Alison Horbury
According to True Detective's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, season two aimed at tragedy, taking inspiration from the archetypical tragedy Oedipus Rex to focus on characters confronting a knowledge that has ultimately fated their path.1 By the end of the first episode, we learn that our protagonists, Ray Velcoro, Ani Bezzerides, and Paul Woodrugh, are all in some way troubled by different types of sexual knowledge: Is Ray's son the product of a rape? What is the origin of Ani's uneasy relationship to sex and sex-work? And why is Paul such a reluctant lover to such a beautiful girlfriend? All this is set against the backdrop of a particularly sexual murder victim, while Lera Lynn's moody bar singer—effecting a tragic chorus—draws attention to how repressed sexual knowledge has left our protagonists living their “least favorite” lives. So, sex, and different types of sexual knowledge, are on the agenda, if not at the heart of season two's tragic plot. And, at first glance, Aristotle's (384–322 bce) tragic formula seems to be in play: season two has a notoriously complex plot, with a narrative twist to reverse our protagonists' intentions.2 But, where Aristotle identified the necessity of including “incidents arousing pity and fear” to bring about tragedy's famous katharsis, season two speaks more to Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) views on tragedy—specifically, his views of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides (480–406 bce).
Euripides, Nietzsche tells us, transformed tragedy into a lesser version of its former glory by bringing “the masses” onto the stage and entertaining their everyday troubles—what Nietzsche describes as a “victory of the individual phenomenon over the universal.”3 Where tragedy once focused on only the “grand and bold traits” of the human condition, Nietzsche says, Euripides focused on the moral concerns of the masses. And this is where it gets controversial. Against season two's backdrop of civic corruption—land-grabs and pork-barrels—the tragedy takes up a modern form of morality for the masses that creates a barrier to tragic wisdom: namely, feminist morality.
Back up, I hear you say. Feminism is a good thing; how does it undermine the experience of tragedy? It's a good question. First, let's start with Nietzsche's views on tragedy.
Above all, for Nietzsche, tragedy is ethical. The type that does it best? Attic tragedy of the fifth century bce. Why? Because, Nietzsche tells us, it stages a “fearlessness in the face of the fearsome and questionable,” making us confront the reality of our being in the world so we are better able to cope with it in the future.4 That is, tragedy poses a question: Who are we as humans, and what are we capable of? What limits should we impose on ourselves, and when do we go too far with those limits? In season one, for instance, we confront something like the worst version of humanity in Errol Childress and the practices surrounding the mysterious Carcosa, but we're able to do it through the eyes of possibly our best self in Rustin Cohle. Sure, Rust admits to being one of the bad guys, but this is what makes him a better version of humanity: his ability to confront his worst self, and find a way to knit that knowledge into something meaningful—in a way that doesn't hurt others.
Season two, by contrast, is a monument to the fact that you can't simply tell tragic truisms, such as Frank Semyon's remark that “sometimes your worst self is your best self” (“Down Will Come”), and get tragedy. So how does it work? For Nietzsche, it's about the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, who inspire the artistic forms appearing across various historical epochs. Apollo, the god of light, inspires beautiful form, classical lines, and symmetry. He reveals the image and the individual—think epic Homeric poetry and blocks of marble chiseled away to reveal the perfect dimensions of the human body. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the god of ecstasy—of formless abandonment, eroticism, and what the French call jouissance, an excess of pleasure beyond normal limits. You're probably familiar with him as the god of wine and the sacred orgy, where, in the transgressing of social taboos, we return to a primal state of being. Dionysus inspires a loss of individuality in the orgiastic return to matter. For Nietzsche, ultimately, Dionysus is the god of music, rhythm, and dance, art in which the artists abandon themselves to become the art.
