When the idea of film noir is invoked in pop culture, there are a few images that immediately come to mind. Harsh shadows, cigar smoke, and a seedy private investigator are some of the usual telltale signs, but underscoring the aesthetic flourishes that the genre has become known for is an obsession with the nature of truth. Film noir began not as a deliberate movement, but as a series of expressionistic trends in the ‘40s and ‘50s, replacing the glossy veneer of 1920s idealism with a layer of dirt and grime that reflected a generation reeling from World War II. Heroes of the original noir movement were often wading against a tide of corruption and moral rot that reflected the moviegoing public’s general unease towards the larger world around them.
But while film noir (usually) positioned its characters against the tide, neo-noir (crime thrillers that switched out the blackened silhouettes of German Expressionism for the realist predilections of the French New Wave) began examining characters washed away by their own vices. Not only were the characters conflicted, but they were often unsure of a world quickly losing its values and humanity, and this is a sentiment that has only gained more and more relevance in a society barreling towards post-truth. Modern society isn’t shaped by objectivity or open-handed honesty, but by social structures that have configured the truth to be whatever is most appealing at any given time. No work of recent neo-noir understands this cultural transition more than the first season of True Detective, realized in hazy shades of Southern Gothic pseudo-realism by writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga.
Even back in 2014, when the show first premiered, its initial setup felt well-trodden: told over the span of 17 years, detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, respectively, at their most vulnerable and electric) investigate the ritualistic murder of a young prostitute in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana. But nothing in the world of True Detective is as it seems, and the swamplands of the South are integral in obscuring the truth from our main characters. While the urban sprawl of major cities provides the backdrop for the most earnest examples of film noir, the decision to set the first season amongst the decaying morass of Louisiana gives the entire affair a feeling of ominous uncertainty — the secret of Dora Lange’s demise is just as much hidden by the marshes she called home as it is by the people who surrounded her. The specter of the Louisiana quagmire even becomes a plot point later in the season; our investigators eventually realize that they’ve been blinded to a much larger conspiracy, due to the Southern coastland swallowing missing persons cases like some gaping maw.
Of course, the swamplands aren’t the only thing obscuring Cohle and Hart’s investigation — Pizzolatto’s writing also points a finger at the very institutions sworn to uphold the pursuit of truth. Right from the beginning, the investigation into Dora Lange’s murder is plagued by convolutions; whether it be a misaligned task force tripping over their own convictions while investigating the “anti-Christian” nature of the case, or a disturbing number of missing persons investigations being redacted and deligitimized by chain of command. It isn’t until much later that Cohle, Hart, and the audience realize the entire case has been kneecapped by a group of very powerful people — a cabal of elites that include governors, sheriffs, and religious leaders.
These people make up the Cult of Carcosa, a ritualistic organization of pedophiles and sadists responsible for the murder of Dora Lange, Marie Fontenot, and dozens of missing young women and children across Louisiana. Carcosa is a reference to the book The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers — a seminal piece of horror fiction that makes frequent reference to an anonymous fictional play that drives anyone who reads it mad. Not only are the references to The King in Yellow purposeful evocations of the weird fiction genre, but they also drive home a larger point about the structural corruption that has taken an active hand in burying the truth. Here, Carcosa doesn’t conjure up imperceptible Eldritch knowledge, but a concentrated effort by sinister human forces to warp objective truth into a web of deceit — just like the play, to realize its scope is to go mad.
It’s this deliberate construction of “truth” that ends the initial investigation into Dora Lange’s murder, a faux-victory orchestrated by our main characters after a bloody and extrajudicial shootout results in them executing two men whom they deemed responsible for the killing. With no witnesses (save for a young girl rendered comatose by the ritual abuse she suffered at the hands of the two sadists), Cohle and Hart are free to manipulate the narrative, painting themselves as accidental heroes in a sanitized story that effectively closed the book on the case for over 15 years. Because of the show’s split narrative, it’s obvious to audiences from the beginning that Cohle and Hart have been unwittingly manipulated into closing the case too early — a fact our titular detectives are too blinded by their own interpersonal conflicts to realize.
