[COLUMN] True Detective's Lovecraftian Horror Was Always Its Broken World | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Early in True Detective, Detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) are summoned to a crime scene. Teenager Dora Lange (Amanda Rose Batz) has been murdered. Her body has been staged as part of an elaborate ritual. She wears a crown of wooden antlers. She has been positioned as if praying. Her body is marked with a spiral pattern. There are wooden sculptures nearby. Cohle observes, “This kinda thing does not happen in a vacuum.”

Ten years after it was initially broadcast, the first season of True Detective remains a monument of prestige television. It came out of nowhere and captured the public imagination. Anchored in two powerhouse (and perhaps career-best) performances from Harrelson and McConaughey, the series benefited greatly from the union of writer Nic Pizzolatto’s gothic sensibility with director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s assured style. All these elements worked together to create something truly beautiful.

Throughout that first season, something lurks at the edges of this serial killer case, monstrous and maybe supernature. As the title implies, True Detective was riffing on the pulpy crime fiction genre, but the show owed a lot to the horror genre. Pizzolatto was accused of plagiarizing horror writer Thomas Ligotti, a claim that he denied while acknowledging Ligotti’s influence. There are repeated elements drawn from the fiction of Robert Chambers, including “the King in Yellow” and “Carcosa.”

Much of the coverage of True Detective fixated on these recurring thematic motifs, inviting audiences to become as obsessive and paranoid as Cohle himself. The show even frames Cohle as a sort of “Lovecraftian hero-victim”, a man driven mad by the act of peering beyond the confines of the physical world around him. Throughout the show, Cohle is haunted by visions that may or may not be real: birds flying in spiral patterns, highway lights blurring into a haze, the sky itself seeming to open.

Some viewers interpreted this symbolism in an overly literal manner. Ultimately, Hart and Cohle discover that the serial murderer is just a human being named Errol Childress (Glenn Fleshler). James Poniewozik complained that the show’s mythology ended up “nothing more than the crazy talk it sounded like”, while Matt Zoller Seitz conceded it was “disappointing.” It seems like some viewers expected the season to end with Hart and Cohle slapping the cuffs on Cthulhu.

These criticisms miss the point of the show. The existential horror peering out from behind the frame was never going to be literal tentacle monsters or black magic. Instead, True Detective uses the language of this Lovecraftian cosmic horror as a metaphor for the forces that shape and mould this world. In its basic structure, True Detective is a show about two cops tracking a serial killer through Louisiana. However, it’s also about the more intangible and abstract forces acting on that case.

The first season of True Detective has a strong sense of place. Pizzolatto grew up poor in rural Louisiana. The state is as important to the show as Hart or Cohle. Owing a lot to Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America photography collection, the opening credits project the state’s geography onto various faces and bodies: intersections, refineries, the bayou. The people and the environment are inseparable, and the environment is in a state of decay and collapse. The season’s defining set piece, positioned right at its midpoint, is a long take that follows Cohle traversing a rundown neighborhood as it descends into chaos.

“This place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory is fading,” Cohle muses on visiting one community. “It's like there was never anything here but jungle.” Later, he opines, “This pipeline's carving up the coast like a jigsaw, place is gonna be underwater in 30 years.” The bulk of the show is set in the 1990s, before Hurricane Katrina. However, society is already eroding. Churches have collapsed into themselves, decorated with occult graffiti. Local children have to be bussed two hours from their homes to privately-run schools. Parts of the show were shot in an area of Louisiana outside New Orleans known as “Cancer Alley.”

“I think True Detective is portraying a world where the weak (physically or economically) are lost,” explained Pizzolatto, “ground under by perfidious wheels that lie somewhere behind the visible wheels powered by greed, perversity, and irrational belief systems, and these lost souls dwell on an exhausted frontier, a fractured coastline beleaguered by industrial pollution and detritus, slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s a sense here that the apocalypse already happened.”

These communities have been failed and abandoned. That failure makes it possible for a monster like Childress to murder with impunity. Cohle returns to the case decades later, noting that Hurricane Katrina just made it easier for Childress. “Think our man had a real good time after the hurricane,” Cohle explains. “Chaos, people missing, and people gone. Cops gone. I think he had a real good year.” The real horror isn’t Childress, but the world that allows him to thrive.

Childress is a symptom of a broader social dysfunction. When Hart asks Childress’ sister-lover, Betty (Ann Dowd), where to find the killer, she replies, “All around us; before you were born and after you die.” It is ultimately revealed that Childress was himself abused as a child, as part of a cult engaging in ritual child sexual abuse. It’s a secret cabal that connects respected figures like the Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle (Jay O. Sanders) and meth dealers like Reginald Ledoux (Charles Halford).

