Category: Blogs

In Part One of this essay, I was
pretty tough on Fargo and True Detective, accusing them of an
absence of imagination, and generosity, in their approach to small-town and
rural life. Perhaps I should heed my
own call for generosity, however. Both Fargo
and True Detective are, in the grand
scheme of things (or, at least, relative to so much television that’s come
before), ambitious, stylish, well-made shows. In certain ways, they are
perfectly wedded to their truncated mini-series form; small towns and miniseries
provide and require just enough life to flesh out a narrative but not so much that
they necessarily overflow with life,
with randomness, imposing their messiness on an auteur’s message. Rejecting for
the most part Frederic Jameson’s "thickening continuum" of geographical
indistinguishability, both Fargo and True Detective rely on their locales to
convey an iconoclasm and remoteness that makes possible the tragic events that
transpire. This isolation is reinforced by the general absence of pop cultural
signifiers—the television, film, or musical touchstones that have become so
ubiquitous in contemporary television and film that they often go unnoticed. [1] Modern
technology plays a diminished role, as well (even taking account of the fact
that shows aren’t precisely contemporary). Fargo‘s
disgraced FBI agents Pepper and Budge work in an old-school, analog file room;
the relevant "files" that True
Detective’s Hart and Cohle seek are said to be lost in post-hurricane
flooding. Instead of GPS tracking there
are French Connection-style
stakeouts. In an age of cell phones, Fargo’s
Gus Grimly nonetheless communicates with his daughter on a walkie-talkie. The
"murder board" at the Bemidji police station is a string figure of
red yarn and local vernacular (one suspect is identified as the "deaf
fella").

It’s hard to tell if the shows
ignore the march of culture and technology as an homage to the by-gone genres they
recall (noir, pulp fiction) or whether those genres provide Hawley and
Pizzolatto an opportunity to slip out of our networked and interconnected world
for a moment, providing a bit of space and quiet to map out their ideas. Either
way, it’s hard not to identify a flattening at work. Still, it’s not as if Fargo or True Detective
are the first shows to reduce small-town and rural life to one-dimensionality
or to a trope. Indeed, twenty-five years before Frederic Jameson wrote his
essay on the false, flat history of small towns and nostalgia films, the Andy
Griffith Show was providing America with a weekly window into a "time gone
by" via Mayberry, North Carolina. Though it was filmed in, and ostensibly took
place in, the 1960s, Griffith himself has explained that the show consciously
catered to a nostalgia for times past, cultivating an 1930s-ish atmosphere. This is the endless reservoir of our
nostalgia. The Andy Griffith Show has
been on the air (in some form) since it debuted on CBS in 1961, and audiences continue
to watch it today out of nostalgia for a time that the show itself sought to
escape via an even deeper nostalgia. 

The Andy Griffith Show was among the first of its kind. By 1971, CBS
had seven rural-themed shows in its line-up, a glut of bumpkin-escapist fare so
pervasive, so identified with cultural complacency, that Gil Scott Heron
indicted it in his seminal spoken-word piece "The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised" ("Green Acres, The
Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction
will no longer be so Goddamn relevant"). That year, as part of
an attempt to appeal to a younger, more contemporary demographic, CBS initiated
what became known as "the rural purge"—cancelling its entire line-up of rural
shows, including Mayberry RFC, Green Acres, and (the year before) Petticoat Junction. As one actor joked, "It
was the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it." [2] And just like that, the "noble rubes" and
barnyard hijinks were gone. But only briefly. A popular (and political) uproar led to CBS’
attempt to placate critics a year later with The Waltons, which followed a decidedly noble family’s travails in
a hardscrabble 1930s Virginia.  Initially
expected to fail—for both demographic and scheduling reasons—The Waltons stayed on the air for nearly a decade (a run extended by several television movies), and it peaked
at Number 2 in the Nielsen ratings in 1973-74. Although it may have been intended to placate the fans of CBS’s canceled
shows, The Waltons also marked a departure
from its predecessors, in part by being more overtly historical (it took place
forty years before its air date) if still folksy, but also by foregoing broad
characterizations and humor. (NBC would try to tap into a similar audience via
the even more historical, more folksy themes of Little House on the Prairie in 1974.) That
said, pre-Waltons cartoonishness
would make a brief return with the Dukes
of Hazzard in the late 1970s. And the comic conflict between rural unreason
and urban sophistication (and exasperation) seen in Green Acres would be revisited, and revised, by Newhart (1982-1990). In other words, The Waltons didn’t really supplant the
shows it replaced. It simply added another trope to the mix. 

Together,
these 1960s and 70s series have provided, and continue to provide, a template
for the numerous rural and small-town shows that followed. For main characters
and audiences alike, television’s version of small-town America have frequently
served as something more than a source of easy laughs. They suggest an escape
from, or a corrective to, the misguided ambitions and increasing complexity of American
life. There are variations within the tropes, of course, whether it involves shaking
off the corrupting influence of New York corporate law (Ed), or a Manhattan transplant at the liminal edge of Alaska’s vast
wilderness (Northern Exposure), or
the Lake Wobegon-esque hermeticism of a town where everyone is strong,
good-looking, and above-average (Gilmore
Girls, Everwood, Dawson’s Creek). Northern Exposure debuted a short six months after Twin Peaks and though the two shows are
marked by thematic similarities—an outsider arrives from out of town and is introduced
to a cast of eccentric characters in a rustic Northwestern setting—Northern Exposure incorporated and
civilized Twin Peaks’ rough edges,
retrofitting its strangeness to familiar frameworks. [3] 
Structurally, Northern Exposure was closer
to Newhart, even if it seemed a
little artier around the edges. [4]
Despite their differences, the majority of these more modern rural and
small-town series attack the fundamental premise of a show like Peyton Place—Jameson’s "claustrophobia
and anxiety," or the assumption that small towns are prisons one must
escape—with aggressive eccentricity (Northern
Exposure), geniality (Ed), and/or
wit (Gilmore Girls). As enjoyable as
these shows were, watching them again, all of the effort nonetheless suggests a
touch of over-compensation.

