Mainline the Secret Truths of the Universe
True Detective
Season 1 of HBO’s True Detective was awesome, but what the heck did it mean?
Follow Rust and Marty into the the mind-blowing depths of Carcosa.
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What The Last Episode of True Detective Was Really About – Form and Void
From the beginning of True Detective, we are introduced to the bleak worldview of Louisiana homicide detective Rustin Cohle. Mirrored by his partner Martin Hart, who has a cheerier outlook, Detective Cohle has lots of pessimistic catch-phrases like “This is a world where nothing is solved,” “Time is a flat circle,” and “If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of sh*t.”
Rust looks at life through a scientific lens, examining human behavior, time, and the meaning of life analytically, and his analysis is often hard and cold. He doesn’t merely condescend to religion, but truly seems to despise it. At a tent revival he says, “What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?”
He admits to his pessimism in Episode One: “I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms, I'm what's called a pessimist. I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware... Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law...We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everbody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
He lays his pessimism on pretty thick. He also struggles with alcohol addiction and pops Quaaludes to sleep at night, maybe to avoid dreams and thoughts about his deceased daughter.
In the last episode of the season, Rust and Marty reunite to chase down a killer they let get away in an investigation that started years earlier with the discovery of the body of a girl tied to a tree with antlers on her head and a dark mark, a swirl, on her naked back. After some good detective work with a few logical leaps of faith (hmm...green ears...green house...green paint on the ears...we know who the green-eared spaghetti monster is!) They track down the “Man with Scars,” aka Errol Childress, at his family home, deep in the bayou. Rust and Marty also discover some lost ruins behind the home, which the Errol tells Rust is a place called Carcosa.
Carcosa is a location invented by Ambrose Bierce, and used famously by Robert Chambers in his book of “cosmic-horror” stories, The King in Yellow, referenced liberally throughout the series.
“Take off your mask”is a line uttered by Errol in the final episode to Rust and is a line from Chamber’s fictitious play.
When Rusts enters Carcosa, winds his way through the creepy, doll-and-dead-body-filled tunnels, and beholds the alter to the Yellow King, he sees a vision of a swirling darkness deep within the cosmos, the darkness swirling around a piercing beam of light. Is he driven to madness, or revelation?
Before Rust fully realizes his vision, he is stabbed in the belly by Errol. Marty “distracts” Errol by getting an ax thrown into his chest, and Rust shoots Errol in the head from behind.
After recovering from a coma, Rust has a heartfelt outpouring that ends the series in which he describes his near death experience as being “reduced to a vague awareness in the dark... I could feel my definitions fading, and beneath that darkness, there was another kind, it was deeper, warm, like a substance. And I could feel, man, and I knew, I knew my daughter waited for me there so clear, I could feel her... It was like I was a part of everything that I ever loved.”
I would argue he had a revelation. Rust thinks he has things figured out, that he knows who he is, that he can’t change, but he is wrong. He wears a mask.
Creator Nic Pizzolatto has said he meant for True Detective, despite its bleakness, to propose an optimistic viewpoint in the end.
As Rust recovers from his fight with Errol, he tells Marty he has been up in his hospital room “looking out those windows every night just thinking, there’s just one story, the oldest.”
“What’s that?” Marty asks.
“Light versus dark.“
In contrast to The King in Yellow, where that play is described as driving the reader mad with the “irresistible” revealed truths, the truth that is revealed to Rust is life affirming; he finds warmth, love, and meaning in the chaos.
That, ultimately, is what True Detective is all about.
The vortex shaped marks that are the signature of the cult in the series, the black stars, might be a subtle reference to chaos theory in mathematics.
My Ascension removes me from the disc in the loop. I’m near final stage. Someone is. I can see the infernal plane. – Errol Childress
Mathematics seeks to discover and explain abstract patterns or regularities in nature. Chaos theory studies dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions – commonly known as the butterfly effect. In chaotic systems, the outcome is predetermined, but unpredictable. For example, spirals are the lowest-energy configurations that emerge spontaneously through self-organizing processes in dynamic systems. Spirals are the patterns that form from the void.
One could say the universe is chaotic, that it began with the Big Bang, and everything is predetermined. Perhaps time is an endless loop, never changing. Natural selection and sexual selection can explain patterns in living things. However, others believe in a higher power influencing and directing the course of history.
Is life merely the product of chaos, and does only random chance determine our lives, which have been set out before us, or do we have a chance to influence our fate? Do we have a soul that lives on after death? This is where science and religious diverge, and where the optimism and faith inherent to religion may still have an upper hand over the cold calculations of science.
However, science too leaves room for the possibility of a human soul. New theories called “quantum consciousness” and “biocentrism” proposes that that the soul is contained within structures called mirotubules inside brain cells. According to the idea, consciousness is a program for a quantum computer in the brain that persists in the universe even after death, explaining the perceptions of those who have near-death experiences. The theories put forth by Dr Robert Lanza (also a leader in the field of stem-cell research), Dr Stuart Hameroff and physicist Sir Roger Penrose suggest that souls are integrally entwined with the fabric of the universe - and may have existed since the beginning of time.
Other scientists studying theories like Neotics - the science of consciousness – have accumulated data showing that thoughts affect matter directly. Quantum theories developed by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others have shown that matter at its most fundamental is not solid or discrete. At the subatomic level, matter exists only in a web of dynamic relationships (chaos), with interconnected energy fields of quantum particles in a "continuous state of becoming."
The point is that Rust’s bleak nihilistic take on life is turned on its head, just as modern science is starting to open up to concepts also familiar to world religions.
At the end of the show, the camera tracks over the Louisiana landscape but lingers on three spots – the house of the Yellow King where Billy Chambers is found tied up and dead, the compound where Hart shot Reggie Ledoux in the head, and the tree where Dora Lange was found dead, naked, and with antlers.
All three places touched are with death, and some sinister imprint seems to linger, even on such an innocent thing as a tree.
Marty says at the end of the show, as the two weary detectives look to the stars, “Appears to me that the dark has more territory.”
Rust’s last words: “You know you’re looking at it wrong... Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”
If the theme of the show is that there is meaning to existence, a possibility for redemption, that people can choose to bring good or evil into the world, that our wills and actions affect the material world around us, that heroes are those that fight for the good, and generally “mainlining the secret truths of the universe,” then the first season of True Detective delivered.
By Peter Steinau