While the occult mystery at the heart of the narrative is the show’s main focus, it also takes its time in peeling back the layers of incongruencies that make up our main characters. Harrelson’s Marty Hart grapples with an inability to be honest with himself and those around him — he admonishes Cohle for his reluctance to start a family, but ironically we watch Hart’s own household collapse around him due to his self-destructive tendencies. Harrelson embodies Hart as a man foolish enough to think he can live two lives — in one, he wears the face of a loving husband and dedicated father; in the other, he mimics the facade of a young man engaging in extramarital trysts in an attempt to cling to his fleeting youth. He has effectively cleaved his masculinity down the middle, and the lies necessary to maintain this performance ultimately leave him remorseful and alone.
McConaughey’s Cohle, on the other hand, is remorseful and alone from the moment we meet him, but instead of coming to grips with his own trauma and psychological damage, he projects his nihilism out onto the world around him. Rust Cohle is a man who thinks he’s figured it all out — human beings are monkeys trapped in a hellscape of self-awareness, fooled into self-importance by what amounts to a coding bug programmed by Mother Nature. This cosmic pessimism is the result of a lifetime of tragedy and drug-induced paranoia, and it’s the other half of Cohle’s obsession with truth — his search for Dora Lange’s killer pushes him to desperate and extrajudicial methods in their initial investigation, and once he realizes that the real killer is still out there, he spirals into an empty existence of seclusion and isolation, one in which his sole focus is unraveling this mystery. For him, his search for the truth isn’t a quest for nobility or honor — it’s a gnawing compulsion at the heart of a bleak and emotionally detached worldview.
Much like the structural institutions we watch these two men struggle against, they themselves embrace the concept of post-truth. Hart and Cohle are both men who refuse to turn their reflection inwards, instead choosing to warp their view of society based on the flaws within themselves. This is what creates such an irreconcilable rift between them at the start of their investigation; sure, they’re two assholes with personalities that are diametrically opposed to each other, but at the core of their dynamic are two extremely damaged men who, more than anything else, need each other. They need someone to be vulnerable and open and honest with, and it’s this openness of self that allows them to change, grow, and, inevitably, catch the real killer in the 2012 timeline.
The discovery of the killer at the end of season one isn’t a particularly incredible reveal — Errol Childress (Glenn Fleshler) is a character relegated to hushed whispers and a cameo scene with Cohle that isn’t contextualized until much later. But the “who” behind the mystery was never as important as the mystery itself, the investigation therein, and the inevitable unraveling of the threads comprising the spider’s web that both Rust Cohle and Marty Hart find themselves at the center of. In finally identifying their killer, Cohle and Hart get a chance to cut through the haze obscuring their vision and finally get a firm grip on the truth — even if they weren’t able to bring down the entire Cult of Carcosa, they now know what they’re up against, and knowledge is a beacon in the fog of uncertainty that blankets the neo-noir aesthetic.
Beyond capturing their killer, the genuine victory of True Detective is presented at the end, shared between two budding friends recovering from near-fatal wounds. Rust Cohle’s brush with his own mortality changes his outlook on life — he now finally sees a purpose, something that has eluded him the entire season. In most noir films, that unease, that apathy, isn’t really something that ever goes away. Usually the protagonist recognizes that the moral center they so desperately wanted to see at the heart of society is being eroded away, if it was ever really there at all. But the ending of True Detective takes a different route. Instead of leaning into the cosmic nihilism that the show had been indulging in over the last eight episodes, the final line of the show is one of bold optimism in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds:
“Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”
Our culture and the structures of power that we rely on have embraced the vapidness of post-truth — when politicians, cops, and community figures have the ability to lie to us and spin it into honesty, it’s easy to feel the shadow of mistrust and uncertainty encroaching upon us. But real, objective truth is a shimmering sword slicing through that darkness — it’s a weapon that cuts away deceit and dishonesty, and it’s also a compass guiding our journey through a larger cosmos that stares back at us with callous indifference and unknowable mystery.
