The Best Australian Essays 2014 (28 page)

To thus summarise, and oversimplify, and omit crucial facts for the sake of those yet to see it, is, it all but goes without saying, entirely to miss the incantatory feel of the series.
True Detective
grows out of the Louisiana swamp like sweetgrass, a place that is in the South, but not of it, an outpost of France's Caribbean empire, full of pirates and vodou, old, old families and long, long decline. New Orleans – the Big Easy, margaritas and cast-iron balconies – never makes an appearance. But nor do we see ever see a Starbucks or a McDonald's. Corporate America – the wholly branded environment – never makes an appearance.

In part that is simple verisimilitude – the rural South is so poor that whole stretches of it are devoid of the big brands that we have come to think of as the ubiquitous texture of American life (helped by product-placement funding of TV and films, which appears to be absent here). But it is also a way of creating an America that is not so much mythical – this is no story of a lost ‘real' place – but interstitial.
TD
America hangs somewhere between the'70s,'80s,'90s, 2000s and now. The bars are deliciously scummy, the houses are cookie-cutter exurbia, the popular culture is the sort of stuff – Juice Newton's hit ‘Angel of the Morning' – that hangs around for ever on FM radio, that all but seems to have no beginning at all.

That it is a wrecked America goes without saying. America has been wrecked for so long that the portrayal of a hopelessly fallen world, a place of fragments, is now simply the default setting.
The Wire
(and
The Shield)
spent a hundred or so hours describing an America which was a rotting shell of a once vibrant body politic – their worlds only made sense as dysfunctional successors of a once whole-world, places where cities were not ruins, and work and neighbourhood were the centre of life, crime the margins of it.
SVU
became a vast catalogue of big-city life as a charnel house of paedophilia, incest and rape, domesticating those crimes in the same way as crime fiction of the'20s domesticated conscienceless murder as something routine rather than a shocking measure of degeneration in a world after the death of God. Each of these series found a way to mark that decline in its storytelling – such as the moving closing scenes of the fifth season of
The Wire,
a long, wordless montage of a dying city waking up, its depleted docks starting work, its once-great newspaper shredded, and
Breaking Bad
in which the decline is the story.

In
True Detective,
this wreckage is simply assumed. We never – until right at the end – see any of old Louisiana (of which there is plenty); no French Quarters, seaside towns, restored wooden mansions. The place is simply what it has been for decades: one of the poorest worst states of the US; bad housing, cracking freeways and poisoned waterways. This is how it has always been, how it will always be, the flat circle of southern decline.
True Detective joins
its particular field of decline – the slow winnowing of the US, through four decades following the end of the post-war boom – with the longer decline, that of a defeated slave-civilisation, dying these hundred and more years.

TD
, though by its name it appeals to the pulp tradition, is in the mainline of southern gothic, something of an understatement. With Rust, its death-driven wall-eyed obsessive sprouting Nietzsche, its erotomaniac women, its swamp people, its black mamas wit' de vodou secrets – if it were any more Faulkner, it would have its own station on the Upfield Line. Its creator and sole author, Nick Pizzolatto, has a prize-winning volume of short stories to his name – impressive but arty, somewhere in the post-MFA hinterland between McCullers and McCarthy – and a neo-pulp novel
Galveston,
a mark of transition from high to genre fiction, i.e. from one genre to another. That makes him the first real high-culture writer to create a full TV series, and it shows.

David Simon of
Homicide
and
The Wire,
Paul Attanasio of
House,
Vince Gilligan of
Breaking Bad
– they are all first-class writers and producers, but they're coming from pop-culture or journalistic traditions.
True Detective
is a repository of high-culture technique, especially in the rendering of Rust, a character who will not settle into a space on the standard grid of mass-culture character differentiation. He's a man who has done a lot of thinking, too much, of a type that sets him apart from the people he sees around him (‘You people – you let your young be eaten as long as you got something to salute,' he says, as he leaves the force, in 2002), but none of which has brought him a wisdom that might bring a sort of peace. His meditations fuse police procedural with a serial monologue of batty speculation about the circular nature of time, the irreducible solipsism of existence (the ‘locked room', police slang for an interview, becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of escaping your own consciousness to a ‘real') and how this relates to new theories of the cyclic universe, of endless Big Bangs creating and collapsing the same world over and over. Rust's musings come with an explicit death wish – his marriage gone after their infant daughter died – and he regards a potential bullet in the head from infiltrating a bikie gang as a ‘zero risk' option. His musings on death, suffering and life are hardly unique to mass cultural style –
SVU
is a psychodynamics casebook, weekly – but what makes them distinctive is their particular mix: cosmic speculations drawing in the mind-boggling world of physics with older early-twentieth-century vitalist speculations about life and death forces, eternity and time.

