Edia Connole - True Detection

True Detection

TRUE DETECTION
the editors, authors, and Schism Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0692277379 ISBN-10: 0692277374
Cover design by Caoimhe Doyle and Kathy Tynan.Interior images by Kathy Tynan.
CONTENTS
I. Black Stars

Gary J. Shipley M ONSTER AT THE E ND :
P ESSIMISM S L OCKED R OOMS AND
I MPOSSIBLE C RIMES 1

Edia Connole C ONTEMPLATING THE
C RUCIFIXION : C OHLE AND D IVINE G LOOM 28Nicola Masciandaro I A M N OT S UPPOSED T O
B E H ERE : B IRTH AND M YSTICAL D ETECTION 65
II. Separate From Itself
Fintan Neylan T HE L ABOUR OF THE P ESSIMIST :D ETECTING E XPIRATION S A RTIFICE 76
Paul J. Ennis T HE A TMOSPHERICS OF
C ONSCIOUSNESS 96

Ben Woodard N OTHING G ROWS IN THE R IGHT D IRECTION : S CALING THE L IFE OF THE
N EGATIVE 105

III. There Was A Videotape

Niall McCann T RUE D ETECTIVE , J EAN -L UC
G ODARD AND O UR I MAGE C ULTURE : T HIS
M AY W ELL BE H EAVEN , THIS H ELL S MELLS
THE S AME 118

Daniel Fitzpatrick T RUE D ICK ... T HE
A CCELERATED A CCEPTANCE AND P REMATURE C ANONISATION OF T RUE D ETECTIVE 131

IV. Its Just One Story
Scott Wilson T HE N ONSENSE OF D ETECTION :
T RUTH B ETWEEN S CIENCE AND THE R EAL 146

Erin K. Stapleton T HE C ORPSE IS THE
T ERRITORY : T HE B ODY OF D ORA K ELLY
L ANGE IN T RUE D ETECTIVE 164

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle T HE F LAT D EVIL N ET : M APPING Q UANTUM
N ARRATIVES IN T RUE D ETECTIVE 179

Daniel Colucciello Barber A FFECT H AS N O
S TORY 196
V. And ClosureNo, No, No
Dominic Fox KOYNTLY BIGYLED 213

Charlie Blake, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, Gary J. Shipley
B IRD T RAP 215

E DGE TO E DGE 221Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle T HE C HOLE S TORY 246

NB: Throughout this volume, the abbreviation TD, followedby numerals indicating season and episode, respectively, isused to refer to True Detective, written by Nic Pizzolatto anddirected by Cary Joji Fukunaga (HBO, 2014):

TD, 1:1 - THE LONG BRIGHT DARK
TD, 1:2 - SEEING THINGS
TD, 1:3 - THE LOCKED ROOM
TD, 1:4 - WHO GOES THERE
TD, 1:5 - THE SECRET LIFE OF ALL FATE
TD, 1:6 - HAUNTED HOUSE
TD, 1:7 - AFTER YOUVE GONETD, 1:8 - FORM AND VOID

To realize that all your life, all your love, all your hateall your memory, all your pain, it was all the samething. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room.

TD, 1:31
I NTRODUCTION

Anything can possess novelty for a short time, even the man who arrives to tell you there is none; but the trick is to stay when thenovelty has worn out, or to never see it in the first place; the trickis to be in the locked room without being there, to be both alive and dead, to wonder how you got there while knowing theres nowhere else, that the locked room is the human world, and that any solution to your predicament can only disappoint: Facedwith the insoluble, I breathe at last.2 At the adverse point of noreturn, there is only an empty detection: logic thrown into the abyss and spewed up intact, the mind broken up inside the impossible. If lassitude is allowed to prevail, it soon becomes itsown motivation, and there is no longer anything outside it, andthe locks are an irrelevance, for the occupant is now too weary toreach the door.

1 This essay was previously published online by Bright Lights FilmJournal, http://brightlightsfilm.com/monster-end-pessimisms-lockedrooms-impossible-crimes-true-detective/.
2 E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, trans. Richard Howard(New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), 85.

The pessimist knows how every life is acted, knows the erased space behind their lives. He has acted to return, to forgethes acting, to disappear. And he disappears in a room: where hes the murder and the murderee, where his status, thoughinexplicable from without, is morbidly certain from within. Possible solutions to any locked-room mystery come under tengeneral headings,3 all at work in True Detective, and all of themare self-defeating and ultimately defy the power of detection toarrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The end has already happened, and all Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart can do is arrangethe bodies in a pattern that makes them look less like bodies,more like things that might have existed in bodies, if those bodieshadnt been born human.

1. A CCIDENT

Certain coincidences (orchestrated or otherwise)accumulate to induce a death that appears to imply asecond agency in the room: Detection relies on there being cogent human reasons behind a crime.Pessimism spurns this methodology.

The pessimists arguments (or rather, his declarations, orrather, his suspirations) are regurgitations of sensation, and assuch they are always imperfect replicas: they are the detectiveshunch that always refuses to become mere words. Like theanxiety detection seeks to overcome, each of its disenchantedmurmurs tries to find a justification for itself, and in order to doso seizes upon anything, the vilest pretexts, to which it clingsonce it has invented them.4 The accident cannot be allowed toexist: an unarticulated mantra underpinning the human world we made but cannot solve, to which pessimism is the solution, the solution to the accident, by its simply letting it be.

3 Though John Dickson Carr lists seven, with five sub-categories, in TheThree Coffins (New York: Charter Books, 1935), 160-173, and Robert Adey lists a full twenty in Locked-Room Murders (Minneapolis:Crossover Press, 1991), 275, the ten I have chosen cover all possible solutions, if with less specificity in places.
4 Cioran, Trouble With Being Born, 84.

Pessimism like depression attends to the details, an attention grown so assiduous that it becomes itself a variety ofpain. And again and again Hart remarks on Cohles myopia, hisblinders, his tunnel vision, but this ridiculed focus is Cohles onlyretreat from the whole that would otherwise consume him.Without the blinders on he wouldnt move. He talks the grand non-scheme but needs to exist in the minutiae, in the possibility of a solution, even while accepting that the entire edifice of argumentation is little more than a comfort blanket, a groundless distraction. And he does this because suffering only comes from outside the focus, and he cant make it mean anything outside ofitself, so he must remain inside it, in the locked room, but looking in as if from outside.

It is no coincidence, then, that Cohle and Hartsinvestigations mirror the chorology of the bayou, leading themback to the shallow, slow moving, boggy, ill-defined morass fromwhere they started, to a place where it is hard to discern wherethe bodies of water start and end, the shoreline always penumbral, always contingent, always shifting. Although, its notuntil the last episode that Cohle acknowledges the sunless and corrosive drag of the fact of things just happening: I could feelmy definitions fading. And beneath that darkness theres another kind, and it was deeper, warm, like a substance.5