"TRUE DETECTIVE" AND ITS INVESTIGATION INTO THE LAW AND ORDER OF EXISTENCE

More than a whodunit about a serial killer, “True Detective” is an investigation into the veil of lies, deception, imbalances, illusions and corruptions that constitute Evil, following the quest of 2 detectives across 3 time zones in their pursuit of Truth. In solving a crime they solve their own enquiries into life.

It’s a tale encapsulated in the title sequence of music and graphics where the outside world shifts and transforms inside body contours, so factories are inside faces and body parts enclose landscapes as one becomes the other. A telephone dial is part of a child’s head, the pupil of an eye opens to show the aluminium factory inside it. Body outlines contain thematic images like the American flag, women as sex objects, powerful religious symbols of ritual sacrifice like the cross and the antlered pagan victim, zealous fire and burning (see cross burning), the guitar, a car wheel, motorways and tracks, a range of emotion from the ecstasy of Bert to the agony of Hart, black dark with white light etc.We are left with the image of 2 men either side of a car with a polluting factory in the background. Meanwhile the lyrics tell us this is “far from any road....hidden in the branches of the poisoned creosote...where the stars will be your eyes and the wind will be my hands.”  This dream like sequence creates a unified vision out of multiplicity, reflecting the later mention of Corinthians, “though we are many, we are one”, an understanding that bookends the story.

THE WORLD

There is something wrong. A shadow, barely human, shifts through the cane field in the darkness of an old oak tree. Then fields are burning like an apocalyptic hellfire. Daybreak finds the ultimate violation of our nature which is murder; ritualistic, disturbing, irrational. And this is the world we are about to enter, one that has gone wrong or “off the road”, “gone native” as Conrad says in “Heart of Darkness” about a similar situation.”There’s nothing out here/people here don’t know the outside world exists/This place is like the memory of a town, like there was never anything here but jungle...and those marks like cave paintings/There is something wrong with them but they dont know what it is”, says Rust at various moments. It feels like we are entering a dream world with the slow pace of the episodes and Rusts somnambulant narration, similar to Sheen in “Apocalypse Now”, taking us further and further into a languid otherworld, as much inside us as outside.

Outside, this is frontier country in the same sense as the “American West” of the Western, though it is the bayou of “Southern Man” (see Neil Young song), a hostile wasteland of empty flat marshes and impenetrable tangled forest. Inside, this is frontier country between the conscious and unconscious, facing forces that threaten stability and order. People who live here are on the edge, physically and psychically, between the civilization of the townlands and the nothingness of the sea, between existence and non-existence. The features of this landscape are damaged (school) or burnt out (church) or toxic (aluminium factory) or deceptive (Bunny Ranch) or ominous (Childress house) or divisive like the pipelines that crisscross the delta. Factory chemicals and recreational drugs pollute the inside and the outside, causing ash clouds, headaches, skin reaction, drug/drink addiction, neurological mutations, behaviour problems.

What could have been a paradise of humans living in harmony with nature has become a nightmare of surreal disorder where the wilderness is taking over, vegetation growing in and over the burnt out church/civil war fort or the entrance roads to the Childress house/Bunny ranch. The civil war fort reminds us of another time in American History when there was division and chaos. All of these places are hard to find, as lost in the landscape as the souls of those who inhabit them.

Maggie holds out against this encroachment with her family in her modern house, but the police department has already gone under with corruption. Tuttle says, “in case you hadn’t realised, there’s a war happening behind things” as he holds his hands in an inverted triangle reminiscent of the triangular twig sculptures that pervade most episodes .He means a war of Good and Evil, part of  the Duality that underpins existence.”Thankyou for playing your part”, he tells the two detectives in a use of dramatic irony. However Tuttle is not what he seems, a deception who appears to uphold the law and order of a civilized society when he is in fact undermining it with pagan ritual fantasies, and so “he plays his part” too.

At the centre of this world is the Childress House and civil war fort. Lost in undergrowth in a sinister enchanted “fairytale” forest, this house has long since given up its intention of cultivating behaviour or the land and has become obsessively chaotic with clutter and debris and incest. There seems no method here at all, no rationality, nothing recognisably civilized. The light through the trees is otherworldly. Cut off, there is no clear road to it, no telephone, no connection to the outside world. As the detectives find the road in it closes over behind them. The fort is an impenetrable labyrinth of confusion and tangled branches, a senseless maze with a void skyhole at the centre, all a visual representation of madness. The roads lead like arteries to this place at the centre of a soul landscape as much as any location in Louisiana.

