re: True Detective S1E08 "Form And Void"

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Looking back, how many crazy twists did the show really imply?

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it wasn't really "twists". it was a mystery-based story (i mean that's the nature of detective series) so we were given a very incomplete picture initially and the point is to make it more complete by the finish.

viewers were trying to use the data provided to guess as to how that incomplete picture would be finished. by the finale, we got a minority of that picture finished, but much was still left incomplete.

it doesn't have to be a shocking reveal/twist, but by the very nature of how the show was built, things did have to be revealed. along the way there was a lot of information hinting at how what would be revealed. we were left hanging on most of that

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the way there was a lot of information hinting at how what would be revealed. we were left hanging on most of that

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I can't even watch the show again because for me there's no payoff.

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I can't even watch the show again because for me there's no payoff.

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that's why i'm intrigued as to what in the frick season 2 will be. basically the same concept you just posted

This is one of the best write-ups on True Detective so far:

LINK

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Old forms can conceal deep meanings. True Detective draws on various strains of American horror — rural noir, Lovecraft’s cosmic nightmares, Chambers’s stories of madness and concealed identity. But what it reminds me of most is something older: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” a short story that Melville called deeper than Dante, and that Greil Marcus has invoked in discussing Twin Peaks.

The story is set in Puritan New England — in Salem, Massachusetts, to be exact. In it, Goodman Brown, a pious young man, ventures into the woods one night on an unknown errand, leaving his young wife, Faith, behind in town. On his walk, he meets an older man who looks much like himself, carrying what looks to be a wizard’s staff. The older man knows Brown comes from reputable stock: his grandfather whipped a Quaker woman through the streets of Salem, and his father set fire to Indian villages in King Philip’s War. Not long after, Brown meets another person from town, Goody Cloyse, who reveals herself to be a witch. Soon, Brown is aloft, flying towards an unseen clearing. All the townspeople are there, celebrating in front of a flame-lit altar which may or may not be full of blood. He recognizes a score of church members, “grave, reputable and pious people, elders of the church.” All the people Brown grew up respecting are secretly in the Devil’s company. The old men are wanton seducers; the young women sacrifice infants. Their waking lives are lies. As the assembly readies to baptize its newest members, Brown cries out — and comes to, alone in the forest, not knowing whether what he had seen was a dream. He lives to the end of his days as a broken man. After his death, Hawthorne writes, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.”

Myth divides the world into the security of civilization and the wilderness of danger. The woods are full of witches and the swamps are full of ghosts. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne — whose own ancestors were active in the witch trials — undoes the structure of myth, exposing a deeper terror. The Puritans expected the threat to their spiritual community to come from the surrounding forest. The woods were the space of danger: of Indians, of paganism, of witchcraft, and sin. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne tells us plainly that the woods are never outside. The community that seems righteous is always criminal, and complicit. As True Detective heads towards its final episode, it looks increasingly like the Yellow King isn’t Chthulu or a mysterious swamp god. Instead, the perpetrator is a family, its associates, its churches, schools, police officers and public officials and servants and custodians. Evil is woven into the fabric of everyday life. To some, that might be a disappointment. To me, it harks back to the original American horror story: the discovery that the woods are in the town, and the swamp is in our minds.

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I don't understand some of these articles expressing "surprise", for lack of a better word, that the end result wasn't supernatural in nature.

Maybe I'm not remembering correctly but didn't we know pretty much from episode 2 or 3 that the end result was going to be some kind of conspiracy among members of the community. I don't remember anybody really believing that the Yellow King was actually going to prove to be real, beyond the possibility of somebody calling himself that and maybe dressing in ritualistic garb.

Yeah it seemed to me from the beginning that myth of Carcosa was about the evil within human nature. Homo homini lupus, "man is the cruelest animal", etc.

Is everybody tuning in for season 2 to watch how two characters interact with each other? And then realize in the end they didn't really evolve at all.

I'll make sure when they are discussing the "case" next season to just pay it no mind and just focus on what the made up characters are really all about

and i just read that

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And then there’s the dialogue, especially Rust Cohle’s, as played by Matthew McConaughey: sinuous digressive soliloquies that touch on everything from applications of string theory to the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal recurrence.

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Just hearing some of this stuff on TV — from the doctrine of anti-natalism to shout-outs to the transgressive horror fiction of Thomas Ligotti to the apocalyptic philosophy of Emil Cioran — is shocking. It’s as if an invisible cultural wall had suddenly been breached, like what would happen if Wisconsin Public Radio ever did a program on the Necronomicon. All of a sudden the psychosphere is in the mainstream.

