Emma Dent, "Not So Minor Details: Objects and Characterization in Episode 7 of *True Detective*"

As “After You’ve Gone,” True Detective’s penultimate episode, begins, we find Marty and Rust sitting opposite one another in an empty bar.  The only forms of interior decoration in this desolate watering hole are neon signs touting beer brands, and Marty’s profile is particularly set against a logo for Miller High Life.  Championed by advertisers as “the Champagne of Beers,” the brew’s promise could not be at greater odds with the current circumstances of either Marty or Rust.  In this opening scene, Marty probes Rust not only about the nature of his return to Louisiana after a long stint in Alaska, but also about the reason for their sudden and uncomfortable reunion.  While stilted and loaded with the weight of past grievances, their conversation nonetheless bears traces of the acerbic repartee that originally bound their unlikely partnership.  One wonders if, despite the passing years, anything has really changed between them.  Marty, for his part, is obviously attempting to become a “better” man.  He is quick to congratulate himself on a nearly three-week-long period of sobriety.  But Marty is a character more skilled at starting, and not necessarily following-through with, tasks.  Consequently, the initial fervor that motivated his temperance has since dissipated, erased with each passing swig of beer taken in Rust’s presence. 

In the intervening years, Marty seems also to have absorbed a heavily simplified version of Rust’s pseudo-psychology.  A purportedly older and wiser Marty preaches, “Father Time has his way with us all.”  Only moments later, however, we again find that Marty is no more evolved or self-aware than before.  Where Rust speaks of a desire to “repay his debts” with respect to the bungled Dora Lange case, Marty proclaims that “he doesn’t live in the past.”  The episode alerts viewers to the absurdity of his declaration even before it has been voiced.  In its first few moments, the camera homes in on an old jukebox situated in the bar and zooms in to give viewers an up-close perspective of its mechanics.  We see the machine moving through its music catalog, eventually landing on an album by country singer Juice Newton.  Of course, neither the jukebox nor the vinyl record are contemporary forms of music media, and the album that begins to play – Juice – was originally released in 1981.  Thus, the show undermines Marty’s already spurious claims for living in the present.  In this scene, Marty is surrounded by elements of both a personal and a more broadly popular cultural past.  The jukebox and its decades-old tunes musically underscore the extent to which Marty’s meeting with Rust represents an act of return.

In the opening scene of “After You’ve Gone,” True Detective mobilizes media – in this case, music – to both frame and comment on its characters and their actions.  Indeed, this episode devotes considerable attention to the various material “things” that surround Rust and Marty, and often these objects are forms of visual representation.  Framed photographs, television screens, videotapes, and mirrors proliferate, and the degree of their visibility cannot be accidental.  In the introduction to his book The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Alex Woloch contends that in the realist novel “the space of a particular character emerges only vis-à-vis the other characters who crowd him out or potentially revolve around him […] Facilitating this arrangement, a narrative can organize its discursive universe into a referential core – the central condition of the protagonist – and a symbolic field that elaborates and nuances this core: the peripheral representations of minor characters” (18).  In Woloch’s framework, a novel’s minor characters always “disappear,” yet nonetheless remain essential to the narrative in their capacity to illuminate the central character(s) (38).  Like the jukebox whose clever presence calls us to cast doubt on Marty’s self-assessment, other objects augment viewers’ insight into True Detective’s central characters, Rust and Marty.  By definition, these items are not “characters” in and of themselves.  However, they catalyze our understanding of the show’s protagonists – and their distinct personalities - not unlike the minor characters of which Woloch writes.

 One object of considerable significance in this episode is the videotape that Rust stows away in his storage unit-cum-office.  Discovered while breaking and entering into Billy Lee Tuttle’s home, the videotape reveals a disturbing sexual crime against a young girl, Marie Fontenot.  The specific details of the act, however, remain hidden to the audience.  At first, viewers occupy the same viewing position as Marty.  As he begins to watch the tape on an ancient television set, the camera closes in on its grainy, black-and-white footage.  In order to register the disgust on Marty’s face, the camera swiftly shifts perspective.  At this point, viewers are no longer aligned with Marty, but rather with television screen itself.  While this jarring reversal in viewpoint merits its own analysis, I am particularly concerned with the videotape and the television screen, whose collaborative presence reveals fundamental differences between Marty and Rust.  Too unsettled by its contents, Marty cannot bear to watch the footage in its entirety.  He grimaces, shouts, and rushes forward to turn off the television set.  Gathering himself, Marty asks Rust if he was able to view the video in full, to which Rust responds: “Yeah, I had to…”  Rust then resolutely declares, “I won’t avert my eyes.  Not again.”  Although visibly shaken, Marty makes no such promise and is only capable of muttering “Jesus Christ.”  Although a “minor” object in the overall scope of the show, the videotape works to further distinguish the two former partners from one another.  Rust forces himself look, to confront the violence played out in the tape.  Marty, by contrast, must deflect his gaze. 

