On certain pages of the typescript for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” an alternate or working title appears. It is “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” which Eliot took from a passage in Charles Dickens’ 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend. In that book,the last novel Dickens finished, there is a character named Sloppy, an orphan who auditions for prospective adoptive parents. His guardian, the barely literate Mrs. Higden, introduces him like this:
“… I ain’t, you must know … much of a hand at reading … though I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of the newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”
One way of looking at Eliot’s poem is to consider it akin to one of Sloppy’s newspaper readings, a collage of voices and language, a jumble of busted images and quotations evoking a world demolished (and sloppily)glued back in the wake of a terrible and unprecedented world war. It is dense with reference and allusion, some of which are as impenetrable and obscure as the hearts of others.
One is either the sort of person who thinks of “The Waste Land” often or not, so maybe it is not much of a surprise that HBO’s new Sunday night crime drama True Detective put me in mind of Eliot’s poem from its opening title sequence. Now I am three episodes in (HBO is giving the series tonight off in deference to the Super Bowl) and the thing has infiltrated my dreams (which end with monsters). It does the police in different voices.
Not that we haven’t heard voices like this before. In fact, the core duo, thrown-together Louisiana State Police homicide detectives Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), comprise a gritty cop show trope, mismatched partners who start out as anything but buddies. Cohle’s philosophy may be a little deeper (and darker) than we’re used to seeing, but he’s still the introverted and intuitive one while Hart’s more pragmatic and conventional, the one who drives the car and mainly interacts with the outside world. Both of them have complexities and contradictions, neither is a Boy Scout. We expect we know something about the trajectory of this pair. We’ve watched enough movies to suspect that they will bicker and bond, develop not only a grudging respect for each other but maybe even the sort of fraternal love that causes soldiers to fight for one another.
But maybe not. Superimposed upon the investigation that our detectives are working - a ritual murder of an especially vulnerable woman back in 1995 - is a 2012 review of that investigation. In the flash forward, Hart and Cohle are each being interviewed by another, much younger pair of detectives. Hart is retired from the police force. Cohle has retreated into alcoholism, he’s burnt out and dead-eyed yet still coldly articulate in his nihilism. Cohle and Hart, it seems, didn’t part as friends. The usual thing that happens in cop shows did not happen here, and the first three episodes have given us a few potential clues.
The show has been generally well-received by critics, more for its dialogue and the characterizations by McConaughey and Harrelson than for its storytelling, which so far isn’t much different from the kind of murder stories we’ve seen before. There’s a killer out there and our boys need to stop him. To do so they must examine some really ugly stuff, plunge their hands into the black muck at the bottom of human experience. They must muck through the worst that we can be. Yadda yadda yadda.
Yet there is a compelling specificity to the characters and the locations of True Detective. It is filmed and set in the southern reaches of the part of Louisiana known as Acadiana, an exotic and wild region (where I started out writing for newspapers) that is usually overlooked by commercial storytellers. Typically they present us a Louisiana as a continuum with New Orleans at one end and Duck Dynasty at the other. Cajuns, Creoles and rednecks appear more or less randomly.
In the HBO series True Blood (shot mostly in Southern California), the fictional town of Bon Temps seems to oscillate between the piney woods outside Shreveport and the cypress trees and Spanish moss of Cajun country. An HBO website pinpoints the town as approximately midway between Ruston and Alexandria, near the actual town of Winnfield, but characters on the show have suggested it’s actually much closer (“20 minutes,” Lafayette once said) to Monroe - probably just a couple of miles from Interstate 20.
We don’t really care because we understand the overt artificiality of True Blood is an important element of the fantasy. The last thing we should expect from something so silly and asinine is geographic fidelity, because guess what?Vampires do not exist.
Monsters, on the other hand, do, and True Detective has a stubborn sense of place. Acadiana’s strange, flat, reedy vistas - a different kind of Waste Land - feel as provisional as the lives of the detectives. It’s all going to be underwater in 30 years anyway, Cohle tells us. Not that it or anything else matters to this odd duck, who looks into the blank eyes of corpses and understands that, in their last moments, they were gifted with insight that could be redeemed for a kind of blank and empty freedom from want. That’s the gospel according to Cohle, grim and fatalistic. He’s just hanging around because he’s interested in seeing how the stories play out. Like one of Walker Percy’s ex-suicides, Cohle “goes to work because he doesn’t have to.”
Are real cops like this? Sure, some of them - I’ve known detectives who’ve read Mishima and Kawabata in the original. I’ve known some that were great family men and a few who were criminals. They aren’t just like us, they are us - although like a lot of us, some of them like to pretend they’re special. People make movies and TV shows about them because their work digs at the nub of the human problem, our insatiable longings and capacity for cruelty. Cohle says they’re the necessary bad men, tasked with keeping the other bad men from the door. But Cohle’s world view won’t admit the possibility of good people, just deluded people. And maybe innocents.
Hart has to make it mean more, he has to privilege his feelings. His love for his family leads him to compartmentalize his life, to invent ways he can pretend to continue his normality in their presence. He excuses himself, he makes allowances, he tries to rig up some resemblance of domestic life. Three shows in, I can see he’s doomed and his failure will be because he can’t reconcile the way life is with the way he’s always heard it should be. And that breaks my heart.
Structurally, True Detective is further evidence of the dramatic possibilities of the cable miniseries, which are really more like very long feature films than the episodic TV series baby boomers grew up with. The first season will have eight episodes and a second season seems likely since the series creator, former University of Chicago literature professor Nic Pizzolato, has a two-year deal with HBO. The series is, relatively speaking, a huge ratings hit.
With the movies going all in on platform-neutral kids who want to watch big explosions, the miniseries is an opportunity for more grown-up stories on the small screen.
True Detective is another encouraging sign, even if it becomes more procedural and less dialectical over the course of its eight-episode run. Even if it’s just doing the police in different voices, it’s in a different, interesting minor key.
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Style, Pages 45 on 02/02/2014