BEING A GENEROUS VIEWER, PT 2: "I Used To Like It But Now I Didn't"

Many people have come to the unfortunate conclusion that film noir refers to black and white movies where men wear hats. While I’m glad the term is still in use, if you use the expression too much it becomes meaningless.   Old Jimmy Cagney gangster movies are not noir.  Alfred Hitchcock didn’t generally make noir.  The “noir” in “film noir” has nothing to do – at least literally – with black & white film.  There are plenty of color films noirs.  What noir is has to do with a very organic post-WW2 movement in movies wherein, spurred by expatriate German and Austrian writers and directors, Hollywood started dancing around the Hayes code in the most graceful doomed artistic pirouette of all time.  (I'm gonna attempt a little "film noir 101" on, if you already know this stiff go ahead an skip up a few paragraphs.  I write the following only for those who have wondered if they've used the term well or not, based only on my non-expert-but-a-big-fan status.)

Inspired by the thinly-veiled glorification of Cagney, Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson in those classic early gangster movies, The Hays Code stated that immoral characters must “get theirs” by the end.  Bad guys can’t win.  Which didn’t mean you couldn’t make a movie where an immoral character lives in an immoral world, surrounded by immoral people, and they all get theirs.

The Hays office also came down hard on sex, or the intimation of sex, or even portraying double-beds.  The code was apparently interested in a world where the good guys win but don’t get laid, nor so seem to care about such things. Which breeds something false into the DNA of every character that you see.  It's a little bit like right now, to be honest.

Anyway, very few people want to hear or tell that story, despite the best intentions.  So noir is what grew up between the toes and under the censor’s noses, stories about a corrupt world full of dimensional men (and even sometimes women, a scarcity to make a Detour fan like me doubt himself morally) who wanted nothing more than to get laid in the secret and often forbidden specific way that they wanted to.  You can never really show that sort of thing, but you can imply its existence pretty nicely.  You can lay a crime story very easily over that bedrock.  And that’s film noir, as far as I've got it figured so far, which isn't all the way by a long shot, but I gather it's a fair Hail Mary.  In fact, to prove it to you, I'm going to randomly forget to italicize the term from this point on.  Nobody went out to make a film noir, at least not in the initial wave, because they didn’t even know they were making them.  They just couldn’t help it.  Bad vibes in the world equal movies with bad vibes, among other things.    Sometimes great art in disguise.  

Neo-noir like True Detective has it a little harder, as the existential elements are now also recognized as part of an easily replicated style.  Once the style has been birthed, you can only ever vamp on it.  And over the years, movies like “Body Heat” and “Chinatown” (and, more blatantly, “LA Confidential”) have successfully transplanted the feeling of noir to the permissiveness of post-code modern cinema. 

The trick is getting the grown-up bitterness right, making it shine bleakly like something that pools up down there no matter how much anyone mops.  With the way things have been going since the turn of the century around this country, it seems a new ashen blush of noirs would make a lot of sense.   And so we have a show like True Detective, where corruption is innate in a world full of men who will do anything to keep secrets, and the good guys have to deal all-the-while with being flawed, tempted, human men.  I mean, look at this ponum. 

If I type in “True Detective Season 2” into the search bar, an article titled “True Detective Is Not A Good Show” is recommended among the top five of the hot news section.  Apparently, this is hot news.  It would seem that, after five long weeks, the actual objective value amount of the second season has been officially calculated, and has been found wanting.  Not just with a shrug, but with an on-their-feet chorus of booing – seemingly righteous booing, if such a thing were possible.

Besides sounding like click-bait for non-English speakers and morons, “True Detective Is Not A Good Show” sounds a little too much like an objective definition or a commandment than I am comfortable with.  Which is why I didn’t title this post, “True Detective Season Two Is Actually Pretty Great”... Though I might have. Or maybe, “True Detective Season Two Is Not Quite As Good As The First Season, But Still Thrillingly Good And Deeply Involving.”

