Taking it off would be an act of cruelty. On the surface level, then, “the mask” might be the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope with this life. So if there was one overarching theme to True Detective, I would say it was that as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself. The show was never concerned with the supernatural, but it was concerned with supernatural thought, and it was concerned with supernatural thinking to the degree that it was concerned with storytelling. Which one is the correct one? Obviously no answer is possible, the whole point is to evaluate yourself and your beliefs, what your life means to you if you’re honest with yourself and “take off the mask”.īut it’s not as simple as a choice between the heavenly afterlife and, as Rust puts it, the pointless existence of a “sentient meat”. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.Ĭlearly a thought incompatible with the preacher’s idea. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person.
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To realize that all your life - you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain - it was all the same thing. To finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go. Yeah they saw, in that last nanosecond, they saw… what they were.
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See, cause they were afraid, and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just… let go. You know what you see? They welcomed it… not at first, but… right there in the last instant. You look in their eyes, even in a picture, doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive, you can still read ’em. This is what I mean when I’m talkin’ about time, and death, and futility. Illustrated with the photos of dead people, we hear Rust saying: And they’d put a mirror in front of you so you could get a good look at yourself.Īnd then, in another episode, he digs deeper into the theme. And they’d cut around your face, grip your scalp, yank down, rip your face off. They’d duct-tape you to a chair that was bolted to the floor, use a couple rolls, make sure you couldn’t budge a fuckin’ inch. This cartel I worked on the border, they, uh, they had this routine. He starts with the general idea that our true self is a nightmare: The preacher, as expected, offers a comforting thought of the afterlife and heaven, and the world being an illusion hiding the face of God - but Rust has a different idea. "To realize all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain - It was all the same thing.In other words, we’re not seeing the world as it truly is. We keep the other bad men from the door." - Cohle
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"If the common good's got to make up fairy tales then it's not good for anybody." - Cohle In 2012, the Papania and Gilbough interviews of Hart and Cohle identify their character flaws, particularly Hart's hypocritical views on morality and Cohle's nihilistic view of the world. They learn through Olivier's grandfather that she attended Light of Way, a religious school owned by Reverend Tuttle, before running off with her boyfriend Reggie Ledoux, a drug dealer, repeated sex offender and former cellmate of Lange's ex-husband, and head out to question Ledoux. Cohle goes through dead body files in search of cases similar to Lange and learns of Rianne Olivier, a supposed accidental death that shared elements with Lange's murder. Hart begins to reconnect with Maggie despite her fascination with Cohle, and assaults Lisa's new boyfriend out of jealousy, questioning his own morality. In 1995, Hart and Cohle locate the owner of the burnt-down church, preacher Joel Theriot, learning that Dora Lange was often seen with a tall man with facial scarring, and begin searching for him while being pressured to turn the case over to the task force.