THE PEOPLE

The inhabitants of this nightmare world are “out of order”, defined as “ghostly” or “monsters” or “animals”, inhuman. The drug addict Ladoux appears out of the wilderness, out of nowhere, a  Yeti mythical hybrid with a gas mask and machete, elusive and incoherent, uttering a strange language about “black stars and dreams, Carcosa and the circle of time”. His partner seems to have cryptic godlike abilities, “I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes. It’s corrosive, like acid. There’s a shadow on you”. These ghostlike figures leave no trace or record of their existence, appear and disappear like vapours. Rust is like them, even described as a “ghost” living in an empty white washed hotel room, losing his identity in undercover work for narcotics, so arriving with no record out of Texas, speaking in dead monotones about incoherent abstractions, suffering from drug induced visions and flashbacks. He walks like a programmed automaton, barely human, stiff and mechanical, making production line tin men out of aluminium beer cans, as lifeless as himself.

Others are described as animals, using animal imagery; Tiger Thomas, Bunny Ranch,” rat fuck, they peck your eyes out, Im a coyote in a cartoon, it gets  you like fish hooks, the river rat boys”, Fox and Hound Club, deer head trophies for the boys  and stuffed animal toys for the girls, the animal masks of the pagan ritual. The policemen squabble and drink together in a pack, intensely physical. Hart is like them, impulsive and instinctive, drinking heavily, full of libido for sex, capable of passion and rage and violence with movements that are sudden and animal like, pouncing into his altercation with Rust.”I always liked something wild” he says about his adultery.

In this veil of deception many are wearing masks of appearance that hide their true nature. The “Marshland Medea” mother appears angelic but has murdered her children and is a monster. Austen Ferrar appears holy but embezzles church funds and drinks. Tuttle and his men appear to uphold the Law righteously while breaking it barbarically. Things are upside down and inside out, like the cat nailed inside out to the church door.

The bikers (Iron Crusaders) and evangelicals (Oldtime Religion) are two disparate groups equally deluded, one under the influence of chemical opiates, the other under the influence of religious fervour (“opiate of the masses”). Both are “selling illusions”, creating euphoria (Rust). The illusion of the bikers is a shared puerile fantasy about “cowboy heroics” culminating in the collective euphoria of a drug raid (“I won’t do cowboy anymore/embrace the outlaw life/I knew you were a gunslinger”/ Harts silver cowboy sheriff badge).These bikers are so absorbed in their fantasy “they have no exit plan” or objectivity. The surreal distortion of sight and sound in the raid of episode 4 illustrates that sense of entrapment in their own illusion. Rust has connections to this viewpoint, has experienced it and understands it. He simulates the drug taking and has the password to get in as an insider.

Likewise, the evangelicals are caught in the euphoria of the preacher’s seductive sermon like children accepting a “fairytale that dulls critical thinking”. Like an actor he draws the emotions of the crowd, “This world is a veil and the face you wear is not your own (more dramatic irony in terms of the speaker!), but he knows you”. This religious fervour gives people the illusion of mutual brotherhood, as the young men mutually combine to push the detectives’ car out of the mud. It’s Hart who has connections to this viewpoint, who understands the social values of religion in controlling behaviour within the boundaries of “common good”, social connection over solitary solipsism. He belongs to the community out of which this evangelical “fix” has evolved.

These two groups appear different but provide the same opiate that dulls the human being into a somnambulant existence. But it’s Childress who represents the centre of this world as the ultimate vacuum, brutalised himself by his father and now brutalising others, a “spaghetti monster”, a “giant”. There is no record of his existence as he moves unnoticed amongst everyone as a handyman, a gardener who cultivates as he destroys. He bears the physical and emotional scars of his abuse in a monstrous mixture as he keeps his father suspended in life, abused and loved in a reversal of power. It’s absurd.

Childress is the gardener/maintenance man in the sense that he has created this place at the centre of which is the ritual tree, not a paradise but a twisted chaotic badlands, rotten to the core,an untamed and disorderly Nature of the soul and the landscape.Its the perfect job for the perfect disguise. Childress and his half sister are children as the name implies,stunted in their development,unable to form an adult Self,acting like children out of "Lord of the Flies".Their house is a mess of fantasy and play, the antithesis of his role as a gardener clearing up  and creating order.

Childress has gone beyond human reason to become the duality of a divided Self. So he appears civilized with his paintbrush or on his lawnmower mowing endless spirals, then savage and amoral with his victims and half sister. He imitates the English country gent voice of James Mason (from the Hitchcock thriller, North by Northwest), then roars like a monster. He lurks in the shadows as a disembodied voice like a ghost, then pounces like a predatory animal. He can copy but has no authentic Self because there is nothing inside him, no soul. He is the ultimate “hollow man” of the TS Eliot poem or Conrad’s “ Heart of Darkness”, who, like Kurtz, “ lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, hollow at the core...an extremist...a shadow, a wandering and tormented thing, utterly lost, who had kicked himself loose of the earth, whose soul was mad and knew no restraint, no faith, no fear....an impenetrable darkness, who had gone over the edge in a moment of triumph for the wilderness...lost, just a voice, little more than a voice reciting ....the horror.” When Childress’ head is half blown off in the civil war fort, there is nothing there, nothing inside the skull. It is empty, hollow. He is the emptiness at the centre of a dehumanised world.