*          *          *          *

Though
there’s no question that the charm of the more contemporary shows discussed
above is revved up high, it’s also true that they are, in many ways, more
self-aware and sophisticated than their 1960s and 1970s predecessors. Take Ed, which ran on NBC from 2000-2004.  On one level, it’s a traditional nostalgia
show. Ed Stevens (Tom Cavanagh), a local son of Stuckeyville, Ohio who left to
become a New York attorney,  "loses
his job and his wife on the same day" (she sleeps with the mailman—which
is the first notice that we’re entering the region of television tropes as much
as we’re entering small-town America)—and takes off to regroup in his
hometown of Stuckeyville, Ohio. There, inspired by a brief but genuine romantic
moment with his high school crush, Carol Vessey (Modern Family’s Julie Bowen), Ed buys the local bowling alley and opens
up his law practice inside. He quickly slips back into a slightly revised
version of his teenage life. His social circle is made up of high school acquaintances;
two of them actually teach at Stuckeyville High. The main characters, thirty-ish, mostly
single, prone to juvenile pranks, remain caught between childhood and adulthood.
Ed, in particular, is boyish in all respects, baby-faced, impulsive, stubborn,
and, most tellingly, endlessly impressed with his own cleverness. The stakes in
Ed are so low, the threat of conflict
so attenuated, that Ed aggressively pursues Carol for seasons-on-end without any
indications from the show’s creators that his behavior might be inappropriate. [5]
If anything, the show posits Carol’s resistance to Ed’s advances as a violation
of the narrative contract, punishing her with a series of terrible boyfriends.
Her fiancé, Dennis Martino (John Slattery), was so despised by Ed‘s audience that fans devoted a
website to the myriad ways they might kill him off. Meanwhile, the show unfolds a high
school sub-narrative, the story of current high school student Warren Cheswick (Justin
Long) who (surprise!) has a crush not only on Carol (his teacher at
Stuckeyville High) but also on Stuckeyville High’s prom queen (and thus Carol’s
teenage analog). In other words, Warren acts as both a bridge and an avatar for
Ed, a perfect vehicle for Ed to relive his youth in its actual and its
alternative forms. [6] Ed’s
second chance also extends to his work. His Stuckeyville legal practice has little
to do with his prior life as a lawyer; instead, he becomes a champion of
community values—his low-stakes, high-principle, long-shot cases rarely end
in a positive judgment, but even so, they often trigger heartfelt confessions
or settlements. His clients (aging pastors and doddering party magicians, good Samaritans,
a variety of sad sacks), and his causes (turning his bowling alley into a
historical landmark, for instance) consistently thrust Ed into the role of
quixotic resistance fighter against bottom-line tendencies. In other words, Ed’s
legal battles are antithetical to, and a kind of redemption for, his prior work
on behalf of faceless multinational corporations—a job Ed was fired from for
"missing a single comma in a 3,000 page document." I mean, is there anything
worse than craven capitalism that’s also
prissy about punctuation?

But
Ed is flush with self-awareness, as
well. When Stuckeyville High decides to start a student-run television station,
Warren’s vision of the station’s programming sounds a lot like an original
pitch for Ed: "Americans
these days are looking to television for something comforting, something warm,
gentle and reassuring." The show
not only acknowledges its genealogy (name-dropping Northern Exposure early in Season One), and its peers (via a
guest-starring role for Picket Fences’ Adam
Wylie), it’s also steeped in television history. In addition to the shows
mentioned above, the first season alludes to, among others, Archie Bunker, Happy Days, M.A.S.H., One Day at a Time, and The Rockford Files. This might be viewed
as yet another embodiment of the loss of small-town autonomy (and identity) at
the hands of "identical products and standardized spaces" that
Jameson laments. And perhaps it is. But Ed
relies on pop cultural memories as a source of stability, using that shared
heritage to link the characters in the show to each other and, of course, to
the audience. With its foregrounding of familiar tropes and its web of cultural
allusions, you can almost feel the nostalgia of Ed the show, pulling against the nostalgia of Ed the character, in
its suggestion that what we long for isn’t the idyll of the small town itself
but rather the television shows that have taken its place. And so, although a
large crowd shows up to see the cast of Happy
Days at a Stuckeybowl promotion, Ed’s attempt to preserve Stuckeybowl
itself as a cultural landmark is met with far less fanfare. In its way, this pop cultural nostalgia signals
a kind of irreversible cultural shift from a childhood of local exploration to
the latch-key childhood of television (or video game) as geographically-indistinct
babysitter. [7] Ed embraces
cultural signification but dispels with the chaotic surrealism of, say, Twin Peaks by stabilizing that
signification. It becomes a kind of
currency.

*          *          *          *

The
persistence of these tropes makes one appreciate all the more those shows that
manage to accrue complexity and ambiguity. Justified,
for instance, which tracks the life and work of a U.S. Marshal banished to his
backwater birthplace, completed its fifth season on FX this year. That
birthplace, Harlan County, Kentucky, is vibrant, and the show takes its time
establishing not just the region’s class hierarchies but also sub-strata, the
teeming and disparate socioeconomic microhabitats that exist even within social
classes. Justified plays out against
a very real backdrop of failed farms and a changing mining industry (Season Two
revolves around the attempts of a mining company to secure land rights) that no
longer supplies the jobs and money it once did. [8]
Not surprisingly, the citizens of Harlan County view both foreign (i.e.,
out-of-state) corporations and the federal government with wariness. And Justified makes clear that the rise of
crime (and drug abuse) in the region is tied to, but not dictated by, economic
conditions. Although the show is genre television—it doesn’t pretend to be
much more than serialized crime fiction—its creators and writers have learned
something fundamental from Elmore Leonard, the genre-master who wrote the novels
and short-story from which Justified
draws its main character, Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). [9]
Justified’s stories
are full of family and regional history, nature and nurture, issues of class,
race, and even gender. These forces work their way through most episodes, and
the result is a cast of characters who make life-and-death decisions in ways
that are frequently unpredictable but rarely incomprehensible. There is a local logic to the Justified universe. As a result, its strongest seasons—two and
four—are those that are most grounded in Harlan County’s history, culture,
and economics. 

At
the end of Season Four, as the violence escalates and the stakes are continuously
raised, it’s a shared, local memory (of an Apollo astronaut’s helicopter
landing at their high school twenty years before) that proves life-saving for both
Raylan and his nemesis, Boyd Crowder (Walter Goggins), Raylan’s childhood
friend and, at times, his uneasy ally. Boyd is a brilliant character—most
fans of the show are aware that its creators intended to kill him off in Season
One but couldn’t because Goggins was so good—but he may not be the show’s best.
It will be a while before anyone comes up with an antagonist as fascinating,
terrifying, and ultimately tragic, as the criminal matriarch Mags Bennett from
Season Two. Powered by a smart, steely performance by Margo Martindale, Mags is
all the more compelling because the character’s power and dangerousness is
terrestrial and local—she is inseparable from the Harlan County that she
loves and that she sells out, torn between tradition and opportunity, loyalty
and fairness, family and community. It comes as no surprise, then, that Justified’s weakest season—this most
recent one—was the first to take events far away from Kentucky (even if it
eventually circled back to familiar soil). And it’s probably not a coincidence
that this was the first season in which neither of the two main characters had
a father figure; Boyd’s father Bo died in Season One, and Arlo, Raylan’s father
and Boyd’s surrogate father, died in Season Four. The show’s first steps
outside of the well-developed regional and familial history result in a loss of
gravity that renders the jokes tinny and more mocking and the violence more arbitrary
and gratuitous than in prior seasons. The show has never lacked for the
stereotypes audiences expect of shows in a rural setting (there are "dumb
rednecks" to spare), but when it’s on its game, it shares Leonard’s genuine
affection for characters, including the dimwitted outcasts. Even better, it
plays with those same stereotypes. Outsiders who underestimate the locals do so
at their own peril. In the end, Justified
pays respect to its characters by constructing a complex moral universe; one
worthy of the characters’ life-changing decisions.