This sort of thinking works without falling into self-parody because it is not unmoored from the genre it seeks to evoke. It is a glance back at a lot of the
True Detective–style
pulp of the midtwentieth century, when such musings on the nature of life, death and eternity were bubbling into the culture. This is particularly so with the ideas of Nietzsche – the centrality of Will and a life force, and living according to it – which took America by storm in the first decades of the century. As Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen noted in
American Nietzsche,
everyone imbibed this idea of a force in existence independent of morality, ‘from anarchists to baptist ministers', because it gave an oomph to an American individualism become jaded in the cogs and wheels of a mass society. In
True Detective
, Rust ain't the only one harking back to Germanic ideas of a terrifying universe that we must try to tame: the neo-Nazi speedfreak apprehended, and then murdered, talks of a ‘circular universe' moments before Marty murders him, enraged at his lethal rape of children. ‘That Nietzsche shit,' Rust mutters. Later, he will play it back to the detectives interviewing him in the ‘present', and uncoil his whole cosmology, the notion that Being is Death – static and unchanging at its root, originator of Time, for it could not be Death without Life.

This is the sort of stuff – out of Schopenhauer, and before him, the ancient Hindu Upanishad texts – that makes Nietzsche sound like a bubbly life coach. Rust scorns self-serving versions of it – that Nietzsche shit – because its notion of making meaning through an exercise of Will is as much a denial of the truth of the universe as the Judeo-Christian notion of redemption it seeks to displace. Rust is not going to war against evil, against suffering – he is going to war against Will itself, against the wayward notion that desire acted on is any sort of action at all. Marty counterpoints him, blowing up his own life through infidelities lacking even the swagger of passionate love, losing his family absolutely, winding up in an efficiency flat, eating TV dinners.

(Yes,
TD
is very male.
Existenz
is something men struggle with, and women – most of whom bear a striking resemblance to the silhouette Playboy logo – love and hate the men as they struggle with das Being. One could say that the women are portrayed as the sane ones, but that hardly compensates. One simply has to take it as part of the genre – or read against it, as a portrayal of the manner in which masculinity is a machine for turning desire into philosophy, for its own purposes.)

The philosophising would verge on pseudo-intellectual flimflam were such content not mirrored in the form. For
TD
uses long-form TV's most distinctive resource – tense shifts and multiple time streams – to give that sense of circular action. Time flows in
TD,
but more like the intersecting runnels of a bayou than as a river, criss-crossing, expansive and formless. Multi-stream TV series have hitherto used different stocks (or video imitations thereof) and filters to separate past and present. There is none of that here, and the absence of external markers of different eras means that the story happens both in time and all at once – made more complex by the fact that the series repays multiple viewings of each episode. The muted particularities blur the line between subjective and objective is this happening, in this order, in the world, or in the mind? If so, whose? Crucial events happen because characters have lied in earlier time streams – so we do not know that the story is the story. Have we been lied to? Is there a series of lies behind those revealed? Is the actual, final revelation a decoy? The possibility, and a few well-placed remarks in episode eight, leave open a continuation in further seasons – although it is difficult to imagine Rust, a hard-eyed adamantine performance by McConaughey, having anything like the impact or gravitas in a second season.

