True Detective (Part 2)

True Detective wrapped up its sixth episode last night, and what I assume to be the shows second act. The interview framework of the show appears to be disposed with, as both Marty and Rust left the police station in states of anger. Good news though, as the two men reunited in 2012 at the end of the episode - hopefully leading to some resolution on the Yellow King case.

After all of the breathless Chambers, Lovecraft, Ligotti commentary that followed the previous few episodes, the show narrowed its focus for this most recent adventure, where we learned why exactly Rust and Marty had a falling out in 2002.

It's here that I confess that even I, the infallible television giant that I am, may have been misreading the show. When Rust met Martin's wife, Maggie, in an early episode, the two shared an immediate chemistry. Knowing that Rust and Marty would eventually split and having seen TV before, I automatically assumed that the dissolution would involve Rust sleeping with Maggie. However, as the series progressed, I started to wonder if that might be a red herring. Then I started to expect it to be a red herring.

Turns out it was no fish at all, and Rust and Maggie do end up having a dalliance, but not in the way that I expected.

Instead of Rust casting aside his carefully cultivated isolation to grasp at a human connection with Maggie, the coupling was instigated by Maggie, in a fit of well-earned pique after having been once again wounded by Marty's philandering.

The event itself was anticlimactic. Maggie comes to Rust's apartment, where she finds him in a state, drunk and reeling from the apparent willful apathy at the police department and in Louisiana in general. There's no doubt about what her intentions are, as she brings over a bottle of wine and almost immediately begins kissing Rust. He very briefly resists before giving in and the two share a love scene (to put it dishonestly delicately) that takes less time that it probably did for you to read this paragraph.

When Maggie reveals that she only did this to ensure that Marty would never bother her again, Rust is upset for reasons that aren't terribly clear (or audible, the sound mix was very weird in that scene).

I'm not one to get hung up on the way that True Detective handles women, but there is a vocal contingent that is. Most recently, Emily Nussbaum (whom I generally agree with) wrote about the "shallowness" that she perceives the show to be wallowing in. She lambasts the "macho nonsense" of the show and believes that Rust is presented to us as a sort of alpha-male fetish object.

As with Andy Greenwald early in the shows run, I feel like this is a fundamental misreading of what Pizzolatto is trying to say, there is an argument to be made, but it's not a strong one.

(Both reviewers are hung up on the "crazy pussy" line from early on, which I interpreted to be Rust passive-aggressively mocking Marty, not a disparaging comment toward the actual woman in question.)

(Also, Rust is not a fetish object. His philosophizing is clearly not meant to be taken entirely earnestly. Even if Nussbaum asserts that he's a fetish object by potentially being right about everything, it's not his philosophy that's guiding that quest for knowledge, but rather, a deep humanity at odds with everything he's saying. Rust is compelling because his actions stand in stark relief to his words. If anything it's an anti-fetishization - certainly less egregious than say Deadwood presents Al Swearengen.)

I think saying that the show is overtly misogynistic is an impossible claim. The entire crux of the narrative is based on the fallout from toxic masculinity. Yes, the women on the show are largely presented as either victims, prostitutes, conquests or tortured wives, but all of them are that way because of a pernicious patriarchal culture that allows these kinds of thing to happen.

(I also take issue with the way that some critics demean Maggie as nothing more than a "cop's wife" plot device. That seems both a shallow reading of the text and an instance of them prescribing their views of ideal womanhood on Maggie. For what it's worth, I've met a lot more women like Maggie than I have the "strong, confident woman" cliche.)

Rust actually addresses this theme directly in the episode when he claims that there has been a rash of killings targeting "...women and children - they get no press. The way things in the bayou get no press." The verisimilitude of that statement aside (I imagine that missing women and children get a fair amount more press in the real world than they do in Pizzolatto's Lousiana), you rarely see the conceit of a show laid out so explicitly.

(The line about things in the bayou getting no press is interesting to me as well. Most of the reviewers who are lukewarm on True Detective tend to be coastal liberal types and I'm wondering if there's some sort of classist response to the show. Is it easier to invest in the life of an urbane anti-hero like Don Draper or a genius chemist like Walter White than it is two backwoods detectives, one of whom routinely appears to punch above his assumed intellectual weight? This episode in particular addresses the way that systemic failures have contributed to the blight of South Louisiana, as Rev. Tuttle expounds on the promise of the charter system, while its stark results are clear to the viewer and Cohle.)