*          *          *          *

Unlike Fargo, True Detective, and Justified, the violence in Ray McKinnon’s slow-building but (for
me, at least) transcendently powerful Rectify
(The Sundance Channel) remains, for the most part, in the distant past or the
uncertain future. Season One follows the first free week in the adult life of
Daniel Holden (Aden Young), once convicted of killing his high school
girlfriend and now released back into the wild (in this case, his hometown of
Paulie, Georgia) after twenty years on death row. [10]
The show doubles its narrative, frequently flashing back to Daniel’s last
year(s) on death row, chronicling his relationship with his fellow inmates,
including his closest friend, Kerwin (Johnny Ray Gill), with whom he has a
running dialogue through a vent connecting their cells.  Like True
Detective’s Cohle, Daniel is an autodidact who leans heavily on
intellectual structure to measure and mediate a universe that has treated him
with cruel arbitrariness. Unlike Cohle, however, Holden acknowledges early on that
the approach has severe limits—that a "world view" that does not allow for "optimism"
is a "kind of fantasy itself."  The first
six episodes are primarily the story of Daniel’s attempt to escape the limits
of a compulsive pessimism that, while necessary in prison, proves altogether
more destructive outside its walls. The show does not shake this pessimism
easily. There’s a lingering acknowledgment in the show’s slow-boiling threat of
malice and violence of the possibility that, as Daniel’s dying former defense
attorney, Rutherford Gaines (Hal Holbrook) puts it to Daniel’s current defense
attorney, Jon Stern (Luke Kirby), we’re nothing more than "monkeys going to
nowhere." Lorne Malvo would no doubt agree. [11]

Rectify
is, like Fargo, concerned with the lessons
in scale and seclusion that attend small-town experience. Over the course of its
first season, Rectify complicates,
but does not fully reject, the Peyton
Place cliché that small towns are prisons. For Daniel, fresh off of decades
of  Spartan solitude, Paulie’s banality is
almost too much, a source of wonder and confusion he can’t understand let alone
control. [12] But
the show also makes clear that Paulie is painfully restrictive for Daniel’s
family members and has been for years. Notions of freedom, confinement, and
privacy are interrogated from the very first scene, where we watch (in profile,
through a dark room and a window) the intake of a newly-arrived prisoner,
complete with cavity search. In the
background, watching through another window and a closed door, is Daniel, waiting
to be processed and released. For the first time in twenty years, Daniel is on
the other side of a window, the surveillor, not the surveilled. In keeping with
this, a guard turns his back to allow Daniel to change into civilian clothes
and even offers him a drink while he waits. 
These first minutes of the first season are typical of Rectify’s approach throughout: a carefully
arranged scene that lets the camera linger when other shows would move it along.
Here, the camera watches Daniel closely, using the muted bewilderment washing
over him to measure the significance of the changes at work.

The
changes do not last long, and the panopticon of prison life gives way to a
different surveillance state. Because Daniel has not been exonerated—he is
released on the basis of DNA evidence that has called his conviction into
question, pending retrial—there is nowhere he, or his family, can go that is
not noted, watched, catalogued, and commented upon by the citizens of Paulie.
("Remember," his attorney tells the family, before they’ve even been reunited
with him, "everything we do is being watched and judged.") Paulie’s citizens
may not agree about Daniel but they do not lack for opinions and, twenty years
after his conviction, the shockwaves still continue to cause damage. In one
flashback, Kerwin, his friend from the adjacent cell on death row, attempts to
cut through Daniel’s pessimism, asking Daniel to "just imagine . . . a world
full of windows." But we come to understand that windows constitute both a
freedom and a threat; as if on cue, we’re brought into Daniel’s present, with television
cameras crowding around his mother’s car as the two of them attempt to leave
the parking lot of a large box store.

And
yet Rectify never construes Paulie
narrowly. Save for one or two characters, it refuses to simplify even the town’s
most unlikeable citizens. A gossipy waitress (Kim Wall), for instance, who
spreads the rumor that Daniel’s sister, Amantha (Abigail Spencer) is sleeping
with Stern, also sends Daniel home with fried chicken from the diner, without
charge. [13]
Ted Jr. (Clayne Crawford), Daniel’s step-brother, is a familiar brand of
jackass, all bluster and baseless self-confidence, who struggles to be
understanding and supportive on Daniel’s return when, in truth, he feels both
threatened and slightly undone by the events. Nonetheless, Ted Jr.’s love for
his wife, Tawny (he passes up the opportunity to cheat without a thought when
he’s on the road for work) and his step-mother appear unconditional. Oft-maligned
institutions are treated with similar ambiguity.  Rectify’s
portrayal of big tent religious revivalism is in marked contrast to that of True Detective, where the church’s
collection of misfits (resembling a circus sideshow) mostly serves to give
Cohle the opportunity to lob insults (Cohle derides their "collective IQ,"
noting that it’s "safe to say no one [t]here is gonna be splitting the atom"). Daniel,
on the other hand, rushes into a baptism at the urging of Tawny, with whom he
has a not-completely-innocent connection. In keeping with Rectify’s
painstaking narrative process, Daniel’s baptism resolves nothing, registering
as a moment of catharsis that nonetheless leaves Daniel confused and raw.  Transcendence might not be in the offing, but
the show nonetheless refuses to judge those with faith, like Tawny, who dare to
suggest that "miracles" might be possible "in this town, right now." [14]

Rectify is slow-paced, and its long silences hang heavily. The
deliberate pace is also a destabilizing force; Rectify packs abundant weirdness into its vast, languid spaces. A
lot of this weirdness stems from Daniel, who remains as much of an enigma to us
as he does to his family and fellow citizens. We come to learn a little about
the child who was sent to prison twenty years before—smart, strange—and he
retains no small amount of teenage goofiness. Early in the first season there’s
a scene where Daniel dances in the family’s attic, wearing his father’s hunting
gear and spinning a duck call while listening to Cracker’s "Low" on his old Walkman,
that is absurd, touching and very funny all at once. Still, his anger and his urges are quite
real, and very powerful. Just how lost Daniel is becomes clear in the fifth
episode of Season One, when, wandering the streets sleepless, Daniel is picked
up by a grizzled (and, yes, mysterious)
stranger [15]
in a beater of a truck (W. Earl Brown) who asks Daniel to help him with some
errands. To go into too much detail would be to destroy a delightfully strange
hour of television. Nonetheless, at one point Daniel and his new friend wrestle
in a field in the early morning and, as the violence becomes increasingly
pronounced, the scenes suggest the real possibility that Daniel could, in that
moment, kill or be killed. More than this danger, and dangerousness, however,
the scenes reveal a loneliness so deep that Daniel is willing to throw himself
into the fight’s visceral, brutal tenderness as a (lousy) surrogate for
intimacy and touch. Watching the episode—in addition to being strange, one of
the finest hours of television I’ve watched in a long time—I was reminded of
the dark, funny surrealism of Denis Johnson’s classic Jesus’ Son, which navigates similar territory, blurring the lines
between reality and dream and between violence, failure, and transcendence.

