Understand why "True Detective" should take a firm stand of realism. The recent update of the American TV series proves that "True Detective" is indeed not only magical realism, but may also be critical realism. America is still a magical land.
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last episode of "True Detective" was broadcast, they swarmed Of viewers crowded the online viewing platform of the Home Theater Channel (HBO). Starring Matthew McConaughey, who started the Oscar laurel a week ago, certainly adds points. The fineness of the drama is the main contributor. The play started smoothly and powerfully. The energy accumulated slowly along the way reached the eruption pass like a volcano. Naturally, there was a crowd of onlookers.
The first shot was under the dark night. Someone carried a person to the field under a big tree. He lit a fire, and a line of fire separated the sky and the earth. Immediately a camera lens occupied the frame. This was the Louisiana Police Department in 2002. The protagonist Luster played by McConaughey and his partner Marty were questioned by two black police officers after many years of leaving. Facing the camera, the two recalled a strange case jointly investigated in 1995. A young woman was found in a burned sugarcane field, with antlers tied on her head, kneeling and praying under a tree, with a swirling symbol painted on her back, and a vine stand beside her. Originally, the police believed that the murderer had been shot dead in 1995, but the same method reappeared, so the police approached them to find out the situation.
American dramas with crime themes are usually fast-paced. "True Detective" runs in the opposite direction. It is immersed in the specific Southern American Gothic culture-the invisible wilderness and swamp, the dilapidated wooden houses in the country and the woody villagers seem to construct a closed time that slows down time. space. Luster faced the strange policeman who questioned him, Schopenhauer possessed him, as if looking back at the world he had already abandoned with cold eyes, all the philosophers who were outside the case further extended the dimension of time, slow It's like the unchanging skyline in the play, and the industrial smoke rising from the skyline.
In this way, the past and the present intersect. The two detectives hop around on the 17-year timeline, using truth and lies together, telling how they found an exit in the erratic maze of clues—in fact, the distance identified a cult group. With a huge silhouette, they only walked halfway in 1995. Luster realized that they had missed the truth as early as 2002. He came back this time to find his old partner to complete the unfinished business of the year.
The slow pace and overwhelming information made some people abandon the show at first. It is very difficult for the audience to clarify the complicated detection process by just watching it once. Unless they are not forgetting, they need to write a chronology and draw a diagram of the relationship between the characters. However, by the end of episode 4, after watching the 6-minute long shot of the gunfight that can be written into the textbook, few people complain that the show is dull.
"True Detective" has no idle pen from beginning to end, and looking down, not only does it not feel drowsy, but it feels extremely scary after careful thinking all the way. For example, the ending of each episode can make people shiver. The first episode is found in the home of a seemingly unrelated little girl who has been missing for 5 years. The same vine frame as the crime scene is found in the first episode; A mural was accidentally found on the wall of the church that was burned down many years ago. In the painting, the person and the victim kneeling in the same posture, with the same antlers on their head, seemed to be a rehearsal of the murder; in the third episode, Rast was in front of the camera in front of the camera in the third episode. Talking about the "sermon", he said that human existence is only a dream, "there is a monster at the end of the dream". At this point, the sound and the picture are separated, and the background music with heavy bass will not appear until episode 5. Of the drug maker walked through the jungle wearing a mask.
The evil deeds of the cult revealed in this play are the tip of the iceberg from beginning to end. The "green-eared" scarred man finally found by the two detectives—that is, the murderer in the first shot who ignites the fire, does not seem to be a big figure in the organization. Among the three cult families in the play, some people died before the clues traced him, and some people in high positions only mentioned their names. No wonder Marty, who has been optimistic for most of his life, said at the end of the play that light versus darkness, "darkness occupies too much territory."
And Luster looked at the sky and retorted him, "Your view of the starry sky is wrong. Before, there was only darkness in this world. Let me say that now the light is winning." This is the last line of the whole play, it is the topic. It’s no coincidence that it starts from the night scene and ends with the night scene.
Orioles, drug producers, child abuse cases, corrupt police, filthy churches, these elements are nothing new in the United States, which is rich in crime dramas. Following the mysterious route and leading to a different dimension of crime drama, David Lynch’s "Shuangfeng Town" (1990) was used as a benchmark; the process of solving the crime is infinitely attached to the helpless reality, and it has repeatedly passed by the truth. , No one can surpass South Korea’s national treasure movie "Memories of Murder" (2003). "True Detective" is reminiscent of these predecessors' jewels, and its special point is that the overwhelming darkness turns out to be just the "mask" of the show. A lot of these are rendered in order to contrast the protagonist's last finding. Starlight, in order to make the other side of the screen, accustomed to taking blood plasma and murder as dessert, we see that little bit of light that is insensitive and tells people "everyone has a choice" (Raster).
An article in The New Yorker harshly criticized that apart from Luster and Marty, other characters, especially female characters, were designed to shape their furnishings, as thin as a piece of paper. A website also mentioned this in an interview with the creator Nick Pizzolatto. Pizzolatto admitted that he did it deliberately. If he goes deeper into the hearts of a few characters, “you can switch to other people’s stories. ", the script will be much easier to write. Indeed, the creators of many "paper men" who sparing pen and ink are just to set off the two protagonists. The "Management" field of "True Detective" does not include them, and it is not even the reasoning process that spent most of the pen and ink. It is not dark and horror. In essence, it is only the inner heart of the two detectives-the yellow robe king in the myth of Cthulhu, the inverted pentagram and the number "666", the symbol of antichrist, and the whirlpool symbol found in the real case. It's just "borrowing" to use it; accordingly, Lastrella's miscellaneous slurs are never superfluous, but the main line.
