Devil-nets of clues: True Detective and the search for meaning

Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen

Abstract

This article examines the first season of the hit television series True Detective

(2014) with respect to the claim that it deliberately adopted a form fitting the new

world of digital television. The article argues that this embrace is less than

complete: the show seeks an immersive, novelistic experience rather than

something entirely new. It further argues that this immersive experience is

supported by the series’ richly detailed background and by its invocation of

various aspects of weird fiction. The article also discusses some of the institutional

factors shaping the series: the availability of the puzzle film genre as an

interpretive framework, the existence of an audience interested in assuming the

attitude of what Jason Mittell has called the forensic fan, and the choice of a

traditional, one-episode-per-week release schedule. Finally, the article discusses the

show’s ending and the disappointed reactions of critics and fans, arguing that the

idea that the show intended to exploit digitization by adopting a more game-like

approach, offering clues that could only be found using digital tools, is undercut by

the many loose ends left unresolved by the finale. The article concludes that the

density and detail of the series’ background, inviting viewers to explore, should be

regarded not as providing pieces of a puzzle to be solved, but as an opportunity to

deepen viewer engagement.

Keywords

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complex TV

digital distribution

Cary Joji Fukunaga

H. P. Lovecraft

Nic Pizzolatto

puzzle films

True Detective

weird fiction

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Digital distribution allows TV viewers to watch and engage with drama series in

new ways: binge-watching, for instance, or viewing episodes over and over again to

examine details with the aid of digital video recorders, streaming services, or both.

But has this influenced drama series’ narrative designs or other aesthetic features?

I will examine a series that was described by several critics as having

deliberately adopted a form fitting the new world of digital television: the first

season of the crime series True Detective (2014). It was much lauded during its

highly successful, eight-episode, nine-week run from 12 January to 9 March 2014

(no episode was shown on 2 February, Superbowl Sunday), and it has already

made its way into the pantheon of post-Twin Peaks quality TV, as evidenced by its

inclusion in the lavish coffee-table book Taschen’s Favorite TV Shows: The Top

Shows of the Last 25 Years (Haubner 2015) and the planned publication of an academic

anthology devoted entirely to it (see Wysocki and Graves 2015). James S. Murphy, a

commentator on aesthetics in the digital age, argued in a suggestive article in Vanity

Fair that the True Detective was ‘the first true cop show of the digital age, or rather,

the first cop show to reckon with and exploit the effects of digitization’ (2014,

original emphasis).

True Detective achieves this, Murphy says, by presenting many more clues than

more traditional police procedurals, but giving them markedly less narrative

emphasis. This encourages viewers to re-view episodes repeatedly, scrutinizing

individual images with frame-grabbing software, and discussing their theories on

the Internet. In other words, if this claim is accurate, the series was designed to

appeal to and elicit the viewer attitude television scholar Jason Mittell has called

‘forensic fandom’ (2009: 128, see also 2015: 52). To be a forensic fan, explains

Mittell, is ‘to embrace a detective mentality, seeking out clues, charting patterns

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and assembling evidence into narrative hypotheses and theories’ (2009: 128–29).

The claim that True Detective was designed to promote clue-seeking was echoed by

other commentators in articles with titles like ‘How “True Detective” turned its

fans into Internet detectives’ (Schroeder 2014) and ‘Does modern TV fandom actually

make it harder to understand TV shows?’ (Franich 2014).

This will not be a study of fans, however, but of the series’ design, in the broad

sense of narrative structure, look, feel, and overall artistic conception – a study of

artistic practice. My approach assumes what David Bordwell has called ‘a rational

agent model of creativity’:

This follows from the idea that the film-maker selects among

constructional options or creates new choices. Our task becomes that of

reconstructing, on the basis of whatever historical data one can find, the

creative situation that the filmmaker confronts. […] Filmmakers have

reflected, to various degrees of detail, upon their creative choices, and this

literature offers a rich legacy of insights into practices. (2008: 28, original

emphasis)

Interviews with film-makers should be treated with circumspection, but as

Bordwell says, they frequently offer an opportunity to learn more about how the

film-makers see their creative choices, even if their reflections may be coloured by ego,

hindsight and other kinds of personal investment.

To the rational agent model, Bordwell continues, must be added a ‘second,

institutional dimension of practice’, which ‘forms the horizon of what is permitted

and encouraged at particular moments’ (2008: 28, original emphasis). Genre,

technology, distribution formats, and production company policies and brand

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identities are just some of the institutional factors which had an important impact

on the first season of True Detective turning out the way it did.

In the first section, I will look at a few of these institutional factors: the

availability of the puzzle film genre as an interpretive framework, the existence of

an audience interested in assuming the attitude of the forensic fan – without it, it

would not make much sense to design the series to appeal to frame-grabbing

sleuths – and the choice of a traditional, one-episode-per-week release schedule.

