Rust and Marty reconnect and revisit the Dora Lange investigation, after Rust presents some compelling new evidence in 'True Detective' season 1, episode 7: ..
Is The Murder Case On 'True Detective' Actually Important?
This week, we finally get to the nitty gritty detective work, which is refreshing to me. This has probably been my favorite episode thus far. We are now in the present. Rust and Marty get drinks together, and Rust says that he is sure there is a cover up with the most recent murder, that the cops are in on this (maybe even unknowingly). Rust tells Marty that the two of them have unfinished business to take care of, that he wants Marty's help working the case without police involvement. Marty tries to say no because he thinks Rust is crazy, but Rust tells him that Marty has a "debt" because Marty shot Reggie Ledoux in '95, rendering them unable to get any further information out of him. Rust takes Marty to his storage unit, and it turns out that Rust has been working this case for quite some time. There are maps of all the missing persons from along the coasts. Rust has also even found a former student of one of the Well Spring program schools. The former student tells him that sometimes during nap time, he would wake up and not be able to move, and that there were men there. Some of them were taking photos, others were touching him. Some of them were also wearing animal masks (at the time, this made him think he must have been dreaming). Rust asks if there was a scarred man. The former student says, yes, in fact there was. He also says that there was one other student who he talked to about what was going on: Marie Fontenot (the little girl who went missing, but was assumed to be with her father). Rust thinks that Senator Eddie Tuttle (Billy Lee's cousin) is involved, that it's a family affair. He admits that he broke into Billy Lee Tuttle's home and broke into his safes. He found photos of children with blindfolds and antlers. He also found a video tape, which he shows to Marty. Marty can't even make it through the whole video; he has to turn it off before it's over (the viewers only see the very beginning of the tape...we mostly just see Marty's face as he's watching in horror, then in tears). Rust says that the girl in the video is Marie Fontenot. Rust tells Marty that he wasn't the one who killed Billy Lee. He thinks people in the group got to him after they found out about the stuff missing from the safes. With Marty's help, they find Reggie Ledoux's cousin, Jimmy. Rust asks him about the scar-faced man, and Jimmy says he remembers him, that he met him when he was a kid. Jimmy says the man stared at him in a way that made him feel very uncomfortable, but that he never saw the man again after that. They find Sam Tuttle's (Billy Lee's father's) retired housekeeper who worked for him for 19 years. Sam had lots of illegitimate children. It turns out the scar-faced man is one of his grandchildren, that his own father was the person who burned his face. Rust then shows the former housekeeper images of the stick figures, and she loses it. She starts asking, "You know Carcosa?" Then she mentions "he who eats time" and says, "Rejoice! Death is not the end! Rejoice!" Rust and Marty try to work deeper into the Marie Fontenot case. A former colleague of theirs, Steve Geraci, had worked on the original case, so Marty goes to see if he can get any information from him. Geraci clearly lies to Marty, so Marty suggests that they get together again to go fishing. Marty and Rust trap Geraci at gunpoint on the boat, and take him into the boat to interrogate him and try to get the truth about the Fontenot case. At the end of the episode, the two new detectives (Gilbough and Papania) are looking for the church Russ mentioned. They stop to ask a man on a lawnmower for directions. The man tells them it no longer exists, and gives them detailed directions back to the highway. One of the detectives notes that this guy certainly knows his way around. The man says, "I know the whole coast...my family's been