Was True Detective Season 2 Actually Really Great?
Did everyone watch this show the wrong way?
(Spoilers, obviously)
I f there’s any hope for critical reevaluation for this year’s True Detective, it’ll hinge on how we approach its debatable — certainly an understatement at this point in time — greatness as a television show.
The possible questions at stake: Is a great television experience ineffable, something that kind of comes over you, compels you and eclipses any analytical inclinations with sheer thrill? Or is that a nice notion but way too idealistic? Does great television need an intention declared by its creators and/or perceived by its audience? Is the measure of a show’s greatness how well it executes these declared and/or perceived intentions while being graded on a curve for how ambitious the declared and/or perceived intentions actually are?
The latter, I’m about to suggest, is probably the case. And if the latter is truly the case then the hope for critical reevaluation of this year’s True Detective depends on a reevaluation of how we (or most) have perceived the show’s intentions.
What I am suggesting is that our appraisal of the show’s intentions prior to episode one doomed our ability to enjoy the show from the start.
True, the show is a drama that airs on HBO whose serious show offerings often imply prestige and with prestige, high-reaching ambitions. True, Nic Pizzolatto desperately wants you to know that he fucks with obscure Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran and any intimation of philosophy in our nearly high-culture-less culture equates as a default to ambitious ideas. True, a show starring Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch and Vince Vaughn teased by a moody ass trailer certainly leads you to believe that prestige television performances are at work.
Yet I found myself enjoying and eventually loving the show for executing none of these things — not as the weighty drama, not as any kind of philosophical discourse, not as any vehicle for awards-driven aspirations. What I found once I dismissed these things as the show’s intentions was that the show could be best appreciated as an experience in corruption’s crushing complexity, confusion vérité as art. It is to be felt more than it is to be understood, at least in the midst of experiencing it.
Which is good because this wasn’t exactly the type of show to be understood in the midst of watching it. Part of the joy surrounding this show’s run these past few months has been how amazingly confused everyone has been, which was typified beautifully by Pajiba’s now infamous “Who the Hell is Stan on ‘True Detective’?” and Slate’s equally infamous “What Exactly Is Going On in True Detective Season 2? An Excruciatingly Clear Plot Breakdown.”
I have this theory that the apocalypse fetish of our current pop culture — tropes you would prominently find in say an absurdly successful show like The Walking Dead or absurdly successful video games like The Last of Us and Fallout — exists because our society has become too complex for most people to understand how to think and act clearly. Concepts like good and bad, right or wrong perpetually exist now in a revisionist present. Our legal system, legislatures, economy and technology thrive as delivery vessels of complexity and consequently, soul-reducing, mind-fraying frustration. It would not be surprising to discover that everyone secretly hoped everything would get reset to zero.
This is ultimately the heart of the art of this year’s True Detective. It — like a lot of documentaries documenting corruption and hopelessness and broad scale unfairness — trucks in administering pain in order for us to emerge more enlightened and more enthralled people. The pain, in True Detective’s case, is the show’s monumentally onerous levels of disorientation. The artistry of this is how, perhaps only in the feeling of the experience, it deftly mimics real life confusion amidst corruption — especially corruption that bears the inviolability of legacies and boasts the tectonic inevitability of moneyed ineluctability.
It is, true, by our standards of prestige television an incoherent narrative. And when it’s not being incoherent, its unfamiliar rhythms seem to misfire. The death of Stan did not mean anything to us emotionally. The deaths of Paul or Ray or Frank or Irina Ruflo or Tascha or the numerous innocent protestors during the shootout at LOL corral did not mean anything to us emotionally. It is a show, in fact, with very little that moves you.
Yet still I can’t help but think this was a unique entertainment. As far as great television is concerned, we currently occupy a sort of qualitative plateau where things — narrative, visuals, character — are executed cleanly, hyperaware of any potential criticism and thus, able to explain itself out of any criticism. It’s simply what happens when you have a room of supremely creative and talented writers (most of our best writers are either writing TV or internet content) working together. Thus we get the disease of goodness. We get pleasant entertainment that succeeds in not being bad really well.
It’s no surprise then to know that True Detective was largely and uniquely the work of a singular un-sharing auteur. This simply doesn’t happen anymore on television (aside from a few blips here and there like Top of the Lake and Black Mirror). And because this doesn’t happen much anymore — large-scale works of uninhibited singular ambitions and all the vulnerability that comes with it — this year’s True Detective felt rare, like a cultural phenomenon, a likeable Lynchian stumble into the unrelentingly surreal house of mirrors that always signals so-bad-it’s-goodness.
Please don’t mistake this as praise for Pizzolatto. Make no mistake, Pizzolatto wanted this to be a great piece of prestige television, a sort of James Ellroy novel that’s shot in the back by Arthur Schopenhauer. But just because he failed to achieve that does not mean the work is a failure. Often times, if this happens, yes, the work is a failure. But in this case, I’m positing, True Detective is a work of accidental brilliance. Pizzolatto tried to achieve one thing but ended up, through his failure to achieve that one thing, achieving something else, something great but also different from what was intended.
Consider this quote from writer Tom Bissell from his essay “Cinema Crudité”:
“Why are so many people responding to this megalomaniacal feat of formal incompetence? Is it the satisfaction of seeing the auteur myth cruelly exploded, of watching an artist reach for the stars and wind up with his hand around a urinal cake? Some viewers clearly relish this aspect of [it], but others come away from [it] strangely exhilarated. In an entertainment culture in which everything from quiet domestic dramas to battling-robot fantasias is target-audienced with laserlike precision, [it] is as bereft of familiar taxonomy as a bat from Mars. In an entertainment culture in which bad and good [entertainment] alike have learned to wink knowingly at their audiences, [it] is rivetingly unaware of itself or its effect. In an entertainment culture in which “independent filmmaking” is more of a calculated stance than accurate accounting of means, [it] is [an entertainment] of glorious, horrifying independence.”
As you might have inferred, Bissell here isn’t talking about True Detective. He’s talking about The Room, a piece of art that is so far from the perceived intentions of its creator that it orbits all the way back around to just behind the creator, never to be seen by him again and yet in full view for us to enjoy — both the entertainment itself and the spectacle attending to it.
Seems familiar.
