(This post contains spoilers. I’d highly recommend watching episode two BEFORE reading. You can read my thoughts on the first episode of True Detective, season two here.)
At the spectacular Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, N.Y., on Sunday afternoon, my family and I went to see Rebel Without a Cause for $5. Spearheaded by the immortal James Dean, all these years later the film is unintentionally hilarious — an unapologetic condemning of a corrupted youth culture, neglectful parents and the national impotency which fed the sexual carnival of the 1960s. A slideshow of fallacies and phallics, Nicholas Ray was disillusioned by the peak-Americana of the 50s, and decades later his picture holds up as a dark, twisted indictment.
Hours later, our group gathered around the television to watch episode two of True Detective. Perhaps Rebel was still hanging in the air, but after the intentional ambiguousness of last week’s “The Western Book of the Dead,” Sunday’s “Night Finds You” was as deliberate as it was flagrant.
Vince Vaughn’s Frank Semyon was crucified last week, pinpointed by many as the valley of the much-maligned second season. I ride for Vaughn — I was 13 when he and Owen Wilson brought Wedding Crashers into existence; he might as well be blood — so I can’t escape my bias. But after a lifetime of playing the fast-talking funny man, Vaughn was caught flat-footed throughout episode one, functioning at half-speed.
It was barely considered by the mainstream media, however, that “The Western Book of the Dead” could be a ploy by showrunner Nic Pizzolatto to gradually unleash the Kraken which is full-measure Vaughn. No, no, it couldn’t possibly be a pragmatic approach by Pizzolatto to slowly unravel his ball of yarn. After one hour, many critics would just as well leave True Detective to bleed out than consider the long game of its sophomore season.
This is not a perfect show. Pizzolatto still writes “talky” dialogue. You can feel the weight of every proper noun as his characters repeatedly call each other by name. Rachel McAdams as Detective Ani Bezzerides is essentially a carbon copy of Marty Hart minus the Y chromosome. The audience should down a shot each time Taylor Kitsch’s Officer Paul Woodrugh begs somebody to put him back on the bike.
But what makes True Detective so captivating is its grandiose scale and the sense of purpose each season’s setting — the former, the timeless romance of the Bayou and the latter, the Dead End sign glowing at the end of modern civilization — has within the narrative of the show. As I wrote last week, the show’s platform provides the necessary star power to draw its abundant audience, but what has kept them hooked through 10 episodes — even the chunk of the audience admittedly “hate watching” — is its dazzling photography and Pizzolatto’s license to wonder unabashed about our world.
Pizzolatto wrote “The Western Book of the Dead” to a means — stick close to the vest, propose an unending list of questions and place our three protagonists at the scene of the crime. “Night Finds You,” rather, is pulsating, its heart beating heavy from director Justin Lin’s opening shot to the final gun shot fired into Ray Velcoro’s stomach.
Vaughn’s opening monologue was not unlike watching a sleeping dog rudely awaken from its slumber. A dead man has stolen Frank’s life’s work. Lying peacefully in his beautiful house, next to his loving wife (played completely in the eyes by Kelly Reilly), Frank is fixated on a pair of water stains on the ceiling. He never knew what to do with the money, he tells Jordan, so he bought a big house. He’s suddenly overwhelmed by the emptiness of his life. What does it all mean — the stains, the stolen money, Ben Casper’s vicious murder?
He tells Jordan a story about his drunk bastard father while growing up in Chicago. (Vaughn must write “from Chicago” into all of his contracts.) Abandoned without food or water in the basement, Frank, only six, awoke to rats chewing on his fingers. He grabbed one and pulverized it, reducing the animal to “rat goo.” Frank comes alive as he tells her that he was trapped in the basement another two days after killing the rat.
What evokes this gruesome tale? The stains signify a crumbling of his reality, that perhaps this comfortable world he built for himself is a lie — that he’s still the little boy trapped in that basement. “Something’s trying to tell me that it’s all Papier-mâché,” he says. “Something’s telling me to wake up. Like… like I’m not real. Like I’m only dreaming.”
And with that, “Night Finds You” takes off running, taking a breath every so often to gander at Lin’s breathtaking highway shots. Frank is determined to recover every dime stolen by the now-deceased Ben Casper. And unlike “The Western Book of the Dead” where every flinch of his 6-foot-5 frame looked painful, Frank seems to be enjoying his newly discovered purpose. He has a defenseless bookie assaulted in broad daylight for his involvement. Staring into his eyes, Frank fires cheap shots at the bloody and bruised informant.
“Why would somebody come after you like that, that’s crazy!” he squeals. “What could you have done to piss these people off? Like some kind of behavior those guys would take issue with?”
Frank solicits the help of a mesmerizing, grill-wearing pimp (Pedro Miguel Arce) for the location of one of Casper’s escorts. He employs Ray to check out the address and sweetens the pot by suggesting he could be up for Chief of Police in Vinci when all of this is over. But Ray is hardly interested. Earlier that day, Velcoro was given a cold ultimatum by his ex-wife: Stay the hell out of her son’s life or she’ll petition for a paternity test proving once and for all if he’s the father — something deep down he knows is untrue. Ray has compromised his entire life working for Frank, but without his son to fight for, there’s no longer any need for him to play the game. Prison, death… What does it even matter anymore?
The most striking sequence of the early season, the gentle bar manager Felicia (Yara Martinez) talks with Ray about her homeland, and she tenderly offers him an oasis that he cannot accept. He tells her it’s too late for him and he’s right. Resigned to his fate, Ray wearily heads over to the Hollywood location. After loafing around the scene — more taxidermy, more sexual toys — a lone shooter in a bird mask blows his guts out with a shotgun.
Ray Velcoro was dealt a shitty hand. Badge or no badge, he’s admired by no one. Earlier in “Night Finds You,” he warns a group of knucklehead kids to quit playing soccer on private property. They flip him the bird and continue their game. “Yeah, fuck me,” he mutters to himself.
Nothing was going to save Velcoro from his fate — he was a hopeless case. As his ex-wife bluntly offers, “You’re a bad person, Ray, and you’re bad for my son. … You were good at being decent. And then something happened and you weren’t strong enough to stay decent.”
I was particularly taken last week by David Morse’s Eliot Bezzerides speech about the plight of the modern man — dealing with the meaningless world he inhabits, spoiling the potential of God’s perfect universe. I’m equally moved by Farrell’s presumably early sendoff in True Detective and, more specifically, Pizzolatto’s choice to give him a final opportunity to come to terms with his fate.
This show’s first season played to its setting — the romantic frontier of the Bayou — and provided Hart and Rust Cohle with an opportunity to make peace with their ignorance of the greater universe. Season two is much more frigid. Facing the final stage of man, one by one these characters will be forced to reckon with what they’ve done, false entitlements and their place in a meaningless world.
Ray’s apparent death is a shock to the system for True Detective fans. We were sold Farrell as this round’s McConaughey — the movie star we could obsess over for the next two months. To take him out — a la Kate Mara in House of Cards — was a wake-up call. None of these characters are owed eight episodes simply because of their incumbent star power. What Pizzolatto promises instead is each character will be given the chance to accept their destiny beforehand — a far more dramatic proposition. Where that leaves Ani Bezzerides, Paul Woodrugh and Frank Semyon is anybody’s guess.
