∞True Detective Season 1 Thread ***CLOSED***∞

Son the acoustics must be sick in Errol's lair maze to Carcosa.

I'd be up in there singing John Mayer's Fathers & Daughters.
 
You know it was good acting when you can't really imagine anyone being as good at MM in the series.
I hope they continue the dark theme of everything, but hopefully they will change the dynamic of the cops. Id like to see Idris and maybe ryan gosling.
 
MrONegative said:
On point. :lol:

You make that?
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Haha, nah.

vTFfizM.jpg
 
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I just wonder the thought process of the writer/HBO, not wanting to flesh this story out even further. Errol doesn't have the depth to conspire.. he was made into being more than what he is with this ending.. a simple, thought-less automaton used by the tuttles. I'm sure he is easily replaced in their doings.

Ending ruined the preceding 7 episodes. Was rushed and too simplistic.
 
Flat Circles, Pagan Spirals, And How ‘True Detective’s First Season Was A Critique Of Binary Thinking
BY ALAN PYKE ON MARCH 10, 2014 AT 5:28 PM
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True-Detective-Rust-Marty
CREDIT: HBO

This review discusses plot points from the full run of True Detective in detail.
“The light is winning,” True Detective’s Rust concedes at the end of the HBO hit’s first season. Or it’s got the momentum, at least, even if the deficit displayed on the scoreboard remains monumental. After seven-plus hours of his paeans to darkness and the inexorable pointlessness and tragedy of human existence, Rust’s closing line throws everything that came before it into a very different, well, light.
A number of critics (including on this site) find fault with that last-second reversal, labeling it a betrayal or holding it as emblematic of the show’s ultimate punt on many of the big questions of power, corruption, violence, and institutions’ control of individuals that it had seemed to raise. But it’s worth setting the question of whether or not True Detective kept its thematic promises aside for at least a moment to appreciate the technical craftsmanship of the storytelling that brings Rust through the improbable arc.
True Detective is built around binary relationships – optimist and pessimist, cop and crook, faithful and bereft. The usefulness and failings of these binaries are a recurring background presence in the season, and in some ways the show has more to say about binaries than it does about any of its plot-level ideas. Rust’s concession (or perhaps it’s a revelation of some long-lit and tightly guarded spark of optimism in him, which could explain why a committed pessimist who’s bad at parties would bother not just to bear witness to the “raw deal” nature’s offered humankind, but to be police, to be one of the bad men who keep other bad men from the door) is a shift in one of these binaries, and it’s worth examining it specifically to think about the broader structure that drove the HBO hit’s first season.
Throughout True Detective’s first season, creator Nic Pizzolato relies upon two combating shapes: the open spiral and the closed circle. “Time is a flat circle,” in Rust’s idle (and meme-friendly) philosophizing, and Pizzolatto’s camera finds visual examples of that closed loop notion in highway interchanges and the bottoms of Lone Star tallboys and the drum magazine on Reggie Ledoux’s AK-47. Spirals adorn Childress’ victims and one is scarred into his own flesh just below the nape of his neck – a location that means someone else had to have carved the shape into his body – to say nothing of the spiral-ish labyrinth that hosts his final showdown with our heroes. If the dominant geometry of human history and experience is Rust’s “flat circle” — where everything repeats, where free will is an illusion, where humanity marches witlessly around some sort of existential grindstone — then fighting crime and catching bad guys and mourning our long-dead toddlers is all pointless playacting.
The spiral, on the other hand, makes for a more hopeful metaphor for existence. Whether they collapse inward or wind outward from their centers, spirals suggest progress from one state to another, implying an uncertain future that can be influenced by present action. The intoxicating nihilism of Rust’s “flat circle” speech and the abstract brutality of the largely-unseen cultists for whom the spiral is a unifying symbol suggest there’s only one assessment of which notion of human existence is right and which is evil.
By converting Rust from a despairing advocate of circular history to a reluctant adherent to the heartening, spiraling idea that light has been bringing the universe closer and closer to a tie ballgame, True Detective reverses its original stance on this symbolic stand-in for philosophical inquiry.
