It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room – actually, the elephant on the flat circle.
The HBO Series True Detective didn’t win a single SAG award last month. It didn’t win a single Golden Globe. And before that, despite being nominated for twelve awards, it walked away from the Emmy’s with only one win. It didn’t even earn a mention on AFI’s list of the top ten TV shows of the year, outranked even by ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder.
This will strike any fan of the show as manifestly unfair; it will strike a disinterested observer of culture as downright bizarre. The critical and popular reception of True Detective was positive across the board. Never mind other TV shows; the HBO crime drama was better viewing than most films cranked out by the Hollywood-industrial complex. From its eclectic Americana soundtrack pulled together by music legend T-Bone Burnett, to the philosophical writing at the hands of former professor Nic Pizzolatto, to the stellar performances from Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, it was one of the finest productions to ever elbow its way into a TV set. And it wasn’t only the critics that were raving. McConaughey’s iconic performance as the pessimistic detective Rust Cohle was parodied everywhere, from Jimmy Kimmel, to Funny or Die, to SNL, to The Soup. The buzz was everywhere, and everyone was talking about it. It was a cultural moment.
So why has it been snubbed at all the major award shows? Was it the accusations of plagiarism and misogyny? Was it that it was just bad timing, with other shows like Breaking Bad having their “moment”? Or was True Detective at the end of the day just too mind-bendingly, soul-crushingly dark?
The answer is: none of the above.
The true reason, I suspect, rests with Rust Cohle and his infamous monologues. Cohle articulates different metaphysical viewpoints throughout the season: we see, in his first lengthy speech, an eliminative materialist convinced that we are all “things that labor under the illusion of having a self”; we see the pessimism of Schopenhauer, which picks apart the imperiousness of human will lurking behind veils of piety; we see an almost Manichean dualism and dread of creation (“The hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat, and to force a life into this thresher,” he says at one point, contemplating the loss of his daughter); and in the final scenes, we see a lurch toward a religious vantage point, an anchoring belief – you might even call it faith – in a communion of persons and a deep, dazzling darkness beyond death.
But despite his philosophical evolution, Cohle’s stance throughout the majority of the episodes – a stance mirrored in the action of the series – is Nietzschean. Cohle’s famous line about time being a “flat circle” is a clear nod to Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence; but in more profound and subtle ways, the show plunges us into the Nietzschean framework, and in particular, to a crisis of nihilism. All the distressing sights, sounds, and moods masterfully arranged by Cary Joji Fukunaga (who brought home that lone Emmy) are mirrored by Cohle’s articulations, and both point toward a fundamental loss of meaning. In responding to claims of plagiarism, Pilzzolatto said:
“Nothing in the television show True Detective was plagiarized. The philosophical thoughts expressed by Rust Cohle do not represent any thought or idea unique to any one author; rather these are the philosophical tenets of a pessimistic, anti-natalist philosophy with an historic tradition including Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, and various other philosophers, all of whom express these ideas.”
In 1881, Nietzsche wrote that the next two centuries would bear the advent of nihilism, “a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end.” True Detective throws us helplessly into the mouth of that river: the muggy, desolate swamps of Louisana, where preachers and politicians alike prey on townspeople too busy preying on each other to notice. It is a world seemingly devoid of purpose, a world in which the lone human animal is left to self-soothe through the day with a comforting illusion, exercise its will over weaker souls, or else succumb to the weight of dread.
But then, even the German philologist’s positive ideal – a Greek zest for life, a Dionysian celebration of tragic art and music, and a revaluation of values imposed by the life-affirming Overman – is a pipe dream in Rust Cohle’s world, which feels like the withered boneyard of the will to power, where only random acts of cruelty and egoism remain. This can only culminate in that unique word the show’s creator uses: “antinatalism.” Most people will recognize the root from “prenatal” – and antinatalism is, as you might’ve guessed, a philosophical viewpoint that stands in opposition to birth. We’ve gone from Nietzsche’s “birth of tragedy” to postmodernity’s tragedy of birth: the belief that we should, as Cohle recommends, “stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
We know that when Rust Cohle says that his daughter, through an early death, spared him the “sin of being a father,” he speaks as much from a place of anguish as from a place of reflection – that is part of the character’s award-worthy complexity. Still, nihilism is very much a live option in the secular age, and the antinatalist terminus of a world that has slayed God lurks in the distance as a live possibility. Flannery O’Connor, whose books bear more than a passing resemblance to Pizzolotto’s world, once remarked that nihilism is in the very air we breathe; and True Detective’s sin was in calling it up and naming it. Our “shows about nothing” keep nihilism at our backs like a tailwind, or at most, at our eyes like glasses that color everything else. True Detective, on the other hand, pulled it out right before us in broad daylight and kept it there. It didn’t make promiscuity sexy. It didn’t make violence entertaining. And it didn’t distance us from human depravity in an ironic way only to, in the end, have us relish in it – again, from a distance. It was up close and brutally honest. If it was a show of extremes, it was only to show us that those extremes are real – in fact, the plot was inspired by actual events – but also that even our most moderate expressions of the same sort imply a loss of meaning behind us and a distaste for life just around the bend.
That revelation may have fascinated us when it arrived; but months later, on reflection, how can we collectively award it? That would be to affirm it, or at least openly confront it; that would hit a little too close to home. If the vision was cartoonishly dark, it would’ve won some awards and we all would’ve moved on; but its darkness was a little too real. And something tells me that the darkness True Detective touched, as the show’s tagline put it, “touched us back.”
Matthew Becklo is a husband and father-to-be, amateur philosopher, and cultural commentator at Aleteia and Word on Fire. His writing has been featured in First Things, The Dish, and Real Clear Religion.
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