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brekin » Mon Feb 17, 2014 7:19 pm wrote:I want to like this show, and I do sort of. It's just the ZZ Cop thing strained credulity. It was like a world's dumbest criminals proposal. I mean let's dress up as cops even though we look so rough we probably couldn't even get night security gigs and go into the heart of new jack city to rob a stash house because they will (momentarily?) think we are cops? And we will bring one of their dudes we have tortured and who has nothing to lose by yelling that we aren't cops? I mean people try to pull some stupid capers for money of course, and meth/crack smoking probably doesn't facilitate great caper strategizing, but Crash just happens to show up the night they are going to pull their biggest boner yet? And I'm really curious how he is going to get Ginger to be hush hush about him being a cop and trading him the baddie cooker.
Also, dramatically the cell mate who spills the whole show seemed uber anti-climatic to me. Guys, heads up, there is this huge satanic ring killing people (and no doubt the church and ptb probably are in on it)? I mean I like a good mystery to be solved but not on the third episode. Unless that is a false trail with bigger fry I think they jumped on the shark with the cell mate bean spiller. It's like the third episode of Lost and someone shows saying "This really just boils down to time travel guys." Oh, well I haven't seen the latest episode? post stash house bungle so maybe it will get twisty again.
Luther Blissett » Mon Feb 17, 2014 3:46 pm wrote:I too don't have any problem with the closing scene of episode 4. The whole heist had a whole period-accurate air accurately portraying the stupidity of drug-addled early-to-mid-90's (isn't this the time period during which violent crime peaked in America?) COPS real-tv criminal escapades. I don't think it was meant to be believable; I think it was meant to be completely unbelievable. In 1995 I was still living in one of America's forgotten zones and had both friends and enemies who were drug dealers and drug addicts. Some of their plots approached the level illustrated here and it's not difficult for me to imagine that if they were a motorcycle club on dust operating at a larger scale that they could have dreamt up that exact same scenario.
Elytte Barbour, 22, has confessed to murdering nearly two dozen people in a jailhouse interview.
ABCNews.com http://abcnews.go.com/US/confessed-crai ... d=22551651
Police in five states and the FBI are investigating a teenage girl's claim that she went on a cross country satanic killing spree that claimed at least 22 victims.
Miranda Barbour, 19, stunned police when she told the Daily Item, a small newspaper in Sunbury, Pa., that she had been killing people since she was 13 as part of a Satanic cult. The claim would make her a rare female serial killer.
Barbour is charged along with her husband of three weeks of murdering Troy LaFerrara, a Pennsylvania man she met on Craigslist. She claimed that she had solicited LaFerrara for sex on Craigslist in November. Authorities said Barbour and husband Elytte Barbour, stabbed LaFerrara to death while in her car.
Despite her confession to the newspaper, a lawyer for Barbour has entered a not guilty plea at her arraignment.
The suspect told the newspaper she has killed what she calls "bad people" from Alaska to North Carolina. Police in Alaska, California, North Carolina and Texas have been called to check out Barbour's story. The FBI said it "will offer any assistance requested in the case."
Here are the most shocking revelations, Barbour made in her only interview to date.
On Selecting Her Victims
"I would lure these people in... "I studied them. I learned them and even became their friend. I did this to people who did bad things and didn't deserve to be here anymore."
On The Number of People She Claims to Have Killed
"When I hit 22, I stopped counting."
On Where to Find Her Other Victims
"I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them... I remember everything. It is like watching a movie."
On Shooting her First Victim at 13
"It was in an alley and he (the cult leader) shot him... Then he said to me that it was my turn to shoot him. I hate guns. I don't use guns. I couldn't do it, so he came behind me and he took his hands and put them on top of mine and we pulled the trigger. And then from there I just continued to kill."
On Testing LaFerrara and Choosing to Kill Him
"I lied to him and told him I just turned 16... He told me that it was OK (to have sex). If he would have said no, that he wasn't going to go through with the arrangement, I would have let him go."
On Confessing to the Murders
"I feel it is time to get all of this out... I don't care if people believe me. I just want to get it out."
[/quote]brekin » Mon Feb 17, 2014 5:09 pm wrote:Luther Blissett » Mon Feb 17, 2014 3:46 pm wrote:I too don't have any problem with the closing scene of episode 4. The whole heist had a whole period-accurate air accurately portraying the stupidity of drug-addled early-to-mid-90's (isn't this the time period during which violent crime peaked in America?) COPS real-tv criminal escapades. I don't think it was meant to be believable; I think it was meant to be completely unbelievable. In 1995 I was still living in one of America's forgotten zones and had both friends and enemies who were drug dealers and drug addicts. Some of their plots approached the level illustrated here and it's not difficult for me to imagine that if they were a motorcycle club on dust operating at a larger scale that they could have dreamt up that exact same scenario.
Interesting. I guess I'll have to defer to your previous shady experience on the matter.
brekin » Tue Feb 18, 2014 12:39 am wrote:But that post sent me down a hole of my home city's newspaper archives looking for articles on my old friends' awful crimes...
