‘True Detective,’ Season 1, Episode 3, ‘The Locked Room’: TV Recap
By MARSHALL CROOK
The “Chekov’s Gun” dramatic principle formulates that there can be no unnecessary elements in a story. If a gun appears in Act I, it must be fired at some point in Act II or Act III. Louisiana spiritual leader Billy Lee Tuttle is the unfired gun of “True Detective.” He was introduced in “The Long Bright Dark” and we know that not only is Tuttle related to the governor of Louisiana, he is deeply concerned with the murder of Dora Lange and its religious implications. The Tuttle Gun wasn’t fired in tonight’s episode of “True Detective,” “The Locked Room,” but the hammer may have been cocked.
In the opening act of “The Locked Room,” Hart and Cohle track down the roaming congregation once attended by Dora Lange. There they discover that she came to services accompanied by a “tall man with a shiny face.”
Hart and Cohle also learn that the pompadour’d and side burn’d revival preacher was enrolled at Billy Lee Tuttle’s university for a few years.
This meeting leads to a fruitless roundup and interrogation of local miscreants and “B&E men” with similar features. When this doesn’t work, Cohle raids the department’s case files and rifles through photo after photo of dead women and girls. He eventually stumbles on the case of Reanne Olivier, a woman who supposedly drowned, but whose body was discovered with severe abdominal lacerations, meth and LSD in her blood, and a familiar spiral scribbled on her back. Reanne Oliver may be the progenitor of Dora Lange.
The detectives interview Reanne’s grandfather, Henry Olivier, and are given the name of boyfriend, Reggie Ledoux.
They also learn that in high school Reanne was a student at Light of the Way Christian Academy, a school funded by Billy Lee Tuttle’s ministry.
The episode ends with Hart and Cohle barreling down the highway, blue light blazing.
They’re off to interrogate Dora’s husband, Charlie Lange, about former cellmate Reggie Ledoux who, we learn, was once busted in connection to a meth and LSD lab. But the momentum and thrill of pursuit is hobbled when, in 2012, both Hart and Colhe solemnly allude to a “fire fight.”
What follows is the slow, dreamy revelation of a strange compound deep in the bayou. Walking through the compound – to synthesizer music out of an early ‘80’s John Carpenter movie – is a nightmarish tattooed man brandishing a machete and wearing nothing but white underwear and a gas mask.
That, more or less, is the plot of “The Locked Room.” Essential clues have revealed themselves: Preacher, Tall Man, Reggie Ledoux, Gas Mask Man and, finally, the fingers of Billy Lee Tuttle worming their way in and out of the corners of the investigation. That’s the plot, but the particulars of this murder mystery continue to prove incidental to the greater story of what happened to these two men, Hart and Cohle, in the intervening years.
“You are a stranger to yourself,” says the preacher. “The world is a veil. The face you wear is not your own.”
I believe when the story ends we will see “The Locked Room” as the series’ skeleton key. Specifically, the integral spiritual debate between the detectives as they watch the praying masses at the outset.
As partners, Hart and Cohle are a paradox: They each wear a face to mask their elemental desires, but the exterior of one is the interior of the other.
It would be easy to believe Cohle’s faith in a meaningless universe and the aberration of humanity represents his “true nature.” But in “The Locked Room,” when Cohle passes judgment on the faithful, labeling them idiotic and sinful people who tell themselves stories “to get…through the day,” he doesn’t sound like he’s conversing with Hart. He sounds like he’s reciting. Cohle reminds me of how a young reader will regurgitate Frederic Nietzsche or Howard Zinn upon first exposure. He speaks like a man who has carefully selected and crafted his philosophy, but spits it back out into the world as though that is the only way he can be sure of what he believes. Hart senses this.
“You seem panicked,” he says. And that for a man who believes life is meaningless Cohle “frets about it an awful lot.”
Cohle’s frets because, like the men and women under the spell of the Preacher, he searches for answers. In the previous episode, Cohle wrapped up the death of his child in a tidy philosophical bow, insisting that her “painless” death was elegant. By dying, she saved him from “the sin of fatherhood” and herself from toiling in “the thresher” of the world. I believe 2012 Rust Cohle actually believes this. Whatever happened at the end of the Dora Lange case pushed him forever down the rabbit hole. But in 1995, I’m not so sure he’s a complete convert. Not unlike the congregants Cohle decries, he is ”cultivating his own illusion” to get through the day. If the universe is meaningless then losing a child, losing a wife, losing the chance to mow his own yard for for his own family are not losses worth mourning. But Cohle can’t help himself. He shows up to Hart’s house, mows Hart’s lawn, and visits with Hart’s wife and Hart’s children. He does not wish to steal them from Marty, but he desperately wants Marty’s life. So Cohle tricks himself with faith in nothingness because it is safer than starting all over again.
Up until “The Locked Room” it was easier for me to judge the artifice of Marty Hart’s life than Cohle’s. But it may be Mart’s is just easier to spot. Also, both narrators – not just Marty- are unreliable. And I wonder if the obviousness of Hart’s internal and external subterfuges is not its own dramatic trick to make us think that Cohle isn’t experiencing precisely the same existential turmoil as Marty Hart.
But, as he himself admits, Marty is “F#@%’d up.” He is a liar. He suppresses guilt. He is selfishly oblivious to how the Dora Lange case is ravaging his family. But Marty isn’t an idiot. At least he didn’t used to be. As Maggie reminds him: “You used to be so much smarter.”
Professionally he’s on autopilot and personally he is a disaster.
Probably Woody Harrelson’s best performance of the season so far was his clumsy attempt at getting Lisa to remain at the bar, utterly ignoring is wife a few tables away. Here’s a guy who wants to self-destruct as if to know what it feels like. Marty preaches “responsibility” – both parental and professional – like a necessary mantra for self-actualization. Cohle believes that life is meaningless and Hart believes in the even keel. That if he stays quiet and avoids holding grudges and self-recrimination then Hart can “have his cake and eat it too.” But when another man mows his lawn it reminds him that he is an absent husband and father. He knows something is wrong – with him, his wife, and his kids – and yet he still won’t turn off the basketball game to care for his child.
I think the tragedy of “True Detective” will be that both Marty Hart and Rust Cohle have the potential to heal one another by absorbing their respective strengths. You see it when Marty cuts down Maggie’s father, and Cohle fins something approximating peace while at the Hart household. By their own admission they are bad men keeping watch for worse men. But they can each be better but, as Maggie senses, neither will change on their own.
So what will happen? I don’t think there will be a “Fight Club” twist and I don’t think either Marty or Cohle is the killer. But, if the Tuttle connection is what I think it is, and the gun eventually goes off, then there are powerful forces at play that neither man neither man can combat. So whether the guy they catch in 1995 is the actual perpetrator, or just one tentacle of a much larger beast, by the state of things in 2012 it is evident that there was no closure. And now Cohle lives alone contemplating Time, Death and Futility, and Hart lives however he does, likely avoiding thinking about much of anything.
In 2012 both men sit there like characters in that old episode of the “Twilight Zone:” The masks they wore for so long became their faces.
Quick Notes:
Thanks to everyone for tweeting me with ideas and observations, particularly with regard to the Cajun Mardi Gras masks. I appreciate the conversation so please keep it coming!
My buddy Mike Calia and I filmed a brief discussion on some early “True Detective” theories. That can be seen here.