Jessica Witte, *Mad Men*'s Impact on the Material Culture of Fashion

The Mad Men-inspired products in popular consumer culture have multiplied since the show’s 2007 debut. The boxed series themselves are works of collectible memorabilia, and fans can read books discussing everything from the food to the ad culture of 1960s New York.  Mattel even designed a line of limited-edition Barbies modeled after Don, Betty, Roger, and Joan.  (Of course, the Barbie set doesn’t include the iconic Sterling Cooper cocktail glasses, but you can buy a set here.)  But Mad Men’s influence in the fashion and design world is arguably its greatest impact on popular culture today.  Fans can buy Mad Men-inspired makeup, nail polish, and even Brooks Brothers suits.  Janie Bryant, the costume designer for the show, collaborated with Banana Republic to create two Mad Men collections.  Bryant also wrote The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Costume Designer of Mad Men, which offers women fashion and beauty advice now that “finally, it’s hip to dress well again.”  Bryant even wants to help men “look a little more Don Draper-dashing.”  As January Jones explains in the introduction to Bryant’s book,

“I think one of the hugest compliments to Janie’s work on Mad Men is how it has inspired modern fashion.  Michael Kors was one of the first to come out with a Mad Men-inspired collection.  We’re suddenly seeing a waistline again and the silhouettes of the ‘50s and early ‘60s.  I’m happily surprised to see women dressing like women again; a feminine tribute through tailoring.” (xi)

Like Jones, the post-World War II fashion world was also eager for a return to traditionally feminine dress.  As Meenasarani Linde Murugan notes in her article “Maidenform: Temporalities of Fashion,”  wartime rationing meant that the “lingerie, corsets, waist cinchers, and girdles” that made a hyper-feminine silhouette possible became “excessive,” and so women’s clothing “stressed simplicity and utility in the silhouette” that was often coded “more ‘masculine’” in style (169).  Furthermore, as Mabel Rosenheck describes in “Swing Skirts and Swinging Singles: Mad Men, Fashion, and Cultural Memory,”

During the Second World War, women went to work alongside men and, at least in heavy industry, adopted male fashions: pants, overalls, and caps (Steele, 80-82).  After 1945, with soldiers returning from overseas, women were supposed to return to the home, give their jobs back to men, resume their unpaid duties as wives and mothers, and refashion themselves in New Look femininity.” (166-167)

This “New Look,” popularized by Christian Dior in 1947, included an “exaggerated hourglass shape and full skirt” that, like Victorian fashions, required “a petticoat, crinoline, and corset,” as Caroline Hamilton discusses in “Seeing the World Second Hand: Mad Men and the Vintage Consumer.”  So, the New Look marked a return to exaggerated, normative gender roles, as shaping undergarments became once again “practical” and necessary to construct the “natural” female form. 

            In the early 1960s, the rise of the working woman contributed to the demise of the New Look.  Rosenheck describes how the “tight waist and multiple, full stiff petticoats supporting circle skirts” gave way to more practical “tailored, figure-hugging sheaths” which allowed secretaries to move more freely around offices.  While Joan and the Sterling Cooper secretaries have escaped the petticoat as working women, they have not abandoned shaping undergarments. In her book, Bryant describes how

“The actors saunter into the fitting room wearing contemporary clothes and makeup.  It’s my job to transport these actors back to another era and help them become their characters.  How to turn a fitting room into a time machine?  My secret weapon for the women is a cache of undergarments, from closed-bottom girdles with garters to lacy bullet brassieres.  These foundations affect how the characters walk, sit, and sigh, and the transformation begins with that first breath.” (xiv) 

Christina Hendricks admits that she has “two scars from the rubber where [she attaches her] garters,” and that she “would complain more, but [the garments] make [her] look good.”  For example, the girdle “changed her posture and forced her to walk with more confidence in her stride, making her feel good about how she looks” despite the physical “toll on the body.”  Interestingly, despite today’s focus on comfortable, practical fashion, mid-century styles so dependent on body-shaping undergarments are nevertheless idealized by fashion designers and consumers alike.

            While most of the women in Mad Men wear the 1960s sheath dress, Betty and the other suburban housewives are generally dressed in the New Look.  For example, in Episode 2.3, “The Benefactor,” Jennifer Crane wears a late-50s, full-skirted shirtdress while knitting baby clothes and waiting for her husband to come home.  Although Betty’s riding costume includes pants, boots, and a tweed jacket at the stable, her outfit is still hyper-feminized in comparison to Sara Beth Carson’s. While both women wear red lipstick and pearl earrings--in the clip-on style of the 1960s--Sara Beth’s loose slacks and masculine necktie contrast with Betty’s fitted jodhpurs and bow tie.  And, after riding, Betty immediately goes home to “get cleaned up,” or to return to her New Look femininity. 

