{"id":43964,"date":"2015-08-11T16:18:36","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T16:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=43964"},"modified":"2018-05-07T08:56:52","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T08:56:52","slug":"true-detective-reinvented-the-noir-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/true-detective-reinvented-the-noir-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"True Detective Reinvented the Noir Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"true_detective\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now that it\u2019s complete, the second season of HBO\u2019s True Detective<\/i> can be properly judged, and, I think, elevated to its rightful status: a noble experiment at worst and, at best, an erudite and deeply-felt reaffirmation of the ninety-year-old Noir tradition that\u2019s threaded through our literature, movies and myth. At the very least, Season 2 deserves to be assessed as a whole, given its novelistic structure and grandiose thematic and narrative ambitions\u2014considered piecemeal, the individual parts have elicited scorn and derision that they tended to deserve. The early episodes, in particular, were disastrously weak; had they been book chapters, any competent editor would have demanded that they be rewritten. (Re-watching the premiere, I was astonished at its plodding, pretentious clumsiness, especially in comparison to the story\u2019s thrilling, tragic final hours.) But now that we have all the pieces, the puzzle fits together into a surprisingly rich and satisfying picture\u2014Nic Pizzolatto\u2019s grim, intricate eight-part crime saga was an extraordinary overreach that, in the end, conquered a surprising and impressive amount of the vast territory it claimed.<\/p>\n

Of course, from the beginning Season 2 suffered in comparison to its predecessor, which was a home run of Babe Ruth proportions\u2014the chemistry between leads Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey and (in McConaughey’s case) the once-in-a-lifetime alchemy of a perfect match between actor and character elevated \u201cRust Cohle\u201d to instant, iconic immortality. Season 1 had none of the hesitance and awkwardness of its successor\u2014the unspooling of consecutive Louisiana murder investigations (expertly framed by an Internal Affairs probe a decade later) was so suspenseful from the moment it started, its dense philosophical cohesion so indelibly rich, that all subsequent disappointments (including what many considered a stunningly anticlimactic and unsatisfying denouement) were forgiven or overlooked.<\/p>\n

The arrogant neo-Nietzschian figure Pizzolatto\u2019s cut\u2014his grandiose pronouncements and tendency to sneer at his critics\u2014didn\u2019t help: when Season 2 stumbled out of the gate, it was easy to cast him in the hubris\/nemesis<\/i> template of Michael Cimino or M. Night Shyamalan (both of whom followed up extraordinary debut successes with disastrous pratfalls like Cimino’s studio-sinking Heaven\u2019s Gate<\/i>). After the first episode of the new season, I was convinced (along with nearly everyone else) that we were witnessing just that sort of harder-they-fall comeuppance. But things changed\u2014by the time the story had performed its unexpected 66-day time jump (after the show-stopping massacre that ended Episode 5) it was clear that the deep historical and artistic roots of this vast Los Angeles tale\u2014and its ravenous need to devour every conceivable Noir archetype\u2014were bearing strange, rich fruit: a modern-yet-ageless detective story that can stand alongside nearly any previous attempt to master the genre.<\/p>\n

Noir is less about film than literature\u2014it actually begins with Ernest Hemingway. After his WWI novels The Sun Also Rises<\/i> (1926) and A Farewell to Arms<\/i> (1927)\u2014in which the moral chaos and vertigo of wartime are examined both on and off the battlefield\u2014Hemingway explored the darkness of peacetime in To Have and Have Not <\/i>(1937), a crime story built along a Marxist armature that (largely thanks to Howard Hawks\u2019 1944 Humphrey Bogart\/Lauren Bacall movie) has been retroactively cast as the beginning of Noir. In \u201cHemingway and his Hard-Boiled Children\u201d (1968), literary essayist Sheldon Norman Grebstein credits Hemingway with inventing a worldview in which<\/p>\n

