From an interview with the Daily Beast: “I’ve just read a couple pieces where the critic tries to dismiss Cohle’s monologues as ‘the sort of half-baked loopiness you’d get in freshman year philosophy,’ and that’s not true at all. But what if, before chiding Pizzolatto because he “tells instead of shows,” we take a minute to think about what he is trying to tell us, assuming both that he has something to say, and that he is managing so far to say it: presumptions consistent in the first place with that Pizzolatto has said about the show, 1 1. We live, after all, in the age of “show, don’t tell,” the covertly anti-intellectual writing school directive a version of which Greenwald actually levels at Pizzolatto. In part this reflects the discomfort that many of today’s critics seem to have with highfalutin ideas being expressed in contemporary art-and especially in an art as supposedly democratic as television (“Television, once my chosen medium for vegging out, has become increasingly snobby in its literary pretensions,” wrote one critic after episode 5). (Kenny Herzog of New York magazine trots a middle ground, praising the show for giving us “philosophy for thought, whether inconsequential or essential.”) This means that nowhere is the possibility considered that Cohle’s philosophical remarks might be, on the one hand central to the show, and on the other philosophically serious and significant. So on the one side we have critics who find Cohle’s dialogue to be “egregious” and “shallow,” and on the other we have critics who say that that’s just the point-Cohle is a damned mess, and one of the ways the show conveys it is through his incomprehensible philosophical soliloquies. Cohle’s monologues, he says in response to Greenwald, are not supposed to be philosophically provocative they are supposed to mark him as a “character who is both smart and crazy, often wise and frequently disturbed.” ![]() I think the point is that both lead male characters are a damned mess.” Chotiner agrees. I don’t think the talk is supposed to be brilliant. “The premise of the Nussbaum piece seems to be that the ‘talk’ on the show is dumber than we’re led to believe,” writes Cynthia Dagnal-Myron in Huffington Post, “but here’s the thing. The three critics above are all on record as disliking True Detective I’ve personally been more surprised by the way that those who claim to like the show have responded to their charges. A sinewy weirdo … delivers arias of philosophy, a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti.” (Nussbaum levels this as part of a broader criticism of the show as being misogynistic, which it may be.) “The series reveals itself as … a vehicle for long-winded exchanges about religion and responsibility that are writerly in the worst way,” wrote Mike Hale in the New York Times, adding that Matthew McConaughey’s character, Rust Cohle-the show’s portrait of a philosopher (or “philosopher”)-is “saddled with most of Pizzolatto’s more egregious dialogue.” For Grantland’s Andy Greenwald, Cohle is “an antisocial oddball who jots down everything in an oversize ledger and is prone to unprompted philosophical disquisitions,” while for the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, he is “a macho fantasy straight out of Carlos Castaneda. Well, of course the ones making the accusations all claim that it is fake or pseudo philosophy. ![]() Above all, True Detective stands accused of engaging in philosophy. ![]() Nevertheless, Chotiner’s commentary reflects what has become the consensus critical view that True Detective is a well-acted and compellingly plotted mystery, which is held back by its occasional pretensions to intellectual seriousness. Confidential.” This is like praising a scene between Vronsky and Anna in Anna Karenina for reminding one of a “great scene in Danielle Steele” (okay it’s not quite that bad). ![]() In the New Republic yesterday, Isaac Chotiner expressed relief that Sunday night’s episode of True Detective had returned to its roots as a “police procedural,” praising one scene in Episode 7 by comparing it to a “great scene between Kevin Spacey and Guy Pearce in L.A.
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