True Detective on HBO

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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby guruilla » Mon Aug 10, 2015 2:24 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 04, 2015 12:08 pm wrote:A friend made a great point: he said episodes 5 and 6 were so cinematic because the characters were basically dissociating into a Heroic Journey narrative rather than facing how fucked they were.

Last Sunday's installment was the reality check.

Frank:
I had ideas of getting out of this, you know.

Osip:
There's no such thing for you, Frank. That world isn't yours, you manage clubs.

I missed this post till now; you know I wondered something vaguely similar but chalked it up to wishful thinking.

Now its all over & I am blown away and left with the sort of internal bleeding that signals that something tremendous just happened. By the end the show transformed into something way beyond the subject matter, for me at least.

Just wanted to throw that out there. Now I gotta go shit some blood.
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Hunter » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:39 am

http://imgur.com/a/ZRpHE

Remember when he was with his father at the bar. "Son I see you running through the trees and they shoot you to pieces..."
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Hunter » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:44 am

Catalyst group = Carlyle group?
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Hunter » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:02 am

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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 11, 2015 9:36 am

Yeah, I was pleased with the unexpected developments -- quite a few -- and left with the same weight. A lot to process there.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby guruilla » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:56 pm

I'm talking to Heather Poirier today about the show, for this week's podcast. She hasn't written much on it yet, but the Greek analogy seems solid.

"Behold, what was once a man." --Bryan Maurice, or The Seeker, Walter Mitchell

Some of the Greek historical and tragedic references in this first episode of season 2 and how they play out in this episode:

Panticapaeum: Ancient Greek city in the Crimea. Built on Mount Mithradat. Mithridates took his life here in 60 BC.

Two sisters, Athena and Antigone. Heavy on the Greek irony: Athena is a virgin goddess, while the character of Antigone's sister is a sex performer online; Antigone died to stay true to her beliefs about burying her brother, while the character is a plainclothes police officer who's got it out for herself and everyone.

Frank Semyon sits across from Ray Velcoro, exchanging the gaze that Achilles and Priam exchanged at the fall of Troy. Privileged gaze: girls doing online porn; police surveillance.

The three detectives are staring into death, both their own and that of Ben Casper. Thanatos, the personification of death, represented by theta, poppy, butterfly (in Paul Woodrugh's girlfriend's apartment, on the wall by the bathroom door where Woodrugh takes Viagra), sword, inverted torch.

Nyx and Erebus are the parents of Thanatos.

Death drive: the drive towards death, self-destruction, and the return to the inorganic (Wikipedia); ego or death instincts are opposed to the sexual or life instincts (Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," On Metapsychology, Middlesex 1987, p. 316). Later, Freud adjusted his theory so that eros opposed the aggressive instincts (New Introductory Lectures 1991, pp. 140-141).

Ben Casper's eyes have been cut out and he's been castrated, per Oedipus.

Casper was discovered at sunrise, so there's a vague attempt to adhere to the unity of time.

...

I've got much more work to do on the Providence paper, but I spent today's writing session on Greek tragedy and learning about Mithridates VI.

I think this season is not going to be as bad as some critics have said. I'm thinking they're not getting a lot of the references, or if they are, they're dismissing them as too superficial. I don't think you can discount the death drives the three detectives each exhibit, and the use of tropes in detective fiction (in S2E1, there were image/reflection and sight/blindness, just for starters) are a modern version of the heavily ironic figures used in Greek tragedy, where surfaces present one face and depths present another.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby km artlu » Tue Aug 11, 2015 5:10 pm

Guruilla -- where can I find the podcast that you mention above?
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby guruilla » Tue Aug 11, 2015 5:24 pm

It'll be up here in two parts this Saturday & the following Wednesday; I'll post a reminder as soon as it is.

The conversation went great.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby km artlu » Tue Aug 11, 2015 6:11 pm

Thank you Guruilla. I'm looking forward to it.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Forgetting2 » Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm

guruilla » 11 Aug 2015 13:24 wrote:It'll be up here in two parts this Saturday & the following Wednesday; I'll post a reminder as soon as it is.

The conversation went great.


Listened to your Parenti interview. Nice job. I think he was searching for John DeCamp and the Franklin scandal when he said John Kerry in the middle there.

