Setting, Class, and Southern Politics in “True Detective” Season 1

True Detective fights against popular perceptions of the South by focusing on the political forces at the root of rural poverty and inequality.

A show entitled something as stock as “True Detective” would typically only provide the lowest pleasures of television: cheap thrills, voyeurism, overused tropes. Within minutes of the first episode of Season 1, however, the viewer is alerted to the show’s heightened expectations for itself: this is a detective show with the standard grisly violence, yes, but also lofty literary and philosophical aspirations. The show’s influences rapidly saturate the screen: Heart of Darkness, retold in the plot of two detectives, Marty Hart and Rust Cohle, losing control over their personal lives and psyches as they venture deeper into the Louisiana Bayou in search of leads; Friedrich Nietzsche, with many references to eternal recurrence; the crime noir of the ’70s, with gritty shots of sordid truck stops and bars and countless extended scenes of Matthew McConaughey mumbling and meandering through a thick drawl; and, above all, H.P. Lovecraft, with a narrative centered around a preternatural terror operating deep in the shadows, ever just out of sight. Against a backdrop of dilapidation — “This is like someone’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading…” — and totalizing isolation — “It’s like these people don’t know the outside world exists…” — a tale of Satanic perversion unfolds. (I won’t recount that tale here.) With a story as brutal as the one depicted, it would be easy for showrunners Nic Pizzolato and Cory Fukunaga to treat the people of Louisiana with contempt. What state in postwar America could possibly produce a horror like the Tuttle Cult? What group of people could countenance the existence of a pit as dark as Carcosa? Only a state full of rednecks, ignoramuses, and cowards, surely, with blinkered retrograde beliefs and no ambition to join the ranks of the modern world. A shallow viewing suggests this is indeed the attitude the show adopts: as Hart and Cohle scour Southern Louisiana and interview dozens of rural poor Louisianians, they encounter weakness, intellectual impoverishment, addiction, backwardness, neglect — in other words, a litany of stereotypes about the rural American South. A more discerning eye, however, reveals that the show’s careful choice of pairings between setting and narrative achieve what is ultimately a defense of the rural Southern poor, levied through a scathing critique of inequality and the depraved elites who contrive to keep the lower classes hopeless and encumbered.

In this way, True Detective serves as a refreshing corrective to the depictions of the South in popular media, particularly media dominated by residents of the coastal and Northern states, who sometimes may slip into generalizations. It is, admittedly, easy for an American Liberal to see the dark, unapologetic Republican Red covering the electoral maps of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the rest of the South and take bitter, vindictive pleasure in knowing that the rural poor who vote for rightwing billionaires like Donald Trump do so at the expense of their own interests. “The wages of sin,” one might think — ye reap what ye sow. Produced by that vanguard of prestige media, HBO, which is watched by many of these very liberals (a bourgeois bunch with seemingly elevated artistic sensibilities), True Detective would probably have still succeeded with critics and audiences had it taken a dismissively judgmental view of Louisiana. But what I wish to argue here is that True Detective, through a careful interplay between setting and plot, far from scoring a victim-blaming cheap shot at the expense of the Southern rural poor, serves as a reminder, and unflinching exposé, of the political forces and class dynamics which undergird ignorance and poverty in the South.

The physicality of Power — corporate, political, religious — is suffused throughout the cinematography of the show from the beginning. This is a hint that the attitude of the show is more politically sophisticated than it might seem at first glance. A giant oil refinery looms in the background of countless shots, some unnamed corporate monstrosity that the characters never acknowledge. It is only ever glimpsed in the periphery; we never really see it directly, or in any degree of detail, but its presence is visceral. Instead of Cthulhu’s subaquatic tentacles we have the refinery’s crenellated smokestacks, just as indefinably extant, as omnipresent, as Lovecraft’s monster. As Rust and Marty venture further into the bayou, the refinery seems to follow them, moving from place to place, keeping an eye on their investigation. A nearly implausibly high number of the show’s scenes take place under its petrochemical umbrage. The refinery even appears in the show’s Emmy-winning title sequence, mingling in and out of darkly foreboding closeups of the two main characters. In the title sequence also appears another centerpiece of the show’s depiction of State power: physical infrastructure, constituted by interstates, overpasses, bridges. Pizzolato lamented that he “could not create a show of simply two men driving around talking — so [he] threw a murder in.” The extended shots of Marty and Rust bantering in their detective cruiser need to occur somewhere — well, on roads — and so it makes sense, at a narrative level, that the show’s many aerial establishing shots would linger on the highways which crisscross southern Louisiana. But these concrete monuments to political and industrial engineering also remind the viewer that the government is not a helpless observer to Louisiana’s grueling poverty and destitution. A state capable of immense feats of modern construction somehow cannot protect its citizens from violent crime, provide for basic common welfare, or rescue its children from lives of ignorance. As Hart and Cohle drive by the rural isolation and hopelessness that mark the lives of poor Louisianians, the viewer becomes a voyeur not of their abject state, but rather the inequality which permits it.

