The Unnerving New Theme of “True Detective”

“My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve.”

With this tagline for season two of HBO’s True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto airlifted us out of the pessimism and nihilism of a desolated Louisiana bayou and transplanted us in the congestion of California. The new storyline (spoiler alert) revolves around a business deal in the fictional city of Vinci, where career criminal Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) is partnering with city planner Ben Caspere to implement a new high-speed commercial railroad up the heart of the Golden State. When the deal goes sour and Caspere goes missing, Detctive Velcoro (a predictable Colin Farrell), Detective Bezzerides (an out-of-place Rachel McAdams), and officer Woodrugh (a brooding Taylor Kitsch) converge in the investigation.

The good news is that the show maintains much of the first season’s aesthetic, and for that, remains head and shoulders above most television shows. The Lone Star-soaked reflections on locked rooms and flat circles have been replaced by a more raw (if more self-satirizing) noir that lets the characters’ actions do the talking. But

The bad news is that because the first season set such a high bar, critics and viewers have been underwhelmed. Cary Fukunaga has been swapped out for the more conventional eye of Fast and Furious director Justin Lin, and the show has suffered the consequences. That aerial traffic shot is a powerful symbol of a virus spreading through the city’s veins, but its repetitive use points to a lack of imagination. The writing has also taken a hit. Overall, the first two episodes also feel flimsy and meandering, and are so jam-packed with off-camera people and events that you can’t help but feel you missed a prerequisite course.

One thing, though, is crystal clear. Whether conscious or not, traditional family structures are completely absent in Vinci, and deviancy is the new normal. It doesn’t just permeate every character; it permeates every character’s family. Ray prefers the solitary life, separating from his wife after she bears a child from a sexual assault; Woodrugh, whose mother tells him he has “hound’s blood” just like his absent father, pops a little blue pill with his isolated girlfriend and is suspended after being propositioned by a driver; Bezzerides has a sister involved in webcam “performances” and intimidates her boyfriend in the bedroom; and Caspere was evidently part of a disturbing underground circuit involving prostitutes and oversized bird heads. Ironically, the closest thing to a normative character is the antagonist, Semyon; he and his wife have a steady if business-oriented marriage, and are trying to conceive a beneficiary through in vitro fertilization.

One of the few Cohle-like insights comes from Semyon, who articulates the falseness and hollowness of this world. “It’s never really yours,” he whispers to his wife in bed. “You don’t take it with you. Just yourself, whatever that was…Something’s trying to tell me that it’s all papier-maché. Something’s telling me to wake up. Like…like I’m not real. Like I’m only dreaming.”

If season one was all about the philosophical paradigm governing modern life, season two turns the lens on the fruits of that paradigm. The only appeal to “natural law” made in the show is in reference to an act of retributive violence; in the domain of intimacy, the only law is that there is no law. The old governing structure of marriage and children is the one road the characters don’t travel. Everything else is permitted – and far from generating peace and love, surrounds the characters with darker and more violent expressions of self-assertion.

This feels like a downer given all the optimism about love in the air in recent days. Writing the majority opinion for Obergefell v. Hodges, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that marriage is a central institution that affirms an “enduring bond” and provides “loving and nurturing homes” for children. The petitioners, Kennedy argued, only wanted to build on this central social reality, making their appeal from a deeply held respect for its “recognition, stability, and predictability.”

But if Ross Douthat is right, this is “one of the ironies in which the arc of history specializes” – because while the “conservative case” for marriage’s centrality is winning in court, the “liberationist case” against marriage’s centrality is winning the culture. While 65% of the Silent generation, 48% of Boomers, and 36% of Gen X were married between ages 18 and 32, for Millennials the number is at a meager 26% and falling. The percentage of unmarried births (40.6%) has hit a record high, while the birth rate for women in their early twenties (83.1 births per 1,000 women) has hit a record low. In short, people are opting for more open-ended family structures and fewer children, a principle which lent support to a new form for marriage, but inevitably causes it to feed back into the decline of marriage overall.

It remains to be seen whether millennials can buck the trend and restore the nuclear family to something like “centrality.” In the meantime, a show like True Detective reveals the tyranny of this liberation, a wider and stronger current that sets the parameters for and subsumes whatever new family models we construct to outlast us. The characters all look depressed and burdened by this new rule, and you can see the desire for truth still flickering inside – but in Vinci, there is no oasis.

If that makes for an unnerving show, so be it. My strong suspicion is we get the entertainment we deserve.

Matthew Becklo is a husband and father, amateur philosopher, and cultural commentator at Aleteia and Word on Fire. His writing has been featured in First Things, The Dish, and Real Clear Religion.