Crime is the specific social equivalent of war, and its prevalence signifies that no watchful deity and no meaningful pattern of order rules over man. The overwhelming impression derived by the reader of Hemingway is that of a violent world, a world at war, a world in which anarchy prevails. Hemingway\u2019s depiction of violence, although it is in frequency by no means his major concern, is nevertheless perhaps the most vivid and memorable aspect of his art. And even where there is little or no violence, as in The Sun Also Rises<\/i>, we are given the sense of breakdown, fragmentation, disintegration. In such a world, toughness seems the only means of survival [\u2026] Throughout Hemingway\u2019s early work, and despite the keen social consciousness of most of it, law neither guides human conflict not seemingly has much relevance to it. No characters in modern fiction exercise greater moral awareness than Hemingway\u2019s; none struggle harder for moral certainties; and almost none achieve such little success.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hemingway\u2019s stylistic successor was Dashiell Hammett, a former private detective who (along with Raymond Chandler, a decade later) debuted in The Black Mask,<\/i> a pulp magazine launched by august literary critic H. L. Mencken (working with drama critic George Jean Nathan) in 1920 for the express purpose of making money with cheap crime stories in order to support Mencken\u2019s more high-toned publications. The stripped-down style of Hammett and other \u201chard boiled\u201d writers was not held in high regard: Herbert J. Muller (in his exhaustive 1937 study Modern Fiction<\/i>) sneered that \u201cthis \u2018cult of the simple\u2019 appears in various forms in the modern world [including] the \u2018hard-boiled school\u2019 [\u2026] It is usually a sign of surface restlessness, a craving for novelty or thrill\u2014the popularity among the sophisticated readers of novelists like Dashiell Hammett is more a fad then a portent.\u201d But Muller allowed that \u201cit also represents a serious effort by some intellectuals to find happiness in the mere being or doing of the great mass of common people.\u201d And others acknowledged the importance of Hammett\u2019s stylistic advances: Chandler wrote that Hammett had a style \u201cbut his audience didn\u2019t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements\u201d \u2013 Hammett was \u201cspare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It took decades for Hammett\u2019s crime stories to be accepted into the literary canon, since their clean, spare surfaces and tawdry subject matter disguised their artistry. As critic Phillip Durham wrote in \u201cThe Black Mask<\/em> School\u201d (1968), \u201cThe idea that style is the American language\u2014discovered independently by several writers in the hard-boiled genre\u2014is unquestionably one of the most significant aspects of the evolving, hard-boiled tradition. Style, then, is where you find it: not restricted to the drawing room or study, but equally discoverable in the alleys [\u2026] Hammett went to the American alleys and came out with an authentic expression of the people who live in and by violence.\u201d Hammett\u2019s best work\u2014the landmark novels Red Harvest<\/i> (1927), The Dain Curse<\/i> (1928), The Maltese Falcon<\/i> (1930), <\/i>and, <\/i>especially, The Glass Key<\/i> (1931), operate like Hemingway\u2019s crime saga in presenting a world with no natural moral order; a narrative environment in which boundaries between the light and the dark are hopelessly blurred and the detective and criminal are both cast adrift, groping for right and wrong. According to Hammett, The Maltese Falcon<\/i>\u2019s protean hero Sam Spade (best remembered via Bogart\u2019s onscreen portrayal ten years later) \u201chad no original\u2026He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the detectives I worked with would like to have been: a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raymond Chandler is to Hammett as William Faulkner is to Hemingway: a baroque, romantic alternative to the ice-cold modernism of the early \u201chard-boiled\u201d style (in fact, Faulkner himself wrote the script for Howard Hawks\u2019 1946 movie of Chandler\u2019s 1939 novel The Big Sleep<\/i> \u2013 and Bogart, again, embodied the central role; if Sam Spade was Bogart\u2019s Indiana Jones, The Big Sleep<\/i>\u2019s sardonic Phillip Marlowe was his Han Solo). Chandler exchanged Hammett\u2019s lonely Edward Hopper minimalism for a dizzying, lush complexity \u2013 and, more important, abandoned Hammett\u2019s abstracted cityscapes (like the Hobbes-inspired \u201cPersonville\u201d of Red Harvest<\/i>) for the poisoned sprawl of Los Angeles, permanently affixing the Noir tradition to that city. As Herbert Ruhm argued, \u201cChandler is indisputably the best writer about Urban California [\u2026] [He] succeeds as no one else has succeeded in portraying Los Angeles, including Hollywood, and it seems at times that it is neither the violence nor the solution of the mystery Chandler is interested in as it is the city and the people.\u201d \u201cMr. Chandler,\u201d W. H. Auden wrote in 1962, \u201cis interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Noir migrated from page to screen in the 1940s, where the simplified scenarios meshed perfectly with wartime frugality (the movies were famously underlit to save set-building costs), but the primal, nihilistic thrust of the original stories got blunted by Hollywood: John Huston\u2019s earnest retelling of The Maltese Falcon<\/i> (1941) distorted and cleansed the novel\u2019s essential ruthlessness (and cast girl-next-door Mary Astor as the book\u2019s terrifying femme fatale Brigid O\u2019Shaughnessy\u2014a role that calls for an Angelina Jolie). Hammett would not get adequate cinematic treatment until decades later, when the Coen brothers smelted Red Harvest <\/i>and The Glass Key<\/i> into their stylistic breakthrough Miller\u2019s Crossing<\/i> (1990). (Red Harvest <\/i>also inspired Kurosawa\u2019s 1961 Yojimbo,<\/i> which was itself remade first as the 1967 Sergio Leone\/Clint Eastwood classic A Fistful of Dollars <\/i>and again as Walter Hill\u2019s 1996 Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing.<\/i>) The brutality and moral chaos of Noir \u2013 the Hemingway vision of a senseless world, viewed through the lens of California crime stories \u2013 had largely vanished from movie screens by the late 1960s, when Pauline Kael famously identified the \u201cUrban Western\u201d (starting with Dirty Harry<\/i> and continuing through the Lethal Weapon<\/i> series) as the new template for cop movies\u2014a safe, Manichean world of vigilante heroes who \u201cgo rogue\u201d in order to uphold and restore a moral order, like the Arthurian figures of Old West legend.<\/p>\n