But that's not exactly why Pizzolatto was so proud of "Secret Fate" when we spoke—nor is it why I'm going to go back and rewatch the episode as soon as I finish writing this post. The real achievement of Sunday's True Detective didn't have anything to do with plot. Or character. Or chronology.
Instead, it was all about theoretical physics.
About halfway through "Secret Fate," Cohle—the mustachioed, ponytailed Cohle speaking to Papania and Gilbough in 2012—launches into one of his metaphysical monologues. "This is a world where nothing is solved," he intones. "Someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again."
That "someone," of course, was Reggie Ledoux. As soon as Cohle and Hart captured and cuffed their killer back in 1995, he started to talk. "You'll do this again," Ledoux told Cohle. "Time is a flat circle." Initially, Cohle dismissed Ledoux's prediction. "What is that, Nietzsche?" he shouted. "Shut the fuck up." But he seems to have given the idea a lot of thought in the 17 years since encountering Ledoux—and, back in 2012, he proceeds to share his conclusions with Papania and Gilbough.
"You ever heard of something called membrane theory, detectives?" Cohle asks.
"No," Papania says. "That's over my head."
And so Professor Cohle begins to hold forth. "It's like, in this universe, we process time linearly," he says. "Forward. But outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage, could we attain it, we'd see"—he crushes a can of Lone Star between his palms—"our space-time look flattened, like a seamless sculpture. Matter in a super-position—every place it ever occupied. Our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension—that's eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it's a sphere. But to them, it's a circle."
Needless to say, Papania and Gilbough are utterly baffled by Cohle's lecture, and I would have been, too—if Pizzolatto hadn't already told me what he was up to.
"You could see Cohle as Job crying out to an unhearing God," he explained. "Or you could see him as something else."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Cohle describes the possibility of other dimensions existing, and he says that’s what eternity is," Pizzolatto continued. "He says that if somehow you existed outside of time, you’d be able to see the whole of our dimension as one superstructure with matter superimposed at every position it had ever occupied. He says that the nature of the universe is your consciousness, and it just keeps cycling along the same point in that superstructure: when you die, you’re reborn into yourself again, and you just keep living the same life over and over. He also explains that from a higher mathematical vantage point, our dimension would seem less dimensional. It would look flattened, almost."
Pizzolatto took a bite of his branzino. "Now, think about all the things Cohle is talking about," he said as he finished chewing. "Is he a man railing against an uncaring god? Or is he a character in a TV show railing against his audience? Aren't we the creatures of that higher dimension? The creatures who can see the totality of his world? After all, we get to see all eight episodes of his life. On a flat screen. And we can watch him live that same life over and over again, the exact same way."
The thought was dizzying. Sure, True Detective is a page-turning crime yarn. But at least according to its creator, it's also a meta-page-turning crime yarn—a story about storytelling. Pizzolatto had transformed m-theory into a metaphor for television—and television, perhaps, into a metaphor for existence itself.
The important thing about the Yellow King and Carcosa isn't what they signify to Reggie Ledoux. It's what they signify to us.
The more I think about it, the more I think this might be the ultimate "meaning" of the series: that at some indivisible level, life is story. Much ado has been made online about all the references on True Detective to the Yellow King and Carcosa, as if they were aspects of a coherent satanic theology to which Ledoux & Co. subscribed—a puzzle to be unraveled eventually. But it's telling that the Yellow King is a reference to The King in Yellow, an 1895 collection of horror stories by Robert W. Chambers that itself references a forbidden play called "The King in Yellow"—a play that in turn "induces despair or madness in those who read it." It's also telling that Chambers borrowed the name "Carcosa" from Ambrose Bierce, and that H.P. Lovecraft later borrowed it from Chambers.
In other words, the important thing about the Yellow King and Carcosa isn't what they signify to Reggie Ledoux. It's what they signify to us. They call attention to the story-ness of the story we're watching. They tell us, as Pizzolatto put it to me, that Dora Lange is "meant to stand in for the universal victim for this type of show"; that Ledoux, with his comically archetypal 666, pentagram, and swastika tattoos, is the universal serial killer; and that True Detective is a form of metafiction.
Watch the first five episodes again, and you'll notice how often Pizzolatto circles back to storytelling as a theme. It's the engine that drives investigation. It's the motivation behind religion—a “fairy tale," as Cohle puts it, designed to “get us through the day." When asked about his so-called shootout with Ledoux, Hart says, "I tell it the same way I told the shooting board and every cop bar between Houston and Biloxi. And you know why? Because the story's always the same, 17 years gone. Because it only went down the one way." But as we soon see, it didn't go down that way at all. Hart's story is just that—a story.
Underneath it all—the spooky imagery and quantum physics—that's the simple but serious claim Pizzolatto seems to be making: that everything is a story. "This doesn’t work if it’s not a tale well told," he explained near the end of our interview. "But if you want to keep going, that’s, like, the fourth layer of understanding. You don’t have to. Nobody needs to think about that. But I’m not just using the genre while saying “Haha, we’re better than genre.” Not at all. I love the genre. But a genre doesn’t ever have to be limited by what’s been done before."
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