The second season of Nic Pizzolatto’s heart-of-darkness cop-noir series is currently being assaulted by all comers on the internet, and it is officially open season. It is not just the worst thing this week, it is now the worst thing ever. Mention it and eyes begin to roll and mouths twist into smug knots. Now that six weeks worth of click-bait writers have done their best grousing after this fashion, they’re really getting down to the brutal end:  I just saw one called “Is Nick Pizzolatto’s True Detective’s Worst Enemy?” flash by. 

I do not need to read that think-piece to know what is going on in those 502 words:  The tearing down of not just the art, and not just the artist, but the tearing down of the idea of the artist at all. The accusation that too much is being left up to one person, even if we're talking about the guy who created it, is kind of scarily agreed upon in these cases. This is where the HiveBrain goes now when it has not been served.  It gets personal, and it gets bleakly accusatory.  The HiveBrain does not like things you have to watch closely, or have to watch twice, or have to figure out in your head.  The HiveBrain is on the couch, and if you want to get its approval, bring it over to them on the couch so they can inspect it, and don’t try any silly stuff.  You know what I mean,  that silly stuff that some people pretend that they like so they sound smart, but really it’s just quasi-philosophical crap.  I take a moment here to point out that it seems these days everything with a philosophical bent is dismissed as “pseudo-philosophical”?  Terrence Malick movies get labeled “pseudo-philosophical,” for God’s sake.  Surely what they mean by “pseudo-philosophical” is straight old “philosophical.”  It’s not fake philosophy they don’t want – it’s any philosophy at all. The very fact that a mainstream piece of work has something on its mind that is not entirely predictable or clear is in a sign of big trouble.  “Show your work!” the HiveBrain cries, like a sadistic math teacher.  (I myself am often floating adrift peacefully in the HiveMind, contributing ignorance to the world.  But not about movies, which I just love so much.)

“It’s not only that is Season Two not good, but goddamnit, it’s so bad that now I don’t like Season One any more.  I loved it when it was first on.” 

Let’s take a look at that.  What is implied here?  Well, it’s plain:  The qualities previously afforded the earlier season were entirely having to do with you being there to see it, like a tree falling in the woods.  You made it good by being interested in it.  And you can just as easily grow bored, and the good word must then be retroactively revoked.  That’s how bad things have gotten with Pizzolatto’s work, apparently.  He not only isn’t talented, he’s actually now become particularly untalented, and the best you can say about Season One is that it fooled you for a while during the original run.  The enjoyment and thrill of watching that must now be stricken from the record books. 

“I used to enjoy it but now I didn’t.”

How could Nick Pizzolatto be the show’s worst enemy?  He IS the show.  He created the show.  Only he can give us more.  If someone else wrote that show, it would not be True Detective. If you want your mother to make a hamburger for you, only your mother’s hamburger will do, even if it’s under-seasoned sometimes.  If someone else took over True Detective, had this trouble-making artiste been ejected soundly from the board room, and had a committee of green dolts been given the reigns, season two would have been about Rust and Marty going after the big boys in the “Yellow King” ring of villains.  And that would not be True Detective because True Detective is film noir.  The very ending of Season One almost betrayed itself by curving up from noir into more traditional melodrama for five minutes. Noir is not about happy endings; everyone should know that going in.  The critics who complain that the show is full of sad people are critiquing their own acumen, unknowingly.  (I here admit that I am not gonna dive into Cary Fukunaga's relative artistic ownership, only to say I agree that a single director is the best idea for this kind of thing.)

True Detective is, as implied by title alone, a show about mysteries leading into the literal and moral fog of a film noir world.  Just the tail has been left hanging out, but if you pull on the thing it leads you into confrontation with the darkest stuff going on in life among the unchecked impulses of men.  To put too fine a point on it: How can you catch the bad guys if you’re a kind of a bad guy yourself? This is not a thing that is a case for Batman or Superman.  This is a thing that exists because there is no Batman, nor apparently will there ever be in this species.  Too thin a character to relate too convincingly of the complexity of life, even in a crime story.   Batman shouldn't have to do that.)