Difficult to know, too, how something like
TD
will hold up, in five years, ten, fifty. Gunplay and speculation on the eternal is pretty much the essence of a certain type of hard-boiled crime fiction, but the nature of the speculation tends to change. Ultimately, philosophical preoccupations tend to be framed by the era in which they take place, and the world of
True Detective
is one in which imposing will hasn't gone too well for quite a while. Whatever chance the place had to break out of its ancient torpor has been sealed over by more recent torpor, with the same families and forces receding ever further behind the scenes.

True Detective
is an example of the much-celebrated ‘new golden age' of US television, but what is of most significance is that the television comes together as the US comes apart. The long-form series has become the empyrean in which one can get the measure of an empire which can no longer comprehend itself. History, when it runs out of Time, invents Culture to grow the things it wants to kill, and that is where we are now, waiting for season two.

Elliot Rodger

Last Sunday afternoon, I made a cup of coffee, fired up the laptop, went online, noticed that the ‘manifesto' of Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, had been posted, clicked on to it – and didn't get up for two hours. I didn't move, save to scroll down, and at one point to feel my jaw drop.

If you haven't read Rodger's 140-page document, you may well not want to. It was described in the news as a ‘rambling manifesto'. If only. It is neither. A narrative of his life up to the point where he started on the series of killings, ‘My Twisted World' is no manifesto, nor is it rambling. Repetitive, yes, as Rodger recounts his perceived humiliations and injustices, and above all his rejection by women. But what it is is relentless, driving, as beat by beat Rodger draws us towards the event that happened soon after it was sent to friends and associates – the stabbing murder of three people in his apartment, and the drive-by shooting of three more, two of them young women outside a sorority house – just as he had said it would. It is a terrifying read because you know what's coming, and because it has the structure of a thriller and may well have been shaped by the genre.

Having detailed a happy early childhood up to the age of six, Rodger starts to paint a picture of things going wrong and a struggle to join the world of love and connection. Then, around a hundred pages in, the ‘Day of Retribution' appears. The ‘Day of Retribution' is – well, exactly what happened. Rodger begins suggesting it after he has started to fume with obsessive misogyny, snobbery and casual racist elitism: women are animals who cannot recognise a great man like himself when they see him, black people and poor whites are sub-human. He does not want to start the Day of Retribution, he says; he will try to rejoin humanity (on his own terms). Eventually, he concludes that there is no alternative. He must take revenge on both women and men – women as a whole because they have rejected him, men because they have been accomplices to such rejection. The narrative finishes with him musing that he will have to kill his housemates in order to complete his plan. This is exactly what he appears to have done.

‘My Twisted World' is an appalling document, because of the events that occasioned its publicity, but it is also a revealing one. It is the meticulous record of a man suffering a total collapse of mind, subjectivity and selfhood, from a very specific and pure form of narcissistic disordering. Various pundits have tried to attach more complex, and tendentious, diagnoses to Rodger's behaviour – most of them relying on spurious neuro-psychiatry – but what is plain, as a first-order description, is that Rodger was poisoned by dysfunctional narcissism. By ‘narcissism' we mean a basic inability to get the relationship between self and world right. The correct idea of that relationship is that we are limited selves in a world with other people, who have their own projects and motives. The narcissistic reversal is that the world is seen only and always as a function of the self, which is always morally blameless. We are all sufficiently narcissistic to function as subjects, organising the world around us. But we recognise our reality in it – that we fall short in our actions, that we are limited in our powers, that reality is a resistant other that we negotiate.

Occasionally, our narcissism gets off the leash – when we overestimate our worth, underplay our culpability in our failures, forget the otherness of others and the legitimacy of their worlds. For some very small number of people, that narcissistic disordering becomes jammed on, totalising, and consumes whatever real assessment of the world they can make. Such people are everywhere, everybody knows one – those in the entertainment industry know many. They usually blaze bright young – and, if they make a sufficient success of it, can accrue sufficient social power to make people put up with their shit. Those who don't, when they fall, fall far, become malign. They're the office sociopath, the paranoid in the MP's waiting room, the adult child who blows up the family at Christmas, and on, and on. Rodger's record of his decline and fall is a portrait of someone at the very extreme of that disordering – not simply because he ended it with mass murder, but because the record of his life is so relentlessly miserable and wounded.