We know the symbolic reversal of that moral binary matters a great deal, since symbolism is so essential to how True Detective works. The show is rampant with the stuff, and its leads are walking symbols of diametrically opposed values systems. The DNA of each man’s worldview is on hardly-veiled display in their very names. “Rust Cohle,” the corrosive and elemental force of brute rationalism, rendering life’s mysteries into plain inevitabilities of time and force, in the same way the earth’s internal forces turn carbon into coal. “Marty Hart,” whose gut goes slack in retirement, the heart-driven man who turns into Fat Marty, Mardi Gras, the guiltless intuiter and womanizer who’s good with people and great at the version of grade-school show-and-tell that adults call happy hour. Here, too, Pizzolatto organizes his clearest symbolic language within a binary structure, while also choosing one that is marked by classic cultural ideas of manhood and its rightful place in society.
More broadly, binaries are easy for an audience, and here they created a very engaging playground. But binaries are also simplistic and deceptive. The masculine binary that animates True Detective crowded out a lot of the shadowy complexity that attends real-world institutional conspiracies around power, murder, and sex. It also seems to flatter some classic cultural notions about strong, tough, brooding men being both rightful arbiters of good and evil and sufficient protection from the latter.
In choosing to locate his story within the Rust-Marty dynamic, Pizzolatto foreclosed a great many possibilities including that of female characters who are fully human or who demonstrate agency outside of how their lives collide with the menfolk they orbit. The space Pizzolatto clears with his choices gets allocated to spooky atmospherics and layers of conspiracy that implicate the most powerful political and religious figures in True Detective’s Louisiana in a drug-fueled ritual-based murder and pedophilia cult cobbled together from scraps of mainline Christianity and transgressive literary traditions. Other shows that handle similar subject matter have made very different choices about how to approach incest and violence against women and provoked very different kinds of contemplation. Taken together, art like Top of the Lake and The Fall and August: Osage Countyand True Detective serve as patches in a quilt of ideas about those subjects.
Some of those patches approach this material with a sure and settled viewpoint and find the right characters to bring that viewpoint to fierce and even triumphant life. Others function more as mirrors than as declarations, and I’d argue True Detective is one of these. Those old, flawed ideas about hard men keeping us as safe as we are docile and loyal that Rust represents? The show’s resolution calls all of them into question, as they fail to net any of the powerful men and institutions that were participating in the Carcosa cult and settle for destroying only its most prolific member. Those binary notions of how we should be and how we should view our species and our place in space-time get dislodged by the show’s conclusion. It isn’t that the spirals vs. circles, Marty vs. Rust, good vs. evil dynamics get resolved in surprising ways, it’s that they prove irresolvable and false by the time it’s all over. Rather than endorsing one or another clear or doctrinaire worldview or conception of reality, True Detective suggests its best to lean on a pastiche of many different elements, in much the same way that Adam Gopnik recently argued that the rump plurality of non-atheist non-religious people have set out to do for themselves in defiance of the self-appointed authority of both Pope Francis and Richard Dawkins alike.
“This world is a veil,” the revival-tent preacher with the Elvis haircut says in one early-season episode. As it turns out, that idea is a better representation of what True Detective has to say about human nature than anything. The spirals and circles, crowns and Yellow Kings, philosophizers and affable broskis are all feints at an orderliness that the real world never actually exhibits on its own. We think we’re making sense of the world around us, but we’ve made it into a veil that is legible to high-functioning animal neurology built to identify important patterns or to create them where none exist. The questions we think are worth asking and the binaries that seem worth organizing your life around prove useless.
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The Crazy Mythology That Explains ‘True Detective’
BY ALYSSA ROSENBERG ON FEBRUARY 16, 2014 AT 10:05 PM
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True-Detective-HBO
CREDIT: HBO

