Marty Hart’s attempts to compartmentalize the various
aspects of his personal and professional life are among his greatest failings.
Although episode three of True Detective
is titled “The Locked Room,” the truth of the matter is that no room is ever
definitively locked; a worldview continuously reflected in the Hart-Cohle
dichotomy. Hart values surfaces and tangibility, causing him to resist Rust
Cohle’s intensely analytic tendencies, which direct the two detectives into
unsettling, uncomfortable truths. At the close of episode two, Cohle alludes to
some “secret truth of the universe” that the case pushes toward. He conflates
violent impulses with the fundamental natures of human existence.
These impulses are not specifically reserved for killers and
sadists, however. Both Hart and Cohle’s will-to-violence is emphasized by the
series. Cohle references the void-like years of HIDTA deep cover and Hart
repeatedly displays reckless fits of rage. While Cohle appears to have
repressed his anger through radical nihilism, Hart’s anger is always a response
to a perceived threat. The primary “master threat” so-to-speak, is the risk that
his detective life, his home life, and his life of sexual infidelity bleed into
one another. It begins in the previous episode when Cohle deduces Hart is
cheating on his wife, thus linking Hart’s detective life with his infidelity.
In episode three, this link spiders out in two major ways. The
first occurs when Cohle mows Hart’s lawn. It is an innocuous chore and gesture,
which makes it all the more threatening to Hart. Cohle’s life, work, and
worldview are entirely symbiotic with his position as detective. His apartment
is virtually unfurnished, and he does nothing in his spare time, opting instead
to study the case all night because he is unable to sleep. He even remarks in
episode two, “I can’t say the job made me this way. Rather, being this way made
me right for the job.” Cohle, who completely embodies the detective life
through his mere existence, breaches the boundary of Hart’s domicile without
Hart’s permission by mowing the lawn. To Hart, these boundaries are critical.
Hart even diagnoses Cohle’s behavior further along in the episode, stating “I think
Rust needed a family. It’s boundaries. Boundaries are good.” It’s an
ineffectually paternalistic sentiment made significant by how incongruous it is
with Hart’s family life, which is clearly unraveling.
The second threat to Hart’s structure of identity occurs at
the bar. To Hart, this threat is much more immediate and sinister, since the
primary subjects of his three lives, Cohle, Maggie, and Lisa, are all present
at the same location, in public no less. Maggie even sets Cohle up on a date,
simultaneously predicting and echoing Hart’s belief that Cohle needs a family. The
sequence culminates with Hart becoming drunk and violent. He confronts Lisa,
follows her home, breaks into her house and assaults her date. Hart tries
expressing ownership over Lisa’s sexuality as a backlash to the forced realization
that it is something he cannot own. And that is perhaps the heart of the
matter. In order for Hart to sufficiently compartmentalize his existence, he
must express absolute control. This impossible end is further complicated by
Hart’s seeming inability to empathize with those around him.
On a formal level, Hart’s lack of self-control and his
excess of self-centeredness ties into the show’s broader arc. It’s no
coincidence that episode three is also the episode most bound up in religious
subject matter, at least up to that point in the series. Cohle demonstrates a
worldview somewhat akin to New Atheism, in which religion isn’t only seen as
false, but actively harmful. On the subject of Christianity and human
exceptionalism, Cohle contends, “Such a desperate sense of entitlement… ‘Surely
this is all for me.’” Cohle responds by arguing the smallness of humanity, an
idea which other characters resist. Although Hart’s life does not explicitly
represent this vast philosophical/existential dread, it does speak to a
violation of Hart’s casual solipsism. Even though Hart tries to separate and
block off the people that surround him, Lisa does not disappear when he is with
his wife, his family does not disappear when he is at work, and so forth.
Hart’s behavior becomes metonymic of human self-importance.
While driving through the isolated Louisiana countryside,
Cohle remarks to Hart, “It’s like they don’t know the outside world exists.”
But in spite of this amplified provinciality in the rural South, the setting
pushes toward a quintessential conception of Americana. And even though Hart is
deeply flawed, he is the everyman character within the structure of the series.
While Cohle’s cool passivity and rationality may make him the more identifiable
character in the face of Hart’s glaring faults, the show obscures certain
realities of viewership. In normalizing Cohle’s alien nature, the audience is
encouraged to forget they are actually the everyman, to forget that the outside
world exists.
Great job Aaron with some extremely sharp insights into the various dimensions that make *True Detective* so effective. Although there were many moments that triggered a head-nodding response in me I especially like the thoughtline suggested here: "Although Hart’s life does not explicitly represent this vast philosophical/existential dread, it does speak to a violation of Hart’s casual solipsism. Even though Hart tries to separate and block off the people that surround him, Lisa does not disappear when he is with his wife, his family does not disappear when he is at work, and so forth. Hart’s behavior becomes metonymic of human self-importance." What I like about this is how it draws on the serial form. Up to that moment we have oscillated between past and present and between different points in the twin narratives that are evoked as both Marty and Rust are questioned about their investigation. Neither man tells the full story of what we actually see: the fuller narrative is evoked for us viewers but not adduced by either character. In this same fashion, laden with what Jessica (in her more recent post on Barsetshire Towers) rightly notes is dramatic irony, we sense but Hart does not that his adulterous chickens will eventually come home to roost. It's interesting that the clearest sign of that is Lisa's appearances in the same spatio-temporal frame occupied by Maggie and Rust. As you note, Aaron, all of the characters through whom Marty triangulates his experience here come together and the result is an explosive tension and violence.
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing such an interesting post!
Aaron, you’ve done a great job of triangulating Hart’s lives. His physical, mental, and emotional attempts to compartmentalize his life do seem to fall flat. Your post has led me to think in two directions. First, in what ways does Hart’s having asked Cohle to dinner blur the line between home and work? What can be said about Marty and Maggie having invited Cohle to the bar that night? And how does Cohle’s emotional-therapeutic relationship to Maggie complicate our idea—though perhaps very different from Marty’s idea—of how “innocuous” mowing Hart’s lawn was?
ReplyDeleteSecond, how does the form of the show affect our understanding of Hart’s ongoing life? Seeing a matured (though maybe not mature) Hart reflecting on past experiences may add an additional life (or series of lives) on top of those portrayed in the story that he’s telling. Do we merely see a man who can now acknowledge the fractures of his attempts at compartmentalization? Or do we see a man who believes he maintained the distinctions of his lives? Hart’s battle-hardened attitude of knowing better than others thanks to his experience manifests itself when he asks his interviewers about their families, about whether they had been in gunfights. What does the formal temporal distance add to our understanding of Hart’s character?
Thanks for those questions Joe. I do think you're onto something very interesting with the dinner invitation and everything it implies about Hart's way of dealing with conventional norms. Conventionally, from as far back as the Victorian period, working men are able to draw a firewall between their professional lives and their domestic lives. As colleagues they should be able to socialize where the presence of wives and daughters (notably neither Hart nor Cohle fathers a boy) index and enable a change in who they are (what Aaron calls compartmentalization). This convention fails to hold up multiple times: the dinner party (where Cohle's drunkenness suggests damage that relates partly to "the job"), the lawn mowing, the double date at the dance. Another aspect of this is Cohle's recognizing the signs of Hart's infidelity and bringing it up in the locker room at work. We sense a building toward something explosive in the relation between these two detective partners.
ReplyDelete