Rutherford
Gaines tells Stern, a lawyer for a death penalty public interest group, that Stern
will never understand Paulie’s treatment of Daniel because he wasn’t there to experience
the terror and anger that gripped the town at the time of the murder and trial.
But if collective memory is the engine of the town’s anger, it also suggests inherent
limits. There are characters—not just Tawny, but a hair stylist, an
acquaintance or two, a few random individuals—who suggest the possibility that
Paulie will be able to move on from the events, that the specter of Daniel will
not always linger. Of course, it’s
not as simple as forgetting. A town’s collective memory can be persistent and
self-perpetuating, and legend and folklore frequently step in when actual
memories start to fade. This persistence is driven home in Rectify’s second season, when Stern and Amantha are confronted by a
Paulie resident outside of the town’s roller-skating rink for nothing more than
the mindless enjoyment each other’s company. Stern challenges her indignation:

Jon: How old were you then?
Five? Eight?

Woman: I was old enough.

Jon: Old enough…for what? To listen to what your parents told you and
believe it because they told you it was the truth? Afraid to think for
yourself? Scared to look at all the facts?

Perhaps word-of-mouth and local legend also have their
limits, however. More than any other characters, it’s those, like Daniel’s
half-brother, Jared (Jake Austin Walker), who weren’t born when the events
transpired (and thus, like Stern, weren’t there to experience that collective
pain) that provide the most substantial indication that Daniel could reclaim possession
of his life. This promise is evident even in the obnoxious teens who snap
photos of themselves with Daniel. They’re drawn to Daniel out of a morbid curiosity,
a horror-attraction that’s familiar to many of us who grew up in small towns. At
a certain age, darkness has an appeal simply because it’s different. And who needs Black Sabbath when you have a convicted
killer next door? But that attraction is abstract, the opposite of experiential—indeed, it is based on the foreignness of
the horror—and thus a passing phase. Even Daniel seems to understand this,
explaining to Jared, somewhat ominously, that Jared’s curiosity about him (or,
as Daniel phrases it, his curiosity about the "taboo") is natural,
but demands caution.

Although
Rust Cohle is True Detective’s philosopher-king,
it’s Harrelson’s Martin Hart who provides us with the show’s core philosophical
observation: "infidelity is one kind of sin but my
true failure was inattention."
This inattention abounds in the True
Detective universe – whether it’s the intrinsic inattention of the state
police force, families, and schools that ignore the disappearances of their
daughters or the extrinsic inattention of the world at large, the failure of anyone
to notice what is going on in southern Louisiana allows evil to fester and
grow. [16]
This is what makes Rectify’s rejection
of traditional narrative demands so remarkable. The town’s vigilance is, in
many ways, pernicious; and yet it’s the show’s refusal to look away for the
convenience of narrative, its willingness to let moments hang in the air, and
its patience in following side characters through seemingly digressive
plotlines, that grants it a rare, and powerful, moral authority. 

*          *          *          *

I
suppose I shouldn’t find it surprising that each of shows on which I’ve focused
centers around the law, whether it be
lawmen, lawyers, or alleged law-breakers. After all, the law is our foremost nexus
and repository of social and cultural currents. And if criminality is an
expression of frustrated ambition, what better specimen than a small-town
crook? Even Cecil County, where I grew up, has its version, straight out of Justified’s playbook. In the late 1970s,
the area in-and-around the county, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, was
the stalking ground of the infamous "Johnston Family Gang," who made
a small fortune stealing farm equipment, cars, drugs, money, and antiques they
fenced through friends and neighbors they’d charmed or intimidated into silence.
Although the Johnstons "worked" out of Chester County, Pennsylvania, Bruce
Johnston, Sr., the ring-leader, was living in Elkton with a girlfriend at the
time of his eventual arrest, and the gang’s crimes routinely crossed state
lines into Maryland and Delaware. From a distance, the Johnston Gang seems in
keeping with television’s tradition of hillbilly rebels—the kind whose crimes
are more ornery than malicious.  But the
Johnstons were ruthless. In 1981, Bruce Sr. and his brothers Norman and David
were convicted of murdering six people (among them three teenagers, including Bruce
Jr.’s fifteen-year old girlfriend, Robin), and attempting to murder Bruce, Jr.,
in order to silence potential testimony against them. Papers around the country
covered the trials, and in the end each brother received multiple life
sentences. Just five years later, in 1986, the Johnston Gang served as the
lightly-fictionalized basis for James Foley’s At Close Range (starring Christopher Walken and Sean Penn), providing
fifteen fleeting minutes of fame for our pocket of the mid-Atlantic. 

The
Johnston legend did not end with those convictions, however. In 1999, Norman hatched
a daring, if old-school, plan of escape, managing to break out of Huntington
State Prison by "stuff[ing] a dummy trimmed with
human hair into his cell bed, then bust[ing] through window bars and
vanish[ing]." He avoided custody
for 19 days. And for those 19 days he was a constant presence in the papers and
the constant source of sightings—on a porch, in a park, at a fruit stand,
along railroad tracks—and speculation in Cecil County, particularly that he
was returning "for revenge or to get money." Johnston’s escape provided ample opportunity for city papers to reinforce small-town
and rural clichés, proving that hackneyed depictions of small towns are not the
exclusive province of the television writers’ room and translating the county’s
“cornstalk lined neighborhood yards” into hoary tropes:

None of this is comforting
to residents of Cecil County, many of whom are used to leaving doors unlocked.
Now, many of them report staying home, with their windows locked and front door
bolted. Streets that last week were filled with the noise of children on
bicycles have fallen silent.

There’s no question that Johnston’s presence
was unsettling for locals. But the above is the stuff of folklore, not news. Instead
of terror, the evidence suggests that, like the curious teens of Rectify, the people who lived along the
Mason-Dixon line enjoyed their brief flirtation with the lawlessness (or taboo)
that Johnston symbolized. That, not
fear, goes a long way toward explaining why copies of At Close Range flew off the shelves of local video stores during Johnston’s
time on the run. Buried under the bullshit in those 1999 newspaper
articles, as well, is a sense of pride, a belief among locals that Johnston’s knowledge
of the land and homegrown resilience would be enough to evade the massive
manhunt dedicated to his capture:

"He knows the area.
… The man was a hunter. The
man was a farmer," said Tim Bickling, who has been following reports about the
manhunt. "If he wants to hide, he can hide," said Bickling, standing
outside his white clapboard home in nearby Cherry Hill.

