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."