The first five episodes of True Detective have mostly been concerned with the contrasting styles of masculinity that meat-and-potatoes Marty Hart and cracked philosopher king Rust Cohle represent. But lurking around in the background is something stranger than even Rust Cohle’s meditations on the state of the universe: references to Carcosa, and a King in Yellow, and in Sunday’s episode, a meth cook babbling about “black stars” and “twin suns.” These details might seem in keeping with True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto’s literary dialogue. But they actually come from someplace else. And that someplace else suggests something interesting about where True Detective could be going.

True Detective, on the surface, seems to be a noir story. But a deeper dive into the references that keep popping up in the show suggest it’s from another place entirely: it’s a horror story dressed up in noir clothing. All these details come from a mythology that writers have been contributing to for more than 120 years: an interlocking set of stories, poems, and even a play about a fictional city called Carcosa, that can never quite be seen directly.
Carcosa shows up first in a story by the American writer Ambrose Bierce, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” The main character is a nameless resident of the city who wakes up in a place he doesn’t recognize, and desperately tries to find his way home. The landscape he finds himself in is one we might recognize as post-apocalyptic. “Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse,” Bierce’s narrator tells us. “In all this there were a menace and a portent — a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.” And in an echo of the tree where Cohle and Hart found Dora Lange, and where Cohle finds the wreath, looking like a portal to another world, “A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.”

He encounters a man dressed in skins, and asks him for directions back to Carcosa, but doesn’t get an answer in any language that he recognizes. Ultimately, he comes across what appears to be a grave and discovers that it’s his own. “And then,” he tells us, “I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.”In other words, he’s trapped out of time, the memories of his last life lost to him just in the same way that Cohle describes to the detectives in the contemporary section of the story. Whether that means that True Detective is going to end with some sort of tear in the fabric of our reality, or whether the Carcosa story is simply a way of describing what it means to be trapped in the same stories that you’ve told yourself over and over again, as Rust and Marty are doing now with the investigating detectives, we’ll have to wait and see. But the repeated references to the city, and the fact that Reggie Ledoux and his victims were both obsessed with the story suggests that at least some of the characters are trapped in a terrible desolation.

And Reggie Ledoux’s name may have some tie to the references to the “King In Yellow.” That’s a phrase that shows up in Dora’s notebook and in Rust’s interrogation. And it’s also the title of a collection of short stories by Robert Chambers, a play described within those stories, and a man himself, an exiled king for whom Carcosa is meant to be a refuge. The play itself is supposed to be so powerful that it drives the reader insane, and Chambers includes only fragments of it in his collection. Those fragments include something called “Cassilda’s Song,” from which Ledoux’s ramblings appear to be drawn:
Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

In a sense, Carcosa itself is a disguise–the King is sentenced to “die unheard in / Dim Carcosa.” But what if that’s the point, that by hiding himself, he can avoid whatever forces exiled him. It’s possible that the Carcosa mythos that’s circulating among both suspects and victims in the Dora Lange case functions like “The King In Yellow” is supposed to: entranced the people it’s told to, building up the legend of the King himself, whether he’s Cohle or not, and providing a disguise for him by distorting his image. Reginald Ledoux’s name could be construed to mean the Second King. Whether that means he’s an inheritor of the real King’s practices, or that the contemporary detectives’ theory that he was a decoy is correct, is for the show to reveal in subsequent episodes.