Before you go scrambling to call me an “apologist” (the overuse of which term is another sign of how merciless the modern audience is), let me clarify:  I’m not Santa Claus. I’m not saying anything the entertainment media takes up as unworthy is worth second-guessing.  My beatitude only goes so far. Plenty of things actually stink.  There is no magic world of brilliance hidden between the lines on a hunk of synthetic disease like THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PART 2.  When there’s no “there” there these days, there’s not even an empty space where “there” used to be.  A terrible movie is a terrible movie.  Usually, the people involved made other terrible movies.  Learn those names and start avoiding those movies. 

But if you liked the first season of True Detective as much as I did – and I think it is one of the precious few TV masterpieces – there is a very sensible way to approach this second season.  And it goes:  “The guy who wrote the first one, which was brilliant and original and seems to have come from his voice, has something new for me.  It’s a sequel in-name-only, and that means what I’ll be looking for is a continuation of the conversation I’ve been having with said writer.  He’ll presumably be taking the ideas and style of the first season and folding them into a new crime narrative.” 

I say conversation, but, of course, it’s not a traditional conversation.  I don’t know Pizzolatto, and maybe he’s a jerk, I don’t care.  He maybe ought to be a jerk if this world view is genuine.  (You can love HP Lovecraft’s stuff, but that doesn’t mean you wanna go out and have lunch with the guy.  What these artists do with their lives day-to-day is unknowable, and frankly not that interesting, so that’s as far as I care.   Being a nice guy has little to do with how striking the art you create is.  That’s just the deal.)

It’s not a normal conversation, but it’s a human being communicating to me. He’s saying “You, theoretical viewer, you who liked the last one, here’s the new one”;  Since I did in fact like the last one very much, I feel a real appreciation for Pizzolatto’s gifts.  I approach this second conversation as I would a second conversation with someone who, by virtue of that first talk, had already cemented themselves in my mind as a brilliant guy.  It’s gonna take a lot of bad conversations with this guy to get me to the point with I start calling the guy names in public.  Pizzolatto is now barely half-way done telling his new story.  His LAST story was a slow-burn if ever there was one. And yes, the plot is complicated, but are we really whining about that?  It’s too complicated?  Good god, show some backbone and dig in!  Certainly over-complication cannot be something we must shy away from in stories? With what the real world is like? And yet already people seem to be actively hoping that HBO doesn’t go for a third season, out of sheer spite.  This is madness, guys.  This is the kind of entitlement that kills polar bears. 

(MILD SPOILERS TO FOLLOW)

This year on True Detective, we’ve got the murder of Ben Caspare, the city planner of the hopelessly corrupt Vinci,  CA - a tiny city on an industrial landscape with strip joints in broad daylight, a city that only exists to line pockets.  Before we even have a crime scene, there’s a whole episode where we meet the four main characters, and that should tell you where Pizzolatto’s interests lie. First, there’s Vince Vaughn as Frank Semyon, an almost-legitimate, almost ex-gangster who is pulled away from his wife’s desire to adopt a child and back towards crime by the fact the money he has invested in the crooked real estate went missing when the city planner was killed.  

And then there are three black sheep law-enforcement types who are assigned the case from each of their independently crooked home offices:  Ray Velcoro (a terrific-as-usual Colin Farell), a supremely haunted soul who has been in Semyon’s pocket for years, since the latter tipped the former as to the identity of the man who raped Velcoro’s wife; Taylor Kitsch’s CHP Paul Woodrugh, a zombified soldier ex of some apparently nasty US-led attack in the middle east;  And Ani Bezzerides (name taken from noir poet laureate AI Bezzerides),  the very angry daughter of the leader of a 70-ish hippie-esque compound in Northern California that has some troubling ties to the current criminal situation.  Her hunches are full of dread, and she’s as flinty as can be under the stewardship of a tough Rachel McAdams. 