The second and third sections will examine some aspects of the show particularly

important for assessing the claim that the show provides a plethora of hidden clues

that only the true detectives among viewers would discover: in the second section,

the show’s attention to detail and its thematic foregrounding of this; in the third,

the way True Detective draws on the American tradition of weird fiction. The final

section will discuss the show’s ending and some of the disappointed reactions to it.

I shall argue that the idea that the show intended to exploit digitization by offering

clues only frame-grabbers would find is undercut by the many loose ends left

unresolved by the finale. This did not mean that the show’s makers embraced a

snobbishly cynical nihilism, dismissing the search for meaning as an exercise in

futility. On the contrary: the many layers of clues appear designed to reward deep

engagement with the series.

Critical forensics

In a thoughtful blog article, David Bordwell has described some of the ‘historical

factors that impel fans to dig ever deeper into the movies they love’ (2013). Among

these historical factors, Bordwell emphasizes ‘the rise of the puzzle film’ (2013).

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Barbara Klinger, as part of her study of repeat viewings of favourite films, has

provided a good outline of the characteristics of puzzle films:

Puzzle films typically display several of the following characteristics:

mature subject matter; a complex, atypical, multilayered narrative (that

experiments with temporal order, for example); a confusion of objective

and subjective realms; a visually dense style; an ending that depends on a

reversal or surprise that makes viewers reevaluate their experience with

the text; and the presence of an initially occult meaning that requires re-

viewing to uncover the text’s mysteries. (2006: 157)

True Detective very clearly possesses a number of these characteristics. Its

portrayal of a world of pervasive vice and degradation with a cult dedicated to the

ritualistic sex murder of young girls at its dark heart is clearly ‘mature subject

matter’. It exemplifies complex, multi-layered narrative with its double timeline

following both the 1995 investigation of the strange ritualistic murder of a young

woman named Dora Lange, conducted by Louisiana homicide cops Marty Hart

(Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), and, in parallel,

their interrogation about new, similar crimes in 2012. Rust Cohle’s hallucinations,

an after-effect of his drug use as an undercover cop, allows for the repeated

blurring of objective and subjective realms. On the other hand, the ending did not

really contain a surprising twist (though many commentators apparently expected

it and were disappointed).

Finally, while True Detective is densely layered, the idea of the ‘presence’ of an

‘initially occult meaning’ is problematic if one accepts David Bordwell’s position

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that films, television series, and other artworks are not ‘containers’ of meaning.

Meanings are constructed by the critic or spectator on the basis of cues contained

in the artwork, but they are not ‘present’ in some hidden box:

The critic does not burrow into the text, probe it, get behind its façade, dig

to reveal its hidden meanings; the surface/depth metaphor does not

capture the inferential process of interpretation. On the constructivist

account, the critic starts with aspects of the film (‘cues’) to which certain

meanings are ascribed. (Bordwell 1989: 13)

I agree completely with Bordwell’s account, but both the show’s makers and the

show itself speak explicitly of ‘occult meanings’ using surface/depth metaphors.

For instance, in the first of the five-minute ‘Inside the Episode’ videos HBO

would post on their website and on YouTube right after each episode – containing

talking-head commentary from writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga

interspersed with clips – Pizzolatto says (over images of the strange pyramidal

stick sculptures we learn are called devil-nets): ‘A lot of those symbols, they carry

historical and anthropological significance beyond what is on the surface of our

narrative’ (HBO 2014b, 01:24–01:31, emphasis added). As the concluding line of

both the first trailer for the show, released on 8 September 2013, and of the

promotional behind-the-scenes video ‘About True Detective’, released on 2

December 2013, we have Cohle replying to a question about what has been found

(the question is ‘Just what is it you think we found?’ but it has been recut in the

first trailer to ‘What is it you found?’) with the reply, ‘Something deep and dark,

detectives – something deep and dark’ (HBO 2013a). The puzzle film genre was

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thus available as a framework for approaching True Detective. The series Lost

(2004–2010) had of course established ‘puzzle TV’ as a viable option (see Mittell 2009;

Ludvigsen 2011; Brücks and Wedel 2013).

If we look at the online response to the first season of True Detective, it seems

clear that many critics and fans approached it as a puzzle; one retrospective

commentator has written of the ‘intense, now verging on obsessive, debate among

fans’ (Haubner 2015: 739). During True Detective’s initial run, I tried to keep up

with important discussions through repeated Google searches and the systematic

checking of top TV review sites like slate.com, hitfix.com, vulture.com,

theatlantic.com, and the news site indiewire.com, supplementing my browsing with

very simple forms of automatic capture, set up with the IFTTT web service. I

would follow links to other sites and use the Evernote program and its Web

Clipper feature to archive the material. In this way, I gathered some 75 interviews

with writer Nic Pizzolatto, director Cary Joji Fukunaga, and other participants, as

well as assembling an archive of some 275 review articles and opinion pieces,

dating from mid-January to late May 2014. Since the discussions quite often

referred to ancillary material like previews, I have also gone through all the extras

on the HBO website and the HBO YouTube channel, nearly 60 videos of varying

lengths.