Behind the place and its people are forces that govern existence according to universal laws of consciousness. They are presented here in terms of duality, the threefold triads of existence, the circle of Time, Love as a saving Grace. This knowledge is part of a mystical tradition extending back as far as the Upanishads, if not further to the point where the first conscious human created Art in cave paintings. These laws hold everything in place but also confine us. They are the “locked room” of the brain in episode3. “Thats the secret and terrible fate of all life,”says Rust, “you’re trapped in it and cant see out.”

DUALITY

A system of duality, in terms of pairs or partnerships or polarised opposites, pervades all episodes from the oxymoron of the first episode title, “Bright,dark” to the similarly titled finale of “Form and Void”. Tuttle affirms it when he talks about the “war behind things”. The most enduring duality for a detective Noir/Allegory is this battle between Light (Good) and Dark (Evil) that Rust and Hart discuss outside the hospital, that “it’s all just one story, the oldest, light versus dark” as they wear opposing white/black clothes themselves. That camera contrast of black/white or light/dark is central to the series, especially scenes like the bike raid, barn dance, Carcosa, the “Light of Way” school. Its the way the binary Mind works and deliberate chiaroscuro effects create a heightened consciousness.  The luminous fairy tale woods contrast with the shadowy horrors of the Childress house. Otherwise the dominant use of colour throughout focuses on the complimentary opposites of the colour wheel, Green and Gold. So ,production details emphasize duality.

The preferred style of the writer is similarly contrapuntal. In episode 1 the two detectives walk one way in the foreground at the ritual site, while others walk the opposite way in the background. Rust and Hart are “unreliable narrators” as they tell one story about heroically saving the two children while the visuals tell another about covering up an assassination. As Hart drives out of the bike raid in one direction, the police car drives in from the opposite direction. Likewise, dreamy sequences contrast with the mundane, semi sacred euphoric moments contrast with the banal and profane. Even the high light female voice of the title song contrasts with the low heavy male voice as they wind round each other. There is an extraordinary choreographed sequence of Rust and Hart by the ritual tree as they reflect and contrast each other’s movements, mesmerising work. In Episode 4 Rust’s breakthrough of the case contrasts with Hart’s breakdown of a marriage. Hart goes into hospital to find Maggie and is rescued by Rust. Rust goes into the bike club to find Tyrone and is rescued by Hart. They conflict and combine in formations that develop their partnership.

They are partnered opposites in the same way that daughters Audrey and Maisy are the partnered opposites of rebel punk and compliant cheerleader. That split in the view of women is stereotypical to men who seem to innately divide women into good nurturing angel or evil tempting devil (see Hart). Fantasy and reality are a duality; the fantasy of the daughters playing detective or princess is in harmless contrast to the fantasy of the men playing their games of pagan ritual, sex bondage and cowboy heroics. The fantasy diary of Dora Lane contrasts with her everyday life as a prostitute. All these fantasies contrast with the mundane reality of work and school and marriage.

The polluting urban factory and its pipelines/goods trains/tug boats contrasts with the idyllic magical bayou landscape, the lurid mad art of Childress contrasts with the innocent child art on the church walls, faith and doubt are contrasted, woman as angel (Maggie) with man as monster (Childress),  manmade order(state laws)  contrasts with the cosmic order (rule of Nature), community and “common good” with isolation and “solitary wank” (ep 3). The cold of Alaska is contrasted with the heat of Texas. In the civil war fort of Carcosa, the opposite sides of Good and Evil clash to do battle.

These dualities are inevitable because as soon as Mind sees one, it sees the other. They come to mind together spontaneously; black and white, good and evil, male and female, light and dark, up and down, in and out, conscious and unconscious etc. The most developed duality here is between Rust and Hart who are opposites in their partnership, defined so even by their names.

RUST AND HART

Rust Cohl (coal) is named after lifeless minerals, connected to the IRON crusaders who see themselves as knights on bikes. His eyes are “brittle” and his soul is “corrosive”. “Rust” denotes the “corrosion” of his metal/mettle. In sufi terminology the “rusted” self needs to be polished if it is to find itself and shine, and there is this sense that Rust is mining himself for answers. His body movements are rigid like a metal automaton, especially his robotic walk and dancing.