            At Lutece with Don and clients, Betty returns wears a girlish bright pink halter dress with a full skirt, which contrasts with Bobbie Barrett’s deep green, fitted frock.  Don has instructed Betty to “be shiny and bright” to please Jimmy, and she succeeds.  However, Betty’s relationship to Don can never be anything more than subordinate.  While Bobbie occupies a modern status as both wife and manager to her husband, Betty describes herself as “a housewife” with two children.  Bobbie’s sheath dress allows her to move fluidly through the public sphere, while Betty’s full skirt and petticoats keep her relegated to the domestic sphere as a visual symbol of postwar femininity. 

           

            

Kyle Johnston, "A Most Unprofitable, Irritating, Unsatisfactory Method of Publication"

In a notice in The Nation, an American weekly, on 24 February 1876, reprinted in David Carroll’s George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (1971), Henry James writes of the first monthly installment of George Eliot’s new novel, Daniel Deronda, a book which “none other at the present time is comparable to,” that

The quality of George Eliot’s work makes acceptable, in this particular case, a manner of publication to which in general we strongly object. It is but just that so fine and rare a pleasure should have a retarding element in it. George Eliot’s writing is so full, so charged with reflection and intellectual experience, that there is surely no arrogance in her giving us a month to think over and digest any given portion of it. (362)

James objects to the serialized method of publication of Daniel Deronda. To James, this method of publication is a “retarding element”; it is only because of the sheer superlativeness of a novelist like Eliot that Daniel Deronda can shine in spite of the deficiencies of its mode of delivery.

James is not alone in his objection to Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication. It is a frequent concern raised in periodicals and newspapers responding to the first book in February 1876. The Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser writes on 7 February that “George Eliot is accused of having brought into the literary world a most unprofitable, irritating, unsatisfactory method of publication—that of a volume at a time—which only serves to stimulate the appetite at the termination of each installment, and deadens it during the interval which must elapse before the appearance of another.” Like James, though, The Freeman notes that in “spite of the scrappy method of its publication it is destined to be the book of the season, and to mark in the literary history of the period.” Similarly, a review in John Bull on 5 February compliments Eliot’s powers while denigrating her work’s serial delivery, writing, “Every reader is aware that a book signed by this remarkable writer will be the matured product of genius, in which not a single line will have been added to fill up necessary space, or in that race with the time which is the cause of so much that is careless and slipshod in our periodical literature.” (As Terence Cave notes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Eliot “still had several months’ writing ahead of her when the first four monthly parts were sent to the publishers in October 1857”—under a deadline, but not, we would expect, careless and slipshod.) The Aberdeen Journal’s review of “George Eliot’s New Work” on 9 February opens with the lines: “To discuss a work of this kind piecemeal is much like criticising a sample brick of a stately edifice. Nevertheless, we protest that the fault is not with the critics; it is with the author.” But unlike the others, the reviewer for The Aberdeen Journal has to “confess frankly that, so far, we are disappointed.”

           

While all these reviews consistently disapprove of Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication, almost all praise the work itself as no less than the apogee of contemporary literature. This raises, in my mind, two questions: 1) What is it about Daniel Deronda’s mode of production that elicits such a reaction? And 2) How can we today imagine what it meant for contemporaries to judge Daniel Deronda as a work of literature divided into eight separate books that were published one month at a time?

           

By 1876, the serialization of novels in the weekly or monthly issues of journals such as the weekly All the Year Round or the monthly Fornightly Review was common. Beginning with Middlemarch in 1871-72, as N. N. Feltes describes it in Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, Eliot and  George Henry Lewes, along with the publisher John Blackwood, devised a new mode of production in which the work was spread out over four volumes, instead of the three that contemporaries associated with triple-decker novels (most of which were first published serially prior to being available in volume form from lending libraries). With the new model, each volume was divided into two books and each book was published monthly and sold for 5s.  In this way the publisher and author eschewed the reliance on lending libraries which the three-decker novel necessitated. The publication of Daniel Deronda followed this Middlemarch model, as did that of Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister which was serialized nearly contemporaneously in eight monthly parts between November 1875 and June 1876 by Chapman and Hall.