The season evokes the “satanic panic” of the 1990s, which has perhaps morphed into the “QAnon” paranoia of the modern moment. However, the series never loses sight of how mundane this is. It’s just rich people taking advantage of the poverty that they have fed and enabled, couched in pseudo-mystical terms to lend it the sweep of grand mythology. True Detective understands that these cases are much closer to the documented abuses of Jeffrey Epstein than literal devil-worshippers.

“A backwater villain such as Childress is possible because of the machinations of power that lay pipe through bayous and neighborhoods and dig ship channels into estuaries, that subject the poor to living in ‘somebody's memory of a town,’ that name them, count them, and separate them,” explains Emma Lirette. “When Rust kills him, he's only killed an effigy.” Childress is just a corporeal expression of this intangible rot, a stick figure representing something more.

“Now, I don't know the sprawl of this thing, all right?” Cohle tells Hart towards the climax of the show. “The people I'm after, they're all fսcking over. They're in a lot of different things, pieces, family trees. The only way for you to understand what I'm onto here is for me to show you.” Throughout the show, these crimes can only happen because people choose to look away from them. They choose not to see, because – in the Lovecraftian tradition – to see is to go mad.

At one point, Cohle interviews Joel Theriot (Shea Whigham) about why he resigned from the Tuttle Ministry. Theriot recalls finding child pornography and presenting it to the ministry’s morals officer, who was “angry that [Theriot] brought it to him.” Hart’s old friend, Sheriff Steve Geraci (Michael Harney), admits that he closed the investigation into Marie Fontenot (Wanetah Walmsley) because he was pressured by his superior. It is easier to look the other way.

Explaining why he resigned from law enforcement, Hart recalls finding a baby in a microwave. “I thought I... I never want to look at anything like that anymore,” he confesses. At one point, Cohle steals a videotape from Tuttle, depicting a horrific act of child abuse. When Cohle plays it for Hart, he turns away; seeing it once was enough. Later, playing it for Geraci, Hart steps outside. “Why are you showing me this?” Geraci demands, before screaming in agony.

The system just keeps on churning. “A giant oil refinery looms in the background of countless shots, some unnamed corporate monstrosity that the characters never acknowledge,” writes Preston Johnston. “It is only ever glimpsed in the periphery; we never really see it directly, or in any degree of detail, but its presence is visceral. Instead of Cthulhu’s subaquatic tentacles we have the refinery’s crenellated smokestacks, just as indefinably extant, as omnipresent, as Lovecraft’s monster.”

The horrors are often left unarticulated, because confronting them would mean acknowledging the world is broken in ways that cannot be fixed by men carrying badges and guns. However, on some level, people know. Hart is shocked to find his young daughter Audrey (Madison Wolfe) arranging her dolls like figures from a sex crime and drawing pornography for her classmates. “Girls always know before boys,” explains Maggie (Michelle Monaghan), Hart’s wife. “Because they have to.”

Capitalism, misogyny, corruption, indifference. These forces are more than just an individual serial killer. Indeed, looking at those looming oil refineries destroying these communities to extract any value from the earth, it’s hard not to think of Matt Taibbi’s famous description of the investment bank Goldman Sachs as a Lovecraftian monstrosity, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Of course, True Detective is famous for Cohle’s argument that “time is a flat circle”, and the belief that its characters are trapped in a cycle of eternal recurrence. The series unfolds across multiple decades, in “a world where nothing is solved.” Even after he is caught cheating with Lisa Tragnetti (Alexandra Daddario), Hart cannot stay faithful to Maggie. True Detective has a somewhat grim view of human nature, suggesting that this decay and collapse is not something new.

In True Detective, Louisiana is haunted by its past. That first body is found amid burning sugar cane fields. Although Pizzolatto had intended for the body to be found in the woods, the choice of location evokes the history of slavery in Louisiana, as sugar cane plantations that were essential to the state’s wealth and prosperity were maintained by slaves. Childress lives on an old plantation estate, and Cohle chases him into Fort Macomb, an old Civil War outpost. The season’s penultimate sequence is a montage of Louisiana’s eerie empty spaces, a tour of the show’s cursed “psychosphere.”

This is the heart of the horror of True Detective. These sorts of forces and histories shape the world in which people live and die, but understanding those forces offers no comfort or reassurance. “Why should I live in history, huh?” demands Cohle at one point, confronting the fact that his awareness of these larger factors brings him no closure or resolution. “Fuck, I don't wanna know anything anymore.” It’s a profoundly unsettling idea – that even knowing how broken the world offers no protection from it.

True Detective wisely understood that true horror is that you can’t just slap the cuffs on Cthulhu.