True Detective and the States of American Wound Culture
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
True Detective and the States of American Wound Culture RODNEY TAVEIRA “Criminals should be publically displayed ... at the frontiers of the country.” Plato (qtd. in Girard 298) HE STATE INSTITUTIONS PORTRAYED IN THE HBO CRIME PROCEDU- ral True Detective are innately and structurally corrupt. Local T mayors’, state governors’, and district attorneys’ offices, city and county police, and sheriff’s departments commit and cover up violent crimes. These offices and departments comprise mostly mid- dle-aged white men. Masculinist desires for power and domination manifest as interpersonal ends and contact points between the indi- vidual and the state. The state here is a mutable system, both abstract and concrete. It encompasses the functions of the legal and political offices whose corruption is taken for granted in their shady rela- tions to criminal networks, commercial enterprises, and religious institutions. There is nothing particularly novel about this vision of the state. Masculinist violence and institutional corruption further damage vic- tims in the system (typically women, children, and disempowered and disenfranchised others, like migrant workers) who need a hero to solve the crimes committed against them—these tropes are staples of detective fiction, film noir, and many television crime procedurals. What then explains the popular and critical success of True Detective? Moreover, what does the show’s representation of the state—its aes- thetic strategies, narratives, and images—reveal about contemporary The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2017 © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 585 586 Rodney Taveira understandings and imaginings of the state, the individual, and the relations between them? While tracing the complex entanglement of the entertainment industries with femicidal and spectacular violence within a critical regionalism, carried out through digital modes of distribution, one can also see how government agencies shape content. Indeed, one can presume, following Jade Miller’s essay in this issue about film and television production tax incentives, that season one of True Detective (2014), with its Louisiana setting, was greenlit by HBO because of that state’s generous tax incentives. Further, this tax policy might have affected the show’s content, leading to a utilitarian deployment of the tradition and tropes of Southern Gothic, as enumerated by Sarah Gleeson-White: the grotesque and irrational, the supernatural and fantastical, the outre and excessive (1–3; 122–25). However, as Miller notes, Louisiana does not necessarily “play itself” when it is the site of film and television production. Further, direct reference to the state’s influence on television and film production appears in sea- son two, where a stand-in for the director of the entirety of season one, Cary Fukunaga, cites California’s tax incentives as the reason for shooting his film in that state. Demonstrating the often arbitrary connection between place and diegesis, the film is not set in Califor- nia, per se, but rather a science-fictional, postapocalyptic future, in the vein of Mad Max. The metafictional positioning of season two indicates that True Detective sees itself as simultaneously exposed to and an expositor of state-culture relations. The pull of state tax policy is acknowledged in True Detective’s season two, but this is a two-way relationship, with the show’s critical representation of the state upon which it depends. The corrupt mayoralty of season two’s Vinci is very concerned about an eight-episode television investigation of the city that seeks to expose its long history of dodgy dealings and violent crime. The self- reflexive nods—True Detective is also, in part, an eight-episode televi- sion investigation of corruption and state violence—are intensified by the fictional city of Vinci’s relation to the real city of Vernon, CA. This is exactly the kind of “did you know that?” connection that fuels online criticism and weekly recaps that tap into consumers’ assump- tions that the state, both real and imagined, is corrupt. The narrative and formal similarities, as well as the regional dif- ferences, between seasons one and two of True Detective reveal the States of American Wound Culture 587 consistency of its exposition of state-culture relations and its understanding of the state and the public sphere. Its popularly mediated understanding of the state overlaps—much like its self- reflexive representation of television production and tax policy— with the standard social science definition of the state. David T. Smith, in his investigation of the circumstances through and means by which the US persecutes religions, remarks that “the core of nearly all definitions of the state” follow from Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation (1919): “the actors and institutions who monopolize coercive control over a given territory” (Smith 28). Furthermore, the state is not “a single