. Welcome to the Brutal Buzz, I am IndieVisible and will be your host.
As Sunday’s finale looms, Nic Pizzolatto discusses the first season’s arc, crazy fan theories, misogyny, female nudity on the show, and Season 2.
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.
HBO/Lacey Terrell
HBO's True Detective was always going to be a big deal because of the Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson of it all — but it's safe to say that viewers' obsessive behavior around the show has come in at the high end of expectations. Each week, creator Nic Pizzolatto's grim, literary time-jumping crime story — in which McConaughey plays the haunted, philosophizing Rust Cohle, and Harrelson plays the gone-to-seed good ol' boy Marty Hart (who is smarter than he looks, to his chagrin) — is picked through and expanded upon by a vigilant audience of 11 million. And yes, it's also possible to enjoy True Detective even if you have no idea who the Yellow King is, or whether time is indeed a flat circle. (Or not enjoy it: If one gift True Detective has given us, it's the vibrant, fun conversations around the show's excellence; its provocations have also birthed intelligent dissent.)
The eighth of Season 1's eight episodes airs Sunday, and the story of Rust, Marty, and the serial murder case that has framed a 17-year period of their lives will conclude. And so will McConaughey's and Harrelson's tenures on the show; next season will reboot with another arc and another cast created by Pizzolatto. (Though True Detective hasn't been officially renewed, as you will see below, it will be.)
This interview was conducted over email — Pizzolatto's choice — and we discussed the season so far, as well as where Episode 7 left us (so stop reading now if you're not caught up). We also talked about charges of misogyny against the show; pay-cable's "clear mandate" (his words) to include nudity; satanic ritual abuse; whether the show will continue to have one director for all of the episodes, as it did this season with Cary Fukunaga; and where Season 2 might go.
Very might: Pizzolatto can get vague with the best of them. Except when he's telling you that — for sure — neither Rust nor Marty will turn out to be the killer on Sunday night. So stop it with that.
Let's begin with the ending of Episode 7, when we see Errol, who is, or had better be, the Spaghetti Monster. How did you build to that moment, and why did you decide to end the episode on that note?
Nic Pizzolatto: Going into the final episode, I wanted to end any audience theorizing that Cohle or Hart was the killer, and also provide a concrete face to the abstract evil they're chasing. So, wild speculations aside, we showed the killer's face in Episode 1. Though we know that as this "third man," whose face was scarred by his father, Errol is himself a revenant of great historical evil. There's enough fragmentary history in Episode 7 that, like Hemingway's iceberg, what is obscured can be discerned by what is visible. We have further context and dimension to explore with the killer, but the true questions now are whether Cohle and Hart succeed, what they will find, and whether they'll make it out alive.
Rust and Marty seem to have found focus in their messy lives by deciding that solving this case is the thing they need to do to find both professional and personal resolution. Did you always know that the show was going to come to that?
NP: The story was entirely planned around them reuniting to try and resolve this serial murderer case. I don't really think either man sees it as a personal resolution, because neither one believes in resolution. I believe they recognize it as their duty, and as perhaps the only thing they're good for. In this I think they are commendable, as they each could've walked away from the whole thing several times in the course of the series. That said, I think it's clear that neither man is living much of a life, and I find it touching when Cohle asks about Marty's life — that's something '95 Cohle would never do. '95 Cohle says, "It's none of my business [your life]." But 2012 Cohle, there's the sense that Marty's his last buoy, the closest thing he has to someone who knows him. This is largely true for Hart as well. And Cohle makes clear to Marty that he wants to die and views this case as something he has to solve first, though it's valid to interpret that perhaps a part of Cohle does not want to die, and latching onto this case again is a way for him to keep living. It's relevant that "Angel of the Morning" is playing when they reunite.
Now I'm curious about "Angel of the Morning." You chose it because of the song's spirit of wistful resignation, or a particular lyric?
NP: Well, it's a love song about unrequited devotion with a female singer, as though vocalizing the anima they've mutually repressed.
Would it be correct in assuming that they're willing to die? Marty in particular seemed to be saying goodbye to Maggie in Episode 7.
NP: I think given the amorphous nature of the evil they're pursuing, its historical roots in culture and government, they would have to be willing to die to fully pursue their absolute justice. And they each understand this.
HBO/Lacey Terrell
Did you imagine that there would be so much audience speculation that Rust or Marty was the murderer, or was that a frustrating surprise as the show has unfolded?
NP: It was a little surprising, but not frustrating at all, just part of the experience of having people connect to the show. The possibility is built into the story, as it has to be credible that the 2012 PD suspect Cohle. I just thought that such a revelation would be terrible, obvious writing. For me, the worst writing generally just "flips" things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced "twist," I think.
Let's discuss satanic ritual abuse, which is the backdrop of the '95 sections (and is certainly mentioned a few times — the task force that looms over them, putting pressure on them to get the case solved). That was an intense, strange phenomenon of the '80s and '90s, and was largely debunked. But the show seems to be coming down on the side of satanic ritual abuse really existing!
NP: The case of Hosanna Church in Tangipahoa Parish certainly seems real enough. I was there through the satanism panic that started in the mid-'80s and then resurged in the '90s. So even as rural myth, it's a part of the time and place. But this is a coastal Louisiana of-the-mind, as I knew it, a place which is no stranger to superstition and esoteric belief, where mysticism mingles with mainstream religion, where Voudon and Santeria are practiced along the bayous and a primitivism still maintains in many places. I grew up with adults who believed the Virgin Mary was appearing in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. They held prayer meetings where they closed their eyes and claimed to see visions, and we were prepped for the end of the world throughout grade school. So the wild extremes of belief were always visible, and then to me it's a short jump to a horror story. The ritual abuse in our show is the darkest side of belief, in a show where belief has been a steady underlying topic.
Did you grow up religious?
NP: I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.
Have you read Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright — which explored a problematic case of "recovered memories" and satanic rituals — and did it inform anything in True Detective?
NP: Never read it; the focus on mysticism and child abuse are both governing concerns of mine, and fit the place very well, based on my life experience.
Twin Peaks strikes me as the other vivid popular expression of ritualistic child sexual abuse — but in Twin Peaks, there was a supernatural element that put a veil over plain-old child rape and incest. I'm curious both about whether you watched Twin Peaks and thought about it at all here. And also what you've thought about all the internet chatter wanting True Detective to turn out to be a supernatural story despite showing no evidence through seven of eight episodes that it's that at all.
NP: I watched and loved Twin Peaks when it was on, at least in that rich first arc, before Josie turned into a dresser drawer and everything went bonkers, though I wasn't thinking about it at all. I don't read internet chatter, but all I can offer is that to date there hasn't been a single thing in our show that's supernatural, so why would that suddenly manifest in the last episode? The show has a quality of mysticism, for sure, but nothing supernatural so far. I think there's a lot of self-projection going on in certain cases; like the show has become a Rorschach test for a specific contingent of the audience in which they read their own obsessions into it. This is what it means to resonate with people, so I don't mind it. The danger is that it's myopic and unfairly reductive, like a literary theorist who only sees Marxism or Freudianism rather the totality of a work.
There are also those who will not be satisfied with any finale unless Rust Cohle steps out their TVs, into their living room, and shoots them in the foot as some kind of meta-statement on magick and mass entertainment. And, you know, the technology just isn't there. That said, I wouldn't totally rule out the appearance of special effects...
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