As I said, there's no way to label this show misogynistic, but some things did concern me this episode, chiefly the gratuitous T&A. I don't think the nude scenes from earlier in the season or tonight really did much to add to the story and both featured a conspicuous amount of "male gaze." This being HBO, it's not unexpected.

You can argue that it's inherently patriarchal that the two people charged with rescuing these vulnerable women and children are two white men, but somehow it doesn't seem like a crazy supposition that these two would be the ones working the case in the world that P has created.

Most interesting to me is the way that the show addresses women and sexuality. The most "liberated" female characters on the show achieve their liberation through sexuality. First the gals on the bunny ranch early in the season and then Maggie in this episode (and, I suppose, Marty's daughter, Audrey). Women asserting their agency through sex is pretty well-worn trope and, in the world of True Detective, appears to be the only reasonable means of female self-actualization.

For the men on the show, sex is shown mostly as a compulsion, as a snare that can't be avoided. Marty can't stop himself from being infidelious and Rust can't resist Maggie's come ons. The debilitating effects of male sexuality only grow more depraved as you consider the people that Rust and Marty hunt. This is an area where I feel like the show could say some more profound things if Maggie were more developed, alas, it appears that it isn't meant to be.

Beyond making me reconsider the gender politics of the show, this episode (and the Maggie/Rust pairing in particular) also made me reconsider my view of the overall narrative.

Perhaps because I've been conditioned to believe that good stories contain surprises and reveals, I was somewhat disappointed by the seemingly pre-ordained hook-up. I'm also a little bummed that it appears that Rust might be right, and there might actually be a vast conspiracy protecting the killers that he's investigating. It honestly feels a little rote, but Pizzolatto has said that he's "not trying to trick us," so that may just be it.

There's really no shame in telling a straightforward, predictable narrative, as long as its well told, (I point readers to Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Marquez), and True Detective has proven that it's more than capable of telling a story well.

I'm hoping there's more going on, and there are some signs that Rust may be unraveling - his creepy Se7en-esque apartment mock up, him telling the infanticidal mother to kill herself - but if it turns out to just be a monolithic conspiracy and not a more interesting story about the banality of evil, I'm fine with that too. I'm in.

Money (*Cash Register Sound Effect*)

For the first time in my life, I find myself in possession of a decent amount of money.

It's nothing crazy, in six months of being a working professional, I've still not amassed what my roommates did over the course of their summer internships while still in school. It's more than I'm used to though.

In the months between when I graduated and when I started working, I thought a lot about money. I thought about how I didn't have any, and I thought about how much my parents had spent on me over the course of the past 22 years.

Beyond that, I thought about my grandparents. I thought about how they grew up dirt-poor on a farm and how my grandfather worked his way up at the gas company to provide for his family. I thought about how my dad went to school to be an engineer because he knew he could earn a living, regardless of whether or not he loved building bridges and pipelines.

I'm a man particularly bound to familial piety. I rarely make any decision that I know would actively displease or, more accurately, dishonor my parents.

I thought earning money would give me a sense of moral rightness. That it would satisfy me in its own sake. Weber writes about that moral compunction to be a good steward being the basis of capitalism. With the specter of Calvin lingering over the reformation era, good believers had no real assurance of their election except the favor of God upon them in their everyday lives. Weber posited that the accumulation of capital was one way that these pious folks proved their heavenly bonafides. Being good Christians, they didn't use their newfound money for licentious or craven purposes. They just put it back into their industry, building capital over and over. Weber thought that the accumulation of wealth without exercising the attendant pleasures that it could bring was a form of worldly asceticism. Rather than beating his breast in the desert, the modern hermit sheltered himself in his factory - a constantly evolving altar to a God whose love was remote and unknowable with any real certainty.

Not being a Calvinist and instead choosing to take God's love as a given (perhaps too carelessly), this accumulation of capital hasn't done much to assuage the persistent dissatisfaction that his hung over my life since I graduated from college. I get a little thrill when I see the graph of my personal finance app raise higher and higher, but it's fleeting. When I look at it, I mostly just ask myself what I intend to do with that money. Why am I earning it, other than out of my aforementioned sense of familial devotion?

