Joe Post, "Dead Women and Children, Broken taillights and Dolly Shots" (*True Detective*, Episode 6)

In the white-walled and large-windowed office of Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, Rust confronts the man he suspects of orchestrating or covering up the heinous crimes that consume his thoughts. Rust comes at Tuttle indirectly, deflecting Tuttle’s appreciation of his prior success in so notable a case as the Dora Lange murder by shifting attention to the academic-evangelical success of Tuttle’s endeavors. The conversation starts innocently enough, exploring how Tuttle built his progress from humble beginnings. Tuttle’s less humble present circumstances spill out onto his desk: his gold watch and gold ring are accompanied by a gold pocket square and gold-rimmed glasses. Rust’s own austere appearance and his large, black notebook offset Tuttle’s seeming opulence. Then a shift occurs. Where the previous moments had been presented to the audience through wide, chair- and desk-inclusive shots, suddenly the camera frames Tuttle’s and Rust’s faces. The mere mention of a former deacon serving under Tuttle caused this shift, cinematic form meeting spoken content.

As True Detective resists strict categorization within a genre (even its own eponymous genre), the series’ form itself undergoes subtle and significant changes over the course of several episodes and within a single episode. “Haunted Houses,” the sixth episode of the series, demonstrates through cinematographic and sound-editing techniques the various temporal and power dynamic shifts that take place at this stage of the series. Each episode of the series plays with the dynamic of the documentary-chronicle evoked through the use of in-person interviews to recount the details of a case long considered closed. Using the frame narrative of Detectives Papania and Gilbough’s interviews, the series alternates between 2012 and 1995, though the retrospective gap narrows to 2002 beginning with Episode 4. By this mid-way point in the first season, the audience (as Rust suspected from the first episode) comes to understand that retracing the steps of a case is not the underlying purpose for this new investigation. By the end of episode six, both Hart and Cohle have left the interrogation room, effectively leaving the temporal spaces of 1995 and 2002. To underscore this collapsing of the temporal distance between 2012 and the events narrated on screen, asynchronous sound in the form of voice-over appears more frequently than in previous episodes.

To transition from a frame story’s present to a narrated past, filmmakers and series creators often use voice-overs, marking both the gap and the connection between what the audience sees and the narrator describes. True Detective, on the other hand, prefers the ostensible omniscience of the camera and of diegetic noise in place of Rust or Marty dictating the course of events. Their comments are predominantly editorial or summative rather than descriptive. And while episodes prior to this one include voice-over as transition, none uses the device so prominently as Episode 6. Part of this increased use seems to stem from the increase of scenes set in 2012. Since each interviewed character sits at a different place at the table, in this episode, Cohle’s place on the far end of the interview room is replaced by Maggie’s location on the side of the room closest to the door, adding a third perspective on the past (the detectives say they’ve called Maggie in for “perspective”). The narrative of past events has reached its breaking point, meeting up with the frame’s present and necessitating an increase of transitions.

Temporal changes and the closing of the gap between past and present do not account for all of the shifts that occur in the sixth episode. Maggie’s sexual encounter with Rust marks an attempt to demonstrate agency in showing that she too has the power to hurt. Yet her transition from object (as victim of her husband’s infidelities) to subject (as perpetrator of avenging harm against her husband) does not begin when she shows up crying on Rust’s doorstep, bottle of wine in hand. The dark, flashlight illumined space of Rust’s apartment does not indicate this change. Rather, the dynamic of her power relative to Marty begins the very night that Maggie discovers the lewd photos (sexting avant la lettre?) on Marty’s phone.

When the family gathers around the television and Marty dives into his bowl of spaghetti, Maggie sits on the couch, indifferent to the slow attrition of feminine presence in the living room. Both daughters succumb to their father’s territorial bedding down ritual, and Marty is left to watch his game. The frame then transitions from the TV to Maggie, but the camera does not merely pan from one subject to another—in its initial position, the camera would have focused on Marty’s head, blocking Maggie out if the camera had simply panned. Instead, the camera pans and moves its own position (presumably via a dolly) to focus on Maggie. Uncommon among the chosen camera movements for this series, the dolly pan here works to accentuate the shift from one gaze (Marty consuming the on-screen game and his dinner) to another (Maggie’s knowing stare beyond the book on her lap and into her husband’s face).

Creative camera techniques continue to the episode’s end. The final shot, ending a scene set wholly in the frame story’s present, attaches a camera to the rear bumper of Rust’s red truck, conspicuously highlighting a broken taillight—the very taillight damaged during Rust and Marty’s brawl in the department parking lot. Why affix a camera to a tailgate, leaving the background into which Rust is driving obscured through depth-of-field focus? Why fixate on Rust’s apparent disregard for keeping his truck in repair?

Perhaps the answer lies in the scene that opened this post. In Tuttle’s office, Rust brings with him the weight of the unsolved and unsettled conclusions of old cases. The episode opens with Rust's visiting the father of a missing boy and continues with his visit to Kelly Reider (the girl found captive in Le Doux’s compound). Such dusting off old cases brought down the ire of Major Salter, though not so totally as did the visit to Tuttle. But dusting off old cases is exactly what Detectives Papania and Gilbough are themselves doing. They, like Rust, pursue leads that slide into the past even as the past intrudes into the present. When confronting Tuttle in 2002, Rust faces a question that he himself will ask of Papania and Gilbough in 2012: “What is this all about?” The response in Papania’s and Gilbough’s minds may well be the very same answer given by Rust when Tuttle asked him: “Dead women and children.” The eternal recurrence spawned in Le Doux’s Carcossa and incubated in Rust’s mind comes undeniably before the viewer of True Detective—but only through a masterful display of cinematic technique for the television screen.

In viewing this series, we may be tempted to treat the camera as an objective focalizer, to see costumes as clothing, to assume that hair naturally changed length and style from one era to another. Replete with verisimilitude, True Detective capitalizes on the lulling effects of realism to distract from formal decisions that have as much interpretive value as anything said or done on screen.