True Detective "Form and Void": High Art on an Ending Spin

The show went back to being high art again tonight. It did all feel a little rushed and plot advancing for the first 30 or 40 minutes, but that left for the surreal scene outside of the hospital with Rust and Marty. It was lit with the feel of being in a Speilberg movie, namely Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Marty was lit by the high light, warm face, speaking to Russ in the darkness. Russ, in a state of extreme fragility, pontificated from there. Philosophy making clear the oddness of our own existence.

Out of the scene, Russ is pushed, trying to find "the light" after having gone through 17 years or more of being forced through darkness, derangement, and degradation. He had to go through all of this because his nature beckoned it. Even when Marty's clearly did not. Out Rust peeks, skin shed, feeling reborn, and absolutely lost. Out back into the dark world where lightness speckles in and out.

This is the best scene in anything done this year. On any screen.

True Detective did lose its way a little here and there as a series, but the sequences like these are without equal. Until Mad Men comes back what can compare to this sort of experimental postmodernism?

It's Spielbergian, Hitchcockian, David Lynchian, yet also so unkempt between these flashes and disintegrations. It goes right back to some unused line of high wire, clinging to it for as long as it will hold.

It's ET for adults. Except there's no foreign oddity. There's these lives. There's this place. There's all that oddness and derangement lurking around. All those doors to all of that. None are ajar. And the meanderings of our current navigations of such a place. The wrong doors making aliens of men.

What have we done to ourselves?



(Cue the T-Bone Burnett soundtrack, please)