In this scene, Marty’s need to look away is arguably emblematic of a broader incapacity to critically examine his own actions.  While he may now prefer green tea and quiet evenings at home to longnecks and barhopping, Marty still has a pattern of repeating the same mistakes (as evidenced by his extramarital affairs).  If the videotape and, by extension, the television screen elucidate our understanding of how both Marty and Rust operate in True Detective’s fictive world, so too does another type of screen: the mirror.  Interestingly, mirrors frame Marty at various points throughout this episode.  Even his apartment, glimpsed in the short scene where he forlornly eats a TV dinner while watching a country western movie, features a wall-sized mirror.  Marty, however, rarely looks directly into these mirrors; instead, his back is typically turned away.

The episode jockeys between two reunions: Marty’s renewed partnership with Rust and his visit with Maggie.  It is in this latter interaction that another mirror surfaces.  Maggie, who has not seen Marty in almost two years, is now living in a stately new home.  While not stated outright, viewers glean that she has since remarried, given the large diamond ring on her left hand and a suite of framed photographs showing her in the embrace of an unidentified dark-haired man.  In one of the episode’s final “flashbacks” to their conversation, we catch Marty as he prepares to depart.  Bidding goodbye with a finality that elicits Maggie’s concern, Marty leans against a carved wooden mantelpiece, above which is a large framed mirror.  For a brief second, Marty stands parallel to the mirror, his profile reflected in its glass.  He appears just about to confront his own reflection, yet ultimately pivots away.  By positioning Marty as such, the episode implicitly reinforces the character’s limited ability to face himself and, by extension, his own behavior.  This scene also materially manifests Maggie’s status as a splintered, partially developed character within the show.  During their conversation in front of the mantelpiece, viewers only see Maggie as a reflection in the mirror, thereby underscoring that her identity in True Detective is wholly dependent upon her relationship to its central protagonists.  Notably, a mirror figures in another scene featuring Maggie, this time as she calls on Rust at his bar.  Unlike Marty, Rust stares directly into the mirror placed behind the bar; indeed, it is the vehicle through which he first perceives Maggie’s arrival.  Yet again, the show frames Rust as a character unafraid to look at his own reflection, while simultaneously reducing Maggie to a mere reflection. 

True Detective arguably sets up Marty and Rust as distinct characters in its first few episodes.  In these early outings, Rust’s philosophical musings and Marty’s struggles with work-life balance help to define them as individuals with particular, divergent temperaments.  “After You’ve Gone,” the show’s seventh episode, continues to hone these distinctions, but does so more subtly through objects like the videotape, the television screen, and the mirror.  Like the minor characters that Woloch considers, which eventually fade into a novel’s periphery but not without consequence, these objects are not minor at all.  Rather, they propel not only the show’s plot, but also our understanding of its principal actors.

Aaron Burstein, “Subjectivity and Proto-Minimalism in *Madame Bovary* (Part One)"

In his introduction to the Oxford edition of Madame Bovary, Malcolm Bowie states that “Flaubert became famous in his lifetime for the supposed extreme cruelty with which he described his heroine’s downfall and death” (viii). Flaubert’s portrait of Emma Bovary is indeed unflattering in many instances, a fact that is difficult to reconcile with his intense identification with and even erotic attachment to the character. Yet these oppositional facets within the narrative speak to a fundamental aspect of both human behavior and the novel form, the limits of subjectivity.

Wai Chee Dimock, in her considerations of comparative literature, Through Other Continents, briefly summarizes Georg Lukács’ analysis of subjectivity in the novel: “In the epic, totality and subjectivity are fused in the image of a journey, suspenseful, but ultimately completable. In the novel, totality and subjectivity are split apart, the former reduced to an idea, a higher order abstraction not manifest in and not graspable in everyday life” (91). Lukács sees the epic as an objective narrative, relatively disengaged from the interiority of its characters. Dimock’s use of the term “completable” in reference to the epic thereby implies an incompletable element within the novel, which is particularly applicable to realism’s turn from grander narratives and neatly-drawn conclusions to a quotidian world in which readers have reason to suspect the subjective perspectives of characters.  The glaring limitations of Emma’s worldview typifies such incompletableness. Her unhappiness rests on the assumption that her discontent is an aberration, a personal curse of her circumstances: “the stupid petit bourgeois, the mediocrity of life, seemed to her the exception, a freak accident that had befallen her alone, whereas somewhere else, somewhere beyond all this, the vast realm of joy and passion stretched on and forever” (Part I, Ch. 9). She views her dissatisfaction as both a lack of agency and some unfulfilled sense of entitlement for a life “full of drama, masked balls, orgiastic revels, and all the extremes of pleasure that these must surely offer, and that she had never known” (Part I, Ch. 9). The words “must surely…never known” indicate her restricted perspective. Her tangibly inaccessible fantasies reflect the abstract totality toward which Lukács points (in Dimock’s analysis), while her everyday life reflects the social and spiritual incompletability of the realist novel.

