True Detective is a show about precarious life
as much as it is about catching a serial killer.
True Detective's big reveal—which does not come
when Rust and Marty catch the deranged, stereotypical murderer, but accumulates
from the title sequence—is that the southern Louisiana land- and waterscape
lies at the nexus of corporate-produced inequality, fragile bodies, toxic
waste, indigence, political bullying, and an unruly ecosystem.
But
this show is neither documentary nor polemic, only mappings. To quote Patrick
Clair's pitch for the opening sequence, "We've zoned in on the idea of
personal geographies."
True Detectiveis a show about men living in a
brutally masculine world
True Detective is built on the "women in refrigerators" trope that structures the genres it pays homage to—principally
the hardboiled mystery à la Raymond Chandler and the film noir à la Double Indemnity and Chinatown. It uses women as both things-to-be-saved and erotic obstacles for the
male leads, a sexism typical for much mystery/thriller-based narrative media.
After years of decline and in the face of mounting evidence that everything
from policework and state groundskeeping to meth and murder exists in a continuous
ecology of violence and power, Marty and Rust become capable of doing only one
thing right: taking out the monster made possible by all the other bad things.
True Detective's actual villain lies everywhere and
nowhere, among the apparatuses of power that structure life in Louisiana. 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. When Rust kills him,
he's only killed an effigy. When Rust survives—a thing he did not want to do—he
does so knowing that his actions did not alter the landscape in Louisiana
The
influence of Petrochemical
America does not stay within the title sequence, but seeps
into the story, creating a heterogeneous geography, a palimpsest Louisiana with
varied, distinct meanings and genealogies.
Todos son extractos del mejor artículo que he encontrado. Se halla aquí.
La cabecera y su andamiaje están aquí y aquí. Y la inquietante Carcosa, aquí y aquí.
