True Detective Conference Room (SPOILERS- GO AWAY)

Alright, so I think one of the really smart things about this show is that it almost parodies interent theorizing about TV shows minutiae and this silly notion that showrunners are out to trick viewers. Come to find out, the most obvious, right-up-front assumptions about the Dora Lange murder and pretty much everything connected to it are true. It's some kind of sex cult. The Tuttles are heavily involved. Something was up at the schools, a la the 1980s day care satanic abuse panic. Lawnmower guy was the "spaghetti monster" (the green ears were the goggles, duh). Nothing has been hidden by coded images or clever screenwriting. Motives and actions have mostly been completely on the level WYSIWYG stuff. It's pretty much exactly what it is, "under your nose" but complicated by all of these conjectures.

There's been a couple of mentions of "bending the narrative" to fit your circumstantial evidence...it's one of the first things that Marty tells Rust at the Dora Lange murder scene. Maybe that's the point, that the viewer is creating all of this excess narrative that actually doesn't exist and that's clouding the truth...which is literally just what you see on TV.

The Dora Lange murder isn't much of a mystery anyway, which is kind of interesting because then the show becomes about other things. We knew halfway through the show that Reggie Ledoux and his pal were kidnapping and killing girls, likely supplying them to the cult. There again, that wasn't really anything hidden.

The mysteries to me, at this point, are the extent of the "scope" that Rust talks about in his shed. We know the Tuttles, but who at the station? What's up with Audrey (I'd really like to see what she's painting these days considering her other work has been indicative of sexual abuse)? What did the old lady really mean when she said that Tuttle didn't like women once they had "it" done to them? Just sex, or something else? What are the bird traps? Or is this all exatly what it seems to be, crazy talk and drawing too many conclusions without actual evidence.

And of course there a couple of million dollar nerd questions:

- Why (not who is) the King in Yellow? Is the videotape the "King in Yellow" that will drive Marty and Rust to insanity? Rust is already mostly there. Is the _spirit_ of discord, decadence and deviance the real enemy here?

- In the show's context, what is Carcosa? The references are compelling- "He's in Carcosa now"..."You know Carcosa?" I almost wonder if it might be some kind of drug-induced state or a degree of initiation, almost like an ascended master or something. Or it could just be, again, crazy talk by crazy people.


Incidentally, the part with the tape was brilliant...it was so tense, and then it showed almost nothing. Maybe Hastur popped up and had his way with Marie Fontenot?

But probably not, because I bet you that when this is all over it's going to be a Chinatown thing...no real answers other than what was obvious from the very beginning. Just a miasma of conjectures, guesses, theories, and assumptions.

I kind of hope it ends that way and doesn't provide some kind of ridiculous twist ending or whatever.

The show has established explicitly that Marty and Rust are unreliable narrators (visiting his Dad in Alaska = biker gang murder spree), and it would be really cool to extend that metaphor to the show itself.

I like the idea that the show is built on the conceit that "Remember all that satanic bullshit in the 1980s? What if that actually was happening?" Very much the in THE USUAL SUSPECTS mode of the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled."

I haven't seen episode 7 yet, and will likely comment more afterwards.

Daily Beast has a long article about how the writer thinks it will end

As he's based it on interviews with Nic Pizzolatto I tend to think he's on the money (and it tallies with my own ideas of what the show's about.)

Two of Jeb's points are explicitly addressed in that article (but don't read it until you've seen episode 7.)

I think Audrey is a big hanging thread - and I keep thinking back to Marty's dialogue about the problem with being a detective - "It's often right under your nose all the time and you just don't see it." (paraphrased.) I think this is clear lampshading on Pizzolatto's part.

One hour of it left - and there's a lot to cover in that hour.

Wow, that guy and I are definitely on the same wavelength...I think he's likely 100% correct because if you read through his analysis, every single element is based completely on empirical evidence shown- none of it is based on a bunch of silly nonsense ("why was Marty wearing a Pink Floyd "Division Bell" T-shirt? Because He's actually TWO PEOPLE!")

The more I've thought about it today, the more I think this is exactly the point. To show how people tell stories AROUND things like this rather than to just look square at the facts and see that the simplest solutions are often correct. I thought it was pretty clear from episode 1 that the Tuttles were involved. No need to have some secret, hidden message in the way a character's head was framed in a shot or whatever. But over the course of the show, that simple fact has taken on so much complexity.

