“”THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE POOR: CRIMINALS, HEROES, AND THE SOUTH IN TRUE DETECTIVE”
CARMEN MÉNDEZ GARCÍA UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID True Detec ve (HBO, 2014) Bootleg DVD cover 1. “FAR FROM ANY ROAD” OPENING CREDITS SEQUENCE
2. “SIXTEEN GOING ON SEVENTEEN” TIMELINES Marty Hart
Rust Cohle 3. “YOU DON’T PIC YOUR PARTNER” GOOD COPS AND BAD COPS
Marty to Cohle:
“Stop sayin’ odd shit, like you smell a psycho’s fear [he means ‘psychosphere’], or you’re in someone’s faded memory of a town. Just stop . . .
Let’s make the car a place of silent reflec on”
Marty [to Papania and Gilbough]:
“there are different kinds of cops: Cohle [to Papania and Gilbough]: the bully, the clever, the surrogate dad, the man possessed by unforeseeable rage, the “I can’t say the job made me this brain…” way. More like being this way made me right for the job”
Papaglia and Gilbough, the “Company men” Cohle [to Papania and Gilbough]: “Bet you want to hear the hero shot, huh?”
Marty: “You ever wonder if you’re a bad man?” Cohle: “No, I don’t wonder, Marty. The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.”
Cohle: “Thirty seconds, in and out, in and out . . . Easy, easy . . . Don’t fire. Don’t fire”
Cohle to Ginger: “I’m so done talking to you like a man” [Cohle to woman who just confessed: “If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself”
Cohle “since when did guilt and innocence define the State Police Department?”
4. “I NEED A HERO” WOMEN, HEROISM, THE EXPLORATION OF MASCULINITY Marty and Cohle lying about the assault on Reggie Ledoux’s house: “[there were] bullets cut[ ng] through right Rust’s head” that made them dive “opposite ways into the growth”, and the criminals had “something high-velocity [that] blew apart this tree between [Rust and Cohle], with . . . fucking ferns and whatnot burs ng all around . . . bark flying off of trews” Marty naviga ng symbollic roles for women (whore, wife, mother) • Cohle about his daughter: “She spared me from being a father . . . The hubris that is to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat” 5. “THIS IS THE END” DEBTS, CRIME, AND PUNISHMENT
• Cohle: “My life has been a circle of degrada on and violence. I’m ready to e it off” Cohle: “It’s just one story. The oldest . . . Light versus dark” Marty: “It appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory” Cohle: “You are looking at it wrong, at the sky . . . Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning”