True Detective

TRUE DETECTIVE: SEASON ONE. HBO.

Season one of HBO's crime drama True Detective follows the outlines of the traditional buddy cop series with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as a pair of detectives trying to solve a cult serial murder case and unmask the highly placed conspirators who have kept it covered up. Set in coastal Louisiana, the storyline switches between 1995, the time frame of the original investigation, and 2012, when new information brings the retired and estranged former partners back together to finish the job. Aside from the familiar theme of a murderous demon-worshipping cult operating at the highest levels of society (as seen in Rosemary's Baby and its ilk), an additional religious dimension comes compliments of its overlay of elements from weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti (whom some have accused the show's creator Nic Pizzolatto of plagiarizing) and Robert W. Chambers. The show also employs Hollywood serial killer tropes that evoke Red Dragon and Se7en played out against a background of the rural South examined in Susan Ketchin's The Christ-Haunted Landscape. McConaughey plays "Rust" Cohle, a damaged former undercover officer who drinks alcoholically, experiences regular hallucinations, and espouses a Schopenhauerian pessimism. The show features some staples of the Louisiana religious landscape (tent revivals, Vodou, the medieval-looking traditions of the Courir de Mardi Gras), but it is through Cohle's pronouncements about the "evolutionary mistake" of consciousness and the universe's indifference to humanity, followed by what could be described as a conversion experience, that "matters of ultimate concern" Tillich claimed as the purview of religion get their most thorough treatment. Fred Chappell's 1968 novel Dagon is a more successful blend of philosophical horror and Southern Gothic, but True Detective is a good way to introduce students to the literary imagination's picture of religion in the American South as well as the kind of philosophical negativity that is often ignored in the study of religion.