In Episode Four, we see confirmation that the show is keenly aware of the politics behind the misery it depicts. At this point in the narrative, the only lead the two detectives have on their suspected serial killer — a certain Reginald Ledoux — is that he supposedly cooks meth for a violently racist motorcycle gang, the Iron Crusaders, whom Rust remembers from his undercover days in Texas. Rust again goes undercover — extralegally — as a member of the gang in an attempt to set up a meeting with Ledoux. To demonstrate his loyalty to the gang, he is ordered to participate in a robbery with the gang’s members. The Crusaders are looking to rob a drug safehouse in the Projects, populated entirely by African Americans and, like most of the other locations in the show, gripped by poverty. As the white gang members enter the projects, we see a police helicopter lazily patrolling the sky and squad cars cruising the streets. Even before any overt violence has occurred, the police are swarming — alerting the viewer to the fact that the State is very interested in keeping this place under strict militarized control. And, tellingly, the motorcycle gang gains entry to the safehouse by pretending to be police. (The process of white supremacists donning badges and uniforms in order to perpetrate racist acts under legal impunity is hardly just a plot device: it is an actual political dynamic occurring across America. Incidentally, one of the show’s more memorable lines is when Rust, attempting to buy narcotics from a prostitute, replies to her musing that he seems “dangerous” by saying simply: “Of course I’m dangerous. I’m police. I can do terrible things to people, with impunity.”) With a few well-placed setting details and narrative angles, the show converts what would otherwise be an unfavorable and voyeuristic depiction of urban blight into, if not a polemical, at least a knowing, statement on the scourge of overpolicing and state failure in Black neighborhoods. It is no coincidence that the residents of the Project are armed to the teeth with rifles and pistols; the sort of violence we see at the end of Episode Four surely occurs regularly, and the police are doing little, if anything, to protect the Project’s residents, and so the residents must protect themselves.

The economic inequality depicted in the show also breeds an epistemological inequality between the educated elites and Louisiana’s lower classes, who are shown as ignorant, addicted, and superstitious. The state’s poor turn to revival evangelicalism, drugs, prostitution, strip clubs, and other hedonistic pursuits to pass the time and divert their focus from their own penurity. But we can gather that the show has a sober and structural view on the causes of widespread ignorance in Louisiana. The show repeatedly emphasizes the dysfunctionality of the state’s underfunded educational system — a common refrain among guardians of the Cult’s victims is that students had to bus two hours or more to the nearest public school — and dropouts are more common than graduates. Meanwhile opportunistic elites like Reverend Tuttle speak about “choice” in education — a euphemism for the longstanding rightwing aim of fully privatizing education and thus further eroding public trust in what remains of the American redistributive social safety net. Indeed, the locus for all of the kidnappings and killings perpetrated by the Tuttle Cult turns out to be Tuttle’s private schools. A key step in Cohle’s process of unearthing the conspiracy is his mapping of the killings and kidnappings to these schools: all of the victims lived within a 10-mile radius of a Tuttle school, we are told in Episode Six. In itself, this would constitute a sharp critique of privatized education — turn education over to the hands of economic elites, and they will use it for nefarious purposes, in this case ritualistic child murder — but the show goes deeper. Presumably, such private schools would never succeed if the state’s polity could protect its public education system from predatory interests like Tuttle. Parasites can only flourish where they are allowed to take hold. And, moreover, if the state had adequate capacity and interest to keep track of its citizens, the Katrina-caused chaos in the mid 2000s would not have sufficed as cover for Errol Childress to keep the disappearances of his victims out of the headlines.

Throughout True Detective the underlying explanation given, and thus the real judgment levied, for the slow-boiled apocalypse of the show’s events is that an apathetic and corrupt political system has betrayed those it ostensibly aims to serve. (Or, perhaps more accurately, it never aimed to serve them in the first place.) Far from being the fault of the average citizen — what could the likes of Dora Lange or Riann Olivier possibly do in the face of such a Leviathan horror? — it is the state’s religious and political elite, happy to let Louisianians suffer under abject deprivation, who receive the ire of the show. The lower classes have been stripped of their power and dignity to the point that the only conceivable economic relationship (and many of the personal relations between characters on the show, too) is predatory.

