I FInd Myself Relating to the Bleak Nihilism of True Detective on a Level That Is Deeply Concerning

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You know that you are in a bad and weird place emotionally when you watch the first season of True Detective and find yourself thinking that Matthew McConaughey’s iconically miserable Rusty Cohle makes a lot of excellent points about the meaninglessness of its existence and the cruel joke that we call life. 

Rusty Cohle is one of the bleakest, most despairing and nihilistic characters in television history. Yet I find myself identifying with him on a deeply personal level. 

The eccentric shamus with the weakness for booze and erudite philosophizing has separated himself from the rest of humanity when the primary action in True Detective takes place. 

The young Rusty chose not to be part of the brotherhood of man and the sprawling community known as humankind. Being invested in people and institutions just hurt too goddamn much. 

The death of his daughter just hurt too goddamn much. The resulting collapse of his marriage similarly hurt too goddamn much. So a deeply wounded survivor opted for a solitary existence apart from people who still believed in people and institutions and the promise of tomorrow. 

In the latter-day interview portions of True Detective Rusty has given up on life and humanity completely. He seemingly has no ties to anyone or anything beyond the liquor stores and bars where he feeds his addiction. 

He has no wife. He has no children. He has no friends. Despite being a brilliant detective with penetrating insights into the human condition and life’s ugliness he left the world of law enforcement behind long ago. 

Rusty has devolved into a ghost of a man, a grim caricature of himself. He’s giving into his demons and his compulsions. 

That might be me if I were not tethered to this sick, sad world through my wife, my sons, this website, my podcast and my deep, unfortunate and often unsuccessful attempts to be funny and insightful on the internet. 

I too have opted out of the brotherhood of man because I no longer feel like it has a place for a man like me. It’s been so long since I’ve had a job or interacted regularly with people who are not my family that I’ve more or less forgotten how to be a human being and exist in society. 

The third episode of True Detective, “Locked Room”, begins at a church service that affords Rusty yet another opportunity to discourse on his favorite subject: the pointlessness of it all and humanity’s innately doomed desire to find meaning and comfort in an inherently random and sadistic world. 

Rusty sees people of faith as obese, poorly educated fools clinging to superstition because they cannot handle life’s true horror. Rusty’s partner Martin "Marty" Hart (Woody Harrelson) pushes back because he is no fan of his partner’s militant atheism, nihilism or monologuing. 

Marty isn’t a fan of his partner on any level. In fact he clearly fucking hates him. That hatred goes both ways. Rusty isn’t fond of his partner either. He sees him as a pragmatic conformist who cheats shamelessly on his gorgeous wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan) Rusty clearly has feelings for that go beyond friendship. 

In one of the episode’s tensest and most compelling scenes Marty returns home to see Rusty looking sexy and dirty in a soiled undershirt. Rusty insists that he’s at Marty’s home because he borrowed his lawnmower and, as an act of appreciation, decided that he would return the favor by mowing Marty’s lawn for him. 

It’s a nice thing to do for a friend but Rusty is not a nice person and Marty is not his friend. He’s closer to being his enemy despite being professionally joined at the hip. 

It’s one thing for an actor like McConaughey to make magic out of long, intricately written and worded monologues but the Academy Award winner is so good in what could be his signature role that I was legitimately riveted by the part in the episode where he walks to his automobile post-“mowing” with Marty glaring at him. 

McConaughey is able to convey so much simply by the way his character perambulates. He’s creepy and intense and otherworldly as well as unmistakably sexual. 

For Rusty and Marty, “mowing your lawn” also means “fucking your wife.” Marty is consequently enraged at the idea of Rusty “mowing his lawn” because even though he is a phenomenally untrustworthy and unfaithful husband he nevertheless doesn’t want anyone else fucking his wife, particularly his partner. 

Marty is the lesser role in part because roles don’t get bigger or meatier than Rusty Cohle. Rusty tells Marty that he is also an inherently obsessive person but unlike Rusty that obsession is not rooted in his job. 

He is instead obsessed with Lisa, a much younger mistress played by Alexandra Daddario, who is tired of waiting for a cop who will probably never leave his family and is moving on with her life and seeing other men. 

This infuriates Marty, who flies into a rage and nearly pummels the poor man Lisa is dating in anger. 

Maggie is running out of patience with her philandering hubby. There’s a great moment when Marty tells her that he feels like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon and he’s fine as long as he doesn’t look down and see that he has run off of a cliff but if he does look down then he realizes the peril he’s in. 

I’ve used that metaphor myself more times than I can remember so powerfully relating to both lead characters in a show about two damaged, broken men who hate each other and themselves is an uncanny and not particularly positive experience. 

I’m so mesmerized by the mood, atmosphere and world-building of True Detective that I sometimes forget that it is, at its core, a police procedural about two lawmen looking for a murderer. 

I also realized that I don’t particularly care about the case at the core of the show being solved but “Locked Room” moves that plot forward with the revelation that the murderer may be a serial killer. 

“Locked Room” ends with a bang, with an unforgettable monologue from McConaughey about, again, the horror and meaninglessness of existence from which the episode gets its title and a sinister, enigmatic figure, presumably the murderer, in nothing but underwear and a gas mask. 

It’s an image out of Twin Peaks as well as one hell of a cliffhanger. 

After next episode I will be halfway through True Detective’s first season. Going in I wondered if the show could possibly be as good as its reputation angrily insisted. 

That’s definitely the case so far. It’s riveting television that I can relate to on a level that’s not just unhealthy but also frankly somewhat alarming. 

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