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it's a cheap trick, but it's being celebrated. this is the type of shite that makes these sorts of "larger" comments worthless

they can't even realize the manipulation being presented. rust is nothing more than pornography for this group

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None of this on its own, though, accounts for the heights of obsessive viewership True Detective has inspired. That has more to do with, on one hand, the strength of the lead performances, and on the other, with the bevy of obscure literary references placed in the script by series creator Nic Pizzolatto.

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how much of the conversation was dominated with discussion on "obscure literary references"? maybe 1%?

this statement is an outright mistruth

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Tracking these Easter eggs and clues is undeniably fun, but I think that focusing too much on them might be a mistake.

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should have been preaching this, and enforcing its structure, a month ago. too bad very, very few people were

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In True Detective, the Horned God seems to have something to do with the powerful Tuttle Family and their “very rural take” on Mardi Gras, apparently derived from the real-life Cajun traditions of the Courir de Mardi Gras, with its masked mummers and costumed masked riders wearing cone-shaped capuchon hats (briefly seen in a photograph in Dora Lange’s mother’s home).

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here the author even admits he/she had no idea what the horns mean. doesn't mean many words weren't used to talk about horns as they apply to other works/scenarios.

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Like Misrach’s photography, the cinematography draws attention to southern Louisiana as a wounded landscape, hurt both by the introduction of the oil refining business and the continued human management of the Mississippi River, whose corralling behind levees has doomed the region to a slow death by subsidence.

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the show didn't touch on the MS River at all, and without the management, LA would already be pretty much dead anyway. same thing if the petro industry wasn't entrenched here. see this is just more discussion on (1) things that weren't even touched in the show and (2) shite that doesn't even make sense. it's a waste of time, energy, and typing. it does sound cool, though

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Does is matter that the oldest prehistoric earthwork in North America is at Poverty Point Louisiana? That Land Artist Michael Heizer makes similar temple-like earthworks in the Nevada desert? That Heizer’s father, Robert, was an archaeologist who investigated depictions of human sacrifice in Mexico? That Heizer’s friend and rival was Robert Smithson, and that Smithson’s most famous work, the Spiral Jetty, is a giant stone spiral half-submerged in the Great Salt Lake?

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i can save time. the answer to all of these is, "no"

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It’s certainly possible to see True Detective as nothing more than a collection of tics and gestures — an assembly of country songs, attractive photographs, and loopy speeches, overlaid with some oddball philosophy for the illusion of depth. But I don’t think that’s right.

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we obviously disagree, then

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The community that seems righteous is always criminal, and complicit. As True Detective heads towards its final episode, it looks increasingly like the Yellow King isn’t Chthulu or a mysterious swamp god. Instead, the perpetrator is a family, its associates, its churches, schools, police officers and public officials and servants and custodians.

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a cliche'd meme that is a much bigger myth than the myths of the "dangerous forest"

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Evil is woven into the fabric of everyday life. To some, that might be a disappointment.

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it's not a disappointment: it's simply not true, especially in this era of humanity

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To me, it harks back to the original American horror story: the discovery that the woods are in the town, and the swamp is in our minds.

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a lie. a cliche'd lie

i'm not slim charles. i don't fight on a lie

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i just don't think it's productive or efficient to throw out wild guesses without any real evidence

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Pretty much every hypothesis I saw was based on some clue in the series. sure there were some 12 year olds guessing about the moon and the stars, but not too many people were "throwing out wild guesses without any real evidence", as you allege.

Any great show takes the time to build its characters so the viewer has some kind of attachment to them. Whether it's pulling for them to win, or hating them, hoping they die, live etc etc.

Where True Detective fails is we get attached and pull for these characters to solve this massive mysterious case that has several layers within it. And the viewer is given hints all along the way so the show holds their interest throughout the season. Then boom there's no answer to most of the questions the shows creator led the viewer to ask and wonder about. The show just kinda ends and that's it.

And now everybody who liked it is lying saying oh I was just watching to see how Rust and Marty's characters relationship evolved. First off that's bullshite. Secondly if you truly were watching for character development then you should he severely disappointed because these characters never changed from episode one.

I really liked the show and thought it was great for 7 episodes and even 40 minutes into the finale. But the last 20 minutes just ruined the entire show for me. It has no rewatchability and I doubt I'll give season 2 a chance.