With "Haunted Houses" True Detective Got Incongruously Quiet But Remained Powerful

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In “Haunted Houses”, the sixth episode of True Detective, a hard-drinking, depressed former man of God played unforgettably by Shea Whigam tells Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle “All my life I wanted to be near to God. The only nearness, silence.”

So it feels poetically apt that the episode is defined by an uncharacteristic sense of quiet. This cranks the intensity and volume way down, from a raging boil to a slow simmer. 

The last episode ended on a cliffhanger suggesting that Rust Cohle might just be the serial killer he’s been chasing. If Rust turns out to be the killer it would be an organic development, as he sure seems like the kind of guy who might have murdered some hobos or student nurses in a fit of incoherent rage. 

One of the central mysteries of this season of True Detective is why and how Rust and Marty fell out. This answer is similarly organic, if not inevitable. 

It would not be accurate to say that Rust and Marty fell out as friends as well as partners because they have never gotten along. They fucking hate each other. Marty thinks Rust is a pretentious, verbose weirdo perpetually spouting off on lofty matters in a way that makes him want to punch his partner in the face. 

Rust, meanwhile, sees in Marty the everyday spiritual and moral corruption that makes the world such a toxic and terrible place. 

Proximity and a shared purpose are all that keeps them together. I used to have a coworker who I really liked and that I thought really liked me. In a world of complicated relationships, where you never really know where you stand and everything can fall apart at any moment it felt like this was that rarest of wonders: a genuine, uncomplicated, unforced friendship. 

I discovered over time that this person REALLY did not care for me. At all. That made me doubt my judgment all over again.  

Like Rust and Matty, what kept us together was proximity and a shared goal. When those fell away the relationship ended. Rust and Marty similarly have no reason to keep in touch or pretend to like each other when they’re not partners anymore.

Marty needs to work on his marriage and appreciate what he he has. Instead he finds another mistress young enough to be his daughter, a former sex worker that he once helped out of a bind who now works at T-Mobile.

Marty's wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan) knows damn well that her husband cheats on her. She knows that he is incapable of fidelity, that he is a weak man who is powerless to resist his compulsions. 

Maggie is nothing if not smart and perceptive. She is all too cognizant of Marty’s myriad failings as a husband, father and human being but she stays for purely pragmatic reasons. 

Maggie has invested her entire adult life in her marriage. She's sacrificed her own wants and needs and desires for the sake of a respectable marriage to a respectable man whose dark side she can no longer overlook, forgive or forget. 

For Maggie, Marty’s new affair is the end. Consciously or otherwise, she’s been looking for a reason to leave him. Marty’s much younger lover gives her what little excuse she needs to end a marriage that hasn’t worked for her for a very long time. 

But it's not enough to leave Marty for his rampant infidelity and dishonesty. Maggie wants to hurt Marty where it will be the most painful. 

So she seduces a drunk and sweaty Rust solely for the sake of pissing off his former partner and her soon to be ex-husband. It’s a transactional act between the two people in the world who are closest to Marty, and consequently hate him the most. 

The sex that Rust and Maggie have is angry, tense and not particularly pleasurable. When Maggie concedes upfront that she had sex with Rust not out of desire or lust for him but rather out of hatred and bitterness for Marty, Rust flies into a rage. 

He screams at her to leave in a way that suggests that their first sexual encounter will also be the last. True Detective has diligently established Maggie and Rust’s attraction to one another. How could they not want to jump each other’s bones? They look like Matthew McConaughey and Michelle Monaghan. But this is True Detective, so the sex is weird and intense and moderately upsetting. 

This would be a good place to discuss Monaghan’s work on True Detective, which is every bit as impressive as Harrelson’s but much less flashy. Monaghan's signature as an actress is strength and a ferocious, intimidating intellect.

In True Detective Monaghan has an understatedly juicy role as a strong, smart woman in a thankless marriage to a man unworthy of her. 

She embodies the old dictum to show rather than tell. She almost doesn’t need to utter a word because her eyes and her body language say everything that needs to be said about her character’s intense dissatisfaction with the life that she chose and now regrets. There is a lot going on with Maggie in this episode and almost none of it is conveyed through dialogue.

When Rust gives in and has a quick, nasty fuck with his ex-partner’s wife the Cold War between them suddenly turns white hot and the men exchange fisticuffs. 

A minute or so of mutually degrading sex kills two relationship that, to be fair, were already just barely holding on: Maggie’s marriage to Marty and Marty and Rust’s professional partnership. 

The theme of this episode seemed to be people not saying what’s on their minds. There is a riveting scene, for example, where Rust terrorizes a female prisoner whose babies have both died under mysterious circumstances by asserting, without outright stating, that he thinks that she murdered her babies and consequently will be viciously abused when she goes to prison.

The situation is so grim that, in a terrifyingly casual, measured tone of voice, Rust encourages the woman to commit suicide if she has a chance. Needless to say, that is not how detectives are supposed to communicate with prisoners. Encouraging people to commit suicide is pretty much an unforgivable transgression regardless of the context. 

“Haunted Houses” is an episode rich in subtext and tension as Rust begins to investigate Wellspring, a shadowy organization ostensibly designed to bring Christian values to schools run by Billy Lee Tuttle, who Jay O. Sanders plays as someone whose mask of pious gentility hides a darkness comparable to Rust’s. 

“Haunted Houses” is slow and methodical for True Detective. Not every episode of True Detective has to be vibrating with dark energy and despair. Sometimes you need to slow things down. Not every episode of True Detective can be a hit single. There’s also a place for the television equivalent of album cuts like this.

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