While I occasionally followed leads on fan discussion sites like reddit.com, the

material I collected consists primarily of responses by critics, both professional

and non-professional. Of course, many prominent TV critics are also fans and are

active in online fan communities, and the overwhelming and intense response of

fans to True Detective is a recurring theme in a great deal of this commentary;

some of it simply reports on the ongoing speculations of fans, producing articles

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with titles like ‘An up-to-date guide to Internet theories about “True Detective”’

(Dean 2014). The fascination with the mysteries of True Detective reached the point

where it was spoofed by The Simpsons (see Seikaly 2014), as good an indicator as any

that something has become a cultural event.

When I present generalizations about the reactions of fans and critics, they are

based on this material. It is ample enough to get a solid sense of what a variety of

sophisticated and committed viewers perceived Pizzolatto’s and Fukunaga’s design

goals to be. It is evident that a lot of people approached True Detective as detectives

trying to solve a puzzle.

The puzzle-solving approach was facilitated by the release of the show in the

traditional broadcast manner, with one episode per week, allowed fans time to

speculate and develop their ideas. Director Cary Fukunaga spoke of this as the ‘old

fashioned kind of way of sort of the anti-Netflix model’ (Mather 2014). The Netflix

model refers, of course, to the release of an entire season of a series at once,

allowing premiere-day binge-watching. Netflix’ streaming-based release model has

been widely described as the way of the future: ‘This is where TV is headed –

where the linear schedule exists just for people who do not want to control their

own lives’ (Dorr 2014).

But True Detective followed the old pattern, and the interest it generated was

intense enough that a relatively large community of fans awaited the broadcast of

each episode with eager impatience, bringing down HBO Go, HBO’s streaming

service in the United States, for three hours when the final episode was released

(Wallenstein 2014). We are thus faced with the somewhat paradoxical situation of

a show that attracted massive amounts of attention from fans on the Internet

because it did not adopt the on-demand release model supposedly most in tune

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with the brave new world of online distribution. When we look at the design of the

series, we encounter a similar paradox. As I shall argue further on, the makers of

True Detective had not really aimed for or expected the puzzle-oriented response,

but there were nevertheless many elements of the show that encouraged this

approach.

The little details

We have already seen how HBO’s publicity for the series contained suggestions

that viewers ought to pay attention to details. In the series itself, the dialogue

contains a number of discussions about how to solve crimes. In Episode 1, Cohle

tells his interrogators:

I’ve always taken a lot of notes.

I mean, you never know what the thing’s gonna be, do you? A little detail

somewhere way down the line makes you say, ‘Ohh!’ – breaks the case.

This kind of talk clearly encourages viewers to start looking for further clues.

One place to begin might be the title sequence. However, in an important

article on title sequences, Matthew Soar cautions against giving too much

interpretive weight to them: a title sequence may be ‘at odds with the specific

details of the movie it is designed to support’, since they are usually produced by

specialized designers (2007: 8). The designers may inadvertently introduce elements at

odds with the main work, leading viewers astray if they interpret them as pieces of

one coherent puzzle. A specialized design studio, Elastic, did in fact produce the

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title sequence for True Detective. Here we have evidence that the title sequence,

rather than a set of clues, is itself a sort of interpretation of the series.

The trade website www.artofthetitle.com, where the leading designers of film

and TV title sequences showcase their work, has published an interview with the

director of the title sequence, Patrick Clair. The interview is profusely illustrated

and includes, fascinatingly, 47 slides from Clair’s original pitch of the title

sequence. The third slide lists what the title designers have taken to be ‘the

fundamentals at the center of the story’; in essence, it is a thematic interpretation

of the series scripts as they appeared at the time. The slide identifies four key

elements:

Petrochemical America: A polluted landscape, a wasteland of unfulfilled

hopes and material exploitation. This is the physical location of the show,

and reflects the lives of its inhabitants.

Symbolism: A hunger for meaning. Be it existential symbolism, religion,

family or just belonging. The characters are haunted by a desperate need

to understand their place in relation to the people and world around us.

Vice: Human failings, vice and temptation. This world is inhabited by

people that traffic in sexual and chemical gratification. These are people

making compromises where they feel they must, just to sustain their

survival.

Internal Division: Broken men, struggling to be good, struggling to be

whole. (Perkins 2014)

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As an interpretation of True Detective, this seems quite convincing. The phrase

‘Petrochemical America’ refers to the title of a book and exhibition project by the

photographer Richard Misrach, a 2012 continuation of ‘Picturing the South:

Cancer Alley’, a series of photographs Misrach took in Louisiana in 1998 along the

stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans where great

numbers of chemical and petrochemical plants are concentrated (Shaheen 2012).

Pizzolatto and Fukunaga gave Eclair, the title sequence director, Misrach’s photographs

to work from (Marchant 2014), and several of them appear as part of the title sequence

itself.