here a long, long time." The detectives pay him no attention and drive off. We see a closeup of the man's face: IT IS THE SCAR-FACED MAN. This episode was so exciting! I can't wait to watch the season finale next week. Things are finally getting tense, and I'm very anxious to see how the season is wrapped up. However, there's also something that has been bugging me. Earlier this week, Slate published an article titled "Don't Try To Solve The Mystery of 'True Detective.' That's Not What It's About." The article goes on to compare "True Detective" to David Lynch's "Twin Peaks," a comparison that has been made a lot, but that I actually find kind of sloppy. Sure, in some ways the shows are alike. They're both about murders in small towns, in which there might be some kind of weird supernatural element at work. But while I feel that Lynch really pulled off the irrelevancy of who killed Laura Palmer, I don't think that "True Detective" does the same. In fact, "True Detective" doesn't even really seem to be attempting to make the whodunnit, thrilling aspect of the show irrelevant. The show's writer, Nic Pizzolato, told the Wall Street Journal that, "It’s also important to me that the mass audience doesn’t need to know or engage these associations in order to enjoy the show" (he's referring to the more philosophical aspects of the show). This means that the story itself, according to the writer, should still be acting as a coherent murder mystery narrative, even with the additions of all the philosophical aspects that make it different from your average cop drama. "Twin Peaks" gave us a lot of other material to work with: complex, bizarre characters that we cared about, a completely weird aesthetic, a bunch of other corny soap opera drama. Clearly it's not impossible to make viewers put the murder on the back burner. David Lynch did a great job of it. The murder is almost a secondary plot when compared to everything else going on. This is not the same for "True Detective." This show REVOLVES around the murder, on both surface level and at a deeper level. There are a ton of clues and references that appear to be worth looking into ("the Yellow King" and "Carcosa" references). Rust's life philosophy is even ripped off of one of the killers. The murder does appear to be an important aspect of the show. Is it about MORE than just the murder? Sure! It's a very clever show that plays around with storytelling, the casting and acting of both Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are absolutely stunning, the directing is dark and brilliant, etc, etc. Is it your average, run-of-the-mill cop drama? Definitely not. Does that mean that people will lose interest in the gory, bizarre, creepy murder case, even though there is other stuff going on? Of course not! The Slate writer seems to be annoyed that viewers are concerned with the whodunnit aspect, but I wouldn't put the blame on the viewers. I think it is only natural to be swayed by the whodunnit aspect of the show, as it's extremely fascinating (by "whodunnit," at this point, I am also referring to the resolution/confrontation with the scar-faced man, since we at least think we know everyone who is involved in the murder). Pizzolato also told The Wall Street Journal that "the show’s agenda won’t be clear until the eighth episode has ended." If, in the season finale, the resolution is really stupid and ridiculous, some viewers (including myself) will be disappointed. I believe that if the show ends in a jumble of nonsense, that will change the audience's entire opinion of this season. Basically, whether or not this season can be called a great season completely rides on next week's season finale. What do you think? Do you still find the murder case itself compelling or are you only watching for the other elements at this point? Let me know in the comments! "True Detective" airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. EST on HBO.
Watch Series True Detective Season 1 Episode 7 online now. Get the full episode, streaming free, on ClickPlay.