The combination of memory, fear, morbid
fascination, and regional pride is potent, and the area buzzed for the duration
of Johnston’s flight. In the end, however, his capture proved both
anticlimactic and a little comic:

But for days on end, he was on the run from state troopers,
crouching in the cornfields, his heart pounding with each pass of the state
police chopper. He was frustrated by his inability to steal new cars with
tricky alarms and to operate self-serve gas pumps. After 20 years in prison,
even his old Chester County stomping grounds didn’t seem the same. "He was
dazed by all the change," said his brother, Joe Rivera, who spoke to
Johnston once during his time on the run.

For all his ingenuity, Johnston
couldn’t anticipate or adapt to the changes in landscape and technology that
took place during his twenty years away. There were new housing developments
and factories where once there were open fields. His old networks had dried up and disappeared.  And so, after all of that work to get free,
he escaped into a world that was not just unwelcoming but foreign to him. Which makes me think of Daniel Holden’s attempts to
navigate a once-familiar world that similarly moved on, inexorably, during his
twenty years in prison. The irony, of course, is that these disorienting forces
of change are also those that might, eventually, set Daniel free.  Even then, however, it can’t help but be a long,
dark journey. 

Spencer Short is an attorney and author. His collection of
poetry, Tremolo (Harper 2001), was
awarded a 2000 National Poetry Series Prize. His poetry and non-fiction have
been published in The Boston Review, Coldfront, the Columbia Review, Hyperallergic,
Men’s Digest, Slate, and Verse. He lives in Brooklyn.

[16] Cohle
is, perhaps, most guilty of inattention – neglecting the moment, community, his
own needs and hiding behind work and nihilistic cosmology.

At some point in the second half of the twentieth
century, the way in which we think about the American small town, its
particular brand of community and stability, began to shift. "What
happened," according to Frederic Jameson, as he wrote in an essay in his seminal 1991
collection The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, “is that the autonomy of
the small town (in the provincial period a source of claustrophobia and
anxiety; in the fifties the ground for a certain comfort and even a certain
reassurance) has vanished.”  Thus, for
Jameson, “[w]hat was once a separate point on the map has become an
imperceptible thickening in a continuum of identical products and standardized
spaces from coast to coast.” This "thickening
continuum," a byproduct of our appetite for cable television, franchising
and box stores, and other modern amenities, posed a radical threat to small
town identity. As Jameson describes it, the American small town was once (but
no longer) "contented
with itself, secure in the sense of its radical difference from other
populations and cultures, insulated from their vicissitudes and from the flaws
in human nature so palpably acted out in their violent and alien histories." Of course, Jameson’s proper subject is actually the popular conception of small-town self-identity and, to the extent his commentary attempts to
speak for small towns, themselves, he’s guilty of a bit of simplification. In
other words, what Jameson describes is not necessarily your experience of small-town America. And it certainly wasn’t mine. 

I grew up, and spent my childhood,
living in the same neighborhood, in a small town in the northeast corner of
Maryland, tucked up against the Pennsylvania and Delaware borders. Elkton, named for its position at the
headwaters of the Elk River, which itself curled off of the tip of the
Chesapeake Bay, had a population of just over 9,000 residents when I left for
college in 1990. Elkton is the largest town in Cecil County. Like so many (but certainly
not all) rural American counties, ours was predominately white and conservative—in 1990, in fact, it was 95% white with 90% of its population living in
neighborhoods that were, themselves, more than 90% white. People
today are most likely to be familiar with Elkton from a few road signs that
clip by as they bisect the county heading north or south on U.S. I-95. In a
different era, it was known as an American Gretna Green, the marriage capital
of the United States—the result of liberal marriage laws so well known that,
when Ben Walton ran off to marry seventeen-year-old Cindy Brunson on Season
Seven of The Waltons, the couple
headed for Elkton. Those days are mostly gone, though wedding chapels still
dot Main Street.

Not all public awareness of us has
been so benign. The Elkton Walmart has,
in recent years, been the site of no small amount of cruel cultural absurdity, including
xBox-related near-riots, customers
superglued to toilet seats, and dead
bodies in Chrysler Sebrings.
Digging deeper, there’s also the county’s occasional flirtation with the Ku
Klux Klan, from rallies on local farms in the 1960s and -70s to
Klan-run anti-Obama meetings held in Elkton municipal buildings as recently as
last year. It
doesn’t matter that these rallies generally packed more bluster than bite, with
gawkers and protestors outnumbering participants. For many residents of neighboring
counties the area remains "Ceciltucky": defiantly redneck,
anachronistic. That view isn’t wholly misguided.
To some extent, it’s even a source of pride: my fifth grade gun safety class at
Gilpin Manor Elementary culminated (to my enormous delight) in a teacher-chaperoned
field trip to a local state park where we were given bolt-action rifles to fire
on paper targets.

My memory is both more complicated
and more sentimental than these data points might suggest. Yes, there’s the
recollection of perfectly-seasoned blue crabs piled high on newspaper-covered
picnic tables (with buttered and salted silver queen corn nearby).
The .99 movie theater in downtown Elkton where I saw Rick Springfield in Hard to Hold in 1984, the first movie I
ever attended without parental supervision. And, although there was ample bluegrass
music and square dancing, there was also the all-black-but-me Parks & Rec
basketball team on which I played (a cherry-picking) point guard and the
mostly-Catholic-but me CYO basketball team on which I played (a less-effectively
cherry-picking) point guard (and that once lost a game against a Wilmington,
Del. team 99-27). There’s also no question that I spent a large portion of my
teenage years dreaming of escape—into what, I had no idea. When I go back, however,
(and I do, when I can) it’s these memories that I’m revisiting. But it’s also
true that (contra Prof. Jameson) many of us welcomed the intrusion of
outlet malls, the internet, cable television, that whole thickening continuum
thing. Because, in an essential paradox, the extrinsic, pan-American
homogeneity that Jameson maligns resulted in diversity within our small towns, an increase in both the variety and quality
of services and products.  Improvements in
the quality of our day-to-day lives that helped narrow the sprawling distances
between how we saw ourselves and how we imagined everyone else in the free world
lived.  In other words, the isolation and
radical difference that Jameson places at the crux of small-town self-identify
may be nothing more than a symptom of perspective. In the end, I suppose, my struggle
to define my own experience keeps frustrating and coloring the way I watch a
variety of well-received television shows, including Fargo, True Detective, Justified, and Rectify, that have aired over the last few years. Each of these
shows has significant strengths—strong, charismatic performances, sharp
direction. But it’s no accident that the complexity of the moral universe at
issue in each show is dictated by location and perspective—by just how much
the writers confuse traditional representations of small towns or rural life
for the real thing. 