Considering the importance of the landscape to the show’s atmosphere, it is

interesting to note in passing that the story was originally not set in Louisiana at

all, but in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, when HBO bought the show in April

2012 (it was sold as a package on the basis of the screenplays for the first two

episodes with Fukunaga, McConaughey and Harrelson already attached to the

project (see Andreeva 2012)). However, HBO wanted to shoot in a ‘subsidy state’, and

Louisiana was chosen (Steele 2014a). The show’s makers were able to turn this change

in locale into an aesthetic advantage as well, not just because they could find inspiration

in Misrach to create images that resonated with the show’s themes, but also because the

landscape was also the landscape of Pizzolatto’s own childhood: ‘The refineries were a

huge presence in my life. I look at this book that we used for part of our art

department’s research called “Petrochemical America”. […] Where I grew up is right in

the deepest red center of cancer alley, carcinogen city’ (Walker 2013).

Returning to the context of puzzles and hidden clues, the theme of symbolism

and ‘the hunger for meaning’ is evidently significant. Importantly, the series is

about this hunger – but that does not mean it necessarily will satisfy it. However, as

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far as I can judge, the forensic fans overwhelmingly devoted their efforts to solving

the mystery of True Detective, playing detectives rather than offering

interpretations. The clues discovered were overwhelmingly enlisted in support of

theories about who was involved in the murder of Dora Lange.

One clue that received considerable attention and which James S. Murphy

uses in his article to exemplify the kind of clue available only if you pause the

programme to examine it in detail, is a photograph appearing in Episode 2: in the

home of the mother of Dora Lange, Cohle looks at a photograph of five costumed

horsemen, four of whom wear long pointy headpieces. Thanks to digital

technology, Murphy points out, fans were able to freeze the image and scrutinize

it. Many suspected the horsemen were members of the Ku Klux Klan, spinning

suppositions about white supremacists. This suspicion was laid to rest in Episode 7

when Cohle talked about the area where the sinister Tuttle family comes from,

linking the costumes to a festival celebrated there called Courir de Mardi Gras:

COHLE: Had a very rural sense of Mardi Gras, uh, you know, the men on

horses, animals masks, such.

HART: Courir de Mardi Gras.

The mention of ‘men on horses’ must be intended to call the photograph to mind.

But some fans, knowledgeable about Louisiana customs, had pointed out the link

with the Courir de Mardi Gras festival immediately, as Murphy notes, and could

take satisfaction in having their observations confirmed.

Episode 7 also contained a few glimpses of a horrifying but blurry videotape

showing a little girl enduring an unspeakable fate at the hands of a group of five

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masked men. They might well be the horsemen in the photograph, and the link

between the horsemen and the Tuttle family seemed to confirm the suspicions of

those who had surmised that the unctuous Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, who first

appeared in Episode 1, was behind an evil cult directly involved with the crimes.

Further confirmation of that the horsemen were indeed the same as the cultists in

the videotape came from an enterprising Internet sleuth who took the names of

members of True Detective’s cast and crew from IMDb and then trawled through

Instagram and Facebook accounts, looking for pictures that might have been taken

during the shooting of the series – and finding quite a few (Hawks 2014). Two of

them show the extras playing the costumed horsemen, and one gives a good view of

the man not wearing a tall pointy headpiece. Instead, he wears a costume of reeds

with a thick, wide reed collar and a mask topped with leaves or feathers, which

looks somewhat owl-like. Because the Instagram picture shows the costume much

more clearly than the photo of the five horsemen in the second episode, it is easier

to compare with the blurry video, and there is little doubt that the central figure in

the video wears the same owl-man costume.

However, it seems unlikely that the Instagram picture was intended as a clue.

There is nothing to indicate that it was deliberately left on the Internet for sleuths

to find. So, rather than being an example of a new way of distributing clues, it is

better understood as evidence of the considerable care the makers of True

Detective took over even seemingly incidental details in the series. They strove to

create what David Bordwell has called a ‘richly realized world’, an environment

where even small details, invisible to casual observation, have been chosen or

designed to be part of a coherent, deliberately textured universe (2013). To take

just one example of this kind of world-making: all the crime scene photos in all the

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old files we see Cohle thumbing through were made for the series. In ‘Making True

Detective’, a featurette released by HBO three weeks before the series premiere, we

learn that people from the art department arranged murder scenes and

photographed them, using period-appropriate equipment: no digital photographs

in files from the early 1990s (HBO 2013b).

The care lavished on such small details invite fans to explore them carefully, but as

the show was coming to an end, the makers seem to have begun to worry that fans

were reading too much into details, which were designed to be atmospheric but not

narratively significant. A number of contributors to the series – the costume

designer, the set designer, the actress playing Hart’s daughter Audrey – were

made available for interviews: ‘Like a sports team hitting the showers, the creative

personnel behind “True Detective” have been dispatched far and wide for post-

finale interviewers’, remarked one commentator (Adams 2014). A recurring theme

in these interviews was the serendipitous character of many details; many elements

were delegated, and not everything was part of a master plan (Stern 2014b; Martin

2014a, 2014c). The costume designer Jenny Eagan said: ‘People were always

looking for clues. But a lot of times, the costumes just ended up being ironic

coincidences’ (Hess 2014).