But despite superficial, essentially fraudulent camp pastiche like Body Heat<\/i> (1981), Dead Again <\/i>(1991) and The Usual Suspects <\/i>(1995), the central Noir ideas have survived cinematically, through occasionally-successful recreations like the period-pieces Chinatown<\/i> (1974) and L.A. Confidential <\/i>(1997) and fringe experiments like William Friedkin\u2019s slick, nightmarish To Live And Die in L.A. <\/i>(1985), James Foley\u2019s striking Jim Thompson adaptation After Dark, My Sweet<\/i> (1990), or the stunning extensions of the L.A. Noir concept into science fiction (Ridley Scott\u2019s visionary 1982 classic Blade Runner<\/i>), surrealism (David Lynch\u2019s astonishing triptych of 1997\u2019s Lost Highway<\/i>, 2001\u2019s Mulholland Drive<\/i> and 2006\u2019s Inland Empire<\/i>), Warholian Pop-art pastiche (Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/i>, 1988) and even computer games (Rockstar\u2019s innovative 2011 L.A. Noire<\/i>). Novelists like Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon (whose 2009 postmodern Los Angeles neo-Noir shaggy-dog-tale Inherent Vice<\/i> was just brilliantly translated into celluloid by Paul Thomas Anderson) and Cormac McCarthy (who skated completely off the deep end of reheated Noir philosophy with his debut screenplay for last year\u2019s disastrous The Counselor<\/i>) still can\u2019t resist the lure of the Los Angeles crime story and all of its gaudy opportunities to meld the lowest human behaviors with the highest existential philosophy.<\/p>\n