Also, just came across a site (they try and steer away from the term 'chemtrail' because of the baggage presumably) geoengineeringwatch.org, which seems to have a lot of information...

He seemed like he was looking for good resources on the topics discussed...

:backtotopic:
You know what you finally say, what everybody finally says, no matter what? I'm hungry. I'm hungry, Rich. I'm fuckin' starved. -- Cutter's Way
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:27 pm

I honestly feel punched in the heart, the next day. I don't think anything has hit me so hard since, well....The Counselor, or maybe Blue Ruin.

Couldn't help but read some hate thinkpieces, in between a particularly meaningless day at work. It's wild how often they devolve into anger over "lack of wish fulfillment." Three main themes I see:

1) "I felt like there were all these tantalizing occult angles but they wound up being so mundane."
Yes, Virginia, that's Earth. There are only men behind those hoods, there is only lust behind those incantations. The dark side is mundane. Really one of my favorite things about the TD franchise so far, aside from the implacably literate pacing, is the insistence upon precisely that: We Are The Monsters In The Woods. Power is perception.

2) "I just wish Velcoro had taken out Burris or Theo Chessani."
I wish Jeb Bush had been killed by his imaginary friend Chang. I wish Hillary Clinton had slipped on an ice cube by the pool at Jeffrey Epstein's island mansion. I wish a lot of things had gone differently; they seldom do. I feel like S2, more than S1, was an honest reckoning about individuals taking on the powers that be. Rust Cohle was such a compelling character precisely because he was so improbable; S2 was all human beings I've known once or twice.

3) "Here's how I would have made the narrative more clear..."
Great: start submitting spec scripts to Law & Order instead of doing essays about TV shows. This, though, I'm less strident about. I recognize it's all a matter of taste -- the recent Pynchon thread comes to mind. Some folks hate him for his "obfuscation," and I'm not going to tell anyone they're wrong about that. Ultimately, the reason I can't let it go is that I don't think his critics would have ever written this story in the first place, so their tips on streamlining the product are like twitter complaints about the new iPhone.

We're getting a third season no matter what - for that much, I am hugely grateful.

It's going to be awhile before I can re-watch that finale, and awhile longer before I can put my finger on why it all hit me so hard. Something about how precisely it nailed the lies we tell each other when we've stopped lying to ourselves.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Hunter » Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:53 pm

Pretty much how I feel, the ending, while not your typical Hollywood feel good ending with good guys riding off in to sunset, was very real, this is very likely how it would play out in life.


Any idea what season will touch on? I wonder if he will do a mafia angle.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby Forgetting2 » Tue Aug 11, 2015 8:39 pm

I thought it would have been cool if she met up with a wiki-leaks person at the end :) Couldn't help thinking of the end of 3 Days of the Condor (?), where Redford's taken his story to the NYT and the guy says 'how do you know they'll print it?' or something like that.
You know what you finally say, what everybody finally says, no matter what? I'm hungry. I'm hungry, Rich. I'm fuckin' starved. -- Cutter's Way
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby BrandonD » Tue Aug 11, 2015 9:02 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 11, 2015 6:27 pm wrote:1) "I felt like there were all these tantalizing occult angles but they wound up being so mundane."
Yes, Virginia, that's Earth. There are only men behind those hoods, there is only lust behind those incantations.


Not necessarily.

From my POV you've moved from critiquing a TV show into making a sardonic debunker-style proclamation about the "real world", one that I don't agree with, and one I don't believe you're in a position to make with the certainty you are projecting.

I'm open to being corrected if I'm wrong.

I felt compelled to comment because the above quote, the type that is designed to shame people who take the "paranormal" seriously, is the type of thing I'd expect to see outside of RI, not within the walls.
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Re: True Detective on HBO

Postby guruilla » Tue Aug 11, 2015 9:11 pm

BrandonD » Tue Aug 11, 2015 9:02 pm wrote:From my POV you've moved from critiquing a TV show into making a sardonic debunker-style proclamation about the "real world", one that I don't agree with, and one I don't believe you're in a position to make with the certainty you are projecting.

From my POV, and apart from Wombat's meaning which I won't claim to know, that was closer to what TD was showing in relation to the occult, that no one gets to see behind the men behind the hoods. It's a shell game, and whenever you think you;ve found the guilty, you can be sure they've already sidled into another layer of the labyrinth....
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