No Substance #173: True Detective, Night Country
1.
I watched the new season of True Detective last week. It’s set in Alaska, in a small, fictional mining town called Ennis. There, just as darkness descends on the town for months, the six men of a research station disappear. They are found days later in the ice, frozen together, naked, and dead mid scream. One of the men, horrifically enough, is still alive. The police chief, Liz Danvers, decides to pursue the case, despite the lack of resources available to her. It’s linked to an earlier murder, she believes, to that an Inupiat woman who was stabbed thirty-six times over a year before, then her body disposed and her tongue cut out. She’s long thought that this woman was killed for protesting the mine that is slowly destroying the town and its people. Danvers believes she has found the woman’s tongue on the floor of the research station.
2.
Issa López is the creator, writer and director of season four of True Detective (she shares the writing duties with half a dozen others on a few of the episodes, it should be noted). Her season is a nice departure from Nic Pizzolatto’s first three seasons, woven around hyper masculine noir and drawn from the dark, weird horror of Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron and others who mine that part of the genre. I always liked the first season most of all and I think this fourth season, a turn to difficult women, and threaded with the weird horror and paranoia of John Carpenter’s The Thing, is nearly as good. López’s season lacks some of the stylistic touches that Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction in the first season provides, some of the creativity, but that’s all that really separates the two. The scripts are quite different, but here, I think, López is the clear winner over Pizzolatto, who never showed any restraint over the long, wandering monologues about nothingness and emptiness and the like.
3.
Speaking of Cary Joji Fukunaga, did you know he’s been accused of sexual misconduct by a number of young women on various sets? I had no idea, but there you go. The things you learn.
4.
At the heart of López’s True Detective is Jodie Foster’s Danver’s, a dissatisfied, difficult police chief who has been shuffled out to nowhere, partly because of the threat she poses to her boss and his job, and partly because after the death of her son and husband, she became awful to work with. She doesn’t care about the family life of her other offices. She’ll impose on her staff to do things she won’t. She’ll berate them, threaten them, and move through them, as if they’re disposable. She’s brittle, angry, capable, damaged, and Foster is great in the role. She’s aided by Evangeline Navarro, her one time partner now demoted to the role of trooper. Navarro partnered her in the original investigation of Annie Kowtok, the woman who was murdered and her tongue cut out. Like Danver’s, Navarro is an angry, capable, damaged woman, though for different reasons. It’s she who walks the line of the strange and occult within the series, caught somewhere between mental illness and otherworldly strangeness. Kaili Reis, who plays Navarro, isn’t as capable an actor as Foster (who is), but Foster’s skill isn’t just in what she does for herself, but how she enables those around her in scenes and sequences, and the two find a good balance when they’re together.
5.
I mentioned the influence of John Carpenter’s The Thing and it’s both a blessing and a curse for the series. Simply put, there’s too much of it referenced. When it works, it’s great. The men frozen in the ice recalls to you the thing itself in the final stages of Carpenter’s film, and the echo of that paranoia and madness is there every time the characters come across the bodies, or stand in front of them as they melt in the city’s ice rink. But it’s not confined. It’s everywhere else. Characters share the names of those in The Thing. There are hidden facilities in the ice. A man is strapped to a chair reminiscent of the scene where they test the blood. It’s so much that it starts to seep into other frames, scenes that might not have anything to do with The Thing, but do now because you’ve been overloaded. It’s simply too much, even if you are a fan of the film, like myself. I would have liked if that had been toned by a little. But then, honestly, I would have liked if in the first season had toned back its references as well, so maybe this is a problem that the show has. Maybe, in reaching for references and influences, the show as a whole has taken too much.
6.
Where True Detective is at its strongest is when it marries the slow destruction of the town by the mining company to the murder case. The dirty water. The unemployment. The stillborn children. The protests. The sense of being powerless. The cold. The darkness. The way it creeps in on everyone. The small, lost lives a the edge of civilisation, the bodies that are here to be used up for the profit of others. The show is great when those moments entwine with the mystery, with the dead men and women, with the madness within. It falls short when they drift away from each other. Sadly, the worst moment of this is right at the end, when it become Mrs Marple in the Research Station, but the balance is otherwise kept well throughout.
7.
I recommend season four. If you were burnt by season two and three of True Detective, I have to say, four will give you some faith, with López as the new creator and director of its vision. For what it’s worth, I liked season three well enough, though I thought two was pretty rubbish. I just thought by the end of season three it had played itself out. It was in risk of becoming a parody to itself. But season four has saved it from it.
If I had to order them, I’d go one, four, three, two.
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