*          *          *          *

Noah Hawley’s miniseries Fargo is, ostensibly, the story of four
characters, the insurance salesman Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), the deputy
Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), the Duluth policeman Gus Grimly (Colin
Hanks), and a killer, Lorne Malvo (Billy 
Bob Thornton), whose paths cross in and around the (very real) small
town of Bemidji, Minnesota (pop. 13,000). Although faithful in certain ways to
the Coen brothers’ film from which it derives its name and, at least loosely, setting,
Hawley’s Fargo is different, darker. In
large part this is due to the importance given to the character of Lorne Malvo—a contract killer and confidence man who is not from Bemidji. Or anywhere, really, which is probably the
first sign that he’s up to no good. Hawley,
who drafted each script himself but collaborated on the overall story with a
group of writers, has expressed a fascinated, forgiving relationship with Malvo,
describing him as “really interesting" and “a very fun character.”
Indeed, although Malvo slaughters dozens, Hawley has stated his belief that “the
violence [Malvo] does to the social contract is almost as bad as the real
violence that he does.” To Hawley, the philosophical purity of the Malvo
character sets him apart, and free: “When you see a shark swimming in the ocean,
you’re not judging the shark. We don’t judge Malvo because he’s not pretending
to be anything else.”
But Hawley can’t be serious—Malvo pretends to be “something else” at each
turn. It’s how he gains access to his marks and how he avoids capture. He veils
his threats against women and children in small-talk and friendly advice. In
other words, if we can’t judge Malvo, who can
we judge?  The answer, it appears, is
pretty much everyone else.

Malvo, shape-shifter,
has a Mephistophelean swagger, and it’s the Mephistophelean that places Malvo, and Fargo, squarely within a tradition of
Faustian American literature—what Hawley
has called the “stranger comes to town story”—a lineage  that includes (but isn’t
limited to) Mark Twain’s Mysterious
Stranger and Ray Bradbury’s Something
Wicked This Way Comes. Both novels use a (yes) mysterious stranger who visits
a small town to examine, to different conclusions, the way our desires lead us to betray ourselves,
our communities, and our values. [1]  Not surprisingly, perhaps, the books arrive
at different conclusions. Twain forwards a near-Nietzschean nihilism, leaving
no doubt that he views “civilization” as a leash burning at our necks, if not a
wholesale fiction. Bradbury’s Mr. Dark, on the other hand, is eventually
defeated by joy, familial love, and friendship. Provided with a choice between
the path of Twain and the path of Bradbury, Hawley goes dark, choosing Twain’s
model. Although the show ostensibly reinforces Fargo (the movie) in its appreciation of small-town common sense
(“decency trumps all,” is how one critic characterized the series’ conclusion),
given the show’s body count, it’s hard to view the triumph of small town values
as anything but pyrrhic. Where it counts, in its characterizations, the
day-to-day life of its citizens, Fargo
shares the cynicism and nihilism of Twain’s unrepentingly dark novel. But to
what end? Twain’s nihilism seeks to liberate man by stripping away the very
things the fundamentally conservative Fargo
ends up celebrating.

But perhaps the mixed messages are
to be expected. One takeaway from Hawley’s countless press interviews on behalf
of the show is that his Bemidji isn’t much more than a blank canvas onto which he
can project his ideas about good and evil—or, as he phrases it, about what
happens when a “civilized man meets an uncivilized man,” or
an “anarchic force enters polite society.” Our
enjoyment of the show hinges on how much stock we put in Hawley’s experiments
in human behavior, but this isn’t fatal to the show’s success. Nonetheless, it’s
hard to see Hawley’s “polite society” as much more than a petri dish in a spotless
laboratory. Although he describes his show as a battle between “the best and
worst of America,” what
he’s really done is introduce a foreign agent into a static environment. (And
then reintroduced it, for that matter. Malvo returns to eliminate Nygaard for
unknown reasons and, absent that return, the story has no discernible momentum
or end.) It’s not the gauzy layers of snow and ice, the tense, beautiful
blizzard shootout, or the frozen lake into which Lester plummets at the series’
end that constitute the show’s blankness. It’s the lack of any perceptible
response from the town of Bemidji as the deaths mount—the series somehow manages
to squeeze thirty-four deaths into 10 episodes.
In spite of the carnage, Hawley clings to a "romantic idea
that you go off and you face evil and you come back and your reward is to lead
a simple life," that what these characters have faced is not, in the end,
a "dark journey." Of
the series’ four main characters, one has been shot and wounded, two have been
turned into killers (one already was
a killer, of course), and two are dead. The town, itself, is piled high with the
bodies of people who, if Grimly does his job in Episode One, would have been spared.
By my measure, the only people who might come out on the other side events like
these without being “haunted” are people who never really felt anything in the
first place.

The cost of Hawley’s
“romantic idea” is that it necessarily strips Bemidji of collective or
institutional knowledge. The town is never granted a life of its own, even at
the baseline, fight-or-flight level of self-preservation. [2]  As a result, we don’t
think twice when Malvo sits across a diner counter from Deputy
Solverson’s father Lou (Keith Carradine), an ex-state trooper, and Lou doesn’t
recognize him.  At this point in the
series, of course, Malvo has been caught on camera kidnapping a murder victim,
arrested, and even interrogated by Lou’s now-son-in-law.  And yet, even after Malvo creepily inquires
about Lester, the man at the center of
his daughter’s investigation, he is permitted to drive off without anyone
in pursuit. All of this is of a piece with Hawley’s failure to allow Bemidji an
existence greater than the sum of its parts. And
those parts are inherently limited: so many of the citizens of  Bemidji are self-interested and venal,
bullies and predators. The women, in particular, fail to generate sympathy—whether it’s Gina Hess (Kate Walsh), an ex-dancer who laughs off her husband’s murder
and chases the insurance payment, Kitty Nygaard (Rachel Blanchard), Lester’s
sister-in-law, a vain ex-beauty queen, or the needling wives of Lester and
Milos (both are relentless and shrill). Although the characters are sharply, if
superficially, drawn, an air of entitlement emanates from each. Even Linda
(Susan Park), Lester’s sweet, boring, second wife, admits to Lester just before
she’s shot that she coveted Lester while he was still married and fantasized
about “getting his wife out of the picture”—she envisioned herself as a
“Cinderella,” clinging tightly to the belief that Lester “would come along and
take her away from all this.” It’s not just
the women, of course. Sam Hess (Kevin O’Grady), Chaz Nygaard (Joshua Close), and
Milos Stavros (Oliver Platt) are each the asshole father of daft, cruel, and/or
damaged children.  In the end, it’s hard
not to feel that the grisly or abject ends greeting so many of these characters
constitute karmic punishment. 

For all of Hawley’s talk about the
“stoicism” of Midwesterners, the motives of Fargo’s
characters are never far from this surface. 
Maybe this is meant to suggest a regionally-specific anti-mystery or maybe
it’s just a convenience. In either case, it’s a far cry from the Coens’ vision
of small-town Midwestern life, where the conventions of “Minnesota nice” create
inscrutability. Hawley has stated that his “job was not to portray
Minnesota as it is in real life. It was to portray the Minnesota that Joel and
Ethan portrayed in the movie.” In keeping with this, perhaps, he doesn’t pay
much attention to Bemidji as it
actually is (it’s a hub of Native American culture, though there’s not a single
Native American character on the show). [3]
But how true is he to the Coens’ vision? If there’s a takeaway from Fargo the movie, it might be that the
inherent inscrutability of human behavior is not a reason for nihilism or
solipsism. Marge Gunderson’s (Frances McDormand) short soliloquy, as the movie
wraps up, distills this to a point:

"So that was Mrs.
Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the
wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little
bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know
that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand
it." 

Of course, for Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud, it
isn’t about money at all. In the end, Marge’s incomprehension of his motives
proves no bar to her pursuit—though she is aided by a brief encounter with an
old classmate, Mike Yanagita, that spurs her to push deeper. In one of the
film’s more remarkable scenes, Marge figures out, over dinner at the Radisson during
a work-trip to Minneapolis, that the emotionally disturbed Yanagita has lied to
her about his life (inventing both successes and tragedies) in order to make a desperate,
loneliness-driven pass at her. In the course of ten minutes, the Coens show us
two sides of “Minnesota nice.” 

Although Marge’s trusting nature temporarily blinds her to Yanagita’s motives,
she nonetheless uses Yanagita’s desire to conform to “Midwestern” conventions
(modesty, a desire not to cause a scene, the fear of imposing on another) to
reject him gently but firmly, defusing the situation. Beyond this, however,
Yanagita provides Marge with a glimpse at the obscure alchemy that transforms human-scale
desire into elaborately irrational action, a realization that sends her back to
re-interview Jerry Lundegaard. If there is a single scene in Fargo (or any Coens’ movie) that defines
the Coens’ vision, it’s this one.  And
yet Hawley’s comments in interviews suggest that he never completely grasped its
importance,
a fact I can’t be alone in finding troubling.

*          *          *          *

Hawley’s exposure of the
barely-concealed venality underlying the placid surface of Bemidji suggests
less the Coens of Fargo (venality and
greed have their place, but the characters rarely fall prey to
one-dimensionality) than the David Lynch of Blue
Velvet and Twin Peaks. This is,
perhaps, a natural or even obvious parallel, given that both Fargo and Twin Peaks are thematic continuations of revered films. An overt
debt is suggested by Lorne Malvo’s discourse on pie in Fargo’s penultimate episode, as well as the presence of  Bemidji Deputy Bill Oswalt (Bob Odenkirk) who,
like Twin Peaks’ crime-scene weeper
Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz), can’t handle the sight of a dead body. Both shows,
as well, provide sly, structural acknowledgements that they take up where their
predecessors left off. In Fargo, it’s
the bag of ransom cash left behind by the film’s ill-fated Carl Showalter and
found by the show’s ill-fated Milos Stavros. In Twin Peaks, there’s the way the opening credits move from an image
of a Varied Thrush to the town’s churning mill machinery, a casual
deconstruction of the mechanical robin that sits on the windowsill, a beetle in
its mouth, at the end of Blue Velvet.
In each case, we are assured the stories, although different, are nonetheless
connected.

Of course, it’s not exactly novel
to acknowledge that Fargo owes a
great deal to Twin Peaks (the list of
shows with a similar debt is long and distinguished).  Still, something seems to get lost in
translation. Whereas Fargo (the
series) adopts the naturalism and
realism of its forbearer —not just the pretty snowscapes, but the grubby
reality of ice-laced sidewalks, parkas, mukluks, and bulky sweaters—Twin Peaks eschews naturalism for Peyton Place-like melodrama. Lynch’s
performers, pushed toward soap operatics, enact a kind of repeated denaturalization.  Twin
Peaks’ distance from realism (and the
real) is established from the opening credits of the first (and each) episode,
which inform us that Twin Peaks is far from
a small town (pop. 51,201).  As a result,
the sense that it’s a place where everyone knows everyone else (Laura Palmer’s
corpse is recognized by everyone at the crime scene) isn’t based on geography, demographics,
or any other extrinsic ordering principle. In other words, the world Lynch is
exploring is, and is not, ours. It remains unbounded by logic even as it mimics
the narrative logic of other genres.

In the end, the Lynch of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks is less concerned with human nature than he is in the
ways we simplify it—and thus betray it—through representation. Indeed, the
“wholesomeness” of Twin Peaks is really the construct of Agent Cooper (Kyle
McLachlan)—who eventually takes up whittling because it’s “what you do in a town where a yellow light still means
slow down, not speed up”—and not the town itself, which is full of secrets. The image
of Blue Velvet’s fop-ish Jeffrey
Beaumont wandering the streets of a very 1950s-appearing Lumberton (in what
Jameson would describe as a “synthesis of nostalgia-deco and punk,” but what
non-academics might identify as an art-house cousin of Back to the Future’s Marty McFly) swaps historical linearity for an
eternal feedback loop in which artists merely adjust the dials. At its best,
however, Lynch’s fusion of “aw-shucks sincerity” with a non-programmatic pastiche
hints at genuine mystery within the “depthlessness." Indeed, in a period
when small towns could be elevated to the level of fetish through the violent,
nationalistic jingoism of movies like Red
Dawn (1984), attacking these representations at the root is admirable. In a
sense, Jameson mistakenly identifies depthlessness where there is simultaneity.
And he fails to give enough credit to Lynch’s attention to the animal drives
underlying the placid, constructed surface of wholesome Americana. Sure, we
push through the lush grass at the outset of Blue Velvet to find the terrifying, chittering beetles churning
beneath. But what separates those beetles from the robin that devours them? In
other words, in the Lynchian universe, "civilized" and "uncivilized"
may be nothing more than a matter of perspective.

Although Hawley’s Fargo foregoes Lynchian pastiche, it doesn’t
avoid pastiche altogether. Instead, his series is a collage and pastiche of the
Coens’ films as a whole, with the heaviest cribbing coming from No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man.
And, indeed, the nihilistic outsider has a long-standing place in the Coens’
cosmology, spanning from Tex Cobb’s bounty hunter in Raising Arizona to Anton Chigurh in No Country. But this “mash-up” of radically different source
material leads to problems. Even the Coens, masters of tonal manipulation,
struggle at times to keep their competing tonalities in balance. When they
fail, they slip into belittling condescension (Burn After Reading, A Serious
Man). Fargo (the movie) took some
heat from critics for this on release, but in watching it now, its balance and
control seem exceptional, a highpoint in the Coens’ filmography.  The laughs are real, but its swift, graphic
violence is unsettling. For the Coens, there is no “good America” or “bad
America,” only America in endless variety. 
Thus, the cultural conventions that amount to “Minnesota niceness” are
nuanced and, like all conventions, neutral. In other words,

Midwestern
niceness can be deceptive—a form of fiction, or a means of avoiding the
unpleasantness that constitutes so much of the world. If the Coens only
highlighted the pleasant parts of the Midwestern disposition, that would be
condescending in its own right. Smartasses they might be, but they respect the Midwest enough to chronicle it in all its niceness and its
complexity.

