(This post contains spoilers. You can read my thoughts on previous episodes of True Detective, season two, here.)
In the wake of last week’s shuffling madness, I finally watched Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Unmistakably an influence on Nic Pizzolatto’s second season of True Detective, Kubrick’s colossal nightmare-fantasy — his final film — has been popping up online quite a bit recently. Tom Cruise is starring as Ethan Hunt for the fifth time, and Grantland just devoted an entire week to Cruise’s astonishing body of work.
Eyes Wide Shut is a striking turning point in both Cruise’s acting career and as a public figure. As Amy Nicholson wrote, Cruise bent over backwards to impress Kubrick. The exhaustive, record-shattering shooting schedule shed light on every nook and cranny of Cruise’s marriage to co-star Nicole Kidman. The public heard about sex therapists and directorial choices only Kubrick could get away with. He forced Cruise to walk through a door 96 times, and demanded Kidman keep intimate details of her sex scene with another actor from Cruise.
I haven’t been able to get the film out of my head, and perhaps that’s the lasting impact of Eyes Wide Shut: Its genius lies in its provocation. Kidman’s final line of dialogue — “There is one thing we need to do as soon as possible… Fuck.” — lands like a punch from Ronda Rousey to the hippocampus.
“Everything is fucking,” says Vera Machiado (Miranda Rae Mayo), Ani’s not-so-missing person, in Sunday’s “Black Maps and Motel Rooms.” Vera wasn’t a victim stolen away from her home by wicked men. She’s a whore, a woman who recognized the market for her services and capitalized on it.
The True Detective universe is crawling with bullshit artists, and season two’s L.A. setting has correctly ramped up the mass self-delusion. The search for Vera — and Ani’s subsequent discovery that Vera is not who she thought she was — is something like a microcosm for the season itself. The audience has been way out in front of these false detectives. I was openly skeptical after episode four as to why the detectives were dancing around their biggest clue, and they still are. These detectives, with their damaged reputations and cloudy minds, were always pawns on the board, and seldom, if ever, in control.
When Ray, Ani and Paul took the Ben Caspere case, they were so far removed from reality that they were embodying their respective identity crises — Paul’s motorcycle (fleeting masculinity), Ani’s knives (the illusion of safety), and Ray’s digital recorder (denying his false paternity). Frank Semyon was fixated on water stains and monologuing about the comeuppance of adopting children, all while refusing to accept his wife’s infertility.
As Molly Lambert wrote for Grantland on Monday, season two has been interrupted scene-to-scene by the sweeping, intersecting highways of Los Angeles: a manifestation of the “fucking” Vera is talking about. This city — this “meaningless universe at the end of the age of man” — is supported by the shady backroom deals signed at secret society orgies. There are Prohibition-era tunnels running underneath the entire metropolis. It’s a city running out of water, and yet it continues to primp itself up day after day so it can play paradise. What is Los Angeles, even? For starters, how about the confluence of greed, excess and lust.
Through seven hours, our leading quartet has been forced to recognize their past lives as a barely-functioning simulacrum. Ray was holding on to his son out of blind hubris, and letting Chad and his ex-wife Gena go was accepting the path he chose when he blindly killed Gena’s supposed attacker.
Coming face-to-face with the demons of her childhood sexual assault, Ani leaves the orgy party conscious of the towering walls she built up in her personal life. She tells Ray in the immediate aftermath of the raid something made her chase whatever lurked inside that party. “That’s my whole life.” When Ani tells her sister that she saved a girl that night, is she talking about Vera or herself?
True Detective has been accused of meandering quite a bit this season, and while I’ve enjoyed it all the same, Pizzolatto has seemed particularly indifferent to pacing this go-around. But when Frank slams his glass of Blue Label into the cheek of Blake Churchman, it signaled to me a smashing of more than just one Jabroni’s jaw. Frank is tearing down his walls — the make-believe playpen he constructed when the money came pouring in all those years prior. He isn’t safe, he isn’t being looked after, he doesn’t have any people — he’s alone. “I want to watch your lights go out,” Frank says coolly moments before watching Blake squirm to death.
Frank literally burns down the business ventures which left him venerable and indolent, and sets the wheels in motion to take back what’s his before fleeing the country with Jordan. If the argument is True Detective could have used more vivacious activity from Vince Vaughn, I won’t argue. But I’ve also been unapologetic about enjoying Vaughn work outside the boundaries of man-child comedy. Frank and Vince, then, have a tremendous amount in common, and next Sunday they have 90 minutes to “land the plane” on the gamble of a lifetime.
Poor Pauly. After walking himself into the mysterious tunnels of the L.A. underground, Paul is left to face the repercussions of years and years of deception. He’s gay, and the flashlights of his former colleagues illuminate the scars and bruises he has tried so hard to conceal. He tries to make one last run for it, even using his former lover as a body shield; Paul climbs out of the tunnel wearing Miguel’s blood on his hands and face.
But there’s no escaping the truth, and unlike Ray and Ani, who have come to embrace their joint circumstance, or Frank, who has destroyed any physical evidence of his cushy fantasies, Paul was never able to accept himself. The weight of the uniform and the badge made it impossible to lift the veil. When Paul clears the corner, there’s a crooked cop waiting to blast him in the back — he never stood a chance of making it out. As Lambert posited, perhaps Paul was surprised he even made it that far.
While Paul lays dead, Frank has never been more alive, sipping a glass of the expensive stuff overlooking the fires and sirens he left behind. And finally alone, Ray and Ani let a few glasses of whiskey lubricate the explosion of feelings they’ve been suppressing between them. After everything they’ve been through since taking on this case together, surmounting their loneliness — I’m sorry: “fucking” — was something they needed to do as soon as possible.