I think he's correct too that the whole Carcosa/King in Yellow thing is probably some kind of Tuttle family tradition...the show seems to suggest, quite explictly, that this family and some associates have been doing this for quite some time. It may not even be an earnest cult per se, more of a Hellfire Club or even Klan-like thing where they adopt all of the spookery as a disguise for their sexual shenanigans...to keep people AWAY.

So next week, under jumper cable duress, I think the sheriff is going to spill the beans about the Tuttles and the Childresses. There will be no shocking reveal or twist, just plain facts. We'll find out that they've done this for a long time and it's just been the done thing...one of those regional, uncomfortable secrets that nobody can really do anything about. Rust and Marty will have a Chinatown moment where they realize there's nothing they can do about it. Those in power will railroad Rust and he will take the fall for the Lake Chaplin murder and be arrested and may die in some way, or even commit suicide (like Charlie Lange and the Marshland Medea).

Stretching it out to just speculate...and this is WILD speculation, but it is based on something empirical in the show...we're going to find out that Audrey is in fact an abuse survivor but maybe not from the cult- they didn't tend to leave their victims alive. But we are also going to find out that that she was adopted. Watch that much-discussed scene with the Barbie gang rape again. The dialogue, before Marty walks in, is Audrey telling Macie "You don't have a mommy and daddy anymore, they died in a car crash." This has no material connection to anything shown in the program so far, yet it's too much of a pointed exchange to just be kids messing around. This would explain a couple of key character points, including Marty's rather extreme behavior with her paramours- protecting an already wounded girl. Marty's a cad, but he's a protective one.

Whether that happens or not, I think Audrey has a connection to the THEMES of the show that hasn't been quite expressed yet but I don't think she's involved and I think the "Maggie's dad" angle is being overplayed. He's just an old, conservative jerk and that whole scene was more about the disintegrating relationship than any kind of secret message.

As for the satanic ritual abuse at the preschools thing...yeah, this show put in mind of all of the scares in the early 1980s about abuse at daycares...I was like 7, 8 at the time and I remember very clearly hearing about all that stuff on the news and it scared the shit out of me. I remember hearing about these kids supposedly taken down into secret tunnels, forced to kill rabbits and do sex things...kids were saying that their teachers were flying witches and so forth...there were all of these alerts to parents to check underwear for bloodstains...so weird, so scary when you're little. But now, it's clear that it was all just this prosecutor-fueled Salem witchcraft hysteria with the REAL abuse being that these kids were convinced by adults that there was all of this bizarre, sick stuff going on to them. Really discredits the tragedy of actual abuse.

Well, I was curious so I just went and looked at some images of Audrey's journal...the most striking picture is one where the man has a bag-like mask over his face- just like what was shown in the video.

Maybe she's seen similar videos and that's where that's coming from?

Eh on the speculation. I do need to say this though: People going on and on about how the scarred man mows lawns in a spiral pattern? THAT'S HOW YOU MOW LAWNS. So you don't spew the clippings on the grass you have yet to mow. Jesus, not everything is semiotics.

Actually, I think the most interesting thing about the whole show is that, despite all that's gone on with the case and the Yellow King and Carcosa and LeDoux and finding the Scarred Man, the essential dynamic of the show has remained the same: that the two partners are on opposite sides of the very criminal situation that they're trying to solve. Marty's corrupt traditionalism vs. Rust's devout nihilism. One claims that things have inherent value and his actions undermine them; the other regards everything as valueless and yet does his best to try to preserve or save them. In sharp contrast to The Killing, where the show essentially became about the tangents trying to distract the audience from the basic maudlin soap opera that was the plot, this show's tangents have all been about elaborating upon that basic conflict not only between the two leads, but within them. It's very smart storytelling and, thankfully, both Harrelson and McConaughey have been brilliant in portraying it (with some great direction, too.)

