http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWLpJRlBYA#t=0
The season finale of True Detective arrives this evening. Consider this an open thread for those entangled in the show who want one last chance to speculate where this story is going and What It All Means.
If you’ve never seen the show, please feel free to chime in. Your guess might be just as good as anyone else’s.
• I like Scott Paeth’s “Rosemary’s Baby Theory”:
Everybody. Every. Single. Solitary person that we’ve encountered on the show up till this point has to be involved in the plot. The only exceptions are Marty and Rust, and the two black detectives investigating the new murder. Beyond them, my theory is that everyone the detectives have come across up to this point, including Marty’s wife, including both of his girlfriends, including Rust’s briefly encountered girlfriend, the politicans, police officers, etc. Everybody is involved in this conspiracy. In the end, Marty and Rust will come upon some hideous ritual being performed for the Yellow King (probably the sacrifice of one of Marty’s daughters), and they will realize that they are battling against forces that it is impossible for them to overcome, and so the whole show will end in a note of ultimate cosmic despair in the face of evil.
I don’t think that’s where it’s headed, but it could work. (I’m pretty sure, though, that if there is a grand conspiracy, Maggie’s not in on it. Her dad definitely. And maybe her new, as-yet-unseen, husband. But not her.)
• Chauncey DeVega offers four predictions for the finale. I agree with half of them and/or half-agree with all of them. Maybe.
• The staff of Grantland offers a great big roundup of still-possible theories about the show. They can’t all be right. They can, however, all be wrong.
• One of the better things I’ve read about the show is Willa Paskin’s “The Horrible Things That Men Do to Women.”
Presenting women as a parade of scolds, sluts, and the strung-out typically makes me hate a television series. But I love True Detective. While it is possible — by which I mean undeniably true — that I am completely in thrall to the ever-captivating McConaissance, I think True Detective has not triggered my usual response because it is, at least on some level, very aware of how stereotypically and perfunctorily it treats its female characters. When it comes to women, True Detective is undeniably shallow — but I think it’s being shallow on purpose.
Ignoring women may be the show’s blind spot, but it is also one of its major themes. True Detective is explicitly about the horrible things that men do to women, things that usually go unseen and uninvestigated. No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up. Another little girl was abducted, and a report was never even filed. “Women and children are disappearing, nobody hears about it, nobody puts it together,” Rust told his boss Sunday night, outlining what he believes is a vast conspiracy in the Bayou. Rust is haunted by women who aren’t there — his ex-wife and his dead daughter — while Marty cannot deal appropriately with the women who are.
What’s really sharp in Paskin’s piece is her awareness that this defense of the show’s treatment of its female characters might just be wishful thinking. It’s a credible argument that explains at least some of what we’ve seen (and what we haven’t seen), and it may be accurate. But we can’t be sure it is — at least not until we see how this story ends. (Or, as Paskin says, until we see what it has in store for us in Season 2.)
That’s the great fun of watching a show like this unfold, and of speculating and theorizing about it. It invites us to consider all these disparate claims, symbols, and plotlines, and to engage with the various narrators — Marty, Rust, the camera — and to choose how much or whether or when each is being trustworthy. And all the while we must be cautious of our own tendency, need or desire to impose meaning and patterns where none was intended.
And of course that’s not just true of smart TV shows like True Detective. It’s also true of works of literature. Including revered, ancient works of literature. Including the Bible. That’s why, as Morgan Guyton says, “English majors make lousy fundamentalists.”
• In an interview late last month, writer Nic Pizzolatto said, “You can Google ‘Satanism,’ ‘preschool’ and ‘Louisiana’ and you’ll be surprised at what you get.” And so lots of people did just that in the past week, coming across what the Daily Beast headline writer calls, “The Satanic Child Sex Abuse Case That May Have Inspired True Detective.”
That would be the 2005 Hosanna Church case, which initially involved lots of lurid detail about Satanic rituals that seemed to have come right out of some Hollywood movie. And those details, it turns out, did come right out of Hollywood movies. After rehashing all that nonsense about pentagrams and blood rituals, Steven Ward finally comes to this — 20 paragraphs in:
All these years later, it’s still unclear if the devil worshiping and occult details that were given to detectives ever actually happened. There was no physical evidence, such as the existence of pentagrams on the floor or buried remains of sacrificed animals, presented at Lamonica’s trial.
… District Attorney Scott Perrilloux, who prosecuted Lamonica, told The Baton Rouge Advocate in 2008 that the case was never about satanic cults.
“This case, from our perspective, had nothing to do with a church or a cult or any sort of high pressure situation. This case is about child abuse and molestation,” Perrilloux said.
Gotta love that “it’s still unclear” bit. Apart from the utter lack of any evidence confirming the existence of something that has never been shown to actually exist anywhere, it’s still unclear. The Beast’s piece also neglects to mention what became of the Hosanna church building where, it’s pretty darned clear, no such Satanic rituals ever took place. Another church moved in back in 2006:
Early in the investigation, authorities alleged that the abuse was part of a satanic ritual but later said investigators found no physical evidence of such rituals.
Yates said that his church received the building as it was after detectives combed it for evidence. The church members also have found no evidence of occult rituals.
Yates, too, does not believe occult activities took place at the church. To him, it is simply a building that will once again be used as a church.
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