He appears as an unknown unattached stranger out of nowhere, like Shane or Harmonica in “Once Upon a time in the West” or the avenging cowboy in High Plains Drifter, who are all haunted by past memories that have to be exorcised.  Rust is haunted by the death of his daughter, “spared the sin of being a father”, an “introvert/pessimist who doesnt mind being alone”. This grief has left him unbalanced, “sometimes i thought I lost it, sometimes i felt mainlined to the secret truth of the universe”. There is nothing personal about him in his bare whitewashed hotel room where he is practically celibate. He has lived a dangerous life and killed 3 men with his gun ,considered a threat to the community as an outsider, (“I can do things with impunity”).He is arrogant and “incapable of doubt”, a man of abstinence, including alcohol, “conflict orientated”, says Laurie.

He is all MIND and conscious, an over active mind that will not let him sleep, trapping him in endless convoluted abstractions that sound good but leave him unmoved because he has “lost heart” and is dead inside since his daughter died. Instead of sleeping he dreams or drifts or has visions, so he seeks release from this state in drugs.  This lack of feeling makes him close to those characters who are “ghostlike” and dead inside, “cut off”, but his mindfulness also enables his highly successful interview technique of detached mental manipulation. It gives him powers of observation and deduction which he keeps carefully logged in a notebook (like Goren in Criminal Intent), but he has no empathy.  At the meths cook house its Rust who THINKS their way out of the situation that Hart has created in blind rage. He also reminds the bikers to “think out” their plan. The captain tells him, “however smart you think you are, you are not as smart as you think”, because ultimately intelligence involves emotions too. Hart sees and communicates this imbalance, “I notice you have a tendency to myopia, tunnel vision/you jump to conclusions”.

However, Rust’s insights can be astounding, “We’re all bad men, but we keep the other bad men from the door/Its important to let go, to realise its all the same dream inside a locked room, a dream about being a person-and like a lot of dreams theres a monster at the end of it./There’s Grace in this world”. He knows these things but he cannot feel them, which is why his “Hugmug” is so ironic.

In contrast, Martin Hart (heart) has a name that is alive and organic like his pulsating extravert nature. “A people person”, he is part of the community and respected with strong family connections that bind him to “family days”. He shows compassion and empathy with everyone, befriending Rust when others wont. However his powerful instinctive EMOTIONS have put him off balance, especially when he gets drunk, as when he beats up Audrey’s “rat boys”, or reacts to shoot Ladoux, when his jealousy takes over, when his worry over Rust leads him into trouble at the bike club. He has a conventional domesticated marriage, never fired his gun or shot anyone (see  Joe in “Shane”). Hart does the practical paperwork while Rust does the headwork. In the car, when Rust “asks for directions”, Hart would prefer to “follow his nose”. Hart is innately optimistic and life-affirming where is Rust is pessimistic, at times nihilistic.

So Hart’s heart is in the right place but his head isn’t! Rust continuously reminds him about that lack of reflection until he realises it himself, “Infidelity is one kind of sin but my true weakness was inattention”, he says, suffering from “ the detective’s problem of not seeing what is under your nose”. He just doesn’t think and “loses his head”. Driven by his libido for sexual experimentation, he justifies adultery as a necessary release to balance his marriage and job, a rationalisation for his lack of control. The mental Rust seeks solace in drugs, but the physical Hart seeks solace in sex. Even with Maggie he would rather touch than talk.

His work style is confrontational and physical, often beating up suspects. Yet he is full of the doubt of a middle aged man in crisis, trying to juggle a wife and a mistress and failing at both. While Rust is likened to a “ghost”, Hart is likened to an animal with relaxed natural body movements, comfortable at dancing or making love, raging with heavy breathing. He is full of life, instinctive and physical.

So the two detectives work together as opposite sides in a dynamic partnership of duality. They move in contrast, or they stand as one, almost identical as they are down by the harbour with the crab fisherman.

THREEFOLD UNITY/CIRCULAR TIME/ LOVE

The sense of a threefold system holding us in existence is most visibly represented by the three time zones of 1995,2002 and 2012,in the three interviews of Rust, Hart and Maggie, and in the triangular twig sculptures("traps") that appear in most episodes  like a reminder, but also in the triangle Tuttle gestures  with his hands as he talks about what is behind everything and in the triangular mast shape of the boat where Rust and Hart ensnare the retired sheriff, also in the triangular crab traps in the jetty. The twig sculptures are three sided traps deliberately placed as markers like pyramids.