Great art, Nietzsche contends, needs both gods in harmony, because there's a terrifying violence to Dionysus: one can go too far in transgressive abandonment, as we saw when Rust returned to the drug world in “Who Goes There.” When in excess, Apollo's emphasis on image can lead to illusion rather than representation. But together, Apollo veils the destructive quality of Dionysus, allowing us to glimpse our primal existence beneath our layers of civility. At best, then, tragedy speaks a Dionysian wisdom, the truth of our being in the world, mediated through Apollo's sage rationality. Nietzsche scholar Tim Themi summarizes tragedy as “lure[ing] us to face the difficulties of the human condition,” to confront “the harshest, most amoral truths of our existence” that are “crucial for an informed ethics.”5
Though not billed as tragedy, the first season of True Detective has plenty of these elements. In many ways, Rust's philosophical outlook establishes the Apollonian function of tragedy by providing a filter through which to confront the “difficulties of the human condition” expressed in the mysteries of Carcosa. This is important, because the Judeo-Christian morality of the bayou doesn't affirm Dionysian eroticism or confront the question of being. So Errol Childress' effort to come up with a more Dionysian religious meaning through the rituals of Carcosa, though horrific, is put into perspective through Rust's philosophy. His Nietzschean indictment of Christianity—“what's it say about life, hmm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day?”—shows us the more pervasive and no less depressing horror of an unquestioned life.
As with Attic tragedy, then, season one isn't a story with a tragic ending but one that forces a confrontation with our being in the world. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)—the French Freud—says that in tragedy we learn “a little more about the deepest level” of ourselves than we “knew before.”6 But to do this effectively, Lacan suggests, the drama has to cross over or go beyond the limits of a little thing called “the good.” Let me explain.
“The good” is the set of values we erect to channel our instinct for self-interest toward social harmony. Put crudely, instead of fighting and fucking all the time, we place taboos on sex and violence that form a limit between the social group—the common good—and our baser instincts. But sometimes the values of the good get out of hand. Remember when Rust tells Marty that, if a “common good” has to “make up fairy tales” about life then it's “not good for anyone”? He's talking through Nietzsche, but it's the same good Lacan wants us to cross in tragedy, because we need to transgress the limits of the good—go beyond the taboos that install it—to achieve tragic wisdom. We don't discard these taboos (or the good), but, for the duration of the drama and from the safety of our theater seat, we go beyond them to confront the Dionysian knowledge they hold in check.
If we look at Ani's namesake, the heroine of Sophocles' tragedy Antigone, we get a reasonable idea of the good in question.7 Antigone breaks the laws of the city that say she can't bury her brother's body because he's a traitor. She does it anyway, because blood is blood and she'd rather face the wrath of the city than the gods for not honoring the dead properly. Antigone is a confrontation between the civic law—Apollo's rational province, what's best for the city, for “the good of all”—and the archaic law of the gods with respect to life and death (Hades, Dionysus). The play asks us to contemplate: What happens when our investment in “the good of all” is taken too far? When the good becomes an inflated ideal, inflexible toward circumstance and Dionysian wisdom, it becomes the Good, capital G: a thing in itself, a restrictive, unbending ideal, rather than a moderating limit.
Antigone is considered just as rash and unbending as the civic Good in this case—the chorus initially judges her harshly—and she's buried alive as punishment. Here she dies by suicide, fearless in the face of the Good, and she is no one's victim. Her actions cross the limits of the Good, despite the deathly consequences, in what Lacan calls a “violent illumination,” because her transgression inspires a thorough questioning of the Good, after which it can be restored in a more moderate mode.
Nietzsche thinks Euripides writes his plays under the influence of this Good—a social ideal—abandoning tragic Dionysian wisdom for a new morality developed by Euripides' friend Socrates (470–399 bce), and later Plato (428–348 bce) in his theory of forms. In Nietzsche's reading, Plato overvalues the idea of things above actual, material things, introducing a type of ideal Good that undervalues our earthly, material existence.8 In Plato's Symposium, for example, “love” is valued as an ideal Good above a degraded material sexuality. In general, this seems unimportant, but, in terms of the tragic formula (and season two's focus on sexual knowledge), it matters. Showing “courage in the face of reality” denotes a strong “will-to-live” in a Dionysian tragedy, says Nietzsche. By contrast, Nietzsche thinks Plato shows cowardice in the face of reality and escapes it for ideals. Lacan agrees and thinks this is why tragedy needs to cross or transgress the ideals overinvested in the Good—however momentarily—so as to arrive at Dionysian truths of our being.
But this is no easy feat. While, as Lacan puts it, “the voice of the hero trembles before nothing and especially not before the good of the other,” we must overcome our “fear” or “pity” in order to confront the wisdom revealed through this crossing.9 While Aristotle saw tragedy as arousing pity and fear to cathartically purge it, in The Will to Power Nietzsche notes that tragedy is an art that requires that we overcome pity and fear to strengthen our personal ethics.10 When head of HBO programming Michael Lombardo said that season one explored “the darkness in men and women” but without “judging it,” he neatly summed up Nietzsche and Lacan's views on tragedy, where morality doesn't stop us from confronting the fearsome and the questionable.11 But what about season two?