This has been a difficult “True Detective” essay to write. I’ve spent most of my afternoon stalling while I inspect the perimeter of the episode, trying to find an entry point. But it is a closed circle and I’ve been retracing my steps for hours. In part this is because “After You’ve Gone” was more of a procedural than any episode prior. So, first, here’s what happened: Hart and Cohle reunite in a bar and Rust tries to sell the suspicious Marty on the statewide implications of the Dora Lange case: Women and children have gone missing along the coast for years, and Rust believes he knows why. Marty joins Rust in his Batcave: A storage unit with décor by John Nash. Rust has cobbled together a map of missing persons who disappeared near a Tuttle Ministry school. A young New Orleans man who attended the same Tuttle school as Reanne Olivier has vague memories – or are they dreams? – of being sexually abused by masked men in robes. And there was one without a mask. One with scars on the lower half of his face. Cohle suspects a vast cover-up emanating from the town of Erath – ancestral home of the Tuttle clan, close to where Dora Lange’s body was found, and where, in the past, Santeria, Vudon, and old time religions formed an alternative Mardi Gras celebration with masks, robes, and blindfolded women sporting antlers. I doff my cap to readers who knew it wasn’t Klan in that photo in Dora Lange’s mother’s home, but Mardi Gras costumes. Cohle then tosses Marty a flask, removes a videocassette from a safe, and pops it into a player. It turns out Rust is also an expert breaking-and-entering man and lifted the tape from Billy Lee Tuttle’s home. Then, in the series’ creepiest sequence, Marty waits until the fuzzy picture morphs into something…horrible. Marty screams, slams a fist, and agrees to help Rust. The girl he saw on the tape was Marie Fontenot. Rust points to a picture taped to the wall: It is the green-eared spaghetti monster they learned about at the Erath Sheriff’s Department back in 1995. Rust believes that this is their man. The giant with scars. By the time they reunite in 2012, Hart and Cohle have floated in limbo for most of a decade. Cohle bounced around Alaska for eight years, working odd jobs to support his drinking. Hart carved out a few more years on the force but then, after seeing the charred carcass of a microwaved baby, vowed “never again,” retired, and opened a now-floundering security business. Each man tries to spin his situation into something approximating serenity, but in the dueling flashbacks of isolated drinking and TV dinners, we recognize that their lives have stalled. Both men have lost their families and their work. They are formless. They remind me of Bruce Wayne in the opening sections of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns:” Without a nightly quest, the spirit atrophies. The characters Hart and Cohle can only exist for their job: They are the bad men who guard the door. And so, once they walk away from the door, what do they become next? Not much as it turns out. “True Detective” is not out to subvert genre expectations. A murder mystery, like any genre, provides a cover for interesting subtext – given the readership spike for Thomas Ligotti and “The King in Yellow,” Nic Pizzolatto was successful in infecting viewers with his influences. But the show revels in its obvious nods to the conventions of the detective story, many of which I noted in my write up for Episode One: A dead girl in the wilderness surrounded by spooky symbols signaling the occult. A mismatched pair of detectives one of which is a restless family man, the other is an aloof loner born to be a cop. You’ve got a lazy professional bureaucracy of overweight and slothful investigators, plus a truck-stop prostitute with maybe not a heart of gold, but certainly a willingness to help cops score drugs. Encroaching special interests? Check. A detective’s wife struggling to connect with her husband? Check. A horrendous crime scene the likes of which nobody has ever seen before? Of course check. In “After You’ve Gone,” all internal conflicts and character idiosyncrasies that embossed the show’s scaffolding are now virtually gone, scrubbed away by time and the narrative’s need close the loop. All that remains are a pure genre reduction and a more meaningful show title. I don’t mean to suggest that Pizzolatto abandoned the integrity of his creation in order to deliver a more by-the-numbers suspense thriller, but he may mean to say that we prefer our detectives unencumbered by family, bureaucracy or love. Rust and Marty had to burn away the ornamentation associated with a well-rounded life if they ever hoped to solve the Dora Lange murder. Much was made about certain narrative conveniences in last week’s episode, “Haunted Houses.” Specifically, what are the odds that Marty Hart would not only bump into Beth while out shopping for his family but hook up with her? And why did Maggie, who dismissed Rust during their café talk in Episode Four, pivot and successfully seduce him so easily in Episode