It's no secret that my real ambition is to be a writer, but, by all evidence, it doesn't appear to be a very pressing ambition. In fact, I've pretty much actively sabotaged any opportunities at writing that the universe has put in my way.

As a sophomore, I was one of two students in my journalism class to be recommended for an internship at the Statesman. Having developed a loathing of journalism (partly the result of my overly stringent and, frankly, not terrible pleasant TA), I put off applying until the last minute, when I was informed that the position had already been filled. That decision proved particularly biting each of the four separate times that I applied for jobs with said publication - jobs that I was more than qualified for.

Of course, journalism has only ever been a stepping stone for TV writing. A way to amass stories and find my voice before I became the next David Simon.

My closest brush with the entertainment industry ("the industry" they call it Tinseltown [Hollywood, CA {California}]) came the summer before my senior year. I applied to the summer program on a whim after the conclusion of a meeting for a website of specious quality that I was writing for at the time. As I typed, sweating in an overheated meeting room in the PCL, my heart pounded and my brain flooded with the addicting chemicals that correspond to possibility. In my essay I said that it had been my ambition to be a TV writer since I was thirteen years old and first read Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (a book my brother, by happenstance, just bought me for Christmas. Here's hoping that's portentous). I wrote about how the summer program would be my first foray into certain...if not stardom, then at least productivity and fulfillment.

Instead, I panicked when none of the internships in development got back to me, so I worked for a magazine and toiled in the content management mines for eight hours a day. It was an educational experience, but not the one I had imagined all breathless and sweaty that day in the PCL.

Twice I've been offered jobs at the radio station where I once interned and loved to work, but both times the timing has been off.

The only writing job I've turned down that I'm happy I withdrew from was in Lubbock. I think it's probably better for my character to be discontent and making money rather than content (in the same way that the denizens of an opium den are content) and making no money.

Luckily, I've now realized what I can do with my newfound largesse.

This whole time, I've felt beholden to this narrative I've concocted about my family's finances and I don't even know if it's true.

(To be honest, I don't really know anything about my family. We rarely talk about ourselves to one another, and even more rarely do we talk about our history. In a movie this would be the sign of a nefarious past, but in this case, I think it's merely a sign of generations of Catholic steadfastness.)

I think all of my internal (and unshared) lamentations and mental anguish may have been mirages. Never once has my father ever actually told me that he expects me to enslave myself to a salary. If anything, his actions have shown the opposite. He's been, honestly, too generous. Beyond that, I think he really wants me to pursue my dreams and to be happy.

A few days after I applied to film school, he sent me an email to a youtube video and said, "You should appreciate this, as a filmmaker."

Now, even I wouldn't have the gall to call myself a filmmaker, but that's kind of how he is. When I was writing all the time, he called me a writer. From what I've gleaned from our conversations, my dad may view me as a writer even more so than I do myself.

So I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, but now (thanks to the sacrifice of untold Gregorys before) I have a little money, and I'm going to try to do something meaningful with it.

I don't know when, or how, just yet - but I'm going to try. I'm not going to look back a year or five or ten from now and wonder why I wasted my youth. I'm going to try.

True Detective (We're Back to TV Talk)

HBO's True Detective was basically made for me. It combines several of my favorite things, including - Matthew McConaughey, HBO dramas, pulpy cop stuff, and the state of Louisiana.

The first half of the season wrapped up last Sunday, and I'm in the rare position of being able to write about a show while it's actively airing, so I've got to take advantage. 

I'll start by saying that it's not what I expected. When the show was first announced a while back, I thought it would stray more toward the kind of high-concept stuff that HBO has been producing recently, your Trues Blood or your Games of Thrones. I didn't anticipate that it would be a hyper-masculine, but neutered, drama that mostly involves two dudes driving around and annoying each other. My subverted expectations turned out to be a good thing, because the show is actually pretty great. 

I don't think it's the best show in the world, but I think it's a show that works and is very deliberate about the themes that it's trying to explore and the atmosphere that it's trying to cultivate, and, for the most part, the internet agrees with me.

(As one of the web's preeminent iconoclasts, I'm naturally wary when my opinion lines up too neatly with the zeitgeist, but one is only as valuable as one's truth, so I won't be contrarian just for the sake of it.) 