The failure of the conclusion to bring together all the many atmospheric

details on which the fans had fixated into a vast, intricate, and super-conspiratorial

pattern did produce disappointment. If you approach a series like True Detective as

a puzzle, it creates a desire to have your narrative hypotheses clearly confirmed or

disconfirmed, and for many of the details of True Detective, the show left this

desire unsatisfied.

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We never get any explicit account of who was wearing the owl-man costume,

for instance; nor do we learn how the photo and the video might be linked, or any

other details of the conspiracy protecting the main villain. The lack of an explicit

summing-up denied fans the satisfaction either of knowing that they had made the

right guesses about the mystery or of understanding how they had been misled.

This was, as we shall see in the last section of the article, widely held to be a serious

flaw. Among the other plot elements for which True Detective did not give an

explicit explanation, none loomed larger in online discussions than the mysterious

phantom that had haunted most of the series: the Yellow King.

Pulp pessimism

The name of the Yellow King was introduced in the preview for Episode 2, which

was released online immediately after the broadcast of the first episode (HBO

2014a). The first shot of the preview shows Cohle saying, ‘This is her diary’,

immediately followed by a close-up of Dora Lange’s diary. The words ‘Yellow

King’ are clearly visible, and with the use of the pause button, it is possible to see

more, including the word ‘Carcosa’.

Connoisseurs of American weird fiction recognized that these enigmatic

phrases derived from an 1895 short story collection by Robert W. Chambers

(1865–1933) called The King in Yellow, a volume strongly influenced by the

decadent aestheticism then in fashion (Chambers later became famous as writer of

historical romances, including the story and screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s 1924

Revolutionary War epic America). The King in Yellow is the title of a book, a play,

that appears in four otherwise unconnected stories in the collection; anyone who

reads the play is driven mad, so disturbing are the insights that it grants. Apart

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from a poem, ‘Cassilda’s Song’, purportedly drawn from the play, Chambers only

hints at the contents of The King in Yellow (although the King seems to be a

character):

This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black

stars hang in the heavens; where the shadow of men’s thoughts lengthen in

the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali; and my mind

will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. (2000: 9)

Several of these elements recur in True Detective. Carcosa is mentioned in the

dialogue. Dora Lange’s diary, a careful scrutiny of frozen frames reveals, quotes

the first two verses from ‘Cassilda’s Song’, referring to twin suns sinking and

black stars rising. When, in Episode 2’s final shot, the camera pans away from the

burnt-out church with the antlered wall-painting, we see the afternoon sun reflected in a

still lake, creating a twin-sun effect (see Anon. 2014c). Those catching the connections

may speculate if the gleaming but inhospitable towers of the ominous refinery

visible in the distance are meant to evoke the dread city of Carcosa.

Fans googling ‘Carcosa’ would discover all sorts of links, not just to Chambers

(who borrowed the name from ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’, a dreamy fantastic tale

by Ambrose Bierce), but to the American tradition of weird fiction, a labyrinthine

mine of strangeness to explore. A key figure is H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who

delighted in incorporating strange names from and veiled references to other

writers, particularly fellow contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, while

also encouraging them to name-drop the sinister alien beings and madness-

inducing books he invented. Robert Chambers was one of the writers whose work

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Lovecraft drew his storyworld by inserting names like ‘Carcosa’ and ‘The King in

Yellow’ into his own stories (for more on the Lovecraft–Chambers connection, see

the introduction to Chambers 2000). This allowed for all kinds of in-jokes and

meta-effects, but the recurrence of names, books and entities in stories by different

authors also helps create the sense of an overarching mythology, a seemingly

consistent network of whispered, horrid secrets. Allowing the name of the Yellow

King to haunt True Detective provided a link to the very extensive and suggestive

Lovecraftian mythology or storyworld that fans could explore almost endlessly:

At this point, the show was no longer producing armchair Sherlocks. It

had started turning viewers meta-detectives and metaphysical explorers,

giving people license to discuss outrageous theories on Reddit and beyond.

No deep end was too deep to jump into. (Fear 2014)

A lot of this speculation focused on who or what the Yellow King was, particularly

after the horror writer Michael M. Hughes published an online essay detailing the

elements the show had borrowed from Chambers (Hughes 2014); less than a week

later, Chambers’ The King in Yellow (a book from 1895, available for free!) had

become a runaway bestseller on Amazon, apparently reaching number four on

Amazon.com’s list of bestselling books (Stewart 2014); when I checked on 20

February, it was at number seven. Even those fans who devoted themselves to

crafting funny send-ups of the show tended to focus on figure of the Yellow King

(see Seikaly 2014; Sidorov et al. 2014). Yet the Chambers material also resonated in

significant ways with other important aspects of True Detective.