Paul wants nothing but to ride his cop motorcycle and zone out, but he had a very powerful homosexual experience with another solider around the time of this implied mid-east massacre, and this memory tussles with his blanked-out desire to lead what passes for a regular life. (“You’re a good-looking white man! You wanna get shot at?!? Raise a family!?! You could have had anything!” says a vicious Lolita Davidovich as his mother).  Ray desperately wants to hang onto custody of the son he has raised with his ex-wife, the son who is most likely the progeny of his wife’s actual assailant – as opposed to the guy it appears Semyon set Velcoro up to kill in the real culprit’s place, all those years ago.  And Ani?  We’re not quite sure what she wants yet, but if the other two are the brooders, McAdams’ character is most surely the one on a journey to self-discovery.

Just one of these characters would be moody enough to count the as anti-hero in a regular noir.  The fact that we have three independently screwed-up protagonists (four, depending on how Vaughn’s character ends up) tells us right from episode one that the larger vision for the show involves the deeper effects of long, unchecked crookedness for decades and decades upon urban souls.  There will not end up being just one reason these characters are miserable, unless you count the very nature of humanity.

That’s the set-up.  That’s mostly in the first episode, in fact.  The investigation into the city planner’s murder (eyes scratched out, crotch shotgunned, I can't resist this stuff) proceeds from there, dragging with it these characters’ horribly compromised lives.  There are intimations, as with the first season of the show, that an untouchable cadre of rich white sex murderers with ties to cultish rituals (I expect Bohemian Grove is going to be a part of the final three episodes) run the show and will continue running the show no matter what any of our sort-of heroes do.  True Detective is a show about a world that is long-since bought and paid-for, and about how much a schmuck you are if you don’t realize that.  This is already the post-apocalypse, and it’s a lot less fun than even Mad Max makes it look.

The dialogue is heavily stylized throughout, and that means it’s not meant to sound like the way people really talk.  It’s heightened. Why shouldn’t it be?  If we all had time to work on writing all the things we said before we said them, we surely would. Encouraged by the reaction to his writing for the first season, Pizzolatto has amped up the psychedelically-tinged tough-guy talk about as far as it can go.  There are clear keepers in every episode, some stiffs, and always a few lines that make me laugh knowingly at their bleak wit: 

“You don’t do someone else’s time,” Semyon counters, when his wife suggests they adopt a child.

 “You have the biggest aura I’ve ever seen.  It absolutely fills this room, green and black,” Bezzerides’ beatific father/minister (a passively hulking David Morse) says upon meeting Velcoro,  “You must have lived hundreds of lives.”  “I don’t think I can handle another one,” Velcoro replies.

And, in a line that was mentioned in nearly every review of the 5th episode, Semyon compares his frustration at not knowing who is took his money to having “blue balls in your heart.” 

That last one could go either way.  You could either go, “A-ha!  He’s full of shit!  That’s a ridiculous line, and I’m done watching this show!”; Or you could laugh at the exaggeration and think, “Well, at this point I'd buy that Vaughn's character would say that.” Much of the criticism of the show’s dialogue is leveled, knowingly or not, at Vaughn’s dialogue, a character who is pretty clearly presented as having obvious linguistic pretensions.  (“Do you know louche?”) Is it not okay to slowly reveal a guy?  He’s the only one of the main characters who talks like that.  And yes, it allows for more airing of Pizzolatto’s linguistic “pretensions,” except that they’re not pretentious as they mostly deliver.  The ideal that characters in fiction should always talk “like real people” is thoughtless and cold.  It represents a near-fatal dearth of imagination on our part.

All these are things you are asked by a show like this to figure out, and America has stopped wanting to figure anything out.  Maybe that makes sense.  Maybe figuring it out always leads to dead ends.  But the HiveMind, the LCD hopefuls, treat that sort of complexity or eccentricity as laziness or a flaw. Dissatisfied, entitled customers, they didn’t come to this restaurant to have to season their own dish, goddamnit.  And once again, the voice of the artist, high or low, is piled on and kicked.  Eccentricity is willfully and gleefully misreported as incompetence.

