“True Detective’s Folk Gothic,” in Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund, and Johan Höglund (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), pp. 130-50.

Here’s the full citation for the chapter – and the book is open access, so you can follow the link to read the entire book for free.

I’m including the introduction to the essay here:

The critically acclaimed first season of HBO’s True Detective (2014) has already garnered significant critical attention, including numerous essays that take up the series’ representation of the ecological damage wrought by the petroleum industry. Riding around the flat terrain of southern Louisiana with oil refineries omnipresent in the background, the two protagonists, Detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), rarely comment on the taken-for-granted landscape of their lives. In one striking exception, though, Rust comments, “This pipeline is carving up this coast like a jigsaw. Place is gonna be underwater in thirty years” (1:3). The intertwined petrochemical industry, climate, and devastated communities of the Louisiana bayous that Rust describes here have attracted most of the criticism on the series.[i] Delia Byrnes writes, for instance, that the series is preoccupied with the “intimate entanglement of bodies and oil,” and Min Hyoung Song adds that “bodies and landscapes are intermingled” as “part of some combined ecology.”[ii] Through attention to the ways in which refineries shape lives and permeate bodies, the criticism on True Detective has tended toward a presentist focus (with gestures toward an apocalyptic near future), a focus that tends to flatten both space and time. As Christopher Lirette eloquently puts it, in the Louisiana of True Detective, “pipes and roots and crosses and truck stops and abandoned schools and caves and the good life and the sad withering of imagination and bigger, national and global things are so enmeshed they flatten out.”[iii] These flattened landscapes of the series resonate with a phrase spoken twice (including by Rust and drawn from Nietzsche): “Time is a flat circle” (1:5).

True Detective certainly seems “flat,” its story line spread out across the even landscape of the present moment. It thus seems the perfect text to read alongside certain posthuman/speculative realist/ecological theories that insist on the enmeshment of human lives with the agential nonhuman—the elements, the weather, the land, and refineries. True Detective offers up, in both its visual and narrative logics, the “flat ontologies” of posthuman theory, things entangled with people. Rob Coley epitomizes this dominant reading of the series when he names what he calls Rust Cohle’s “geo-material sensibility”: Rust engages in an “ecological detection,” as he is able to attune himself to “the weird aesthetic entanglement of human culture and planetary matter.”[iv] As illuminating as such readings are, they also inevitably obscure; they exert pressure to emphasize the present and, in their propensity toward “flatness,” tend not to see the unevenness of the effects of such things as the transnational petrochemical industry and hurricanes. As Jennifer Wenzel has claimed, “Anthropocene species talk” can be a “troubling new universalism that disregards the highly uneven roles that different groups of humans have played in the transformation of the planet, and the uneven distribution of risk and resilience in confronting this human-made world.”[v] The “flat” readings of True Detective also fail adequately to recognize both race and the history, as well as the more recent history that lies between the present and what Coley calls the “temporality of the Anthropocene: a deep time, a planetary time.”[vi]

A more human, more recent history—the history of the sugar plantation and of race and slavery—is crucial to the plot and the landscape of True Detective, however. The dead white body that begins the series, the body of the murdered Dora Lange, is found in a sugarcane field. And that’s important. It has also scarcely been addressed, with the exception of Sharae Deckard’s provocative claims about the show’s deployment of “the resource Gothic of the sugar plantation” and its linking of the “petroleum uncanny” to the “sugar uncanny.”[vii] Dora’s body has instead been read primarily through its enmeshment with the petroleum industries of Louisiana. Dora Lange, Song writes, “embodies what humans become, even in life, if the extractive zone depicted in the show grows and proliferates.”[viii] But Dora Lange’s body is inextricable from the cane fields of Louisiana and its racialized history. We must look, as Wenzel insists, to the intractability of “environmental racism and the toxic burdens borne unevenly by racialized minorities.”[ix] We must look to the monoculture—sugar—that created Louisiana’s wealth, along with its slave system and its poverty.

