Why should you be watching HBO’s “True Detective”?
It’ll give you straight-up nightmares, that’s why.
In a TV landscape overstuffed with quality programming — not that I’m complaining — this noir miniseries has managed to stand out as one of the weirdest, smartest, most genre-subverting shows in years. You’ll find yourself obsessing over its haunting imagery and metaphysical dialogue long after the credits roll.
The setup, on its face, is that former Louisiana detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) are being interviewed in the year 2012, by two current detectives, about a 1995 case in which Cohle and Hart sought a ritualistic killer.
But minutes into the pilot, that fairly commonplace premise was upstaged by Cohle’s nihilism-tinged monologues, the glaring discrepancy between Hart’s “good man” image and his personal life, and the implication that we could take exactly zero about this supposed procedural at face value.
Now five episodes in, creator Nick Pizzolatto has peppered “True Detective” — named after a pulp crime magazine from 1928 — with enough literary and philosophical hat-tips to fuel a feverish cult following and countless online dissections of its meanings.
The most-discussed of Pizzolatto’s references is “The King in Yellow,” an 1895 book of short stories by Robert Chambers; it concerns a fictional play, of the same name, which causes anyone who reads its second act to go insane. Nods to the text are everywhere in this show, from the suspected murderer’s mention of “black stars” to scribblings in the victim’s notebook to the frequent, pointed appearance of the color yellow and, occasionally, crowns.
Meanwhile, McConaughey’s present-day Cohle, a scraggly, gaunt alcoholic, regularly derails the interrogation, holding forth about subjects like membrane theory — a quantum physics school of thought in which time, from a certain perspective, is fixed — and his very meta take on narrative and humanity: “All your life, you know, all you love, all you hate, all your memory, all your pain — it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams . . . there’s a monster at the end of it.”
Hardly your typical cop-show banter.
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (2011’s “Jane Eyre”), the show is cinematic in the extreme; an agonizingly tense six-minute single take at the end of Episode 4 blew fans’ minds, but nearly every shot is suffused with a menacing beauty, and occasionally a tableau so dark you almost wish you could un-see it. Exhibit A: Our first glimpse at the monstrous maybe-killer, which sees him walking through a hazy Southern jungle holding a machete and wearing nothing but filthy underwear and an old-fashioned, pendulous gas mask — like he was literally striding through someone’s nightmare.
The scene was echoed in Cohle’s languid comment to his increasingly annoyed interviewers: “That is the terrible and secret fate of all life,” he tells them. “You’re trapped in a nightmare you keep waking up into.” Which is likely a reference (and possibly a direct quote from) author Thomas Ligotti, whose nonfiction work “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” is another influence Pizzolatto has explicitly cited.
And this, in my opinion, is what makes the show so much more unsettling than even “Breaking Bad.” There, we watched anxiously, wondering to what new moral depths antihero Walter White would sink, and whom he would be taking with him.
In “True Detective,” the existential dread extends to humankind in general — and, hence, you. It neatly eradicates the usual voyeuristic separation we enjoy from our warped, violent TV shows.
Creeped out yet? I am — deliciously so.