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By their suggestions that behind our seemingly stable, everyday world lurk

unfathomable, sanity-blasting horrors, Chambers and Lovecraft offer a

particularly bleak vision of the universe. In a book-length essay entitled The

Conspiracy against the Human Race, a work of radical, unremitting pessimism, the

American cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti describes the ‘baleful agencies’ of

these horror writers as a clear analogy with ‘that pernicious something the

pessimist senses behind the scenes of life’ (2010: 55); they give inklings of the true

nature of existence: endless, entirely meaningless suffering and death. We live in ‘a

MALIGNANTLY USELESS world’, Ligotti concludes (2010: 181, original

emphasis).

One of the most striking elements of True Detective is the pessimistic

philosophy of Rust Cohle. He espouses an extravagantly dark and nihilistic world-

view that goes beyond mere world-weariness or depression to evoke an existential

dread unusual in a cop show. Cohle’s views are very similar to those found in

Ligotti’s book, so similar, in fact, that Pizzolatto has been accused of plagiarizing

them (see Davis 2014), even though he has freely admitted his debt to Ligotti in

interviews:

Anyhow: there was a clear line to me from Chambers to Lovecraft to

Ligotti, and their fictional visions of cosmic despair were articulating the

same things as certain nihilist and pessimist philosophers, but with more

poetry and art and vision. And then I found that this level of bleakness

went arm-in-arm with the genre of noir, and that aspects of the weird

fiction I loved could be used to puncture and punctuate aspects of the noir

genre that I loved. (Steele 2014b)

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The suggestions of bleakness and despair gave the Yellow King material an

important thematic function in True Detective, but following up on the references

did not make any difference with respect to figuring out the murder plot, leaving

some fans who had done a lot of homework feeling duped and dismissing it as just

one big red herring:

All the references, all the philosophical subtext, all the weirdness – turns out it

was topping after topping […] The writer once read a story that had the word

Carcosa in it but since his cat was already named Chuckles he used it in a TV

script. (Anon. 2014b)

Such objections could be thought to gain some support from the draft

screenplays of the first two episodes that were leaked online during the series’ run

(the scripts were probably the ones circulated in April 2012 to set off the bidding

war among the cable companies). They contain no references to any Chambers

elements; instead, Dora Lange’s diary invokes Saint Michael. The Reddit post

linking to the leaked scripts concluded: ‘I think the imagery used throughout is

just a distraction. Doesn’t seem significant. Nic Pizzolatto essentially had angels

and stuff and then replaced it with Yellow King’ (Anon. 2014a). But this mistakes

the artistic significance of the material entirely, in my view.

As I have noted, the Yellow King references create a connection between

Cohle’s bleak pessimism and the horrors he must confront; at the same time, it

avoids the overused cliché of the almost telepathically sensitive detective mind-

melding with the serial killer. The weird fiction elements also create an uncertainty

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about some of the things we see: might they have a supernatural explanation?

When Cohle sees a flock of birds form a spiral sign in Episode 2, is that just a

hallucination? Has he ‘lost it’? Or is he, as he says himself, ‘mainlining the secret

truth of the universe’? Pizzolatto has emphasized in interviews that everything can

be explained naturalistically: ‘Cohle’s visions are accounted for by his neural

damage, probably guided in some part by his unconscious associations. There’s no

evidence to suggest that the things we’ve seen are the result of anything supernatural’

(Steele 2014a). Nonetheless, the suggestion is powerful enough to create an intensely

ominous atmosphere more typical of horror than of regular cop shows. It comes to

a triumphant conclusion with Cohle’s vision of the whirling chaos at the heart of

the universe in the last episode. The hallucination – if that is what it is – is not only

evocative of passages in both Chambers and Bierce (see Romano 2014); it shows

that this fairly naturalistic-seeming police procedural is both willing and able to

carry off the feat of presenting us with a visionary image of awe-inspiring

strangeness and cosmic grandeur: we get to see the black stars rise.

A world where nothing is solved?

Cohle’s hallucinations have a very clear functional role. They motivate the

subjective flavour we saw was characteristic of the puzzle film, and they allow for

the ambiguity characteristic of the fantastic, in the sense Tzvetan Todorov used the

word: stories where we are left unsure whether we are dealing with natural or

supernatural events; a non-supernatural explanation may be offered for

everything, but we still cannot help wondering (1975: 25). The fantastic genre as

well as Lovecraftian horror needs ambiguity. Without it, the fantastic is no longer

the fantastic, and Lovecraftian horror tends to lose its effectiveness if one tries to

21

describe and explicate the alien entities and mythological underpinnings in detail.

The mystery genre, on the other hand, is seen by many as requiring the resolution

of all ambiguity, the solving of the puzzle. Much of the criticism directed at True

Detective is based on the implicit or explicit assumption that its conclusion failed to

fulfil the obligations a mystery or detective story has to its audience.