Drunk with hubris, Pizzolatto chose to take all of this on at once, and the result has been maddening, frustrating, impenetrable, inept, uneven, rushed (both in its execution and unmistakably in its conception and production) \u2013 but, finally, remarkable: as pure and unalloyed a resuscitation of the hybrid literary\/cinematic Noir tradition as has ever been attempted. The dizzying, numbing complexity (Faulkner was asked to explain a mysterious dead body that appeared halfway through The Big Sleep<\/i> and was never mentioned again; baffled, he contacted Chandler, who had forgotten the whole thing); the vast, cynical corruption of all public and private institutions; the endless booze and drugs and cigarettes; the dizzying, hallucinogenic sprawl of the city and its hapless, damned inhabitants; the moments of fragile and delicate sentiment and nobility that are mercilessly crushed and forgotten; all the decades-old elements of Noir are not just reconstructed but are blown up to epic, mythical proportions\u2014Pizzolatto does to Los Angeles what Leone did to the Old West, expanding its scope and scale beyond any journalistic depiction of reality, so that the primal human elements of darkness and chaos, justice and sacrifice are cast in vivid, operatic relief. We have a parched city that needs water (as in Chinatown<\/i>); a shortage of busses contrived to subsidize a rail system (like the freeway-based conspiracy in Roger Rabbit<\/i>); contaminated land; lethal desert showdowns; prostitution rings; sabotaged investigations; and, finally, broken and maimed protagonists propelled past the limits of the public institutions that have failed them and their own faltering endurance, into an endgame where they must stand or fall based on nothing but whatever shreds of decency and grit they can muster. The modern touches\u2014e-cigarettes; GPS transponders; Blackwater-style mercenary groups; Russian mobsters; TMZ expos\u00e9s; sexual harassment charges (and the resulting \u201csensitivity training\u201d requirements); ankle monitors; Viagra and MDMA; memories of the 1992 riots\u2014not only don\u2019t interfere with the eternal Noir elements but actually enhance their potency: the characters\u2019 apprehension that they\u2019re living out an unchangeable template\u2014that they can\u2019t escape the \u201cworld they deserve\u201d\u2014lends a fatalistic nuance to the story. (\u201cSome of these sheds have been here since the 1930s,\u201d the state attorney notes as the detectives finally find the remote murder scene.) When Bezzerides\u2019 father tells Velcorro that he \u201cmust have lived a hundred lives,\u201d he could be referring to the archetypes that stand behind his character, and the dozens of writers who have mapped out this dark territory\u2014the story that \u201cwill never blow over\u201d\u2014down through the decades.<\/p>\n

But, in the end, True Detective <\/i>Season 2 was Pizzolatto\u2019s own\u2014and the circumstance of his empowerment as dictatorial auteur, as lone author, allowed the creation of a flawed but unique work, as far away from the focus-tested and homogenized Hollywood product of the day as could be imagined. Pizzolatto took on the authorless expanse of Los Angeles, and the countless attempts to impose identity onto its endless baked landscape\u2014through lineage, through ownership, through crime, and, as in every Noir tale, through the struggle of the detective\u2014and, mostly, succeeded in making his mark. Velcoro and his \u201chundred lives\u201d are the repeated images of the same primal figure, Hammett\u2019s \u201cdream man,\u201d a grizzled, timeless hero who transcends the specificity of any author or decade, whose hopeless struggle against the rotted fabric of this vast, haze-covered city is the same every time\u2014he has a name, but, as Leonard Cohen whispers, never mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that it\u2019s complete, the second season of HBO\u2019s True Detective can be properly judged, and, I think, elevated to its rightful status: a noble experiment at worst and, at best, an erudite and deeply-felt reaffirmation of the ninety-year-old Noir tradition that\u2019s threaded through our literature, movies and myth. At the very least, Season 2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43966,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43964"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43964"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44514,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43964\/revisions\/44514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}