A third potential link to the Carcosa mythology is the Yellow Sign that Chambers describes in The King In Yellow. It’s never fully described, though artists have invented versions of it for other Carcosa stories and works of art. But it’s supposed to perform the same entrancing function as the fictional play. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the tattoos described on Reggie Ledoux and found on the women who are supposed to be his victims are supposed to be the Yellow Sign, a spiral pulling those who knows its meaning deeper into complicity, and those who don’t into the mystery that will eventually consume them, too.
And then, there’s a short story by James Blish called “More Light,” in which a character much like Blish himself visits a critic named Bill Atheling, who’s been seemingly transformed. Much like Rust, Atheling has a beard that’s sitting poorly on him, and “He had lost some twenty or thirty pounds, which he could ill afford…His skin was grey, his neck crepy, his hands trembling, his eyes bleached, his cough tubercular…If he was not seriously ill, then he had taken even more seriously to the bottle.” But the cause of his troubles seems to have been how deeply he’s read into the actual manuscript of “The King In Yellow,” given to him by H.P. Lovecraft (whose real-life writings referenced Carcosa, too)–though he’s been unable to finish it.

Blish takes a crack at the play, and gets deeper into the text. A strange figure comes to Cassilda, a queen embroiled in a succession struggle, and confronts her with the Yellow Sign, but promises her that “The Pallid Mask / protects me–as it will protect you.” “How?” she wants to know before agreeing to don the concealment. “It deceives. That is the function of a mask.” But having put it on, Cassilda is condemned to wear the mask forever, and is stripped of her humanity. There’s an interesting detail in the stage directions, which Blish notes, given both Lovecraft and Chambers’ negative opinions of Jews and black people: “N.B. Except for the Stranger and the King, everyone who appears in the play is black.”

So what does it all mean? The parallels between the characters of Blish and Atherling, and between Hart and Cohle, both sets of men reunited by interests in a common mystery, are clear. And while Hart and Cohle aren’t the only white characters in a cast that’s otherwise majority-black, they are juxtaposed with the two black detectives who are interrogating their motives. Does that make them the Stranger and the King, at perpetual war with each other? And if so, which one is proffering the mask? Which one will fix it forever on an innocent woman’s face?
The answer may be that there’s no answer. Blish and Atherling each read deep into the play, but neither one of them can reach the end: something stops them reading along the way. Maybe True Detective will never tell us the truth after all.

But there’s a joke in Blish’s short story, too, a moment when Blish and Atherling talk about why Atherling didn’t show the story to his wife. “Female common sense would blow the whole thing sky-high in a minute,” Blish admits of their obsession. Maybe that’s true of Maggie, too, and she’ll get out of this all right. And maybe it’s true of Hart and Cohle, that they’re caught in an obsession with no answers, at the expense of themselves and everyone else, but that female common sense, so lacking in so much of True Detective, could have cut through with the kind of clarity Hart frequently laments that he lacks. The story of True Detective is structured like the spiral on Dora Lange’s back, both in relation to itself and the larger Carcosa mythology: it goes round and round, but the city itself can never quite be seen clearly, or its power would vanish. Or maybe, like the inhabitant of Carcosa, Hart and Cohle are going to end up staring at their own graves, and taking their secrets with them.
 
SFN 155 said:
The show is completely done and so many people are still overthinking everything.
Click to expand...

This is the fun part :lol:

I don't get why people are all "stop over thinking it" "it really wasnt' all that". Like ok...all these theories not only stimulate my brain but inform me of mythology i knew nothing about. Let the theories cook
 
I don't think people are stretching this story out in hopes of finding alternate endings or supernatural **** etc etc. People are taking the show and trying to figure out the messages behind it. Carcosa, the yellow King, etc etc all came from a specific set of stories told decades ago so naturally people are going to read those and examine them along with the show.

It's a disservice to the writers to think that main messages and philosophies aren't shared throughout this show. These guys took months or years writing this story and getting ridiculously intricate with every detail from character traits, to development, to the actual visual footage. When a show is this detailed the writer does that for people to analyze the work and learn that is what good writers incite.

so all of that people are overthinking talk just seems ridiculous.... especially considering that in the play the king in yellow the author specifically leaves out parts of the play in fear that it will drive the reader insane.

so i think it's painfully clear that the writer of this show wants people to think about true detective in a analytic way. Not to mention there are several times where the characters are speaking on the case, and that same monologue can be used on anyone viewing the show.