Six? Likewise, isn’t it a little convenient that Rust now possesses ninja and safecracking skills? Were this an episode of “CSI” or “Law & Order: SVU” we would likely toss it up to “The Plot Needed It to Happen” or “I Called It!” So why does it sit so strange for “True Detective?” Is this show above such plot provisions? In an essay for Slate, Pasha Malla argues the series should be watched less for its mystery than for its insights into an audience’s relationship to storytelling. That from title to text, “True Detective” is a parody of the detective genre. So, while an audience is inclined to pore over each veiled literary and philosophical reference, and identify every yellow light or photo or sign or symbol for careful inspection, the architecture of the show is not a Rube Goldberg machine. The series is intelligent, but you don’t need to order a decoder ring to figure out what’s going on. In time, it will hit all the beats because the beats are preordained. Here’s a recommendation: Re-watch Episode One. Marty has been a broken record on the whole “Detective’s Curse,” thing but it looks like he was right all along: The solution was right under our nose. Marie Fontenot, the spaghetti monster with green ears, the Tuttle connection, and the police cover-up were each introduced in “The Long Bright Dark.” Now, since this is a circular series, our detectives have completed their revolution and we are all back at the beginning to re-investigate the very first lead in the Dora Lange case. Not that there may not be a final twist in Episode Eight, but it won’t be a bait-and-switch. And if time is a flat circle, then once the detectives smell their prey they revert to a natural natural state. Marty may be a bad husband and wretched father, but he is a decent detective. He scours old records and tracks down a woman who once worked for Sam Tuttle, father to the late Billy Lee Tuttle. While on the ride to interview her, Cohle takes his familiar place in the passenger seat, smoking and pondering the disorder on the other side of the glass. While suffering from dementia, Ms. Delores can still recall the Tuttle homestead in Erath, one overrun with children, many of them the illegitimate offspring of Sam Tuttle himself. Apparently the elder Tuttle could only sleep with a woman once before she became revolting to him. Ms. Delores remembers a little boy with scars, a grandchild of Sam Tuttle’s but not of the Tuttle family. This boy was a Childress, Sam Tuttle’s “other family.” But once she sees Cohle’s drawings of “devil’s traps” she asks, “You know Carcosa?” “Rejoice,” she says. “Death is not the end.” Whatever Carcosa ends up being – a slaughterhouse, a wooded grove, a vision of the afterlife, or all of the above – it is both the religion and the inheritance of the Tuttles and the Childresses. Something worth preserving and shrouding from the outside world. And when an old family accumulates real power, facades are easier to erect. One such façade is Rust and Marty’s old CID associate Steve Geraci, now a local Sheriff. Many years prior, before CID, he took the initial report on the missing Marie Fontenot while working under the Sheriff for Erath, Ted Childress. Over a friendly game of golf, the grey-haired Geraci gives Marty an oddly exact recollection of the Fontenot disappearance. Marty knows he is lying. He and Rust lure Geraci out of his jurisdiction and onto Marty’s boat for an interrogation at gunpoint or, if he won’t talk, by car battery and jumper cables. Meanwhile, Papania and Gilbough are lost in the backwoods as they try to find the old church Hart and Cohle stopped by in Episode One to inquire about Marie Fontenot. At the edge of a graveyard they stop and ask directions from someone we’ve met before, a lawnmower man. He’s backlit by an orange sun and so we can’t see the details of his face. He is soft-spoken and calmly directs the cops back to the highway. Once they’re gone, the man steps off of the lawnmower and wipes his brow. He is very tall. When last we saw him in Episode Three he had splotchy beard. His beard now gone, we see the tall man’s scars. “My family has been here a long time,” he coos, before hopping back onto his lawnmower and continues cutting a flat circle into the grass. Check out our Oscar live blog now. For the latest entertainment news Follow @WSJSpeakeasy
Mar 2, 2014.. This week, we finally get to the nitty gritty detective work, which is refreshing to me. This has probably been my favorite episode thus far. We are ..
True Detective: Season 1: Episode 7 -- After Marty is shown a harrowing.. (2014) Still of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective (2014).
Mar 2, 2014.. Recap: 'True Detective' Season 1, Episode 7 Investigates 'After You've Gone'. Photo of Kevin Jagernauth By Kevin Jagernauth | The Playlist ..
True Detective Season 1 - Episode 7 - After You've Gone - Version 1 TV SERIES US WATCH ONLINE FREE.
Mar 2, 2014.. This has been a difficult “True Detective” essay to write. I've spent most of my afternoon stalling while I inspect the perimeter of the episode, ..