But Hawley lacks the Coens’ mastery, and his Fargo provides little evidence of the
generosity—the grant of personality, intelligence, agency —that a sense of
the “tragic” requires. The reliance on stupidity and venality to drive the
series’ plot has significant psychic costs. In particular, I’m thinking of the
death of Glen Howerton’s Don Chumph, whose dimness and small-scale ambitions
(he wants to extort just enough money to open a Turkish bath) are seized upon
by Malvo, who belittles his dream and orchestrates his death. That death, duct
taped with a shotgun to a chair, in a hail of bullets that would make Peckinpah
proud, is given an operatic treatment so much larger than Chumph’s life that it
can only be seen as a last joke at his expense. It’s one thing to play the
dimness of your characters for laughs; to then dispatch them violently,
mercilessly, or worse, humiliatingly, is nothing more than cruelty.

*          *          *          *

Fargo isn’t the only major
miniseries of the past year that centered on a mysterious outsider spinning
webs of Philosophy 101-level nihilism, of course. There’s a moment early in Nick
Pizzolatto’s True Detective, the
camera tracking Detectives Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew
McConaughey) from high above their Chevy Caprice as they glide through the
Louisiana countryside, where Cohle offers his opinion of the people he’s sworn
to protect and serve: “People around here,” he says, “it’s like they don’t even
know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking moon.”
Like the clockwork universe of Hawley’s Fargo,
True Detective’s Louisiana also takes
issue with individual ambition. Down on Louisiana’s southernmost edge, in
Pelican Bay, the grandfather of murder victim Rianne Olivier restates the
sentiment as an ethical imperative, suggesting that her disappearance is the
result of fatal immodesty: “Everybody
think they gonna be something they not. Everybody, they got this big plan.”

True Detective doesn’t
share Fargo’s single, coherent
community, of course. As enamored with Louisiana’s landscape as True Detective is – the camera lingers
over not only its idiosyncratic natural landscape but also its “jigsaw” of
pipelines and the refineries – it’s far more interested in that landscape as a site
of cosmic horror than in socioeconomics. As a result, the show traffics in clichés
of Bayou exoticism: the Cajun, the Creole, corruption and conservative
politics, “Santeria and Voudon all mashed together,” Mardi Gras, evangelism, a
swampy apocalypticism. [4] As
Detectives Cohle and Hart move among the kith and kin of the murder victims, the
thread tying the various characters together seems to be a feeling of persistent
degradation: the headaches and corroded hands of Dora Lange’s Mother (Tess
Harper), the neurologically-damaged former baseball player Danny Fontenot
(Christopher Berry), Burt (Douglas M. Griffin), the castrated and
mentally-handicapped member of a local church, and even Tiger Thomas (John
Eyez), the drug dealer kidnapped and tortured by Ginger and his crew of Iron
Crusaders. 

These witnesses and leads never
amount to much more than a gothic menagerie (a touch of Flannery O’Connor, a
bit of Night of the Hunter). They
provide True Detective with rich
atmospherics, and an occasional red herring, but Pizzolatto doesn’t ask his
audience to imagine the day-to-day (let alone the internal) lives of the characters.
Instead, they’re emblematic of the forces of entropy (both natural and
cultural) that continue to work on the landscape and its inhabitants, the
zombie population of Cohle’s “fading memory of a town.” This persistent
degradation—of memory, culture, and landscape—presents a staging ground for
cosmic terror.  Our brief experiences
with the residents of southern Louisiana makes it abundantly clear that they’re
incapable of resisting whatever forces are at work. And Errol Childress (Glenn
Fleshler), in the grotesque grandeur of his ruined family and his ruined home,
is the embodiment of that terror. Perversely, and fittingly, it is in the
chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction that this evil is
permitted to "have a real good time."

Of course, True Detective was, from the jump, more interested in what was
going on inside that Chevy Caprice than in how people live outside it, in the
dialectic between the flinty Cohle and the good-old-boy Hart (with its easy
reduction into “cold” and “hot” and “coal” and “heart”): the former shunning
community while secretly craving it, the latter arguing on its behalf while
constantly betraying it. Hart invites Cohle to dinner, but doesn’t really want
him to stay; Cohle doesn’t even want to show up and yet lingers in conversation
long past (Hart’s) welcome. When we finally arrive at the story’s end, after the
climax has finally, definitively divorced the story from reality, it’s pretty
clear that the narrative and emotional drive of the series is fundamentally
that of a Romantic Comedy (by way of its homosocial cousin, the “buddy cop”
story) that happens to have a Southern-fried supernatural thriller grafted onto
it.  Because of this, the show’s
preoccupation with the relationship of its main characters means that we hear a
lot about what the characters think
about community rather than experiencing that community for ourselves. And yet
there are moments that reveal the region’s social and cultural transformation
as, over the years, the pastoral background gives way (enacting Jameson’s
“imperceptible thickening,” perhaps) to an anodyne wasteland of strip malls and
storage units. When the detectives visit a dilapidated bunny ranch tucked off
of the secondary roads near Spanish Lake, we glimpse the myriad ways in which
cultural and/or economic entropy can lead to new social arrangements.  It’s also one of the show’s sole assertions
of female autonomy. Even if that autonomy is colored by sexual commerce, it
stands out from the other scenes in which Cohle and Hart talk with witnesses by
being something more than a simple reification of narrative hierarchies.

*          *          *          *

What is it
about these small towns and rural spaces that inspired Hawley and Pizzolatto to
animate them with their cosmic and/or philosophical stories of good and evil?
Their reasons are different on a number of counts, I’m sure.  But I can’t help but think they share at
least two. The first is a reliance on their settings as “separate points on a
map,” a separateness that allows them to control their experiments in good and
evil but only at the expense of nuance and complexity. The second is diminished
expectations. Whether it’s the novelty of Hawley’s surprisingly cruel
Minnesotans, or the passive acceptance of the evil in the midst of Pizzolatto’s
Louisianans, stereotypes and assumptions about the people who inhabit the shows’
locales allow Hawley and Pizzolatto free reign to wax exegetic on so-called
forces of light and dark. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone accepting their
manipulations anywhere but the "moonscape" of small town or rural
life.  As with Jameson’s essay, however, this
tells us more about how we imagine small towns than it does about those who
live in them.  Of course, our own
collective imagination has been influenced by a long, pervasive history of
representation. Shows that manage to step outside or beyond the level of
stereotype or trope are rare.  The second
part of this essay will discuss some of that history and two recent examples of
shows that complicate it.

Spencer Short is an attorney and author. His collection of
poetry, Tremolo (Harper 2001), was
awarded a 2000 National Poetry Series Prize. His poetry and non-fiction have
been published in The Boston Review, Coldfront, the Columbia Review, Hyperallergic,
Men’s Digest, Slate, and Verse. He lives in Brooklyn.

[4] As others
have noted, the Louisiana landscape is a perfect fit for Pizzolatto’s purposes
– which is probably why it’s also the setting for HBO’s other series about the small-town supernatural, True Blood. 
See http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/03/true_detective_louisiana_is_more_than_just_the…