In a reversal of season one, which questions the Good, season two follows Euripides in reducing Apollo and Dionysus to “good” and “evil” forces. Nietzsche identifies in Christian morality (which he calls “Platonism for the masses”)12 an emphasis on an inflated, moral Good that turns us against our instincts—against life—and labels them “vice.”13 This is what we get in season two. In season one, the mysteries of Carcosa give us this distortion of Dionysus as evil. Because the practices surrounding Carcosa are born from the Tuttle Christian dynasty, the erotic aspects of these practices express a return of what the church has repressed. In Freudian terms, when something is repressed, it will return to the surface in distorted form, so the rituals of Carcosa animate Dionysus in the form of the devil—barbaric and destructive rather than erotically life affirming. But in season two, not only is there no affirmation of sex, but also we don't really investigate it either: sex is only on the margins of the criminal activity, as an evil associated with corruption.
The catalyst for the drama is, of course, the murder of a guy (Ben Caspere) killed for liking “young trim”; his eyes are destroyed by acid and his sexual organs are blown off at close range. Sounds very Oedipal, but what it says about sexuality is more a moral statement about sexual enjoyment. The tragedy is that Caspere has already internalized this morality, his “tremendous shame and self-loathing” sending him to psychotherapy (“Night Finds You”). Under this moral Good, a specific type of sexual knowledge becomes hubristic for each of our protagonists—the thing that brings about their downfall. Woodrugh experiences so much shame over his sexuality that he ends up murdered, and both Ani and Ray murder people in reaction to the traumatic impact of sexual knowledge in their past. Additionally, for Ani, this traumatic past conflicts with her current sexual enjoyment in ways she doesn't know how to reconcile. In this Euripidean frame, where Apollo has become an ideal Good and there is little affirmation of Dionysus—or our material and physiological instincts, drives, and desires—we all suffer with our protagonists. For, unlike season one, with its philosophical interrogation of Judeo-Christian morality, season two has no meta-philosophical framing, no Rust, to put this ideal Good into perspective.
And this is where the tragedy of season two perplexes. There's no shortage of sex, but it's mostly alluded to off screen: we're not privy to any eroticism. Even Ani and Ray's coupling—one of the more extensive sex scenes or, at least, one of significance—is a little ho-hum in its tastefully edited modesty. There's no shortage of violence in season two either, yet, as a substitute for repressed Dionysian eroticism, it too feels banal. There's nothing as barbarically transgressive as the practices of Carcosa because, in season two, the repressed violence of Dionysus returns over the issue of money. In Lacanian terms, the taboos imposed by the Good have diverted everyone's energies in the city of Vinci toward the service of goods—the accumulation of wealth, which is another kind of violence enforcing taboos on our instinctual life (in “Omega Station,” Ani says money is “paid for in blood”).14 Even in the final episodes, when Ani confronts her repressed past at the Full Moon orgy and Athena warns her “you get on that bus and it's fuck or run,” what does Ani do? The painfully repressed returns and she kills a guy, then runs. It's exactly what Nietzsche finds in Euripides' The Bacchae, where Dionysus returns to “destroy those who denied him” in “a return of the repressed as repressed.”15
So why stage a tragedy with only a repressed Dionysus in it? Are we not adults? Is this not HBO? This is where feminism comes in, becoming season two's contemporary mode of the Good.