Many commentators expressed disappointment with the final episode;

television scholar Jason Mittell, for instance, wrote a blog post entitled ‘True

disappointment’, complaining that ‘sloppy plotting’ made it ‘completely incoherent how

all the pieces connected’ (2014). Other influential commentators expressed similar

sentiments in titles like ‘The disappointing finale of True Detective’ (Nussbaum 2014),

repeating the complaint that too many pieces of the narrative puzzle were left

unexplained. John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine and former

speechwriter to George W. Bush, put it most pithily:

Like the patsies and suckers we all are, we fell for it again. ‘True

Detective’ just screwed us […] For the umpteenth time, a serialized

television melodrama featuring an elaborate mystery involving a

diabolical conspiracy simply refused to follow the elementary rule of

mysteries: It left us hanging. It didn’t solve the puzzle. (2014)

Many loose ends were undeniably left hanging. When an interviewer asked

Fukunaga to say something about the finale right before it was broadcast, he

admitted that it contained ‘A lot of loose ends… I don’t know if they ever get

addressed. (Laughs)’ (Stern 2014a). The show’s creators, it appears, had mapped out

the details of the conspiracy and could have explained how all the pieces fit together;

22

even so, Pizzolatto said in an interview, they decided not to do so: ‘a lot of things are

left in fragments for the viewer to piece together about how we arrived at where we

arrive’ (Jensen 2014).

This decision goes against the norms of the mystery genre, succinctly set out by

crime literature historian Leroy Panek, whose works provide a historical poetics of

the genre with particular attention to plot construction: ‘The detective novel has as

its first responsibility to prove guilt in a quasi-legal manner, to show opportunity

and motive. This part of the formula never varies’ (1979: 205). In True Detective,

there is abundant proof of the guilt of the main villain, but his motives are more

obscure, and his opportunities – his earlier movements and activities, the

infrastructure of the evil cult – even more so. Probably, Pizzolatto and Fukunaga

believed that having the detective(s) present the details of the solution near the end

would have been too much of a cliché and also difficult to stage in a manner that

worked dramatically. After the climactic battle in the evil shrine in Episode 8,

Marty gets a visit in hospital from Papania and Gilbaugh, the cops conducting the

2012 investigation, and one can imagine them pulling out a case file and starting to

draw lines on the Tuttle family tree; but that would most likely have stopped the

episode dead in its tracks. Having Marty instead tell them that he doesn’t want to

hear about it seems a way of telling the viewer: this doesn’t matter, almost as when

Hitchcock famously covered up the whole explanation of the villains’ plot in his

North by Northwest (1959) with jet engine noise (and that very film is playing in the

background of an earlier scene of the same episode).

This indicates that Pizzolatto and Fukunaga did not primarily see the series as

a ‘reader–writer game’ – or, in this case, an audience–showrunner game. Various

remarks made by Pizzolatto bear this out, notably in a much-discussed interview

23

with BuzzFeed, published during the last week of the series’ run when expectation

and speculation about what the last episode would bring was reaching a fever

pitch. Here, Pizzolatto comes down hard on speculations that either of the two

heroes might be the killer, and somewhat ungenerously needles weird fiction fans

of the show hoping for a supernatural revelation at the end as ‘a specific section of

the audience’ who ‘read their own obsessions into it’ (Arthur 2014).

Such interventions, where Pizzolatto in the deft words of Evan Kindley ‘took it

upon himself to shut down certain lines of inquiry like a local sheriff putting the

kibosh on a compromising investigation’ (Kindley 2014), would suggest that the

creator of True Detective had not envisaged or sought the kind of Lost-like forensic

fandom it had acquired. Pizzolatto went out of his way to say that mysteries and

their resolution was not his primary concern: ‘We use the procedural case as a sort

of clothesline on which to hang the real meat of the show, the character

relationships and interactions’ (Dinsmore 2014). Fukunaga too occasionally

seemed ambivalent about forensic fans, making the point that True Detective’s

appeal to them hinged importantly on its format and the manner of its release:

The general chatter around those things is great, but it’s probably the

kind of chatter that wouldn’t have happened had all those episodes been

released at once. The anticipation-speculation that comes with a weekly

schedule is a double-edged sword. Because people have more time to talk

about things, some crazy ideas get a lot of attention. (Martin 2014b)

The ‘novelistic sensibility’ Pizzolatto has described as informing his work (Dekel

2014), as well as Fukunaga’s previously quoted remark about the weekly release

24

model being ‘old fashioned’ (Mather 2014) suggest that the viewers they had in

mind when they made the show were not really forensic fans but rather binge-

streamers or box-set watchers who would go through the whole narrative before

they started to explore atmospheric details or allusions to weird fiction

mythologies. The detailed fictional world and the weird allusions were not

designed to provide clues to the mystery, but to make the fictional experience feel

richer and more textured.