The threefold system traps us but also keeps us suspended in a balance that avoids the extremes of duality, “trapped in a nightmare we keep waking up into”(Rust). We see this develop in the mediation of Maggie who stands between Rust and Hart, and also between the two black detectives as guidance. The black detectives rely on her to “give them some perspective because if its wrong we want it put right”, which she does, “I knew Rust to be a good man, an intense man but he had integrity and was responsible.... He knew exactly who he was and there was no talking him out of it. Marty never knew himself so didn’t know what he wanted”.

Hart considers the threesome of himself, his mistress and Maggie as a healthy release that balances his marriage with work. He doesnt see it as a problem of rationalisation that is causing his disintegration. There is also a threesome going on with Rust, Hart and Maggie, one that brings a unity despite Hart’s jealousy. The three of them are constantly passing information between each other when one isn’t communicating.  The third presence is a conduit or mediator, a binding glue. In this way Maggie completes their totality. And its well documented in mysticism that a man cannot reach totality without a woman or the feminine because women are by nature considered closer to  totality,(see Ibn Arabi,12th Century or modern use of anima in Jungian psychotherapy).

That understanding of a threefold system is ancient and arises everywhere in triads that complete themselves; sky,earth,sea/ above,between, below/ father,mother,child/ Body,Mind,Soul/animal, vegetable,mineral/ past,present,future/ lover,beloved,love/ subject,object,verb/Life,death,limbo.(see Upanishads)

Time as circle or spiral is a concept that preoccupies Rust in his abstractions and Childress in his spiral mowing of the lawn and pagan symbol. “Time is a flat circle”, says Rust, “where we do things over and over again forever”. Ladoux also talks about “time as a circle”. Rust watches the spiral mumuration of the starlings, moving as one in that formation. The labyrinth of Carcosa is a multi cursal spiral winding in to the centre. A circular twig wreath with hollow centre has been left at the Ritual Tree site. Rust’s cosmic vision in the fort is spiral, “outside our dimension is eternity looking down on us as a sphere or circle”, he says, “We process Time linearly, but outside us it doesnt exist”. The school girls spin on themselves in a spiral as Childress watches, captivated. So we are trapped in our existence of duality, triads, spiral and circles; a geometry.

It’s only in moments that we get a glimpse of something else, a greater reality beyond all this, something transcendent, and whatever the preparation these moments come as a gift, an act of Grace, involving an energy that is felt as Love. This realisation is part of the two detectives’ journey, “there’s a Grace in this world but you have to ask for it/nothing but Love”, says Rust.

None of the ideas presented here are new, but part of a perennial knowledge passed down in stories and art, from the first awakenings of forest mystics in India over 2000years ago to fairy stories we tell our children today. A 12^thcentury mystic Lorca is mentioned in episode 6, but it’s possible the main influence here might be the 14^th Century Franciscan mystic, Ramon Llull of Majorca, since there are so many similarities.

Whilst composing a love song, Llull’s conversion epiphany was a vision of Jesus suspended in midair just like the portrayal of Rust looking like Jesus on his hospital bed suspended in the night sky amongst the stars with all boundaries transparent. This is also the moment of Rusts epiphany, seeing beyond form or outline. It was Love that brought Rust to this point too, love of his daughter Sofia ( a name that means “wisdom”).

Llull was an artist with a unified vision in which apparent contradictions of opposing forces are resolved in combinations. It was a system of correlations, correspondences and alignments similar to the Plato’s  “Chain of Being”, where the outside and inside worlds are recognised as connected,(song at end of episode 2, “the kingdom of heaven is within you”). To illustrate this Llull drew a series of Enneagrams based on interlocking concentric circles. When rotated they should reveal all possible truth about a subject of enquiry. In his art he diffused his system of circles, triads or triangles that he called “life traps”, and relational pairs (duality).When unified,  it is a system based on co-operation, not competition, and evidence for it are decipherable clues scattered in the natural world, (“I see signs”, the song says at the end of episode 1). This web of interconnection traps us and sustains us into a dynamic creation, (see “Book of the gentile and the three wise men”,1275).

Llull wrote books about chivalry and the Beloved where the soul is defined in the triad of Love(action), Beloved (object) ,and Lover(subject).He used the “Tree” as a symbol of central eternal knowledge bearing branches of subsidiary knowledge interconnected to form a whole. The “Flowers” that come and go on the 5 symbolic trees were blooms of fluctuating knowledge. In this soul landscape  the Intellect guides the traveller through as consciousness, but ultimately it cannot know truth until it lets go and surrenders to the awareness of Love.

All these concepts are uncannily reflected in “True Detective” ;the duality of the 2 detectives, the Sacred Oak Tree (solid and central), flowers(used  deliberately as a motif throughout on womens’ clothing, wall paper, and the dialogue of the sister),the triangular twig sculpture traps ("life traps" or "bird traps"), Rusts final vision as he lets go of his ego in the abandonment that is the experience of Love.