Season two animates some of the consequences of feminist logic where it aims at a common good—a moral guide for the masses—but becomes excessive and subsequently the Good that forms a barrier to tragic wisdom. Ani's conflicts about sex, for example, seem (partially) tied up in a feminist logic that purifies women's sexuality, identifying them as victims of male desires such that they become innocent of any desire or, at least, their desires are imagined wholly Good by contrast. In the first episode, Ani confronts her sister Athena over her web-cam activities, animating Ani's feminist position where it conflicts with post-feminist attitudes. Athena might be considered post-feminist in the sense that, though embracing aspects of feminism, she moves beyond its collective second-wave concerns to celebrate her desirability to men and self-interest in the form of sex-work, which, for feminist Ani, is “not right, it's not healthy.”16
In the same episode, Eliot Bezzerides deconstructs Ani's feminist persona with a mix of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Nietzsche that shows us the origin of Ani's feminism in her personal resentment toward her father. Eliot charges Ani with being “angry at the whole world—and men in particular—for a false sense of entitlement for something you never received,” alluding to Freud's theory of penis envy where, in his clinic, Freud found that some girls developed a personality structured around resentment and envy after discovering they didn't have a penis.17 The symbolism of Ani's “robot dick” e-cigarette and knife “equalizers” suggest that Eliot's analysis might be right. For, though most feminists reject Freud's theory, some see penis envy as a legitimate response to the discovery of anatomical differences: where these differences carry symbolic statuses and have social effects, resentment is understandable.18 But Ani's resentment at not being physically equivalent to a man—the “difference between the sexes is that one of them can kill the other with their bare hands” (“Night Finds You”)—speaks of the material reality to her difference and carries a certain Nietzschean ressentiment.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche develops the term ressentiment to describe resentment acted out in a type of revenge against an imagined oppressor.19 Ani's ressentiment toward her father is partially due to his failure to protect her, but it also locates him as her oppressor, as if he somehow had a role in the random allotment of Ani's sex. Here, Ani follows Nietzsche's description of Plato's ideal Good: she reacts against material reality (being born female) by escaping into ideals, acted out via police work that Eliot further suggests isn't even something she enjoys, just “a reflexive urge towards authority” (“The Western Book of the Dead”). And where Eliot suggests that Ani's “entire personality is an extended criticism of” his values (“The Western Book of the Dead”)—especially where he rejects universality for individual “truths”—we see how her critique of her father becomes conflated with the feminist critique of patriarchy—and takes on the feminist Good of the masses—precisely what she needs to cross, or go beyond, to confront Dionysian wisdom.
There's no doubt that the idea of crossing feminist values, in general, is hard to swallow. Feminism's intellectual roots are in the Enlightenment, and who's going to argue with the age of reason, its ideas about universal freedom and human rights? After sixty-odd years of second-wave feminism in the West, it's de rigueur to graduate from your liberal arts college with a working knowledge of feminist film theory and the dehumanizing form of sexual objectification that is “the male gaze.” But feminist principles are taken too far in season two and become the Good that should be crossed where it limits tragic wisdom. For it's not just Ani speaking from a position of the feminist Good.
For example, you might have thought it odd in the first episode when reformed gangster Frank tells Ray to find himself a “good woman” to “mitigate” his baser instincts, but it's a reminder of how feminism, heir to Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) moral philosophy, becomes the Good. Kant felt that our humanness—our dignity—distinguishes us from the animal kingdom and that sexual activity outside monogamous marriage reduces us to animals, where we lose our special dignity and become degraded as “objects” or “instruments” of another's sexual appetite.20 This sounds a lot like Ani in episode seven, when she tells Vera, “maybe you were put on earth for more than fucking,” and it also speaks to Ani's problem not with fucking but with being an object of desire. In sex-work, certainly, we do reduce each other to instruments of sexual appetite, but it doesn't follow that we always lose dignity when consenting to be an object for someone else. Vera is pretty pissed at being “rescued” from sex-work because the money provides a comfortable life—an arguably no less dignified life than that of those who pay for her services because, as Vera exclaims, “everything is fucking.” The pursuit of wealth—all the land-grabs and pork-barrels—sees Dionysus return as repressed in the brutally clinical violence of money. Everyone is getting metaphorically fucked over for money and power, so one may as well fuck literally for money, and perhaps enjoy some Dionysian transgression.
Athena also promises a more liberal post-feminist attitude—“not everybody has a problem with sex”—before reaffirming sex-work as degrading by justifying web-camming as “performance” and balking at the Full Moon parties, “the real hooking” (“Down Will Come”). Though Ani obviously has a sex life, she can only admit to enjoying it (and in “Other Lives” big, thick dicks you “have trouble handcuffing”) through sarcastic negation, while the sex itself remains off screen, as if irrelevant to her story or as if such depictions would degrade her through our objectifying gaze and lessen her heroism.
To be sure, the good (small “g”) is something we need. But putting a taboo on sex and violence to create social harmony doesn't get rid of sex and violence; it just ignores or represses it (where it's all the more fascinating) so that, when it does reemerge, we don't know what to do with it—the mysteries of Carcosa are a case in point. It's under the influence of the feminist Good that season two represses or, at best, ignores sexual reality so as, ironically, not to objectify and degrade its protagonists. But with what effect?
