Sam Plasencia, "Taxonomies of Gender and Class in *True Detective*, Season 1, Episode 4, 'Who Goes There?'"

As we’ve discussed so far, Marty Hart is a character deeply invested in exerting and maintaining control. For example Jessica Witte has aptly argued that Marty “idealizes women who passively submit to men” and thus can only interpret women “within the virgin/whore dichotomy” (Witte)  As Aaron Burstein adds, Marty also attempts to rigidly compartmentalize his life, his “‘master threat’ … is the risk that his detective life, his home life, and his life of sexual infidelity bleed into one another” (Burstein) I’d like to build on Witte and Burstein’s commentary by suggesting that there is a significant class dynamic at play in these divisions.

The opening sequence visually compartmentalizes images along class lines. The very first image is a long shot of an industrialized horizon and unkempt grassland on either side of the foreground. This field is bifurcated by a clearing marked with tire impressions, a make-shift road that visually drives the viewer—watching from the safety and comfort of their private homes—towards the smoggy public world of what appears to be a single, geographically expansive factory campus. It’s significant here to consider the show’s intended viewership. HBO is a premium cable channel, a subscription-based service that can cost viewers anywhere from fifteen to twenty dollars a month. Illegal downloading and rental access aside, the original intended viewer is presumably one who can afford this added luxury above and beyond regular cable service, which itself is already expensive. Consequently the viewer’s perspectival plunge is more than just a shift from private to public; this ocular route takes them towards a different—and threatening—kind of private, the industrialized private of the underclasses; a world without the privileged illusion of compartmentalization.

Thus the second image is a close up of the factory from an angle showing that it is located right behind a ranch style house. In this image the backyard, a geographic appendage to the “domestic” and idealized by the middle class as a protective space of childhood innocence, is occupied by industry. The opening credit sequence is jarring to middle-class viewers precisely for such spherical collapses. It takes us into the world Marty seeks refuge from every night.

The gender dynamic of these juxtaposed images is also significant for thinking about Marty’s masculinity. In the first “public” image Marty’s face is enlarged, faded to look ghost-like and translucently superimposed over the cityscape, his head tilted and facing down as though protectively keeping watch over it. In the second “domestic” image the enlarged and superimposed picture is of a woman, centered and faded into the background as though part of the scene, and thus implicitly part of what Marty surveils. This contrast frames Marty Hart as paternalistic, a white, middle-class cop attempting to control an implicitly criminal rural poor. As such, the opening credits visually and metaphorically position Marty (and the 1995 cops) as guards against what might be called the “master threat” to characters in fictional nineteenth-century country towns such as Middlemarch and Barchester.  To borrow an insight from Elizabeth Edwards’ The Camera as Historian (2012) the “forces of [a] disordered modernity” continual threaten “cultural and material disappearance” (82).

Taken as a whole, the opening sequence emphasizes these parallels. As Witte notes, the female silhouettes overwhelmingly “suffer a voyeuristic dismemberment which the male silhouettes do not.” The men (all white) remain both whole and fully dressed, personifying the show’s cops with their clean shaven faces and neat but not too fancy suits. Moreover they’re repeatedly superimposed in authoritative ways. Like Marty in the first image, some are spatially positioned above the scenes of rural poverty and shambolic industrial development. Others are centered, standing stern, upright and visually foregrounded, thereby given literal prominence over scenes of industry. Their masculine, shaven faces aesthetically contrast them from the dreary and derelict images of rural Louisiana and its residents.

Moreover, their clean, neat suits are part of a material hermeneutic that, as Edwards notes, morally contrasts them, as material products of the middle class, from the material products of the criminal cityscape: women’s dismembered and half-naked bodies. These contrasts establish a class, gender, and racial dichotomy between the paternally authoritative, white, middle class cops and the racially diverse underclasses they desperately attempt to contain. What is at stake in Marty’s compartmentalization then, is the very existence of the private, of a material space—a locked room—away from the entropic forces of modernity.

Episode 4, “Who Goes There?,” finds these entropic forces finally collapsing the largely illusionary boundaries between Marty’s lives. As he bemoans his situation to Rust, Marty admits that he “fucked up” with Lisa and explains, “I like something wild, I always did, just it feels like it slews out the other parts of my life.” Marty’s use of the term “slew” reinforces his interpretation of Lisa as seductively wild, but violent and uncontrollable; the disordered modern force that destroyed his marital culture and the material configuration of his domestic space. And yet it’s quite telling that Maggie blames another modern configuration for their demise, what Weber called the iron cage.   

When Rust tells Marty that his meeting with Maggie went well—that he could see them back together in three months—he does so presumably for the same reason he tries to convince Maggie that everyone makes mistakes: because he needs Marty to have his back on their rogue undercover mission. For his life, and I’m sure he would say for the greater good, he sets Marty up for inevitable devastation. He does exactly what Marty does when he justifies his affair as a release valve, exactly what Maggie accuses him of: “at the end of the day” he “tuck[s] under rationalization, same as any of them.”

The phrase “at the end of the day” and the term “tuck” are significant because they conjure the image of sleeping, of tucking into the domestic bed that’s already polluted by the rational calculation of the public world. This language suggests that for Maggie it is not the criminal cityscape—the entropic forces of modernity—that destroyed their “cultural and material” domestic. Instead she suggests, it’s the system of rational control that’s poison.

This is perhaps most clear in the abrupt scene shift from Marty’s desperate attempt to get Maggie on the phone in 1995, to his contemporary account of the Dora case, in which he admits he made mistakes. In 1995 Marty is shaking, his breath heavy and erratic as he begs Maggie’s father to put her on the phone. The desperation of a man who needs to feel in control and has lost it materializes in his kicking the suitcases and verbally threatening Lisa with sexual assault. When the scene shifts to 2012 Marty admits, “did I make some mistakes? Yes, you know the detective’s curse? Solution is right under my nose but I was paying attention to the wrong clues?”

Although Marty is technically referencing the murder case, the abrupt shift between seemingly incongruent scenes function like the photo archives Edwards discusses, a system of material ordering that gives the parts being ordered new meaning. Had the two scenes not immediately followed each other, they would have told another story. But their compilation encourages us to read them together and consider how one gives meaning to the other. As such, it suggests that just as in the Dora case, in his marriage Marty was focusing on the wrong clues. It’s not the entropic forces of modernity (Lisa) that destroy the material configuration of his domestic world, but rather the bureaucratic rational control he attempts to impose on it. A taxonomy that concentrates the power in his male hands at Maggie’s direct expense.