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? 

Jessica Witte on Volume 2 of *Barchester Towers*

           As we have discussed in class, realistic works often “push into” other genres, leading us to question what, exactly, defines the genre of realism.  Volume 2 of Barchester Towers can be characterized as a realistic melodrama that functions as a satirical commentary on the social rules governing Victorian society in general and Barchester clerical society in particular.  The drama, originating from Mr. Slope’s letter to Eleanor Bold containing improper content, develops in Chapter 28.  The Grantlys, Mr. Harding, and Mr. Arabin (or the “Grantlyites”) falsely interpret this correspondence as a sign that Mrs. Bold will soon become Mrs. Slope.  Because none of the characters is able to straightforwardly confront Eleanor, the rumor--which “one word” could have “cleared up” immediately--spirals out of control, increasing both the characters’ concern for her future and the novel’s melodrama (Chp. 28).

  

           In his letter, Mr. Slope refers to Eleanor’s son as “my darling little friend Johnny” who pulls on his mother’s “beautiful long silken tresses” (Chp. 27).  While this intimate correspondence makes Eleanor “nauseous,” it merely confirms her family’s suspicion that the two are planning to be married (Chp. 28).  This creates a dramatic irony wherein readers know that Eleanor has not tried to “encourage” Mr. Slope’s behavior, while the characters at Plumstead believe the opposite (28).  Within the strict rules governing nineteenth-century decorum, it would indeed be suspect for a single clergyman to address a widow in such a manner.  However, the narrator acknowledges that Mr. Slope “could not be expected” to understand the impropriety of his letter, suggesting a disconnect between middle- and upper-middle-class social norms (Chp. 27).  While the Grantlys and Proudies earn upper-class salaries typical of the clerical elite, Mr. Slope is a parvenu whom the former do not consider a true gentleman.  

         At the same time, the narrator also presents a satirical commentary upon Mr. Slope’s inability to “practice what he preaches”; as a purported Christian, Slope pursues the married Madame Neroni and manipulates everyone around him using the cowardly method of writing letters.  Excluded from the clerical elite both socially and (as the narrator suggests) ethically, Mr. Slope would not understand why his correspondence with Mrs. Bold is both odious and inappropriate.  In the Grantly’s world—which rests on the moderation of change—the only acceptable relationship to the low-church zealotry represented by the Proudie/Slope faction is one of pure disgust and rejection. 

           Furthermore, the narrator notes that Eleanor “[fails] to see that much more had been intended than was expressed” in Mr. Slope’s letter (Chp. 28).  Here, the narrator references her angelic nature as the perfect Victorian woman, a complete foil to Madame Neroni, the female sexual predator of the novel.  While Madame Neroni, the “noxious siren,” can “in no way live without catching flies” (men), Eleanor appears, at least in Chapter 28, innocent of coquetry and ignorant about the ways of men (Chp. 27).  However, we know this is not true; as a widow, Eleanor has a greater knowledge of men than perhaps she lets on.  

         

           Nevertheless, she is in the middle chapters that comprised the novel’s original second volume , too pure and meek to fully understand Mr. Slope’s designs, yet none of the characters take it upon themselves to discuss the gravity of his letter with her.  Even Mr. Harding’s “authority” over Eleanor “ceased when she became the wife of John Bold,” and he wishes to leave his daughter to her own choices (Chp. 28).  While young women without husbands are generally subjected to their fathers’ will, Mrs. Bold possesses a certain kind of freedom to freely judge on her own.  However, Dr. and Mrs. Grantly and the rest of the Grantlyites attempt to dissuade her from her correspondence with Mr. Slope.  Although Eleanor “greatly dislike[s]” Mr. Slope, she also believes that the Grantlyits are “prejudiced and illiberal in their persecution of him,” and so refuses to participate in the “persecution” of him (28).  Eleanor’s independent morality, rather than her purported affection for Mr. Slope, fuels the rumors, allowing the melodrama to continue. 

           At the same time, Eleanor’s innocence prevents her from defending herself against the rumors.  At dinner at Plumstead, the narrator describes Eleanor’s response to the “elephant in the room”:

She felt that she had been tried and found guilty of something; though she knew not what.  She longed to say to them all, ‘Well, what is it that I have done?  out with it, and let me know m crime; for heaven’s sake let me hear the worst of it; but she could not.  She could say nothing, but sat there silent, half feeling that she was guilty...” (28).

If only Eleanor could have asked these questions she raises internally!  However, as the narrator later acknowledges, “but then where would have been my novel?” (28).  The melodrama surrounding the potential Mrs. Slope extends into the final volume, sustaining its satirical purpose.  Ironically, it is Eleanor’s adherence to Christian morality that perpetuates the drama.  At this point, she can only quell the rumors that she will be married to Mr. Slope by falling into what she sees as Proudie/Grantlyite hypocrisy and condemning the young clergyman, allowing the “war” to continue between the two factions.

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.