Compare season one's depiction of down-and-out sex-workers with the no-holes-barred eroticism of Marty's sexual trysts. All around the bayou, lackluster sex-workers appear pitiable. Like Marty, we look to the Good to save them, condemning the sexual appetite that fuels the sex industry that degrades them. By contrast, when Beth seduces Marty out of his commitment to Maggie in “Haunted Houses,” it isn't just a gratuitous “tits and ass” shot: it shows us something about sex important for our questioning of the Good and the limit Christian morality (its insistence on marital monogamy) imposes on sexuality. We see the power of the sexual drive and its fascination in Beth's eroticism. It's what Lacan describes as the “function of the beautiful” in tragedy. It draws us closer to the reality of our sexual drives, our desire—however dangerous to the status quo—so we can fashion a more honest and informed way of incorporating it into our lives.
The lure of beauty gets us closer to Dionysian truth, but in the first episode of season two, when the beautiful Emily tries to seduce Woodrugh (virtually the only scene with comparable eroticism to season one), she is shot down, and so are we. Dionysian knowledge is repressed here—we don't get any from Woodrugh's homosexual encounters either—and we're left feeling as if Emily shouldn't have objectified herself. We feel the need to reassert the feminist Good that might have saved her the indignity.
You might be questioning my morality right now, and I don't want to suggest we abandon morality or the good in general. But in tragedy? If we want Dionysian wisdom or enlightenment about the human condition, we need to be willing to question ideals, however noble—however good. We need to be willing to transgress or go beyond the limits of the good that hold us all in check. The problem with feminism as the Good is that, in a drama about sexuality, we were asked to avert our eyes. In episode seven, Eliot tells Ani she is innocent, but of what? Murder? A personality based on an imaginary revenge against “men in general” if not Eliot in particular? Ani's innocence is idealism, an Apollonian illusion of the feminist Good that, if properly questioned, might have revealed something about its limits. We know that Ani is a victim (of childhood abduction, at least), but, as a victim according to the feminist Good, she is unaccountable. Though in episode seven she admits to “waiting my whole life” to confront and kill a man, and maybe “even went looking,” Ani's actions or reactions (a personality based on imaginary revenge that results in murder) don't question the feminist Good that makes her innocent, fearsome though it may be.
There's no doubt that crossing the limits of the Good is easier said than done. Getting too close to the Dionysian thing, Lacan tells us, can inspire anguish, a sense of anxiety as we transgress moral taboos installed to produce social harmony.21 In “Haunted Houses,” for example, monogamy overinvested as a moral Good is questioned when Maggie seduces Rust into a primal fuck so Marty might finally leave her. It's a graphic scene, as distressing as it is brutally erotic. Our enjoyment is mixed with anguish, not because Maggie is objectified but because we feel the anguish of transgression, of crossing a limit, of getting too close to the Dionysian thing, and its consequences.
Is Ani's reconciling of her repressed sexual knowledge properly transgressive? Properly tragic? One senses that the Full Moon orgy is supposed to shock: a confrontation with the knowledge that troubles her. It's given an Eyes Wide Shut quality, but, as a backdrop to civic corruption, there's not much about consensual adults engaging in sexual commerce to induce anguish. As a result, we don't confront the “harshest, most amoral truths” of our sexuality at the orgy but see it through Ani's eyes, literally seeing her abductor in the faces of rich old men—the patriarchy—degrading Good women with their baser instincts. And when Ani admits her repressed truth in “Omega Station”—she enjoyed being the object of desire (“he told me I was pretty” and “I felt proud”)—we're made to feel for her as a victim, not a heroine, because she feels “sick”—degraded—by her pride.
Ani admits she's been “unfair” to people, and we'd be unfair to Ani if this were real life. But in tragedy? There's no Dionysian wisdom when our protagonist runs from her truth into ideals. Like Euripidean tragedy, where the hero gets a well-earned reward, Ani and Jordan walk into the night with Ray's baby in what seems more a victory for Thelma & Louise fans than anything tragic. The ethics of sexuality are left underexplored and we are left with the symptoms: the reality of not confronting their origin and of accepting the prevailing version of the Good that governs our social group (in this least favorite season, feminism), whose virtuous are left holding the baby.