With “The Secret Fate of All Life”, the Fifth Episode of its First Season, True Detective Continues to Fucking Rule
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There are fundamentally two sides to True Detective. There’s the police procedural aspect and then there’s the artsy philosophical drama, which is less interested in finding the killer than it is in figuring out the meaning of life and why we are all, individually and collectively, hopelessly and irrevocably doomed.
As I wrote in the last write-up, you know you’re in a bad place emotionally when Rust Cohle’s pretentious nihilism begins to make all the sense in the world, when you find yourself yelling “Preach, brother!” during particularly bleak monologues.
That, unfortunately, is where I’m at right now. I find myself identifying with one of the saddest, strangest and darkest characters in television history on a level I frankly find more than a little disconcerting.
I consequently gravitate towards the meaty metaphysical element of True Detective, to its erudite pessimism and bleak take on human nature and the institutions we create in an innately doomed attempt to keep our demons caged and our monsters from destroying us.
These two elements complement one another. The highbrow intellectual element lends a bracingly cerebral quality to what could easily have come off as standard-issue cop stuff while the cop stuff imposes a structure and formula on the show’s esoteric musings.
“The Secret Fate of All Life” is the perfect fusion of police procedural and weighty drama. You could compose a slim book of gloomy philosophy from Matthew McConaughey’s dialogue in this episode alone.
He is very much in his element, drunkenly holding court in the police station as he toys with the detectives interviewing him like a cat with a terrified mouse. He’s always philosophical and never in a friendly or upbeat fashion but he is particularly verbose here.
As far as Rust sees it, the not so secret fate of all life is to suffer and suffer and suffer some more. It is to be traumatized and then re-traumatized by a universe that does not proceed in a linear fashion as we foolishly imagine but is rather a flat circle that continually takes us back to our darkest and most destructive memories and experiences, that forces us to revisit the most agonizing moments of our lives in a perpetual loop.
Rust is particularly fucked because his life seemingly consists of nothing BUT dark and destructive memories that haunt him in a way even he would have trouble articulating. We’ve seen some of the trauma that he’s survived but there’s also an abundance we don’t know anything about. This episode more than any before calls into question how well we really know Rust.
There’s a wonderful moment early in the episode when an undercover Rust is talking to Dewall, the meth-dealing motorcycle gang member cousin of suspected serial killer Reggie Ledoux.
Dewall, who is, again, a meth-dealing member of a racist motorcycle gang, tells Rust that he does not like him and that there is a darkness within him that makes him want to kill him should they ever meet again.
The paranoid drug dealer is right, of course. Rust is a dark and tormented figure wracked with the kinds of demons we can’t imagine. Being an undercover police officer ostensibly on the side of right and good doesn’t make Rust any less dark or tormented. If anything it makes him more dangerous because of the extraordinary destructive power of a badge and a gun.
We get to witness some of that awful power when Rust and Marty descend upon Reggie Ledoux’s ramshackle domicile and after discovering two abused children either dead or hovering on the brink of death, Marty shoots Reggie in the head even though he is both unarmed and handcuffed.
It’s a split second decision with life or death consequences, the kind that detectives are regularly called upon to make. In another split second decision Rust instinctively chooses to cover up his partner’s crime by attempting to make it look like Reggie died in a shootout he and Marty were lucky to survive instead of being killed in cold blood by a killer with a badge that doubles as a License to Kill.
You know who else has a License to Kill? James Bond. You know who directed the last James Bond movie? True Detective director Cary Joji Fukunaga. Does that have anything to do with this episode? Not really? Is it at least a mildly interesting factoid? Arguably.
Reggie’s seemingly spontaneous killing ostensibly wraps up the mystery at the heart of the show’s first season yet it is purposefully anti-climactic, particularly compared to the stunning set-piece that closed the last episode and won Fukunaga an Emmy for Best/Most Directing.
Before dying Reggie indulges in some esoterica of his own, mumbling about time being a flat circle. It’s almost as if he is Rust’s shadow self, his even darker other half.
The cover-up is successful and Rust and Marty are rewarded for actions that may or may not have resulted in the death of a serial killer with a weakness for striking, surreal imagery but was definitely unethical and illegal.
It’s police corruption, pure and simple but no one seems to mind because no one in respectable society wants someone like Reggie Ledoux on the streets and up to no good alongside his criminal associates.
Rust and Marty might not have gotten the right guy or a copycat might have sprung up in his wake because murders like the ones Rust and Marty investigated back in 1995 are happening again. It’s almost as if time is, in fact, a flat circle.
The twist this time around is that the detectives interviewing the older, sadder Rust and Marty have a hunch that Rust himself may be a murderer.
That tracks. Oh sweet blessed lord does Rust being a killer and a criminal make sense. He’s been giving out a serious serial killer vibe all season long so it’s consequently very plausible that he might just be the monster he has the spent the show chasing.
In a lesser show this development might seem cheap or sensationalistic but True Detective has gotten so uncomfortably deep inside the character’s mind that making him a killer, or revealing that he’s been a killer all along, would feel both merited and organic.
This ends on one hell of a cliffhanger. I can’t wait to see what happens next to the point that I am annoyed with the universe that I’m writing one of these a month instead of watching all of the remaining episodes in one big binge.
Then again there is something to be said for delaying your gratification and I am finding the first season of True Detective (which I hope in Japan is known as Weirdo Cop) to be even more gratifying than its lofty reputation as the best of the best would suggest.
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