In that respect, the elements of the crime(s) itself aren't that important. It's more about the whys than the whats. All that said, I think the idea of 'Carcosa' or being in Carcosa is part of that central dynamic. It's a function of questioning whether the man outside society (Rust) is the insane one or whether society represents the insanity (whether the broad view or the narrow one; the latter represented by the cult of the Yellow King) and those inside it, like Marty, are the mad ones. I thought it was interesting to show that, despite Rust seemingly abandoning his philosophy to come back and finish this thing, Marty had also drifted sharply toward Rust's worldview in that he spends his life alone surfing Match.com and eating microwave dinners on a TV table. And he does in a kind of determined fashion, since Maggie pointed out that she hadn't seen him for two years before that, meaning he's cut himself off not only from her but also from his daughters.

Just great stuff and I'm really intrigued by the prospect of next season being a whole new story arc and, rumor has it, with a very strong female presence leading the way (in contrast to this season's male-dominated approach.)

I love the show and it sucks that there's only one more, at least for a while.

I took the old lady to mean that the guy wasn't interested in the women once they had had a child.

jeb wrote: Eh on the speculation. I do need to say this though: People going on and on about how the scarred man mows lawns in a spiral pattern? THAT'S HOW YOU MOW LAWNS. So you don't spew the clippings on the grass you have yet to mow. Jesus, not everything is semiotics.

Yes, but Lawnmower Man is mowing clockwise. That throws the clippings into the spiral, not out of it. This could be Lawnmower Man's Voudon grass clipping removal powers, that we have yet to see. Or it could be a director who has failed at lawnmowing reality.

It's funny how Michael starts to speculate about what this-or-that means in the show, right after stating that there is probably no hidden meaning.

I think it's much simpler: the whole show is all about the to detectives, and how the case affects their lives and changes them. In a sense, it reminds me of one of my favorite TV shows, Homicide: Life on the Street , which was also all about the detectives, while the cases were usually dead simple. (For example, in the very first episode, they find a dead guy in a motel, with his car missing. Pembleton, the veteran leader of the investigation immediately says that "We find whoever is driving around in that car, he's the killer". Bayliss, the rookie questions it, "Why would he keep a car that connects him to the murder?" Pembleton: "Dunno. Maybe crime makes you stupid." Turns out, he's right.)

Here's my sole contribution to the thread

www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2014/2/...oing-everyday-things

Gosh, SO ripe for parody...

Wice, my point wasn't that speculation was a mistake...as long as it's based solely on _what is explictly shown and said_ in the show. It's impossible not to speculate- it's part of the fun of any detective fiction or mystery story. The problem is that audiences today expect all of this hidden bullshit to mean to something and it makes people feel smart to "outfox" the screenwriters and pick up on all of this supposedly secret messaging. "Oh, there's a shot where you see Marty and the word "King" is next to him- he is the Yellow King"!

That's a very different kind of speculation than drawing a possible conclusion about a line of specific dialogue and the possibility that there is a detail that has not been revealed as of yet.

In the article that Trif linked to, the show's creator mentions something that really got me thinking...he says something to the effect that for the past 20 years, audiences have gotten used to be lied to and then getting the big twist that everything they just watched was all a lie or whatever. And that, of course, goes straight back to The Usual Suspects. And then The Sixth Sense. X-Files engaged in some of that. Lost definitely did and the end pretty much invalidated the entire show.

I don't get a sense that True Detective is lying to its audience or trying to hide its answers in coded messages, symbols, or whatever...like the thing with the lawnmower.

Jack has a great point about the character dynamic...one is an avowed moralist that completely blunders his morals, the other is an extreme pessimist with extreme morality.

Cohle is totally Rorschach. Everything about him is Rorschach. That whole B&E scene was totally something Rorschach would do to solve a crime.

After reading a bit of this, I am now, for the first time, irritated that I shut off the cable.

True Lovecraftian horror? And I'm missing out?

Fuck.That.Shit

Well...it kind of depends on what you expect from "true Lovecraftian horror".

Simple flowchart. If "True Lovecraftian horror" directs you to "trashbag/garden hose monster", then nope.

If instead it directs you to "existential dread with a possible deviant, esoteric cult involved but no actual supernatural element onscreen at any time", then maybe.

It's _almost_ like how the Chris Nolan films treat Batman...a very pulp element, but taken at face value and placed matter-of-factly in the real world. There's no camp or schlock involved.

That's what I mean. True Lovecraftian horror is that existential dread...bad shit happening for no reason and the film doesn't give you any VISUAL clues but many small tidbits of ~~~DAT LORE~~~ indicating some sinister shit is happening.

Pulp, not Camp.