It must be this model which The Freeman’s Journal “accuses” Eliot of bringing into the world—but why exactly this model elicits such a strong reaction is unclear when monthly serial publication was not new or uncommon. Perhaps the reaction indicates just how hungry readers were for the new Eliot—avid fans, they wanted to “binge,” and the constant deferral of completion and wholeness frustrated them.

           

What interests me most in these reviews is that the things that are praised in Daniel Deronda are frequently inextricably tied to the experience of serialized reading of which the reviews disapprove. This is most evident—and most eloquently expressed—in James’s review. James sees Daniel Deronda’s “manner of publication” as its one “retarding element.” Yet he also notes that “we must express our pleasure in the prospect of the intellectual luxury of taking up, month after month, the little clear-paged volumes of Daniel Deronda,” and, even more strikingly, adds,

For almost a year to come the lives of appreciative readers will have a sort of lateral extension into another multitudinous world—a world ideal only in the soft, clear light under which it lies, and most real in its close appeal to our curiosity. It is too early to take the measure of the elements which the author has in hand, but the imagination has a confident sense of large and complex unfolding.

What James describes here are two of the most prominent features of the experience of serialized reading: the experience of reading across time and space, of “lateral extension” into other worlds stretched over months, over a year, and the imaginative and social experience of serialized consumption in which the gaps between installments give rise conjecture and discussion—the story goes on, even while the next installment awaits publication. As Jason Mittell writes in “Serial Boxes,” “the gap between installments is the constitutive element of serial fiction, the space between available story units when both writers and readers imagine new possibilities and reflect on old tales.” James—who continues his review by imagining the various “potentialities” of Gwendolen Harleth—gets a large part of the pleasure he takes from Daniel Deronda from his experience of reading it serially.

And James is not alone in indulging in the pleasure of imaginative conjecture and reflection which serialization invites. The reviewer for John Bull dwells on Gwendolen, drawing connections to Felix Holt’s Esther Lyon and then criticizing her as “the incarnation of self-consciousness.” The York Herald is sympathetic to Gwendolen, while Berrow’s Worcester Journal finds that “at present the heroine does not exhibit any of the traits of a St Theresa, but it may be that George Eliot will subject her to a discipline of love which shall transform her nature, and call forth the nobler capabilities of her soul”; The Freeman’s Journal finds her “heartless and imperious, but at the same time too high-spirited to be selfish.” What gives these reviewers such a strong distaste for Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication remains to be seen; what is clear is that they enjoy and actively participate in the communal discourse of reflection and imagination which seriality invites, and that, for Henry James at least, the experience of reading a novel in serialization gives a pleasure unique to itself.

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. 

Ryan Dubnicek, "What is the Turret Without its Ivy? Gender and Agency in *Barchester Towers*" (Volume 3)

Within the first pages of Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope writes, in reference to Mrs. Eleanor Bold that, “hers was one of those feminine hearts which cling to a husband, not with idolatry, for worship can admit of no defect in its idol, but with the perfect tenacity of ivy” (14). Trollope seems to be proclaiming that there is a common tendency for a woman to cling to a man due to inherent feminine weakness and male strength. This metaphor is key to the understanding of the female characters in Barchester Towers, but perhaps not in the way it appears on the surface, since, throughout the remainder of his novel, his characters tear down this metaphor and rebuild it with an opposite take on who fills the role of the ivy and who the stone to which it adheres. As the plot of Barchester Towers comes to an end, it becomes apparent that women, not men, are the characters with agency and are not weak plants who cling to male presence and power.

Eleanor Bold, at the outset, seems to be a perfect example of a woman who cannot operate positively without a man. She is a widow reliant on the help of a nurse, and who seems to have entered stasis since the death of her husband. She is presented as naïve, at best, and oblivious to the workings of the men around her, at worst. Yet, Eleanor withstands angry gossip and assumptions from her sister, her brother-in-law and father; does battle with the Stanhope family’s manipulative interactions and machinations; and repels two unwanted, and selfishly-motivated, marriage proposals. When the metaphor of the ivy and the stone again surfaces in Chapter 49—the fourth from final—it is in a very different tone and with a new meaning. As Mr. Arabin and Eleanor embrace after professing their love to one another, Trollope writes:

When the ivy has founds its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper (239).

The metaphor is no longer one of ivy clinging to a stone but of a “parasite plant” clinging to a “tower.” Trollope describes, just a few sentences later, the engagement as a victory and asks, “What is the turret without its ivy?” In this instance, after the events of the novel, Eleanor seems to be situated as the turret herself and Mr. Arabin the ivy. Eleanor was able to withstand a siege from both Mr. Slope, a character steeped in ambition to conquer, and Bertie Stanhope, someone who seeks a wealthy wife to pay off his debts. Further, Mrs. Bold is established as a key figure in the power struggle of Barchester, similar to a fortress, since it is she who chooses the winner in the fight between the low-church (Slope/Proudie) and the high-church (Arabin/Grantly) philosophies when she chooses a husband.

