1.6 Haunted Houses Six episodes down. Two to go. Given True Detective’s curious time signature I referred to last week, I think it’s permissible, even at this late stage, to skip back to the beginning and remind ourselves of one of Rust Cohle’s earliest comments on the murder case that started this bad ball rolling: ‘This kind of thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum’. Consequently, this episode was concerned with the things that happen outside the walls, outside order. Its title, Haunted Houses, while of a piece with the gloomy nomenclature of the series, was something of a misnomer. A haunted house is threatening because it traps you inside with malevolence. True Detective examines the threat of being outside. For the most part, this means outside the strictures of law. There were two scenes in which our anti-heroes explicitly decided to deal with things without recourse to the badge. Marty Hart, handling the fallout of his daughter’s sexualised rebellion preferred to issue his own beatdown to the two male participants that he, tellingly, continued to refer to as ‘boys’. Later, after another bout of vengeance-violence, it was Cohle who declined to press charges. These men may be agents of the law, but that only makes them more aware of its limitations and more keen to circumvent it whether the matter is directly personal or not. Cohle’s continued pursuit of the Lange/Yellow King case is conducted without the sanction of his superior and, it is implied, even after his has surrendered his badge for the final time. His comment to [he young mother who had killed her baby that she should ‘kill herself at the earliest available opportunity’ again speaks to his extra-mural tendency. Cohle has no faith in the institutions of law to either punish or protect her. Both solutions must come by her own hand. It’s a bleak moment in a bleak episode of a bleak series, but it is entirely consistent with the lone-wolf attitude that has infected both detectives. Where Cohle expresses his solitariness through psychological force, Hart does so through pure violence. His big-ass belt buckle (an inch or so above his self-proclaimed ‘big-ass dick’) gives him the look of the cowboy, colouring his hyper-masculine instinct that drives such men to disdain offering comfort to the abused in favour of seeking vengeance on the abuser. He had it last week at Reggie’s place, and again here, using his insider status as a law officer to deliver his punishment beatings extra-judicially. He finds himself outside every institution he serves but, unlike Cohle, is unable to see it. If his preparedness to bend the rule of law (and note his careful preparation in both cases, protecting his knuckles with gloves before beating the boys, removing his badge and weapons before tackling Cohle) makes him a cowboy cop, then his continued unrepentant philandering makes him a cowboy husband, outside the walls of his own marriage. Just watch him sit; eating his dinner in front of ‘the game’, a stranger in his own living room and utterly oblivious to his own alien nature, the kind of guy whose well-signposted divorce nevertheless appears to come out of a clear blue sky. One of the, admittedly few, criticisms of True Detective is that it is too masculine, that it presents female characters in the familiar moulds of victim or harlot or nagging wife. Such criticisms, while accurate, are somewhat misplaced. Yes, it has a male-oriented worldview, as any drama from which the bulk of the narrative comes from male characters’ direct recollections must necessarily have, but that is not tantamount to endorsement, and certainly not here. True Detective, in this first season at least, is an examination of a male worldview and a critique of it. Both male leads are damaged in their own way and, in their own way, leave a trail of destruction in their wake. For Cohle, this means a dogged pursuit of the Yellow King case that brings harm even as it seeks to make things right. If that means upsetting the one known survivor, then so be it. If it means pissing off the powerful Billy Lee Tuttle (perhaps to the point of suicide) then so be it. The case is the case and it does not happen in a vacuum. Read Michael’s review of the previous episode, The Secret Fate of All Life here Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here