One prominent member the internet, Grantland's Andy Greenwald, does not agree with me. Greenwald has been wary of the show since its beginning and the simmering unrest of the commentariat came to a head this week after he posted his recap of the most recent episode. 

I'm not one to begrudge a man his opinion, Greenwald is a talented TV writer who seems to know his stuff, but this opinion did actually bother me, because I think he's fundamentally misreading the show. 

But with Hart in free fall, it’s clear that writer Nic Pizzolatto doesn’t think Cohle is loopy — he thinks he’s awesome. I’d prefer a show that offered more than halfhearted resistance to Rust Cohle’s whiskey-courageous speechifying. But more and more it’s clear that wherever this show is heading, he’s the one in the driver’s seat.

This is a criticism that I don't understand. If the show were presented as a straight mystery-thriller, one could maybe see Pizzolatto as glorifying McConaughey's Rust Cohle. He gets to deliver lots of weird, nihilistic speeches and is repeatedly praised as some sort of super-detective. A lesser show might lean into these traits to turn Cohle into your classic badass antihero type dude - House with a gun.

However, this is impossible due to the framing device employed by the show. Not only are we seeing Cohle and Harrelson's Martin Hart attempt to puzzle out a murder in 1995, but we also see them talking to a new crop of investigators in 2012. (Investigators 2: The New Batch).

The Cohle presented in 2012 is in no way awesome. He's a washed up drunk waiting for death. However he may be presented in the past timeline, we're not supposed to see Cohle as an aspirational figure.

True Detective has also been criticized in a broader sense for two reasons, both, I believe, unjust.

Some say that it's just another show about a white, male, antihero trying to figure out his place in this world. In this sense, the show is simply being punished by chronology. We've had many successful dramas in this mold over the past decade plus, so it stands to reason that viewers may get burned out. (Is it fair to judge TD on the shows that came before it? Probably not, but it's inevitable.)

The other criticism is that the show leans on the spooky occult serial killer angle that has been done to death on both cable and network TV. Again, the show is being punished for arriving in 2014 instead of 2007.

As far as the serial killer thing goes. Pizzolatto himself said that that angle is a secondary concern to him. The real story he's telling is the construction and destruction of Cohle and Hart's relationship.

I think it's here that Pizzolatto most succeeds as both a storyteller, and as someone trying to separate his characters from the aforementioned pack of similar heroes.

Cohle is a fundamentally broken man. His entire life has been a series of traumas, starting with his childhood, to the death of his daughter and the dissolution of his family, to his time as an undercover drug-runner, all the way up until where he find him, as a detective in Louisiana.

These traumas have turned Cohle, in his own words, into a big-P Pessimist. He's constantly spouting off about the pointlessness of life and human existence. His entire ontological underpinning is one of nihilism and materialism. Cohle is where he is because of some unfortunate causality that he has no power to alter one way or another, but still troubles him deeply.

If this was all there was to Cohle. If he was just some sort of misery-cliche spewing automaton, then, yeah, he'd be a kind of trite character. But the show doesn't present him that way. In my mind, it's never clear how seriously Pizzolatto (and, by extension, the audience) takes Cohle's ramblings. Furthermore, it's not always clear how seriously Cohle takes them himself.

For all of his philosophizing, Cohle is still capable of moments of humanity. He takes clear pleasure in being around Hart's family, and he's injured when Hart's wife, Maggie, tells him that he must have been a bad husband. He even hints at having a sense of purpose, when he tells Hart that although he's a bad man, his job is to stop other bad men.

Hart is similarly complicated. He's presented at first as the antithesis to Cohle. He's a God-fearing family man who just wants to do his job and live his life without thinking too much about it.

Just as Cohle is afforded brief glimpses of humanity, Hart is slowly revealed to be more sinister than he would ever think himself to be. He's disengaged from his family, he's a philanderer and a hard drinker, and, when crossed, he flies into violent, self-destructive rages. Cohle, and the audience, can clearly see this, but Hart is blind to it.

As these two characters with serious personal blind spots get to know each other, the audience, through the flashback device, is afforded a glimpse into the reality of both men. We know how the story ends. Cohle is a sad drunk; Hart is a successful, but no longer married. Neither get a happy ending.