Conclusion

Can True Detective through its aesthetic design be said ‘to embrace the digital

age’? I have argued that it does not, at least if we assume that embracing the

digital age means to make fictions that are more game-like or puzzle-like, the way

some classical detective novels were. We cannot say that this is something True

Detective does. The rejection of the game-like is evident in the equivocal reactions

of Pizzolatto and Fukunaga to the elaborate narrative hypotheses of many forensic

fans, the way the ending left many plot threads hanging, and Pizzolatto’s insistence

that his main interest was the characters, not the mystery. It is also worth

remarking that True Detective was shot entirely on 35mm film (Anon. 2013; Radish

2014). The deliberate decision to not use digital cameras indicates that the show’s

makers had at least in some ways chosen to reject the digital age.

That being said, there were many aspects of the show that encouraged the

online exploration of its background: the richness of detail, the connections to

Lovecraftian mythology, and the rich evocation of a fallen world, a place where

‘the apocalypse already happened’, in Pizzolatto’s words (Arthur 2014). Many

fans, even some who have been strongly critical of the show’s finale, seem to have

25

found this activity very rewarding. For instance, TV critic Dustin Rowles, despite

his frustration over the many loose ends left hanging at the end, urged Pizzolatto to

continue in this vein when writing the show’s second season:

For seven episodes of True Detective, I’ve rarely had more fun

experiencing a television show. I learned so much about Robert Chambers,

The King in Yellow, about H.P. Lovecraft, and Cthulhu. I learned about

satanic cults, and I learned about the culture of Louisiana […]. Like many

on the Internet, I might have gotten carried away, but in getting carried

away, I learned more about literature, and movies, Louisiana, and

filmmaking, that it didn’t matter in the end that I was a little disappointed

in the finale. […] Instead of watching television, we get to experience it

now. We engage with it. (2014, original emphasis)

The ability to engage spectators in this rewarding way is one of the outstanding

qualities of the first season of True Detective, and it would not have worked in the

same way before the Internet. Richly realized worlds and elaborate and weird pop-

culture allusions certainly existed before the emergence of present-day digital

culture, but while they do not depend on it, digital culture has made this kind of

artistic practice easier to appreciate.

A lot of the criticism against the first season of True Detective seems to have

fallen into the trap that David Bordwell cautions us against: the trap of seeing

criticism in terms of the surface/depth metaphor, of detecting the true meaning

hidden beneath the images and sounds we watch and hear. This raises an issue that

is beyond the scope of this article to address: are there aspects of forensic fandom

26

that are intolerant of ambiguity, that insist that there must be one and only one

right answer to every question? – with the nihilistic corollary that if the questions

raised by artworks do not have right answers, if meaning is constructed the way

Bordwell says, then everything must be meaningless.

Whether or not such views are widespread among forensic fans, James S.

Murphy points in that direction when he concludes, rather bleakly (but

presciently, since he was writing before the last episode’s broadcast dashed the

expectation that all would be explained): ‘The intention of True Detective is surely

to bring us to the same conclusion about the endlessness, if not futility, of the

search for a solution’ (2014). To say this is to say that True Detective embraces the

radical pessimism of Thomas Ligotti: the world is malignantly useless and the

search for meaning a conspiratorial illusion. Yet this is not, as I see it, the lesson of

the show.

It is true that True Detective does not provide a full solution to its mysteries,

but merely gestures at a criminality too pervasive and protean for everything to be

resolved. The upbeat ending, however, explicitly rejects radical pessimism: Cohle,

who has been its voice, has changed his tune. Even if the darkness is pervasive, the

investigations of Cohle and Hart have brought a little more light with them, and

for that reason those investigations are deeply meaningful, even if they are unable

to uncover the entire conspiracy: ‘That ain’t what kind of world it is, but we got

ours’, as Hart (perhaps too explicitly) states in the final episode. In much the same

way, the fans got theirs: their search for meaning is not made futile because the

show does not have a single true meaning to be uncovered. The search, the

experience, has meaning in itself.

27

28

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Contributor details

Casper Tybjerg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of

Copenhagen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1998. His current research interests

include film historiography, the history of film style, and the relation between

Danish and German film-making in the silent period. He has written extensively on

Carl Th. Dreyer and Danish and Scandinavian silent cinema. He has helped

restore Dreyer’s films Once Upon a Time and Love One Another, and he has

recorded DVD audio commentaries for three of Dreyer’s films as well as Benjamin

Christensen’s Witchcraft through the Ages and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom

Carriage. He sits on the advisory boards for the Danish film archive and the

Danish radio and television archive, and he has been a co-editor of Journal of

39

Scandinavian Cinema (2010–2014) and a board member of the Society for the

Cognitive Study of the Moving Image (2010–2013).

Contact:

Casper Tybjerg

Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication

University of Copenhagen

Karen Blixens Vej 4

DK- 2300 Copenhagen S

Denmark

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