What Beasts the Night Dreams (and other odd shit)

When everyone did their roundup of "The Best Films of the 2010s" some folks (actually many folks) included Twin Peaks: The Return on their list of - once again - "The Best Films of the 2010s". I'll agree that it was one of the most exciting and original artistic endeavors of the decade, but get real; culture is very big on labels right now so let's keep things in their place. However, if I were to consider Television, Music, Literature, and other forms of media as "Film" then I'd nominate Season One of True Detective as just one of the best anythings of this century. 

I know it was popular - so much so that I think a lot of people actually felt as strongly about it as I, which made it even more exciting. And while I could certainly do my own deep dive analysis on all of its strengths (and weaknesses) I think the very superficial characteristic that captured everyone's imagination was its mood; it had a persistent story with quotable lines and big ideas and great performances and a lot of its themes were derivative of commercially-proven fiction, but at the end of the day and the show it had a unique and identifiable atmosphere that felt as fresh as it did spooky. And I would argue that, while Seasons 2 and 3 wouldn't manage to carry over some or most of these winning attributes, heavy shades of that atmosphere remained prevalent. So what do you think my understandably predictable approach to Season 4 would be? 

How does one even recognize something as abstract as "mood" - especially one that feels specific to something: pacing, music, setting, subject matter, cinematography, and all the other intangible things that you can technically put on paper but the actual execution requires talent and vision. So basically you can't explain it - you watch the show, you understand. Besides it's better to not cheapen such things with clinical understanding. So I can say with my own level of perception and certainty that True Detective: Night Country wasn't able to appropriate the same flavor as its namesake. Though not for lack of trying - and therein lies a big clue to its clumsiness: that name brand "True Detective" is a legitimate afterthought and was nothing but a Trojan Horse for this entire standalone series. 

A lot of people assert that you shouldn't compare -- and they apply that to everything artistic: this book vs. that book, The Beatles vs. The Stones, this season vs. other seasons. "Apples and oranges" they say. Even current show runner Issa López has damned anyone who dares to hold them up side by side and nitpick the differences. Rubbish. What else are we supposed to do with art (especially art we enjoy) except think about it and analyze it and play with it? This isn't a court of law, the gatekeepers and fanboys and even the artists have no power once it's ours. It's a subjective enterprise and we can say and feel whatever we want, and if we wanna compare, let's compare! ...Even if it isn't actually True Detective.  

Issa López brought her show Night Country to HBO, and HBO said "We've got an idea..." and so henceforth this Limited Series Crime Genre Fable had to live up to, what I feel, the best original TV Season in the past 25 years. An exciting honor as much as it is a death sentence, and puts me as a hypercritical viewer in a precarious position. It wasn't until I'd seen two whole episodes of Night Country did I become aware of the fact that I was being sold Pepsi in a Coke can, so I ended up having to shift my sight - but only a little bit. Put it this way: had it not been called True Detective: blah blah and not been sold as such and not had a "Based on the show by Nic Pizzolatto" credit and was released as its own original thing, I'd still compare it to True Detective because it's the Gold Standard in every aspect of what Night Country is trying to be. 

First impression of First Episode: the differences were bold and broad. I liked the setting, I liked the crime, I liked the idea of a larger ensemble cast, and I especially liked the insinuation of a supernatural slant. I'd already sat through two seasons that weren't able to live up to the ghostly psychodrama that was the first so my expectations were whatever, but this was clearly a different animal. The inclusion of a pre-credit sequence was immediately jarring in a structural sense - it's like having a dialogue scene before the opening STAR WARS crawl. And then there's the credit sequence itself, which is a whole heap of trouble. 

The now-iconic intros for the first three seasons were a collaborative invention between several different motion-graphic studios and Pizzolatto himself - memorably superimposing characters and imagery from the show over their respective geography and landscapes, complete with a theme song that felt indicative of its time and place. Night Country's intro is a choppy CGI mess full of blink-and-you'll-miss-them "easter eggs" that looks like it was put together by a 16-year-old who just saw Fight Club for the first time. It's not that they don't get True Detective, they don't get mystery, foreshadowing, subtlety, ambience, aesthetic, mood, etc. One of the big anchors of this season is an intimate look at the Iñupiat community of Alaska, which could've lent itself to an incredibly rich and haunting theme song. Instead they use something by Billie Eilish which is so pedestrian it feels like product placement (of which there is actually a lot of in this season). 

The alleged homicides that begin the series are grotesquely creative and provoke a genuine "I wanna know what happened" mystery. That really is the central strength of this season, and it's a good strength to have, but it very quickly and almost frivolously falls into the background and becomes buried underneath a buncha superficial subplots and halfhearted character development. Typically that's necessary - in True Detective or just in storytelling in general: we certainly want context or maybe even subtext around our main conflict, and Night Country maps out a paint-by-numbers pastiche of past traumas and broken homes and casual sex and buried pasts and unsolved crimes that plague our players and their community. There are bad cops and not-as-bad cops and convoluted bureaucracy and racial tensions and social unrest that, though predictable, all sound and feel like an engrossing journey. So, why isn't it? 

The fact that HBO forced this premise into the established True Detective landscape did so much more damage than good - even beyond the comparative stuff. What is clearly an overwritten pulp exercise that would've blended right in with every other HBO Limited Series Thriller had to clearly amend dialogue and plot points and perhaps its general implication to better fit in with its newly-appointed moniker. Except this was the wrong goddamn path to follow; I don't care if symbols or timelines or bloodlines bleed into past seasons - that's MCU bullshit and I'm sure that's why some people are celebrating it. If the writers were coerced into riffing on (or ripping off) previously published material, they should've focused on the aesthetic, because they already had an incredible groundwork on which to build. 

It sounds made up but I'd secretly been hoping for a snowy, wintry True Detective season ever since it was determined that each installment would have a different location, so I was pretty giddy at the idea of Alaska during the Winter Solstice. And wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what it was: an idea. Despite filming much of it actually in Alaska and occasionally shooting at night, at no point did the wind machines or snowfall fx or cartoon polar bears or heated soundstages ever give me the slightest chill. Freezing cold weather doesn't even come through in the performances; like the unsexiness of porno actors who aren't into it, no one's shivering, no one's bothered, and if and when you can see their breath, it's animated. (If you're interested in a much more competent "cold" True Detective watch Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark from 2018). 

If stuff like fake snow and pop songs and TV tropes feel like trivial critiques then you're either not paying attention or you have a different outlook. A lot of people predictably combated negative reviews by falling back on race and gender anxiety, and if you think that's the nature of my frustration then I can't help you. There's clearly a friendly relationship between the writers and the audience: every moment is saturated in heavy-handed symbolism that's been over-calculated and free of craftiness so that viewers can feel like a detective themselves. But I never cared too much for "cracking the case," not in any season: I'm currently taking another look at Season 2, and despite its callously convoluted story I'm still more engrossed than I was at any point during the slog of Night Country because the vibe feels that much more genuine and exciting. 

- Paul