By already showing us what's going to happen to the characters, Pizzolatto has freed himself from the trap of the antihero. There's no temptation to glamorize these men as their adventures unfold. Each time they do something badass, the camera cuts back to 2012 and reminds the viewer that, no matter how cool they may be now, it's going to ultimately be empty. All that's left is to just watch and enjoy the atmosphere.

In short, Andy Greenwald is wrong and I am right. Andy's assertion is doubly meritless because he loved Breaking Bad which subverted the fundamental conceit of the show by fetishizing Walt.

Hire me, Grantland.

Love,

Kyle

Pitches (American Horror Story)

It's no secret that I'm one of the hottest young writers in the game right now. My pilot has been rejected by three (three!) screenplay competitions. One of which offered me the note, "The other characters aren't well defined and the humor could be funnier." So I'm basically on a rocket to the moon.

It's in this capacity that I thought I would offer to help embattled showrunner Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story) with some ideas on how to improve the next season of American Horror story. The season that ended just last week was a big pile of awful campy garbage, in a bad way, not in a good way like the tolerable Murphy excretions, so it's clear he needs my guiding hand.

First off, Murphy has expressed his desire for the next season to be a period piece, like season 2's mostly successful American Horror Story: Asylum. It should be noted that this is a season that featured a bunch of aliens that were never explained, Dylan McDermott nursing from a prostitute, and a woman who may or may not have been Anne Frank.

I know Murphy's natural inclination will be to look for eras where he can cast divas to chew scenery for 13 hours worth of episodes - Revolutionary France, Victorian England, the Roaring Twenties - basically any place with costumes, stupid accents, and horrifically tasteless things for Murphy to appropriate as entertainment (the natural terminus of this show is a season that's just set in an abortion clinic). It's here that I'd encourage Murph to go against his first instinct and instead of looking backward for a period onto which to lay his piece, he look forward and produce American Horror Story: SPACE!

I was originally going to actually break 13 episodes worth of story, but that proved daunting and also boring. So here are the broad strokes.

Cast

Sarah Paulson - Dagny Coleman, a sensitive research scientist who lives alone on a space station with her husband, who she isn't sure if she loves.

Lance Reddick - David Palmer, great-great-grandson of the former president, David unrepentantly loves Dagny, but he's unable to open up emotionally because he is still scarred by the troubling legacy of spacism (racism against people who live in space).

Dylan McDermott - Johnny 5, an android who is plagued by existential questions and also an addiction to moon rocks.

Taissa Farmiga - A broom.

Story

Episode One: The Space Between
Dagny and David live aboard the space shuttle with their android, Johnny 5, trying to find a cure for feline diabetes. A meteor shower destroys their communications array. Johnny and Dagny bang while David tries to repair it. David spies the couple through a window and begins to cry, but only briefly, as he is almost immediately shredded by another meteor shower. A mysterious furry appendage drags his body away.

Episode Two: Ants Marching
Johnny is jonesing for a hit of Buzz Aldro (moon rock slang) and turns hostile toward Dagny. Dagny seeks David for comfort and finds him, but something is different. He is unusually placid. David makes her eggs. Johnny gets in a fight with his dealer over the telecom. On the underside of the ship, it's revealed that the real David is trapped in the web of a giant spider played by Jessica Lange.

Episode Three: Crash Into Me
The spider agrees to spare David if he promises to teach her how to dance. A montage set to an original Randy Newman composition shows the pair hitting it off, eventually banging. Inside the station, Johnny's dealer, Chudge (Ron Perlman) arrives. He is a bigfoot, the last bigfoot. Out of guilt for her actions, Dagny dotes on the mysterious non-David, cooking whatever he wants, not realizing that the satellite was never fixed and no fresh food supplies would be coming. The ship is rocked by an explosion and a gang of space hunters arrive, led by John Lithgow. They aim to kill the last bigfoot.

Episode Four: #41
The crew of four still within the ship hide in a secret compartment in the ship's attic, while the hunters tromp around looking for signs of Chudge. They find scat and fur, but are unable to determine if they are from a bigfoot or from a known species. In an effort to keep his men from being bored, John Lithgow starts hiding behind corners and throwing rocks, then looking at his men all like, "Did you see that!!!???" Then they start a campfire and tell spooky stories. Chudge starts a diary in the attic.