On the surface, the personalities and styles of this pair of partners are far from each other. One is the old-school policeman who follows the trend of investigative methods, the other is the academic school who is good at profiling; the other is a secular man who blends in with the crowd, and the other is a marginalized person who is incompatible with the environment; One has a delicate mind and heavy thoughts. They also didn't get together as quickly as many popular duo partners, but stumbled all the way because of the different "frequency".
However, they have two things in common. One is the instinctive innocence in the face of "evil", and the recognition of this point allows the two to quickly adjust to the same frequency to conduct joint investigations again after 10 years of unfriendly separation. In addition, "the common failure of the two people is that neither of them recognizes the possibility of happiness." Marty didn't bother to think about what happiness is, just for a moment of freshness, and easily lost the good days of his wife and children. Luster is accustomed to self-exile. On the one hand, it is the pain of the death of his daughter. On the other hand, the father who raised him alone is a "survival freak"-this is a group of people who are anxious under the nuclear deterrence of the Cold War. They think human beings. May be destroyed by nuclear war at any time, so they live in isolation, use underground bunkers to store ammunition and materials, and use cruel methods to train their family members. Luster said that he hadn't watched TV before the age of 17, and he could only watch the stars of Alaska at night and make up stories about the stars.
Luster has been wandering on the edge of nihilism for a long time, doubting the existence of extraordinary humans. It is not without irony that humans are a mistake in evolution. Everyone thinks that he is a unique individual with purpose and meaning. In fact, people are just "living puppets". Once the thread is cut, everyone will fall. However, when he felt that he had sunk into the darkness because of his serious injury, it was not nothingness that surrounded him, but the love of father and daughter. Is it just an illusion of dying? This illusion happened after he personally turned out the incarnation of "evil"-Scarface. It was the encounter with the extreme "evil" and victory over him that allowed him to find the meaning of being a human being, and thus walked out of the cage of years of self-containment and reconciled with the world.
Pizzolatto revealed his own thoughts, and the main theme of "True Detective" is that "everything is a story." Who is "I" is a big question that both philosophy and religion must answer. The screenwriter used Luster's words to tell us that human beings are "just our story between life and death." Religion and philosophy are also human talks. Give yourself a story. It was the same conversation about the starry sky, Luster said, he wanted to understand, "This is just a story, the oldest story", "Darkness and light showdown." "This" refers to the twists and turns that they have experienced in this case over the past 17 years. It is also the path of his mind and the reflection of the world in his heart. The shell of "True Detective" has a long and intertwined plot line, which is a big drama; the core is as simple as one sentence, and it is to let the two protagonists, especially Luster, rewrite their "story" and "identify that there is happiness in this world." Possible".
It is not difficult to provide a set of "characters" with vivid personality, but to write a naked human heart. This requires ability and courage. Most of the time, in order to have peace of mind when eating off the screen, the joys and sorrows of the world are simulated by various "roles".
Get out of the shackles of oneself and be sad to defeat others. If a person does not believe in happiness, he will never be happy; if a person does not believe that there is love in the world, even if he is loved and loved, he will not perceive it. And how difficult it is to change a deep-seated obsession, see the movie "Inception" (2010). It is so light, and the big story is poured into a thread of thought to discuss God and man, life and death. The last time I saw it, it was Russell T. Davis's famous work "Comrades Also Mortal" (1999).
This creative concept can be seen in the opening credits of the series. What is unique is that the portraits that occupies almost the entire screen are "emptied", and the heads and bodies of the two detectives are embedded in the empty shots that appear repeatedly in the play: under the low dark clouds, a lot of thick smoke comes out of the gray factory. The conceptual poster in black and white reproduces this design: the top half of the sketched portrait becomes a chimney, and half of the poster is covered with smoke. The inside of the protagonist reflects the world. In the play, the world the protagonists live in is a polluted Louisiana.
At the end of the second episode, there is an empty mirror that hits the eye. Behind the horrible ruins of the church, wood-like chimneys stand full of the connecting parts of the sky and the earth, and the whole series spares no effort to portray pollution and wreckage. There is a detail in the lyrics of the opening song. The branch where the poisonous snake that bit "me" hides contains "poisonous wood oil", which is a pungent and corrosive substance; in the last episode, the two go to Scarface His lair set out in a completely dead wood. As the two detectives drove around to investigate the case, smoking factories always appeared on the plain skyline.
Does industrialization really bring civilization to people? In the old photos, many of the cultists who participated in the torturing of children to make savage sacrifices were not exposed to animal masks in the end. The drama implies that there are many educated dignitaries among them. In the post-industrial civilization era, why would there be people who have a dog-like appearance while getting rid of their humanity and trampling on the lives of children like wild beasts? Of course, it can be said that Louisiana is located in the southern part of the United States and has the evil voodoo influence in the Caribbean. The actual causality suggested by the plot is even more critical:
First of all, in the vast rural areas of Louisiana, many children drop out of school and fewer regular schools. The Tuttle family’s "Siyuan Project" was able to take advantage of the emptiness to open church schools and provide "another option", and these schools are them. The main carrier of secretly trapping children.
Furthermore, hurricanes are also a recurring plot structure element, first with Andrew in 1992 and then Katrina in 2005. The "stalk" of the hurricane, too many film and television works have been used, and in "True Detective", like the sharp decline in school, the hurricane also expresses the lack of righteousness, so the evil spirit is in charge. First of all, hurricanes are associated with chaos and anarchy. Women and children disappeared and no one asked. They were thought to have run away from home or died of flooding. After the hurricane, many people moved out. The situation of fewer regular schools was aggravated, and old files were also destroyed after the hurricane.
Fortunately, Luster figured it out. After a long journey in the labyrinth of "evil", he was unmoved by the vision of the nebula vortex in the residence of the Yellow Robe King "Kakosha". He chose the starry sky. , Or this one in the real world, maybe it has always been.
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