Some Major Cognitive Dissonance

True Detective, June 1952

The conclusion of another season of True Detective looms nigh.

Judging from conversations and the scores registered at Rotten Tomatoes, my sentiments for this season dovetail with those of other viewers. It is neither as rich and compelling as season one nor as Byzantine as season two (and I say that as someone who liked season two). The sense of setting, so pervasive before, feels more any-town here, and the lyrical dialogue of the characters has been toned down.

For me the biggest disappointment has been the drastically curtailed soundtrack, with the deep cuts of the last half century replaced by instrumental scores and Moog bass so low it shakes our television. Seriously — the site I check after every episode for the track list is crickets and tumbleweeds.

And yet the central mystery of this season is probably the strongest of the three. When you smooth out the flashbacks and flashforwards of the original McConaughey and Harrelson adventure and lay it linearly, the story is fairly straightforward. The plot of season two was completely lost among the sprawling cast of characters, which is OK because I understood writer Nic Pizzolatto was going for a Raymond Chandler type of noir and Chandler emphasized characters and language over plot.

This season, with its return to S1’s rural roads and tripartite time frames, seems to be playing with our expectations of similarity, and yet after seven episodes we still don’t know the motives for the crimes committed. The trailers and opening credits inspired us to anticipate things that have yet to materialize; we thought we were buying another backwoods conspiracy involving child predators, when instead what we may be watching is a clandestine custody battle complicated by an accidental murder.

Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff are nothing short of mesmerizing but for me S3’s real standout has been Carmen Ejogo’s character Amelia. The unsure wannabe writer of the earliest frame, scribbling notes with some vague notion of collating them into a book, is replaced in the 1990s frame by a confident author receiving galleys and doing bookstore readings, inversely mirroring the decline of Ali’s character Wayne Hays as she matures and ascends to the role of superior detective.

A complaint about journalism in general and true-crime specifically is that it preys upon the misfortunes of others, and it’s particularly galling for Amelia to be a target of that spite from her own jealous husband. No one questions the police officer’s inquisitiveness, but writers and reporters, for all the vitriol aimed at them — especially these days — are just another kind of investigator, complete with flaws, mistakes, and fuck-ups.

True-crime writers are especially relentless detectives; just ask Michelle McNamara’s widower husband. If the officer isn’t begrudged a promotion at the close of a successful case, why do we begrudge the writer her book or the reporter his news story? The answer, to paraphrase Vince Vaughn’s character from S2, is because writers often refuse to parrot back the lies we tell ourselves. When somebody else tells a narrative of events that differs from our own, it angers us.

The joy of watching True Detective is constantly readjusting, episode after episode, my ever-unfolding theories about the mystery. Sunday night I’ll probably be right about some stuff and wrong about other stuff, and because I can’t tell which will be which, I’ll also be surprised.

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