Southern California has its own industrial light and magic. Transplants walk around in a daze for the first year they live here, pointing vaguely at the sun, because of this light. You step out of LAX and the zap gets put on you. In this light, you look past the trash can fires burning in tent cities south of downtown, you ignore the ugly refineries pounding the earth out by the airport, you ignore the drought-stricken farmland north of the city.
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Jul 16, 2013 - Description: After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesic, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues.
You see the same shopping mall pop up every three miles and it doesn’t even matter. You are living in a dream. This dream light is why Los Angeles and its assorted satellite communities are such a perfect setting for True Detective.
And it’s also why Ray Velcoro can never die. At the end of “Night Finds You,” Velcoro took two in the chest from a shotgun-wielding assailant wearing a bird mask. At the beginning of “Maybe Tomorrow,” Velcoro finds himself in the Purgatory Saloon with his still-living ex-cop father (Fred Ward) and a Conway Twitty impersonator singing Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” It’s telling that Velcoro asks his father, “Where is this?” It’s a slightly different, weirder question than “Where am I?” It’s more concerned with the place than the person. When Velcoro visits his father later in the episode, he brings him some indica to help him sleep and fishes his badge out of the trash.
Despite real-world references, this scene has the same dreamlike quality as their first meeting. His father thinks he can hear Ray’s dead mother. Is that any weirder than the image he describes to Ray of men chasing him through the trees and shooting him to pieces? He talks about the O.J. Verdict and the L.A. “There ain’t no P.D.
Anymore,” says Ray’s father. Well, then what does that make Ray?
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True Detective needs the signifiers of our world, but not the rules. It needs the corruption, the graft, the institutions, the laws, and the crime, but that’s it. Characters on this show don’t talk like us, and they don’t act like us. They are of this world but not in this world. This is “Los Angeles,” not Los Angeles. Once you accept this, True Detective becomes a different kind of show, and it makes a certain kind of sense.
Last season, the unreliability of our two main narrators was established through a series of backward-looking interviews. Memory and self-perception were adversaries to the truth, and Cary Fukunaga and Adam Arkapaw’s camera worked to create a world that existed largely in the minds of two storytellers — Rust Cohle and Martin Hart. In the absence of the singular vision of Fukanaga and the interview gimmick, the show’s directors (so far, Justin Lin for the first two episodes and Danish filmmaker Janus Metz Pedersen for Episode 3) have turned, consciously or not, to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as a central text. Lynch’s 2001 film looked at Los Angeles — from the Hollywood Hills mansions to the sun-baked parking lots outside of doughnut shops — and saw a city that could contain infinite possibilities, horrors, timelines, and realities.
Nic Pizzolatto’s story is following suit. Those overhead shots of freeway interchanges are overused and serve mostly to transition from one scene to another, but when viewed as part of the dizzying narrative that is being assembled, they make sense.
These roads are Carrie Mathison’s or Lester Freamon’s cork boards — they indicate the interconnectedness of the evil that lurks in the light. Think about how many different faceless organizations, departments, and corporations we have been introduced to in just three episodes: holding companies like Catalyst and Porpoise; security companies like the one Paul Woodrugh worked for in the desert; all the various arms of the law — Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol, the state attorney general’s office, Vinci P.D. And then there’s the underworld — the various dark forces controlling everything from prostitution to construction. They build your house and tell you who you can sleep with inside of it. Ever so slowly — I would argue a little too slowly — a picture is being drawn: a conspiracy of entities, civic and criminal, involved in the assembly of the California dream (the high-speed rail line through Central California) and the facilitation of its underbelly. The murder of Vinci city manager Ben Caspere — killed in the Hollywood apartment rented for him by the shadowy Catalyst — threatens to unravel this conspiracy. Ironically, the three cops charged with solving the case are also — knowingly or not — supposed to make sure that doesn’t happen.