in order to figure out what the fuck is actually going on. They’ve drawn a line in the sand, in terms of ethics, their own experiences, and the political superstructure. They have decided that the world will be one way and not another. And they fight for this.

They fight against the brutality, against the acquiescence to official authority, against the entropy of their relationships and their flaws. They fight for their vision and for what they see as a functional world. Sometimes they are weak and pathetic and fight badly. Sometimes they are strong and they fight well.

In this way, they define themselves. In this way, they build a structure from the chaos.

This, I think, is the deeper significance of Rust’s closing monologue. He talks of the light winning; of the new stars burning in what was once just blackness. But before this, he talks about what happened to him, down in Carcosa. He talks about losing his definitions. And we remember— him peering up into the dark, and the awful opening of the heavens, the breakdown of his internal architecture that threatens regularly, whenever the borders of his mind start to soften.

What’s beyond them?

What was that horrible shaft of light? What was Carcosa? It’s tempting to just focus on the death of the killer— case solved, battle won, now they can both go on with their lives, now they can fight more battles.

But the show expended so much time and imagery building that architecture of evil. What did it mean?

We only get tiny glimpses, again. The killer, who generates so much emotional gravity and primal imagery during the course of the series, is shockingly visually absent. But when he does appear, and when we hear him speak, he offers clues. He talks to us about his “ascension removing him from the disk and the loop” and about being “near the final stage”.

The final stage of what?

Russ says that time is a flat circle— that we’re a collection of repetitive habits and unbreakable cycles. Round and round. But the symbol on the first corpse was a spiral. The killers leave spirals. The acolytes of Carcosa believe they can escape the circle. They think there’s a way out.

If you do what the King, the Man with the Scars did, you’re destroying your boundaries and the boundaries of others. You’re rebelling against human culture and you’re violating yourself. You are finding a way to become, to change, despite your tiny, pre-programmed status as a southern male in the United States of America in the Human Race on the Planet Earth. Your neurotic compulsions must all be removed for you to be free. Your biological compulsions. Your humanity.

Your definitions.

The massive temple the Man with the Scars wrought on that overgrown estate was a temple to the only god that actually matters, the only god Rust Cohl could actually believe in. The god that was beyond. The one. The true. And down in that hell, in the arms of death, surrounded by bloody rags and children’s shoes, Rust had his one and only religious experience.

This good/evil stuff is a lot more complicated than he let on, because it turns out the Yellow King is a prophet of the only true religion.

Not so fast. I’m not advocating serial rape and murder.

“Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is Lost Carcosa”

Reggie Ledoux, the man Marty shot outside that trailer complex nearer the beginning of the series, spoke of the black stars. He he believed in the same freedom. He worshipped at the same church.

Because, as I implied earlier, the stars that Rust refers to are the tiny pinpricks of human consciousness, standing out against the darkness, the deep warmth, the “substance”, as he put it, that he was sinking into, down there in the dark. That darkness is not spacial, it is biological. Those bright stars make choices and have identities and create civilization; they have “definitions”.

Rust, initiate and initiator, knows the terrible secret: “light” doesn’t mean “good”. “Light” just means “conscious”. And most of us aren’t, most of the time. We’re marching forward and we’re lighting the torches, but we do not come from the light. As he clearly stated, we come from the darkness.

Those that worship at the court of the Yellow King want to go back. They want to rape and dismember and torture and festoon their homes with their own guts and become the opposite of civilization, because they know what the Zen Buddhists know: thought is a burden and, as Rust said so eloquently back at the beginning, consciousness is a mistake. But it’s the mistake that makes us who we are.

Even he wanted that darkness, at the end. He felt the undifferentiated touch of his dead daughter, a longing for his biological entanglements. Even Rust, as dedicated a soldier of the intellect as he was, longed, for a moment, to have his consciousness extinguished.

This is the burden of consciousness. There is no reward, and there’s no resolution to it— every moment we think, decide, and act to build a better world, a world where we can live with less violence, is us lifting our heads above the mud for a few seconds and gasping for breath. It is the hardest thing in the world.

You do not get rewarded with answers or with a god to worship, for being conscious. You get rewarded with consciousness. Congratulations.

There’s only one god, and he’s down there. In that pit. Hanging around that disgusting altar, waiting to show you the only path to freedom. Because consciousness isn’t about freedom, it’s about responsibility.

That animal darkness is our entire history. It cannot be found, or hemmed round with borders, or excised. We’re building on that foundation. So Rust understands the futility of your question; of the idea that something has been solved. Because the very idea of a solution implies an answer. Implies a neat little package. Implies a God with a plan, a morality, and an end to the battle. It implies that evil is an anomaly in the universal order, to be neatly corrected.

Rape and murder are global problems, history is rife with them, and his and Marty’s investigation could go on forever.

This wish for a neat solution is the failure of the viewer. The battle does not end. The battle of consciousness is eternal, and individuals, like the two individuals this show sketched a portrait of, always lose it. Because we all go back into the dark. The prize here are these tiny human lives, Rust and Marty, real friends and recognizing eyes, stark in illumination for a moment against the dark of that subterranean vomit-bowel.

We have only these two weak, flawed men. There is no omniscient narrator for us to turn to.

We must know that any god is our enemy, lest we lose ourselves in the mad ecstasy of answers. Bertolt Brecht, the great playwright, thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Like a post-orgasm nap.

Richard Chambers describes the first act of The King in Yellow, the play, as a lure. It’s got normal characters and normal action, a sort of quotidian story that acts as your red carpet into the mind-destroying second act.

The second act that implies an answer. The second act that deletes the question.

And the second act, thank god, we will never see.