True Detective recap: season one, episode two Seeing Things

This episode is preoccupied is masculinity, and the ways in which men seek to control the world around them – but there is still no sign of a suspect

Spoiler alert: we are recapping True Detective after UK transmission. Please don’t read on if you haven’t watched episode two. If you have seen further ahead in the series, please do not leave spoilers.

Read Gwilym’s episode one recap here.

Let’s talk about Marty Hart. Granted, that might seem a strange starting point for discussion in an episode that sees Hart’s infinitely more attention-grabbing partner Rust Cohle suffer trippy hallucinations, wax lyrical on birth and death, and smack someone about the head with a toolbox. But, fascinating as Rust is, he is also an out-of-towner, with a redacted file full of wild stories and a way of looking at the world that is entirely his own. He’s an outlier, and as such, doesn’t really aid our understanding of what makes this dark, despairing Louisiana – described by the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston as the uncredited star of True Detective – tick.

Hart, though, is more firmly rooted in this universe. While Cohle’s unfurnished flat suggests a man who is just passing through Erath, Louisiana, Hart is firmly in situ, bringing up a family there. He espouses the same God-fearing, old-world values that seem to govern the state itself. He’s a man with a code, a way of doing things.

Of course, this is all hokum. Hart is as hypocritical as they come, a man who preaches the importance of family but who has a mistress on the side. In reality, his belief system, his way of doing things, is little more than a means for maintaining power over the people in his life, and when people fail to bend to his will, he tries to bully them, both physically – pinning Cohle to a locker when Cohle makes it plain that he knows Hart is having an affair – and psychologically, using the threat of the serial killer in his attempt to keep his mistress indoors, away from other men.

As much as anything, this episode of True Detective’s preoccupation is masculinity, and the ways in which men seek to control the world around them. Men like Hart don’t like prostitution, the madam of the bunny ranch where Dora Lange worked tells him, because “you don’t own it the way you thought you did”. And while that assessment paints a somewhat simplistic picture of just who benefits from prostitution, it’s certainly accurate in its assessment of Hart, a man who looks to box the women in his life – wife, daughters, mistress – in ever-more restrictive little compartments. Home life, Hart tells his wife, “is supposed to be what I want. It’s supposed to help me.” Equally, he expresses his annoyance that his mistress (Lisa, the court reporter from episode one), wasn’t in one night when he drove past her house, as if her sole function in life is to be ready and waiting to service him.

Hart’s flimsy excuse for his infidelity is that it helps him “decompress”; to act as a buffer between his wholesome family life and the dark nature of his work. He’s certainly better at distancing himself from his job than Cohle, who we see stumbling around in the dead of night, asking sex workers whether they knew a Dora Lange.

Cohle throws himself into his work in a manner that feels unhealthy. In the present-day interrogation, he reveals that he switched to homicide after a lengthy period in the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area force, where deep undercover work led to him developing a narcotics addiction. That is the root cause of the strange psychotropic hallucinations (beautiful smears of colour in the sky, flocks of birds forming occult symbols) we bear witness to throughout the episode. We also learn that, in between his HIDTA work and his current posting, Cohle spent time in a mental institution.

The root cause of this behaviour? The death of his daughter, killed in a road traffic accident several years before. In the episode’s most striking monologue, Cohle confesses that part of him is pleased his daughter didn’t have to suffer life in its extended, excruciating form. “Isn’t that a beautiful way to go out? Painlessly as a happy child,” he says to his interrogators. It is an opinion justified somewhat by the evil he has witnessed in his job, from the man injecting his infant daughter with meth to the Lange killing itself. Yet the looks the two investigating officers give in response suggest not sympathy, but horror, and you do wonder just how seriously they consider Cohle a suspect in these killings.

Still, in the original 1995 investigation Cohle’s obsession over the case is beginning to bear some fruit: the aforementioned toolbox assault on a pair of garage workers leads to one of them revealing the address of the bunny ranch, which leads Hart and Cohle to find Lange’s journal, which in turn directs to the burnt-out remains of a church, where they find a giant piece of graffiti of a naked, antlered woman, unsettlingly reminiscent of Lange in her sacrificed state.

It is vindication for the slow and painful process of lead-chasing the pair have undertaken so far, and something to take to their major, who is becoming frustrated with the glacial pace of the investigation (not to mention the more erratic aspects of Cohle’s personality), and wants to palm it off to a separate squad tasked with investigating “anti-Christian” crimes. But there’s still no sign of a suspect, and much remains unanswered. We’re no clearer to establishing a link between Lange and Fonteneau, the girl who went missing five years earlier. The significance of those sculptures remains unknown. And just who is the “king in yellow” Lange mentions in her journal? Theories please.

Loose threads and other observations

• After Cohle’s mention of “carrying out the little girls” in the opening episode, Hart refers this week to “a big throwdown in the woods”. Are they referring to the same event? And when are we likely to see it?
• I briefly touched on how Cohle and Hart’s characters have changed physically in the intervening years (Hart doesn’t look too different, Cohle looks like hell), but what about their personalities? Cohle, who now lives “in a little room in the country, behind a bar”, feels far more at peace with himself (“I know who I am,” he tells the investigating officers). Again, Hart acts largely the same as he did in 95, still clinging to his old-world values and pining for a time where “men didn’t air their bullshit to the world” (a veiled dig at Cohle’s philosophising persona, perhaps?).
• After the Reverend Tuttle made a personal appearance in the police station last week, we now see just how powerful organised religion is in the town, as the “anti-Christian crimes” task force takes a personal interest in the case.
• Lange’s mother’s migraines, which came on just as she was asked about the church, seemed a little convenient to me. And what about that photo on her dresser? Were those men in hoods Klansmen? Or perhaps something more occult?

Quotes of the week

• Hart: “If it’s one of those tent revival places they’ll move around.”
  Cohle [deapan]: “Yeah, tents usually do.”
• “Most of the time I was convinced I lost it. But there were other times that I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe.” Cohle reflects on his “visions” in the wake of the discovery of the graffiti.

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