Llull wrote in Majorca at the same time as Rumi was writing similar discourses on Love in Konya, projected into the spiral movements of his whirling dervishes as they let go and lose consciousness in dance. But that sense of universal coincidence is common to all mysticisms in all locations for all time, because the psyche, like the tree core, doesnt change. It is itself the unitive presence, something Carl Jung understood from his research into mysticism before amalgamating it into his modern psychotherapy based on Individuation. And it is curious to see elements of modern “psychobabble” mentioned throughout “True Detective” too, (“closure, fulfilment, entitlement, loss, denial, self-loathing, process, projection, persona”, etc).

(Another influence is the myth of Theseus and the minotaur whose origins were in the fertility rites of a ritual marriage by a ceremonial oak with women wearing antler horns and men in bull masks.)

So we come to the heart and soul (!) of “True Detective”, the journey of Rust and Hart, which is also our journey. The language changes according to Time and Place ( ie.Self/soul/psyche), but the journey is always the same.

THE JOURNEY

“What’s going on? / What is wrong with you two? / Without me there is no you/ I asked for it to be investigated/ We’re not that kind of police sir / Who is then? “

So what is going on and who are these detectives?

.........

There is something different about these two detectives suggesting they have a greater significance than their role in a murder investigation. Every step they take to uncover the truth uncovers something about themselves as heroic travellers on an epic journey, making roads into regions of consciousness that will bring them to a realisation of their true nature and the world they inhabit.

We are constantly reminded of this “road trip” in the presence of the car that is so crucial to their police work, that Hart designates “a place of contemplation”. This is their means of transportation in the same way as their consciousness transports them. It’s how they get about, inside and outside. They interact inside the car while the landscape of Louisiana flickers past them through the windows. They stand either side of it against the landscape, as they stand either side of the consciousness they will investigate.  “You have a long road to climb” says Maggie, meaning inside as well as outside.

At first the polluting factory is far away in the distant, then in close up as they get closer to the truth, then they are out of the car and standing next to it. They drive up and down, criss crossing the landscape like the pipelines, connecting. We see them on motorways connecting towns, on tracks between towns and wetlands. Its their way out of the bike raid, and their way in to Carcosa. Through its windows we see Rust’s visionary experiences, by day and by night. After the altercation they are no longer in the same car, but in separate cars going their own way. Then they come together again in the same car as they recombine to seek the killer monster. After the encounter with Carcosa we dont see them in the car because they have reached their destination.

So the role of the car is as important as it was to Kerouac in his Modern American road trip novel, as the boat was to Ulysses or Jason’s Argonauts or Marlow in “Heart of Darkness” on their adventures, as the horse was to Quixote or Parsifal in their quest narratives. As Rust says, “this is all one story, the oldest”, the EPIC journey of the soul/Self in the world. It is repeated in stories where travellers take the Way like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Nights Dream”, or Attar’s “Conference of the Birds”, or The Wizard of Oz. In these tales the protagonist is always a “seeker” and the frame of mind must be open to enquiry, otherwise the story cannot start. Literary epics begin with a question that turns the hero inwards, from action to reflection (see Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita), a process needed to complete the journey. In the Grail stories of England the Parsifal is not ready to ask the right question until the third time he encounters the grail vision, so he goes round again until he is ready.In fairy stories it often takes 3 efforts to complete a task (see Rumplestiltskin).

In “True Detective” episode 1 starts with the right question for Hart, “what do you think?” This forces the emotional Hart into reflection. For years Rust and Hart have been all over the place, crisscrossing time and place trying to locate a killer monster, “you got a specific location or we just going to wander around til we find it?”, says Hart.  “I drift”, says Rust, “maybe you travelled the same circles, wake up and dont know what happened?”, just as the transgender Toby doesnt know if he is dreaming or not. They move in and out of time zones and memories, meandering about aimlessly, spiralling, “paying attention to the wrong clues”, with Rust uttering his circuitous abstractions like a “stream of consciousness” leading nowhere.

As two sides of the Self, Rust and Hart begin with limited partial viewpoints that have sent them off balance. They are both experiencing a crisis of identity, inside and outside. Hart has lost his head in a struggle to recover his youth in escapades with a mistress, and Rust has lost heart over the devastating loss of his daughter. They are both lost and searching. “Start asking the right questions then”, says Rust to end episode 1, because the opening question is no good for Rust who thinks too much. The right question has to awaken his emotions and go beyond thought.

The story proceeds to chart the journey of these two detectives as they develop a relationship that will restore order to themselves, to the world where a murder has been committed, and to the three disjointed time zones where the questions are being asked. All of these things will come together in the present in the place that is both a civil war fort and the mental construct of Carcosa.