To unearth the residues of sugar and slavery in season 1 of True Detective is also to recognize its gothic nature, specifically what I call its “folk gothic.” Two critics have mentioned the gothic in relation to the HBO series, but only dismissively.[x] Attention to gothic objects, place, and time can, though, adumbrate a depth hidden within more “flat” readings. While the refineries are integral to the flat landscapes of the series, captured in the many wide-angle and extreme long shots, the gothic intrudes in tight close-ups, shots that emphasize foreground over background, detail over distance, the proximate over the remote.[xi] Whereas the shots that capture the refineries, moreover, express a self-evident causality—literally linking the petrochemical industry to the eroding land, the encroaching water, the desperate poverty, and the ruined buildings and land—the shots that capture the gothic are isolating, atomizing; on the surface, they appear to inhibit connections rather than clarifying them. The elements of the gothic are also displaced from the self-evident contemporaneity of the petrochemical landscape, hinting at a lost pastoral, a more untouched nature—what one critic has called a “wilderness” that only appears to be separate from the pipelines and refineries scarring the landscape.[xii] But the gothic objects and “wilderness” of True Detective, along with the “folk” who own, create, and inhabit them, are profoundly implicated in the Anthropocentric logic of the series, opening up a history of sugar crops and plantations that is more entangled with present ecological destruction than is apparent in the series’ overwhelming visual focus on the petrochemical landscape.

Notes:

[i] Christopher Lirette, “Something True about Louisiana: HBO’s True Detective and the Petrochemical Aesthetic,” Southern Spaces, August 13, 2014; Delia Byrnes, “ ‘I Get a Bad Taste in My Mouth out Here’: Oil’s Intimate Ecologies in HBO’s True Detective,” Global South 9, no. 1 (2015): 86–106; Rob Coley, “ ‘A World Where Nothing Is Solved’: Investigating the Anthropocene in True Detective,” Journal of Popular Television 5, no. 2 (2017): 135–57; Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Toxic Screen: Visions of Petrochemical America in HBO’s True Detective (2014),” Communication, Culture, and Critique 10 (2017): 39–57; Helen Williams, “Petrochemical Families: Landscape and Lineage in True Detective,” in True Detective: Critical Essays on the HBO Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart and Michael Samuel, 29–50 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018); and Min Hyoung Song, “True Detective and Climatic Horror,” Post45, April 4, 2019, http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/04/true-detective-and-climatic-horror/.

[ii] Byrnes, “I Get a Bad Taste,” 88; Song, “True Detective.”

[iii] Lirette, “Something True.”

[iv] Coley, “A World,” 152–53. For a discussion of “flat ontologies,” see Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 93, 117, 127–28, 171.

[v] Jennifer Wenzel, “Turning Over a New Leaf: Fanonian Humanism and Environmental Justice,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Nieman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 165.

[vi] Coley, “A World,” 140.

[vii] Sharae Deckard, “Ecogothic,” in Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 181. Deckard makes compelling claims about the series but does not develop her reading as her focus is on contemporary postcolonial fiction. Byrnes, too, mentions Louisiana’s history of plantation slavery twice, only to point out the “uneasy intimacy of Louisiana’s plantation histories and its petrochemical futures,” adding that it warrants further elaboration. Byrnes, “I Get a Bad Taste,” 102; see also 94.

[viii] Song, “True Detective.”

[ix] Wenzel, “Turning Over,” 172.

[x] Rodney Taveira merely lists tropes of southern gothic deployed within True Detective—“the grotesque and irrational, the supernatural and fantastical, the outré and excessive”—and leaves it at that. Taveira, “True Detective and the States of American Wound Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 3 (2017): 586. Byrnes argues that such tropes limit the scope of the central murder and its causes, orienting the series toward the local when it is, she says, global. The series’ southern gothic tropes, she writes, “have long been used to shore up geographic boundaries and associate region with ontological difference.” Byrnes, “I Get a Bad Taste,” 89.

[xi] The prominence of the gothic in season 1 is made particularly apparent in its contrast to season 3, which also follows the trails of sacrificed children and is also set in the U.S. South (Arkansas), but which is not only itself signally bereft of the gothic but raises the narrative of season 1 only to strip away the gothic. Hart and Cohle were simply uncovering a “pedophile ring,” we are told in season 3 (3:7).

[xii] Williams, “Petrochemical Families,” 34, Williams’s essay very effectively shows how Errol Childress is aligned with the “more primeval forces of nature” (29) and how neither is at all separate from the spaces of modernity.