It is the inequality in resources, both material and intellectual, and enabled at every step by a malevolent State, which forms the backbone for the show’s Lovecraftian mythos. Epistemological limitations which are placed onto the average citizen through their powerlessness and oppression are placed (to a lesser degree) on the viewer, who similarly cannot fully glimpse the machinations of corruption and perversion which lurk at the edges of the narrative. The full conspiracy is never fully uncovered; it is too ancient, too amorphous, too embedded, to be observed in only eight episodes. The only way an elaborate and multidimensional conspiracy such as the one which propped up the Tuttle Cult for decades to occur is if a vast majority of the state’s residents can be trusted to not have the means or knowledge to put clues together, to question authority, or, in the event that they were to start poking around in sensitive areas, have the support network or savvy to withstand intimidation or outright elimination. The learned helplessness of the lower classes, enforced by the State, is the essential ingredient in the pervasive success of the Tuttle Cult. Even two skilled detectives, professionally tasked with canvassing evidence and available knowledge to generate conclusions in the public interest, struggle for well over a decade to even establish all the prerequisite clues to solve the case. At every step, they are met with resistance from superiors, suggesting that, to some incalculable extent, high-ranking police officials are in on it. And when they do “solve” the murders, Rust knows that the true case hasn’t really been solved. The real mystery is how the cult could involve such high-profile figures — a governor, a senator, a famous reverend, unnamed others — and yet go undetected for so long. The tentacular reaches of the cult, whose full extent both temporally and geographically is unknown, mirror Lovecraftian horror so evocatively that it is easy to think the comparison itself is the only point the show is interested in making. But there is, unmistakably, a political valence as well, a pointed focus on the rampant inequality which facilitates the ability for elites to obscure themselves so effectively. The viewer doesn’t see everything because the lower classes cannot see everything. The depravity of the elites towards the lower classes is the show’s true horror.

The harshest judgment of all is reserved not for the Tuttles or Childresses, who are depicted more as morally inert avatars of deeper evils than as conscious agents with genuine choice. Rather, the show criticizes most severely the otherwise well-meaning figures such as Steve Geraci, a government apparatchik who turned a blind eye to irregularities in the Marie Fontenot case in exchange for lavish material rewards: a Maserati, and that unmistakable class marker, a man’s pride in his golf swing. In Geraci we see Arendt’s now near-cliché “banality of evil,” manifest in those who could’ve prevented incalculable suffering but passively did not. Had Geraci and men like him shown a little more spine, a little more interest in asking the right questions, they could’ve clogged the gears to the giant machine churning up women and children across Louisiana. They wouldn’t have been heroes, maybe, but they would’ve at the least retained their honor. Instead, they blithely accept the chain of command — “I just do what the big man says!” pleads Geraci. There is a similarity to be drawn between the disposition of Geraci, seemingly upstanding but with a core filled with cowardice, and the American attitude towards poverty and inequality, an attitude defined by an inability to confront the true dynamics which keep millions of poor Southerners impoverished.

None of this is to say that the show is not voyeuristic — it is — or to argue that it aspires to be some defiant champion of the working class — it is not. But True Detective repeatedly alerts its viewers to its point-of-view, and sharply acknowledges its own voyeurism when it occurs. Whenever Cohle issues one of his bitter generalizations about the show’s common people — “What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?” — Hart is there to provide pushback: “What do you know about these people?”, he retorts.

Cohle himself, an autodidact who despite growing up poor and motherless in rural Alaska has familiarized himself with Nietzsche, M-Theory, and a plethora of criminological knowledge, serves as a sharp foil to the general blanket of static ignorance covering the show’s subjects. The point is not that Cohle’s example of social and intellectual mobility demonstrates that it is the lower classes’ fault for their own subjugation. If this were the claim the show aimed to make, we would expect the camera to treat Rust kindly, sycophantically: after all, under this rosy view, Rust won, beat the statistics, was chosen, was one of the few “good ones” who deserved to rise above the chaos of poverty. (It goes without saying that examples of this contrived narrative abound in American media and public life). But this is not the point the show makes, and this is not how it depicts its main muse. Rust suffers profoundly. Rust’s own inability to “reconcile his nature” (words Rust himself says) as an intelligent, highly sensitive human to the suffocating social expectations prescribed to men of his class is one of the primary motifs of the show’s dialogue, and one of the main sources of tension between Hart and Cohle. The point is not that Rust has pulled himself up by the bootstraps and thus demonstrated the unexploited potential of the lower classes. Rather, it is that his extraordinary uniqueness reveals the cruel design behind the political forces which aim to keep the rural poor uneducated and unfulfilled.

At root, True Detective’s politics are an indictment of the State and the perverse elites who run it. By focusing our attention to power, and by portraying that power as evasive and self-protective, it rebukes the public perception which would blame the suffering of the South on its seemingly backwards residents. It is hard not to seem backwards when the Tuttles are the ruling class.