Ex: when Marty tells Rust to never look at a case with a predetermined outlook because then you begin to force scenarios which many people did at first.
 
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I hope the next series is still in the same universe so when the final season comes around Nic can tie all the stories together a bit or at least call back to them.
 
First of all, you guys care way too much about a TV SHOW. I mean jesus christ breaking bad ended 5 months ago and people still post in that thread. True detective was an amazing show, probably my 2nd favorite ever behind breaking bad, and the day after the final episode I could care less about the plot lines that you guys analyze and cry over. I mean don't you have anything better to occupy your thoughts with? 

2nd of all, while watching the show I could care less about the killer or any of these theories. What made the show so great was the relationship between Marty and Rust, Marty's family drama, and just the overall mood and setting. I never saw the actual crime story as anything more than 2 detectives catching a killer, something I've seen a million times, again that wasn't what made the show great. /thread 
 
toogoon23 said:
 
First of all, you guys care way too much about a TV SHOW. I mean jesus christ breaking bad ended 5 months ago and people still post in that thread. True detective was an amazing show, probably my 2nd favorite ever behind breaking bad, and the day after the final episode I could care less about the plot lines that you guys analyze and cry over. I mean don't you have anything better to occupy your thoughts with? 

2nd of all, while watching the show I could care less about the killer or any of these theories. What made the show so great was the relationship between Marty and Rust, Marty's family drama, and just the overall mood and setting. I never saw the actual crime story as anything more than 2 detectives catching a killer, something I've seen a million times, again that wasn't what made the show great. /thread 
Click to expand...
 
toogoon23 said:
First of all, you guys care way too much about a TV SHOW. I mean jesus christ breaking bad ended 5 months ago and people still post in that thread. True detective was an amazing show, probably my 2nd favorite ever behind breaking bad, and the day after the final episode I could care less about the plot lines that you guys analyze and cry over. I mean don't you have anything better to occupy your thoughts with? 

2nd of all, while watching the show I could care less about the killer or any of these theories. What made the show so great was the relationship between Marty and Rust, Marty's family drama, and just the overall mood and setting. I never saw the actual crime story as anything more than 2 detectives catching a killer, something I've seen a million times, again that wasn't what made the show great. /thread 
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Wrong thread to talk that talk bruh.
 
toogoon23 said:
First of all, you guys care way too much about a TV SHOW. I mean jesus christ breaking bad ended 5 months ago and people still post in that thread. True detective was an amazing show, probably my 2nd favorite ever behind breaking bad, and the day after the final episode I could care less about the plot lines that you guys analyze and cry over. I mean don't you have anything better to occupy your thoughts with? 

2nd of all, while watching the show I could care less about the killer or any of these theories. What made the show so great was the relationship between Marty and Rust, Marty's family drama, and just the overall mood and setting. I never saw the actual crime story as anything more than 2 detectives catching a killer, something I've seen a million times, again that wasn't what made the show great. /thread 
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**** around and be the next dora lang, whodie
now THATS too goon
 
toogoon23 said:
First of all, you guys care way too much about a TV SHOW. I mean jesus christ breaking bad ended 5 months ago and people still post in that thread. True detective was an amazing show, probably my 2nd favorite ever behind breaking bad, and the day after the final episode I could care less about the plot lines that you guys analyze and cry over. I mean don't you have anything better to occupy your thoughts with? 

2nd of all, while watching the show I could care less about the killer or any of these theories. What made the show so great was the relationship between Marty and Rust, Marty's family drama, and just the overall mood and setting. I never saw the actual crime story as anything more than 2 detectives catching a killer, something I've seen a million times, again that wasn't what made the show great. /thread 
Click to expand...

Thanks for (once again) letting everyone know how cool and breezy you are.

toocoolfortheroom23
 
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