Rust and Hart get to know themselves as opposites as if in a mirror, and as mirrors they reflect back the image each cannot see alone. As they open to each other, they become self-consciously aware and save each other, as Rust saves Hart in the hospital and Hart saves Rust in the bike raid. Hart tells Rust, “you’re making it too complicated, a maze you cant get out of”, (just like the maze of too many modern cop shows with displays of cleverness!). Rust forces Hart to reflect on his impulsive behaviour and its consequences, “much as my sin was infidelity, my real weakness was inattention”.

(animal meets ghost)

The journey into the Self takes them deeper. Its in the middle of one of his detached interrogations that Rust loses his head in an emotional outburst over mention of the “yellow king” and the realisation that he made a mistake and is not infallible. His emotions are also aroused over Maggie leading to the altercation with Hart, his partner of 7 years (the number of completion). The split is a turning point that changes everything. However the job is not done, and after 10years separation, Rust seeks help from Hart to complete the task, inside and outside.

 “Help me/ How?” is the right frame of mind for the last part of the journey, just as it was for Parsival in the medieval grail stories, a state of mind that opens  them up to each other’s vulnerability. When they reunite they are different men,reversed. “Sometimes I was aware I lost my mind”, says Rust.”There was a time I thought it was all in my head, but it passed”.  Hart says, “I was a different person. I lost it. Im back”. Hart has separated from his wife and the police force, lives a quiet solitary life, doesnt drink. Rust has started drinking and socializing in bars, his storage unit is full of artifacts, as his head is full of ideas. “I dont want to KNOW anything anymore” says Rust. Only Hart is close enough to get inside Rusts head, as only Hart is close enough to be allowed inside his storage unit. Likewise Rust now moves into Hart’s office as they start to build their case.

Now “there is no other way round it” as everything comes together in the Present, focused. They have the concrete evidence of the video that motivates them. What Rust has “is conjecture” but Hart can get access to concrete records and proof.Hart can make sense of Rusts obsessive collection of thoughts. What was an animal hunt with “tracking” and “trapping” imagery  on a “creole nature trail” culminating in the cook house shoot out now becomes a paper trail  and “laying a trap” of a different kind, using “case files, background checks and lists”. Despite Rust’s conjecture its Hart who “establishes the connection” between the green ears and the green paint. He is now thinking his way through.

As they drive deep into the forest towards Childress and the centre of themselves, Rust returns to the topic of identity. Before the bike raid he talked about the skin peeled off a face before being forced to look in the mirror at its bloody mess, the removal of the persona or mask we wear until the only thing left is Awareness. Now he talks about the human struggle, “where everybody has a choice” in “crafting their own identities”. Before he was fatalistic and nihilistic, despising the human condition and advocating its extinction. Now he affirms the power of choice and responsibility, the importance of “doing the right thing”, the importance of human qualities at their best, not animal or ghost. If they hang onto that thought it will take them through the labyrinth, as Theseus held onto the thread (clew)that took him through.

(the malformed couple at the centre of this world that has "gone Wrong"

The surreal journey to the centre of the Self in the fort- labyrinth is to slay the savage presence of the monster-minotaur, the thing that threatens our humanity. Childress lurks there in the shadows, a disembodied voice divided into two tones, seductive and ferocious. “Come down with me little prince, be a witness to my journey, take off the mask”, he says. Inhumanity is the evil that makes the monster here in thetangled fortifications of the civil war fort which is also the mental construction of Carcosa, an image inside us visualised outside, a fantasy that is also a reality created by Childress. Its a place designed to confuse and puzzle with deliberate blind paths and clues (clews) that may help along the way, as we find in the perplexities of life or even detective shows! The labyrinth art is a tangle of utter madness made by a monster of our own making.

Holding onto the clews, the thread of human life, will get them in and out safely, but if they let go they are lost forever. Rust knows this because he saw the faces of victims who had “let go” in their last moment and found release. For one moment Rust does let go, loses consciousness in a visionary distraction that links the centre of his being with the cosmos, and thats the moment Childress attacks him in the head, his weak spot. It knocks him unconscious as Childress turns to axe Hart in the heart, his weak spot. Childress appears huge like a giant in the spotlight, an eternal image of evil, “We’ve been here a long time/ all around you, before you were born and after you die”. Then Rust recovers enough to blow half his skull off, only to reveal there is nothing there, nothing inside, the Being has long gone and the centre of the labyrinth is a cavity that matches the man who made it.From that moment on Childress just seems to disappear as his hold over things is broken. So the spell of Carcosa, a mental construct as much as a place, is broken and they are free. When the monster was confronted there was nothing there.  Drained, they await their rescue by the outside world as it re-forms to retrieve them. The camera pans out, sweeping across the landscape and all that they have encountered there, from the close-up of Carcosa to the panorama of the bayou.We take the path back out.

