COMMENTARY

True Detective 2 is a pretenious, mopey mess

Gangster and businessman Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) meets with detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) in season two of True Detective.
Gangster and businessman Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) meets with detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) in season two of True Detective.

"My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve," declares washed-up detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) in the early going of the second season of True Detective.

I'm not sure anyone deserves the brooding mess that the series creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto is giving us after spending the show's first series marinating us in bayou flop-sweat. But goodness, is True Detective -- which braises its characters in a sauce of toxic masculinity and brown liquor, hooks us in with clues to a larger mythology, and constantly signals its own literary intentions -- the show we deserve given the terms we've used to define the so-called Golden Age of television.

This year, Pizzolatto has packed up the stakes he planted in Louisiana and decamped for Los Angeles County, setting this series in the fictional city of Vinci. Ray is a fallen cop with a fondness for whisky who owes gangster and businessman Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), who fingered the man Frank says raped Ray's now-ex wife (Abigail Spencer). Ray took retribution, an act he declares "a right, by any natural law," but the act hasn't endeared him to his ex, and it's part of the general shadow that hangs over him, making him a target for investigation.

State authorities get their chance to dig a little deeper when the jurisdictional issues around Vinci's brutally murdered city manager lead to the creation of a task force that includes Ray, Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), who appears to have read a lot of Andrea Dworkin and tucks knives into her outfits, and Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a highway patrolman who has a mother with a serious set of boundary issues and some psychosexual challenges of his own.

Once again, there's someone powerful behind all of this trouble. But as with last season, Pizzollato's idea of how to signal that Vinci's mayor is corrupt is to decorate his office with a gold-plated model of an industrial facility, and to make it clear that he has swiped Don Draper's barware and the accompanying alcoholism.

Detective Rust Cohle's (Matthew McConaughey) monologues worked so well last year in part because they existed in a context where, most of the time, the other characters spoke like recognizable human beings who employed humor, irony, and self-awareness, and each had distinctive speech patterns. But many of the characters in the second season of True Detective sound fundamentally the same, combining garbled grammar with five-dollar words (or at least five-dollar ideas).

The easy response to this is to suggest that Pizzolatto is just working within the confines of hard-boiled fiction, where the women are dames, the men are cynical philosophers, and the children are all devices for their parents' psychological development. But the thing about hard boiling, whether it's television or eggs, is that the technique actually requires a certain amount of delicacy.

Last season, True Detective was marinated in a shared horror mythology about a fictional city named Carcosa, which shows up, among other places, in the Robert Chambers short story collection "The King in Yellow." Carcosa was theoretically located somewhere in the Hyades star cluster, which draws its name from Greek mythology, specifically the daughters of the titan Atlas.

This year, the Greeks have stepped to the fore. Ani's father (David Morse), who is washed up from his period as the leader of a 1970s-style experiment in communal living, lectures at the Panticapaeum Institute, which also happens to be the last place a missing woman worked as a housekeeper. Panticapaeum was an ancient Greek city in Croatia, remembered today mostly for a distinctive pottery style, its silver coins, and its role as the place where Mithridates VI committed suicide after leading a series of wars against the Roman Republic.

Ani's real name turns out to be Antigone, which ties her to a rather grisly pedigree, though it doesn't seem like much of a leap that a quasi cult leader might link his daughter to a woman who committed suicide rather than be buried alive after burying her brother against a king's orders. Her sister, more fortuitously, is named Athena.

Who knows what this jumble augurs, though? Last season, all the talk of Carcosa and the Yellow King gave way to a madman's fantasy and Rust Cohle's religious reawakening. Pizzolatto may have earned viewers' confidence that his explorations of hypermasculinity will pay off at some point, but even in the first season, his handling of the mythology that made True Detective seem more significant was more of a bust.

I suppose it's some sort of accomplishment that that first season of True Detective trained me to pick up on all these crumbs, but I have little confidence that they'll make a satisfying meal. But True Detective doesn't exactly feel like a feast television's revival was supposed to deliver.

Style on 07/05/2015

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