unitary, intentional actor or a static, established entity [but] actors who exercise public authority and the institutional arrangements that grant and maintain that authority” (28–29). One way of reading the “trueness” of the detectives in a show that turns on the definition of “truth” is the manner by which their authority to exercise coercive control is granted beyond these legal and recognized parameters. For example, in season one, it is only when Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Coehle (Matthew McConaughey) have left the police force that they are able to identify and legitimately kill (in self-defense) the serial killer, Erroll Childress (Glenn Fleshler). Previously, as police officers, they merely manage to identify his accomplices, and they must concoct a lie to cover Marty’s illegitimate execution (that is, his lynching) of Reggie Ledoux when Internal Affairs constructs the state’s official history of the incident. The inadequacy of this official history and Marty and Rust’s state- sanctioned investigation is made apparent when bodies of women killed with the same modus operandi begin to appear years after the crimes had supposedly been solved. Significantly, Childress has been hidden in plain sight all along, working as a groundskeeper and local handyman. Pursuing what they think is the correct line of inquiry, Marty and Rust dismiss him as a suspect because they are blinded by the processual imperatives of police investigatory practice. This practice instead leads them to Reg- gie Ledoux and their extra-legal violence. This mistaken dismissal of Childress is repeated by Detectives Thomas Papania (Tory Kittles) and Maynard Gilbough (Michael Potts) who investigate the new spate of murders in the show’s contemporary timeframe. 588 Rodney Taveira The State’s Wound Culture Institutional processes cause two sets of detectives to misperceive or ignore the killer before them. The state’s dumb blindness becomes more sinister by its association with Childress. He is a member of the Tuttles, a long- and high-standing Louisiana family. Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle is leader of the evangelical Tuttle Ministries. He is also cousin to Louisiana Governor (and later Senator) Eddie Tuttle. Rev- erend Tuttle possesses a recording of the ritualized murder of a girl. It is implied that other men of governmental, legal, and religious prominence, dressed in ceremonial robes, take part in a series of these murders, perverse black masses where religion and the state meet in femicide. The final episode of season one explicitly shows that the Tuttles are not brought to justice for their involvements in these murders, or for any other crimes, such as sexual abuse in schools and embezzlement. True Detective’s corrupt Louisiana partakes in and produces what Mark Seltzer names, while discussing the phenomenon of serial kill- ing, America’s “wound culture.” The show’s popularity (season two had higher ratings, despite the largely negative responses and reviews) turns on “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 1). “Serial killing,” as Seltzer puts it, has its place in a culture in which addictive violence has become a collective spectacle, one of the crucial sites where private desire and public fantasy cross.... [T]he mass attraction to atrocity exhi- bitions, in the pathological public sphere, takes the form of a fasci- nation with the shock of contact between bodies and technologies: a shock of contact that encodes, in turn, a breakdown in the dis- tinction between the individual and the mass and between private and public registers. One discovers again and again the excitations in the opening of private and bodily and psychic interiors: the exhibition and witnessing, the endlessly reproducible display, of wounded bodies and wounded minds in public. (253) In True Detective, this wound culture is produced not only by psy- chotic serial killers, but by the state, often in conjunction with crimi- nals and killers, whether this conjunction emerges, as in Louisiana in States of American Wound Culture 589 season one, through omission and misdirection motivated by family connections and complicity, or, as in California in season two, through connections to a wider, international network of crime, and by direct perpetration. This more expansive notion of the state that includes non-state actors who are nonetheless related to the state—familially, financially, historically, religiously—indicates that a domesticated version of what Timothy Melley calls the “covert sphere” operates in tandem with, while at the same time producing, the wound culture in True Detective. Melley describes the covert sphere as a fabrication and fabu- lation deriving, in the context of the Cold War and founding and growth of the CIA, from the state, the individual, and the public sphere, “a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state” (Melley 5). The exposition of the covert sphere in True Detective is a state-sponsored production of America’s wound culture, the site of violent crime where “private desire and public fantasy” meet.