The experience leaves Rust in a coma, as it left others catatonic or entranced or unconscious, some unable to return from the abyss. Hart is also in a paralysed state of shock. They are saved and restored by two visitations that come to them through the Grace of Love in female form,(see anima).

When Hart wakes up he finds his family united around his bed. The Love of his life, Maggie, still wearing the wedding ring, has made this moment possible, and his face lights up with pure joy. He bursts into tears and smiles. In this unified moment he is radiant, “Now Ill be fine” he says.

It’s a woman who graces Rust with her love too, not a lover but a daughter aptly named Sofia, after “wisdom”. It’s the experience of her continued presence in a vision that gives him the strength to repel the forces that would cause his disintegration. He always KNEW that “death was not the end” but now he can FEEL it.  “There was a moment in the darkness, whatever I was reduced to, a vague awareness, I could feel my definitions and beneath that a deeper kind, like a substance. I know my daughter waited for me, like I was a part of everything I ever loved. All I had to do was let go and I did. I disappeared. I could feel her love there, nothing but Love”, he says. He is describing the transcendent unitive experience that follows the “dark night of the soul” on its journey towards “enlightenment”.

Thats the journey of  the psyche/soul mapped by mysticism or Jungian depth psychology, the journey of Rust and Hart too. They are both transformed and enlightened by the ordeal, realising a greater reality than what divided them. Hart has tempered his exuberance with caution, “seems to me the dark has more territory”. Rust has restored hope and optimism, “you’re looking at it wrong, once there was only dark, if you ask me the light is winning”. So, Rust answers his own question by changing his mind and completing the story.

Its the image of human nature that matters, how we integrate that image instead of alienating it.  “All that we are is the result of what we have imaged”, says the Buddha in Dhammapada, “This is an eternal Law”. That involves choice and responsibility and “doing right” by the human endeavour, a development that begins with the Self. Rust, Hart and Childress make different choices that create the worlds they inhabit.

 “True Detective” investigates the deep mysteries of the human Soul/Psyche/Self in its struggle to regulate itself in the world, a struggle that never ends, “You may search the limits of your soul without ever finding them, go down any road you will; such a profound reality it has”, (Heraclitus fragment 45).

.............

In 2005 I wrote a study of the two detectives, Goren and Logan, in “Law and Order Criminal Intent” that reached similar conclusions about them as partners in a duality.

It can be found here : http://janethyland2.blogspot.ie/2014/06/the-mothers-city-state-see-to.html

Look at subsection, GOREN AND INTEGRATED MAN:

“For the Truth is we are not a polarization, we are a unity. Behind the veils of lies, deceptions, imbalances, illusions and errors that constitute our Evil is that plain Truth, and the Good Sons, the Truth Lovers, know that. Only in the self-abandonment of an energy like Love can those sons willingly surrender their Egos to reach clarity and integration. While the other brothers create ever-widening divides and alienation, these sons restore equilibrium to both inner and outer worlds. They revitalise society, co-ordinate the Soul, and restore us to our significance. For in the end all that is outside is also inside. We are The Mothers, The City State, and the Integrated Hero. The battle rages within and without, and what we learn in one world is applicable to the other. Evil is that which pulls us apart, while The Good are those forces that put us together again, but those forces have to be more than “all the kings horses and all the kings men” of the proverbial nursery rhyme.They have to be Truth Lovers like Goren.”

This blog contains collected writings on Law and Order Criminal Intent from 2005, including one on the role of a threesome in the episode “Silencer”.

The actor who played Tuttle in "True Detective" is the actor who played the captain in the last season of Criminal Intent! He delivers with irony in both!

Also on that blog is a similar analysis of the spaghetti westerns and their soul landscape. 
See http://janethylandandplainpaintings.blogspot.ie/2012/09/cowboys-and-spaghetti-dish-made-in_9.html             The scenes of final encounters in "Once Upon a Time in the West" remind me of "True Detective".
Harmonica is like Rust.

This is what i call  Archetypalist Literature, the language of the Soul telling its own story.

(all photos reproduced here care of HBO. Sadly I cant find any photos of the essential moment of unity at the bedside of Hart when his face lights up with pure joy.! Hart has such an expressive alive face where as Rust is a blank,deadened.Brilliant acting from both actors.)


ps. Wow! Are there 3 trunks growing out of one in that oak tree? Brilliant!
yes it does...look! Its broken into three......ha! Someone knows their stuff!

Jay Sanders,the actor who unites "True Detective" with final season of Law and Order,Criminal Intent!
I love the fact he is in both because they are linked,in a way.