“But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou
shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die.” (Genesis 2:17)
Let
us talk about good and evil. Where do we find it in True Detective? How do we tell the one from the other? It is a
blurry line, here, one which is not easily drawn. The good and bad seem to
inhabit one another. Rust—on the side of the law, ostensibly on the side of
good—does not exist outside of the violence he is supposed to prevent. He
murdered a “crankhead” once; in the fourth episode, “Who Goes There?” he works
with Ginger and the Iron Crusaders to rob a stash house and murder at least one
person. He is under no illusions of his own goodness: “Sometimes I think I’m
just not good for people, you know, that it’s not good for them to be around
me,” he says in the second episode. “I can’t say the job made me this way. More
like me being this way made me right for the job.” Rust sees himself as a bad
person, maybe even an evil person,
and it is his evilness which so suits him to his job. Under Rust’s philosophy,
only evil can truly know and truly destroy other evil.
Similarly,
as Aaron Burstein and Jessica Witte have noted, Marty
is no good man. He is an unapologetic misogynist who willfully deceives and
manipulates his wife, Maggie. On multiple occasions he uses his symbolic
authority as a law officer to violently impose himself on others: in the third
episode he assaults Lisa and her date in her apartment, flashing his badge; in
the fourth he assaults Maggie at her work, flashing his badge again as
justification; and in the fifth he assumes the authority of the entire justice
system for himself as he murders Reginald LeDoux. While Rust recognizes the
evil within himself, Marty tries to mask it under his badge; yet, this very act
undermines the positive moral value associated with that symbol.
Like
the morality of our detectives, the morality of our killer, too, is ambiguous.
The accused murderer’s name, Reginald “LeDoux,” the soft, spoken with a Louisiana creole accent sounds like Le Dieu, God. And indeed, there is an undeniable aura of spiritual
earnestness behind the killings. They are ritual murders, overloaded with
symbolism and adapted Christian iconography: the crown of thorns/antlers, the
“devil nests,” made to keep away evil. These are killings with meaning, a
surplus of meaning. Perhaps, like Rust, it is evil’s way of fighting the evil
in the world.
It
would seem that in True Detective the
division between good and evil is being broken down. Such value judgments are
impossible to make. This paradox is embodied in the first episode title, “The
Long Bright Dark.” Bright and dark, good and evil, contained in a single,
coherent whole. It recalls Milton’s vision of Hell as “darkness visible,” and
like Milton’s Hell it is not entirely a bad
place: “Here at least / We shall be free” (1.258-59). Yet—and I think Milton
would concur here—it is a decidedly evil
place. We get this judgment explicitly from Rust, the embodied voice of the
show’s philosophical and moral reason. “I think human consciousness was a
tragic misstep in evolution,” he says in the first episode. “We became too
self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are
creatures of nature who should not exist.” There is something implicitly wrong with us, Rust says. We have
exceeded nature: we should not be.
In
The
Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks identifies a realist mode of
signification which he calls the “moral occult,” “the domain of operative
spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of
reality” (5). For novelists like Balzac and Henry James, the true subject of melodrama,
Brooks argues, lies in this domain. “Melodrama starts from and expresses the
anxiety brought by a frightening new world in which traditional patterns of
moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue. It plays out the force
of that anxiety with the apparent triumph of villainy, and it dissipates it
with the eventual victory of virtue” (20). In a post-Enlightenment world in
which clear morals are not handed down to us from above, it is the task of the melodramatic
imagination to reconstruct a morality out of the “repository of the fragmentary
and desacralized remnants of sacred myth” (5).
The result is the moral occult. Melodrama, to Brooks, thus restores a
kind of morality to a valueless world, telling the reader what is good and what
is bad, thereby constructing a space in which virtue can triumph over villainy.
True Detective also constructs
a moral occult, but in a much different way than realist melodrama. Like such melodrama,
True Detective draws on the moral
occult to reconstruct a space in which value can be imposed on a valueless
world. The mystery of Dora Lange’s
murder has a surplus of meaning. To the murderer, Rust and Marty, and the
viewer, the killing is not about Dora Lange’s death; rather, her death
signifies, metonymically, the presence of and struggle against evil in the
world. Yet this is not a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and
evil. There is no space for the good and the virtuous in the reconstructed
value system of True Detective. There
is only evil: evil fighting evil, evil confronting itself.
In
“Dystopian
Romance: True Crime and the Female Reader,” Laura Browder argues that one
of the functions of the true crime genre is to “provide a secret map of the
world” to women which serves as a “how-to guide for personal survival” (929). True
crime books expose the evil in the world: they bring hidden violence to the
surface of reality, and in so doing make their readers, in an almost religious
sense, feel “more aware” (932) than other people, as if true crime books lead
them to a higher spiritual and moral truth. Like melodrama’s intersection with
the moral occult, Browder’s interpretation of the true crime genre imposes
clear moral standards on a valueless world. Readers are “secure in the
knowledge that every story will have a happy ending, or that at the very least
evildoers will be punished” (929). The world of true crime is filled with evil,
but in the end the evil is brought to justice—even if the violence it has
inflicted cannot be undone.
In
the fifth episode, aptly titled “The Secret Fate of All Life,” True Detective makes it clear that there
can be no justice for its evil. “I know what happens next,” LeDoux tells Rust,
kneeling, handcuffed in front of him. “You’ll do this again. Time is a flat
circle.” Seventeen years later, this idea of eternal return is repeated by Rust
during his interview with Detectives Papania and Gilbough:
In eternity,
where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes.
So death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn
but into the same life that you’ve always been born into. I mean, how many
times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you
can’t remember your lives, you can’t
change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all
life.
The
ontology Rust describes allows for no change, and without change, how can
justice ever be served? This is a world in which evil and evil alone exists,
and which can never be rectified, for it will always, eternally return. Nietzsche,
on the other hand, takes the idea of eternal recurrence as a test of amor fati.
If this thought
[the idea of eternal recurrence] were to gain possession of you, it would
change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every
thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh
upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have
to become to yourself and to life to crave
nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (The Gay Science §341, in The
Portable Nietzsche 102)
To
Nietzsche the idea of eternal recurrence can do two things to an individual: it
can change you, or crush you. Rust is crushed. He sees nothing of positive
value in life. To him, the eternal return is a confirmation of the
meaninglessness of life and the inevitability of the triumph of evil. Yet, as
Nietzsche makes clear, this is not the only, or even most preferable, way to
respond to this idea. To Nietzsche, the best response to the eternal return is
to crave nothing more fervently. It
does not deny meaning or value to the world but rather produces those things,
urges us to confirm, not deny, the things in which we believe, to become to yourself and to life the
change we see as necessary.
When LeDoux first invokes the
eternal return, Rust responds, “What is that, Nietzsche? Shut the fuck up.” Rust
recognizes and immediately denies an affirmative Nietzschean reading. True Detective does not afford space to
this kind of reading. There is no attempt to affirm values, but to deny them.
The world is evil, and there is nothing we can do about it. We are creatures
who should not exist. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, and now we can do nothing but wait to die. The show’s underlying
“pessimism,” in this way, naturalizes and essentializes late-capitalism. It is
and always has been, and it will always return. There is something wrong with
our world: we know it is evil, we know it does bad, terrible things, but there
is nothing we can do about it. There is a revolutionary aspect to the way
Brooks sees melodrama using the moral occult to redefine the good. True Detective denies a good, and if we
don’t have a good, if we have nothing to confirm, then what is worth fighting
for?
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