HBO
Every week, I sit down to watch True Detective with my fiancée and discuss what we’ve learned about the Caspere murder. As a general rule, I am a fan of the show’s second season, while she has come to agree with many of the people who stopped watching early. This week’s episode was particularly rough for her; after hearing the most recent clues surrounding the nineties Hollywood investigation, she started to grumble that the show would never tie everything together to her satisfaction. For her and countless others, True Detective is a show with plenty of buildup and very little payoff.
There’s no denying that we’ve reached the payoff portion of True Detective’s second season. If you weren’t aware of this to begin with, the teasers at the end of every episode – breathlessly counting down the number of remaining episodes – would be more than happy to remind you. But as we get closer to wrapping everything up, it’s important to remember that True Detective has never been a show about solving grand conspiracies. When Wood Harrelson’s Marty Hart announced that they didn’t get everyone but they did get theirs, he was telling audiences that, for better or for worse, True Detective is a show about big webs and small spiders. Don’t expect this season to end in mass arrests any more than the first.
Now, onto the episode.
“Church in Ruins,” the sixth episode of season two, begins with some of the finest writing of Pizzolatto’s run on True Detective. Those who were looking forward to a violent showdown between Velcoro and Semyon may be disappointed, but their measured exchange across the kitchen table highlight how well the two men understand each other. For Semyon, Velcoro’s bluster is an empty threat, a cover for the realization that he would have found a way to hurt someone eventually, regardless of the reason. For Velcoro, Semyon’s ignorance is further evidence that he has always been subject to the oversight of another and never served as his own master. Whether you believe Semyon’s denials regarding Velcoro’s victim – and I do – the scene finally establishes the mutual admiration the two men have for each other. It’s a fucked up friendship, but an honest one in a world where few exist.
From here, “Church in Ruins” mostly follows the parallel investigations that Semyon and Bezzerides lead into the disappearance of Ben Caspere’s personal effects. There are a few detours along the way – mostly noticeably the epic Velcoro drug binge and the visit that the Semyons pay to his former henchman’s widow, played by Sprague Grayden of Jericho fame – but True Detective has its eye on the prize and is starting to weave together its now-and-then murder mystery at a feverous pace. This culminates in the long-awaited porn party sequence, where a dazed looking Bezzerides hacked and slashed her way through bodyguards to free a not-so-surprise witness for the state attorney.
Those engaged in a few friendly prop bets regarding True Detective may have been disappointed to find out no knives were hidden on Bezzerides’s person during the orgy sequence, but what should have been the strongest part of the episode (and perhaps the most anticipated moment of the season) ended up feeling just a little flat. While McAdams does fine work in her most emotive sequence to date, the party scene feels rushed and not as eloquently staged as one could hope. The drug-induced blur effect on the screen feels like amateur work – akin to every party scene in every raunchy teenage comedy – and the potential for truly frightening and Lynchian imagery is undermined by the “shock” factor of HBO sex scenes. We’ve all seen Game of Thrones, HBO; there’s nothing shocking going on here at this particular party.
One of the key revelations of the party – issued through bland hallucinations – is that Bezzerides was molested as a child. It might be that Pizzolatto is trying to create a divide between the Vinci elite that traces back to Bezzerides’s childhood – that someone who moved in the same circle as her father caused David Morse’s character to disengage from the rest of the club – but the idea that women can only be portrayed as powerful in a response to violent sexual assault is a sad, tired trope. Furthermore, it prevents the female characters from having any kind of sexual agency that isn’t a reaction to male abuse. May I remind you that the two main female characters in True Detective’s second season – Rachel McAdams’s Bezzerides and Kelly Reilly’s Semyon – were either sexually assaulted or underwent multiple operations that left her incapable of having children. If these are the types of female characters that Pizzolatto is going to write, perhaps we’d be better off with him sticking to the male-centric casting of season one.
While the orgy scene may have been visually disappointing, the musical choices were anything but. Gone was the rhythmic percussion that T. Bone Burnett had taken to using in chase sequences; instead, we were treated to a lush and very dissonant orchestral piece unlike anything we’ve heard in True Detective. An observant Reddit user identified this particular piece of music as part of a three-movement orchestral piece titled Harmonielehre by minimalist composer John Adams. The section used in “Church in Ruins” comes from the second movement, itself titled The Anfortas Wound.
According to Arthurian legend – which varies greatly depending on who is doing the writing– the Anfortas Wound is the wound afflicting the Fisher King, last in a long line of men tasked to protect the holy grail. The Anfortas Wound left the Fisher King both incapable of engaging in combat and infertile, and it is only through the assistance of Sir Percival that the Fisher King is able to carry through his divine calling. It shouldn’t take too much effort to see some parallels there between Arthurian mythology and Frank Semyon’s own impotent and diminished powers in protecting his railway project.
It might be nothing, but it is also fun to look at a bit of the context surrounding the composition of Harmonielehre and apply it to the work that Pizzolatto has done on True Detective. Adams’s three-movement piece was, by his own words, an attempt to blend together the style of twentieth century minimalism with the expressiveness of German Romanticism. On his website, where Adams has provided his own essays for each of his orchestral pieces, the composer writes that Harmonielehre looks at the past in a “’postmodernist’ spirit,” but does so without any of the irony of his later Nixon in China. Over time, Harmonielehre has come to represent the evolution of minimalism from gimmicky and musical commentary into a sincere movement within music.
Those looking to defend the second season of True Detective — and “Church in Ruins” in particular – might do well to think of Pizzolatto as composer rather than screenwriter. Like John Adams with Harmonielehre, Pizzolatto has posited his second season of True Detective as a classic film noir viewed through the prism of his own mythical storytelling. Despite uneven pieces of characterization, these episodes act in constant dialogue with the past – with film noir, Californian history, and Pizzolatto’s own successful first season – and do so with an earnestness that undercuts the idea of True Detective as nothing more than a series of homages. Music theory, in my own experience, has always been less self-conscious about its connection to established pieces of music. We condemn Pizzolatto for standing on the shoulder of greats even as composers like John Adams become living legends for doing exactly the same.
So the Jon Adams score serves as both an expressionist musical queue for Bezzerides and an intertextual piece of musical commentary on Pizzolatto’s own reputation. Then again, it’s also possible that Pizzolatto performed a Google search for creepy dissonant orchestral music and “The Anfortas Wound” was the first thing that caught his eye. Perhaps it truly is better to be lucky than good.
With only two more weeks remaining in True Detective, the show has to figure out which storylines need to be wrapped up completely and which can afford a bit more ambivalence in their resolution. According to my owner personal account, we could stand to hear more about Velcoro’s misjudged assassination, Woodrugh’s awkward family life, Bezzerides’s troubled childhood, the nameless Mexican gangsters who threaten Semyon’s business, the definite link between the shootout and Caspere’s people, the background of the two orphaned children in the police photo, the history of Bezzerides’s mother and father, the possibility of the Semyons to have a child, and the paternity of Velcoro’s kid. Oh, and the murder of Ben Caspere. Here’s hoping that I’m right and True Detective gets its man.