The First Episode of True Detective Immerses Audiences is Lynchian World of Madness and Murder

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.

As far as professional pop culture media is concerned, there really are only three times when it’s appropriate to write about a piece of entertainment. The most natural time to cover something is of course when it comes out and excitement and anticipation are at a fever pitch. 

The second time “The Man” thinks it’s okay to write a book or movie or TV show is on its anniversary. But it can’t be just any anniversary. You can’t commemorate an eighth anniversary or a thirteenth or a fourth. No, the anniversary has to be a nice round number. 10th anniversaries are great, as are twentieth, twenty-fifth and fiftieth. 

The final time the Powers That Be think it’s okay to write about something is after one of its creators or stars have died. 

Thankfully I am not beholden to the dictates of conventional wisdom on this here website. I can write about what I want when I want and I can swear as gratuitously and pointlessly as possible, shithead. 

I can also just randomly insult dead Democratic politicians for no reason. I have no sane, responsible editor to tell me that I can’t just write that Walter Mondale’s mother was bald-headed and wore combat boots. 

It’s called freedom, baby! Freedom of speech, freedom of expression. 

But mostly I have the freedom to write about the pop culture that patrons have chosen for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0.

I don’t bother with anniversaries here because they seem meaningless and arbitrary. So I do not have to wait until True Detective turns ten on January 12th, 2024 to write about it because one of you beautiful people have chosen the first season of True Detective for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. 

That’s right: I will be covering 2014’s hottest show a mere nine and a half years after everyone couldn’t stop talking about it. 

True Detective was posited as one of the apexes of peak television. That was the popular notion that television, which previously only aired insulting garbage like My Mother the Car and The Tortellis, had become so good that every television show was now better than even the best movie. 

This was driven home when a rerun of What’s Happening Now swept the 2011 Academy Awards. A single episode of a mediocre sitcom from the 1980s was considered better than any movie that was released in 2010. That’s how bad things got. If it weren’t for the excitement of 3-D movies like Yogi Bear, the movie industry very well could have gone out of business.

Then a motion picture miracles known as The Snyderverse and Warner Brothers’ Dark Universe came along and suddenly film was on top again. 

Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself. I’m here to write about the first episode of True Detective, which is so intense, so grim and so dramatic that it demands to be written about irreverently as well as reverently. 

True Detective was hailed, not inaccurately, as an unusually cinematic television show. It was praised as a highbrow art film that just happened to unfold in eight roughly hour-long segments that aired on HBO. 

The show had prestige. It had class. It had production values on par with anything at the arthouse theater or multiplex. For its leads it even had Matthew McConaughey, a bona fide Academy Award-winning movie star as one lead and his good friend and fellow marijuana enthusiast Woody Harrelson, an Academy Award nominee, as his partner. 

True Detective reunites the stars of the poorly received 2008 vanity project Surfer, Dude for a project that could not be more difficult in terms of tone, ambition and quality. 

In Surfer, Dude McConaughey played the ultimate surfer stud while in True Detective the handsome Texan with the sexy drawl plays Rustin “Russ” Cohle. For this deeply scarred lawman, nothing is alright, alright, alright and everything is horribly, tragically wrong. 

True Detective’s framing device has Cohle and former partner Martin "Marty" Hart (Harrelson) being interviewed by detectives Maynard Gilbough (Michael Potts) and Thomas Papania (Tory Kittles) in 2012 about their 1995 investigation into the murder of a sex worker named Dora Lange. 

In these sequences McConaughey looks as bad as possible for a man his extraordinary beauty. His hair is long, stringy and pulled into a deeply unflattering ponytail. He has an even wilder, even more unfortunate facial hair. 

He looks like someone who hasn’t slept, or showered, or enjoyed a moment’s peace for a very long time. This tortured, haunted man has given in to his demons, his darkness and his addictions, to the point that he makes the detectives fetch him a six pack of beer as the price of talking to them. 

He is a broken man in a state of rot and disrepair but his mind remains sharp. We’re told that he’s been off the grid for eight years. Seemingly nothing good has happened for him in that time. 

Time hasn’t been terribly kind to Rusty’s former parter either but he knows how to exist, even flourish, in the world in a way that Rusty does not. 

We alternate between the 2012 interviews and the 1995 investigation. Rusty is clean-cut and handsome but nevertheless has the haunted quality of a man who has seen things that no one should ever see and is irrevocably scarred by the trauma. 

In one of many quotable lines in “The Long Bright Dark” Marty observes of his partner, “Past a certain age a man without a family can be a bad thing.” 

But Rusty is not a man who has never had a family. He was married and had a daughter, but she died when she was three and the marriage ended shortly afterwards. Rusty was undoubtedly a tormented and unhappy man before the tragedy but nothing destroys someone’s psyche and chance for happiness like the death of their child. 

It’s a wound that never heals, a scar that lingers permanently. Even if Rusty’s job didn’t force him to confront the horrors that mankind is capable of on a daily basis losing a baby would put him in a decidedly bleak frame of mind. 

Early in the episode one of the detectives interviewing Marty asks him if his former partner was strange he chuckles knowingly because “strange” doesn’t begin to do justice to the character’s all-consuming weirdness. 

Nothing about Rusty is straightforward. He’s a nihilist who talks more like an unusually depressed philosophy professor than a cop. 

It’s not just a matter of Rusty choosing not to talk or behave like a sane, reasonable human being; he is incapable of even passing as someone who isn’t profoundly damaged and disturbed. 

Throughout the episode Marty functions as an audience surrogate by telling the verbose egghead he’s cursed and blessed to have as a partner to shut the fuck up with his pretentious bullshit and at least try to act normal. 

I belong to a subReddit called I’m 14 and This Is Deep. It is devoted to social media posts that seem VERY philosophical to people who don’t know any better. I thought of that subReddit throughout “The Long Bright Dark” because, in its first episode at least, the show exists forever on the brink of arty self-parody without crossing over. 

It’s a very fine line the show walks confidently. This is accomplished by having Harrelson’s more conventional and relatable detective act as a foil and react to Rusty’s intense weirdness. 

With another actor, writer or director Rusty could easily come off as the single most annoying, pretentious character in the history of television. In the hands of McConaughey, writer Nic Pizzolatto, who created the show and wrote every episode of its first season, and director Cary Joji Fukunaga, however, he emerges as one of the most fascinating and enigmatic breakout characters in recent memory. 

Rusty isn’t just smart. He’s spooky smart. He’s intimidatingly smart. He’s one of those unfortunate souls who knows far too much about the world and its awfulness and brutality to ever have a chance of being happy. 

He’s one of those cop savants who can do a once-over of a crime scene and get more out of it than other detectives do out of months and months of dogged investigation. 

Rusty illustrates this gift when he and his partner investigate a crime scene involving a naked sex worker who has been bound and left by a tree with antlers adorning her head like some manner of ghoulish crown. 

The crime seems to be cult-related but if the Satanic Panic of the 1980s taught us anything, it’s to be skeptical of murders ostensibly committed to impress the devil. 

Actors don’t get more likable, attractive or charming than McConaughey. So it’s fascinating to me that one of his signature roles involves playing a character that is unlikable, unattractive and devoid of charm, a cold grey man forever haunted by death in all of its forms. 

True Detective looks and feels a LOT like Twin Peaks without feeling overly derivative. It’s sad and surreal and filled with odd characters and striking imagery. 

It took me nearly a decade to finally catch up with True Detective but I am glad that I have begun this journey with you. So stay tuned for a new piece about the first season of True Detective every month. 

This is going to be fun, in a very dark, ghoulish, nightmarish kind of way. 

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