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.