Episode Five: Mercy
With food and moon rock supplies exhausted, Dagny and David are both at each other's throats. Chudge is confused by the new experience and doesn't fully understand why everyone is fighting. Non-David remains placid. Without outside stimulation, the hunters start to develop space madness, clawing out their eyeballs and tongues. On a walkabout around the outside of the station, Real David finds a rose that he begins to nourish. The rose (Frances Conroy) begins to talk with him, issuing curt one-liners like a pez dispenser. The spider spies this interaction and grows jealous.

Episode Six: If Only
Being a simple spider and therefore largely unable to distinguish between humans, the spider sends her brood of tiny spider babes to gobble up the inhabitants of the space station, as revenge for David's relationship with the rose (which she believes to be a smaller human). The horde of little spiders enter the station and lay waste to all but John Lithgow who grabs hold of the broom and sweeps them out of the airlock, along with the broom. Driven mad by what he's witnessed, Lithgow gains the second sight, and learns where the core four are hiding. He marches up there with an old timey blunderbuss, fully intent on slaying them all.

Episode Seven: Two Step
David falls more and more deeply in love with the rose, but she won't return his affection. Rather than live without her, he pledges to die and flings himself off of the station. Realizing that she has lost  her one chance at true love, the rose withers away. Inside the station, Chudge throws himself in front of John Lithgow's musket ball, sacrificing himself for his friends. The real David, caught in the ships orbit after his failed attempt to jump off, comes careening through the entrance to the attic, totally splattering John Lithgow's head against the hull.

Episode Eight: You & Me
Through Chudge's sacrifice, the gang realizes that friendship is most important thing. Also, it turns out that the mysterious David was the real David's doppelgänger, who had been pulled through a trans-dimensional rift when the meteor shredded David Prime. Also, David Beta didn't actually have to eat anything, he was just being polite. The gang shares a laugh about that while Chudge's corpse is roasting over the fire pit. From outside the ship, there's an ominous rumble, followed by the evil voice of the spider lady. She's come for revenge!!!!

Episode Nine: So Much to Say
The Spider Lady slays everyone aboard the ship. The next 37 minutes are a ham-handed monologue about loneliness and what it's like to be an aged lady. Jessica Lange wins an Emmy.

Episode Ten: Lie in Our Graves
Flash-sideways to an alternate universe where everyone's genders are reversed. Things that seem normal in the previous world seem shocking and oppressive. There's gratuitous sexual violence. Everyone learns a valuable lesson.

Episode Eleven: Cry Freedom
Devastated by her newfound loneliness, Spider Lady begins to sing an old fratro spiritual from the dark days of frattel slavery. She spies a beam of light come through the hull. It grows brighter and brighter before finally materializing into the form of Dave Matthews. Dave and the Spider scat-sing a bunch of nonsense. He then reveals himself to the be singularity, an omniscient, omnipotent merging of man and machine. Moved by the spider lady's faith, he restores the lives of everyone on the station. The broom floats back in.

Episode Twelve: Drive In Drive Out
Flashback to heretofore unseen character, Blord, the vampire. A montage of Blord and his father fixing up an old space shuttle runs under VO of Dagny explaining that research scientists and vampires have always been at war - since time immemorial. The montage continues with the vampires invading space stations, building ornate castles in them, seducing the scientist and then running away with their proprietary research. Flashforward to present day and the characters learn that there is a cabal of vampires headed their way. The threat is presented as incredibly severe, but when the vampires arrive, Chudge runs them all over with his motorcycle.

Episode Thirteen: Satellite
David and Dagny complete their research, eventually learning that the cure for feline diabetes was to start an ad campaign encouraging cats to seek out sugar-free sodas. (Cats are capable of thinking and feeling just as deeply, if not more so than humans, but are bred as a food source by their tyrannical simian masters).  Also, everyone learns that what's really important is to let the world know who you are. The characters return to Earth and come out as research scientists, an inter-dimensional clone, a spider monster, a bigfoot, an android, a bunch of hunters, and John Lithgow. Everyone applauds their courage, and, more importantly, the courage of the person who created their platform, Ryan Murphy.

The End...









The End?