Furthermore, Emma’s feelings on what her life ought to be are tellingly derived from her reading habits, at least in part. Bowie notes “If Emma had read better books and read better, [Flaubert] seems to imply, she would not now be in her advanced delusional state” (xvi). The novel even references her tastes for George Sand and Balzac (Part I, Ch. 9). Balzac is a particularly salient figure, since his fiction concerns the sort of high society Emma envies and encounters when she attends the Marquis’ ball. When looking upon her glamorous fellow patrons, Emma “longed to know all about their lives, to penetrate into them, be a part of them” (Part I, Ch. 8). While Balzac’s prose is indeed glamorous, the penetrating aspect of his language also reveals a vast hollowness among the lives of the upper crust (as is the case in “Domestic Peace”). Furthermore, Emma fails to consider the possibility that many of the ball’s attendees may be just like her: ordinary people indulging their fantasies by performing a role. In this regard, Emma’s disaffection with her situation might run even deeper than she realizes. Her fixation on the private misery of simple country life restricts her ability to turn a critical eye toward the abstracted totality her fantasies present.

As a result, Flaubert’s narration shepherds the reader into a reproachful view of Emma. However, this view is a calculated manipulation of the reader’s own subjectivity. By opening the novel with a focus on Charles, Flaubert highlights the personal struggles and insecurities of Emma’s future husband, enabling readers to sympathize with Charles while positioning Emma in an antagonistic light. As characters in a realist novel, Charles and Emma are foils. Both feel they’ve made all the right moves in their pursuit of romance, yet there’s a fundamental difference of expectations. Charles is just happy to have a woman around, considering his appeasement of his previous wife despite her controlling and possessive tendencies. Emma, on the other hand, expects a more revelatory affection: “the desire for change in her life, or perhaps the nervous excitation produced by this man’s presence, had sufficed to persuade her that, at long last, she held within her grasp that marvelous passion which until then had hovered like a great rosy-plumaged bird in the splendor of poetic skies” (Part I, Ch. 6).

However, her move from life in the Norman countryside with her father to life in the Norman countryside with her husband, coupled with an inability to create meaningful change (redecorations, luxurious pursuits, and new locales make little permanent difference in her overall mentality) all leave her in a state of loss. Realism, although committed to ordinary, everyday subjects, does not aspire to a broad, Lukacsian representation of social reality writ large, but rather depicts a distinct condition. Realism thus embodies the incompleteness that Dimock and (as she sees it) Lukács allude to. Flaubert’s realism is a narrative of surface details and material objects of no intrinsic significance, and of characters with desires so abstruse and unarticulated that both they and the reader are left confounded.

To return to Dimock once more, Flaubert’s brand of realism contains certain cross-cultural implications, both in terms of style and subjectivity, which indicate a deep recurrence across human behavior. In contrast to the more extravagant style of realist writers like Henry James or Balzac, Flaubert most accurately speaks to 20^th-century American realism, specifically dirty realism or minimalism. Bowie describes Flaubert’s characters as “little in moral stature, limited in intelligence, stunted in their ambitions, sordid in their private thoughts, and ridiculous in their public prating and posturing” (viii). On the subject of language, Bowie finds Madame Bovary “remarkable for its economy and precision, and throughout [Flaubert] seems intent on vindicating the aesthetic principle ‘less is more’” (xxii). Both these observations could just as easily have referred to writers like Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason.

All of these authors focus on emotionally and communicatively deficient individuals, generally ranging from lower to middle class, and write with a formal commitment to the notion that “something strange and undeclared is going on” (x). While Bowie suggests “that Flaubert has other than ‘realist’ designs upon us,” his heightened focus on style seems to be an amplification of realist depiction rather than a departure from it. In his sparse and candid treatment of Emma Bovary, Flaubert strives toward an impression of provincial and historicized totality, while nonetheless championing the realist novel after Scott in all its subjective incompletability. 

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.