Eleanor’s strength in repelling these suitors stands in stark contrast to Mr. Arabin’s rather pitiful sulking after his first misstep whe he poorly attempts to tell Eleanor of his love by asking her about Mr. Slope. In his sadness, Arabin is drawn to the Signora Neroni because, “he required charming in his present misery” (121). Thus, while Eleanor copes with her own sorrow, Arabin looks to lean on the strength of others—or the illusion such. Arabin even takes on some conventionally feminine traits when it is customary for a man to take the lead, as when he is reluctant to be assertive in his interactions with Eleanor for fear of rejection and when he confides in the Signora about his desires for Eleanor.

Though Mrs. Bold is an excellent example of the agency ascribed to Barchester Towers’ female characters, she is not alone. Just as Eleanor is the most impactful of the Harding family, so a woman controls each of the other major households within Barchester. The Bishop, Dr. Proudie, is firmly in the hand of his wife, Mrs. Proudie, while Charlotte and the Signora control the Stanhopes. Their power is not just within their families: each accomplishes many of their goals in the wider community. Mrs. Proudie twice delivers the news that Mr. Quiverful is to become the new Warden of Hiram’s Hospital and even forces the Bishop to sign the order to do so. Charlotte Stanhope actively negotiates with her father to deal with her brother Bertie’s debt and persuades the latter to pursue Eleanor’s hand in marriage—something he sours on yet continues out of fear of her wrath.

Most telling is the Signora whose entire existence seems to be framed around her ability to attract and destroy the men around her. In behavior akin to a bug zapper, she seductively draws in Mr. Slope and then publicly, and violently, rejects him, necessitating his need to leave Barchester altogether. The Signora also pushes Mr. Arabin to continue his pursuit of Eleanor and the latter to be receptive to this pursuit—which ends, fittingly, with Eleanor calling back a retreating Mr. Arabin, and squeezing an engagement out of him despite his desire to shy away from such a high-tension moment. The Signora even shows incredible agency throughout Barchester despite a disability that restricts her movement. While Mr. Slope often chooses to act through letters, the Signora travels to  Mrs. Proudie’s party and Miss Thorne’s fete, despite her physical limitations. In scenes akin to a queen holding court, she draws people to her at these events and her family home,

A female presence in power is comparatively absent in the home of Archdeacon Grantly.  Without the presence of a dominant woman, neither he nor Slope (who breaks with Mrs. Proudie) is very effective in their endeavors: each is more reminiscent of limp ivy rather than a strong turret upon which others can cling. Mr. Slope is most powerful at his writing desk issuing letters and often flounders when he attempts to accomplish his goals in person. The Archdeacon, while he is often traveling, is also a man with only one conquering maneuver—the discussion. While he can talk about many things, he is unable to persuade others to agree.  He fails directly to accomplish any of his goals—neither convincing Mr. Harding to take the wardenship or become the next Dean of Barchester, nor persuading Eleanor to stay away from Mr. Slope, nor influencing the Bishop to act in accordance with his wishes.

The “ivy and tower” metaphor is poignant for its simultaneous accuracy and inaccuracy in Barchester Towers. However, Trollope seems to employ this metaphor as a playful acknowledgement of the pretense of Victorian life. While he, if not entirely convincingly, writes that, “There is nothing so odious to man as a virago,” he creates many female characters who act strongly and with fury to the delight of the reader (247). Trollope seems to present two sides of most of the events and characters of Barchester Towers, and succeeds in pointing out the disconnect between the perceived idealism of the time and the reality. As the narrator speaks admiringly about the clergy of the Church of England, the effectiveness of the Countess De Courcy’s rude tactics at the Thorne breakfast, and of his pity for Eleanor Bold, he presents the clergy acting in decidedly un-Christian fashion, plainly admits that the De Courcy’s are “in the wrong” (108) in their conduct in arriving at the Thorne’s party, and shows Eleanor gaining a loving husband, and happiness against the odds. Trollope enjoys pointing to the conventions of provincial Victorian life only to oppose those very conventions. The novel suggests that if women are indeed the ivy of Barchester’s towers, then it appears that the ivy is holding up the crumbling walls of the men of Barchester, and not the reverse.

Kyle Johnston, "*True Detective*’s Moral Occult* (Episode 5)

“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?