Can it be we don’t want individual expression any more?  Are we offended that the implication that people are different, sometimes strikingly so, will one day force us to accept that some people are 'smarter' than others, whatever that ends up meaning?  This wouldn’t be a fair world if that were so, right?  (Is this just about hating rich entertainers? A “we could do better” night rally?)

True Detective season two is good stuff, and if you all don’t like it, that finally just means more for me.  The show so far is fascinating on a moment-to-moment basis, and certainly promises some kind of outrageously bleak finale, where we will perhaps finally see Ani use that knife she inherited from her mother. Five episodes in, three left.  I have no idea where this is going, happily, although I have a I-hope-he-doesn't-go-there queasy theory about where Ani keeps that knife. 

With such rich groundwork, I have come back to watch each episode a second time, and there is always a second or third layer of rich storytelling sediment there that I’m amazed I managed to miss on first watch.  Very few things are worth watching multiple times once you realize how precious time is, but some things simply demand it.  It's just so.  I’ve seen the first season of the show three times, and there is not a moment that feels undeveloped or unnecessary.  It is written with an ending in mind from the start, like a film – not like your average TV show. So, we can assume, is the new season. Your average show has to hustle and change every week to keep interest for fear of being canceled.  A show like True Detective is a big movie chopped into eight chapters.  Anything that seems like a wasted scene or a dead moment is probably not necessarily so, because thought has been put into what to reveal when - or can we not extend that courtesy?  

Which is certainly the opposite of how “you” (if I am meant to accept that the internet speaks for everyone) seem to feel.  “You” say the dialogue is overripe (which it obviously sometimes is, but not fatally) and full of too much exposition (which it is certainly NOT,  you don’t get overt exposition and a hopelessly complex plotline on the same plate; “Show don’t tell” doesn’t mean nobody should ever talk, but rather than you don’t want to be on-the-nose in your storytelling.) “You” say that it’s a miserable show full of miserable characters, which it absolutely is, and which is absolutely a kosher point of view by me, as long as every show or book or painting isn’t also so bleak.  (I can put on Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon if I need a boost up, that thing is like methamphetamines.) What True Detective is and has been is, again,  film noir.  Yes, “film” even though it appears on television.  Yes, “noir” even though it’s pretty sun-baked.

So, yes, the second season of True Detective is a show about rather miserable people attempting to solve a murder while trudging through a morass of human corruption and wreckage, much of it their own.  It’s depressing, sure, but not so much as it is thrillingly cinematic, deeply poetic, ghastly, and riveting. It deals in truth. A good movie is not one where good things happen. A good movie is where whatever happens also happens to you. 

So I’ve reached the point where smarter readers are asking, “So when are you gonna tell my why this show is good?”  Thing is, I can’t do that.  The reasons I have are mine.  The best I can do is passionately advocate the idea that there is high value in the show, and if you pay attention you will discover the reasons it is good.  If you don’t pay attention, and then end up confused and uninvolved, it’s no fair blaming the show.

The best scene in the second season so far is the on e most clearly inspired by another show:  There’s no mistaking a Twin Peaks influence in the dream scene where Velcoro, in reality splayed out on the floor of a crime scene having been shotgunned with rubber bullets, dreams that he meets his cop father (the great Fred Ward) at the same very depressing dive bar where he often meets Semyon for assignments and Mexican food. 

In the dream, a Conway Twitty impersonator mimes along to Twitty’s hit recording of “The Rose” while Ray and his father exchange quizzical dialogue. 

As the love song continues, Ward relays the contents of dream to his son:  

“I see you.  You were running through tall trees.  You’re small.  The trees are like giants.  Men are chasing you.  You step out of the trees, but you ain’t that fast.  Oh, son, they kill you.  They shoot you to pieces.”

The world is the thing fathers cannot protect their sons from, in the end.  The world is the thing that will win.  And as Sean Penn's character said in The Thin Red Line (that masterpiece of "quasi-philosophy"), "There aint' no world but this one."