And most importantly, the Tuttles are at large. Rust is still a bereaved father who’s alone in the world. Marty still remains estranged from his family because of his own actions. This, I think, is the great lesson of this whole story: that our lives have no meaning beyond what we ourselves give them, and if we do that by believing a whole lot of extradimensional mumbo-jumbo, we’re cheating no one but ourselves.Īnd for anyone who thought it was all too neat, remember that as far as happy endings go, this one comes with a lot of whacking great asterisks. It’s not in the stories we tell ourselves - be they deranged tales of Carcosa and human sacrifice or self-serving lies about being a great family man or nihilistic philosophical musings about flat circles and the secret fate of all life. The thing to take from this, it seems, is that if we define our lives by anything, it should be by the love and compassion we have for others. Presumably Jesus wasn’t expecting to get resurrected, either - and doesn’t Rust look more than a little Christlike in that hospital bed? In both cases, we have a man offering himself up for death, and in both cases redeeming others by doing so. As Matt Zoller Seitz points out, there’s a definite parallel between Jesus offering himself up for crucifixion and Rust’s journey into Carcosa.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of fascinating religious allusions in the finale. He’s been on a death trip for decades, but at the last moment he found a reason to live, the thing he’s been seeking all these years. And beneath that darkness, he saw something warmer. This is why anyone who wants to argue that Rust’s near-death revelation was somehow about “finding God” or any such thing is entirely missing the point - it’s not like he’s been converted to the idea that hey, everything’s great after all! It’s more that, like Willard meeting Kurtz, he’s seen the extreme of where his nihilist philosophy can lead, and recoiled from it. Just like everyone else in the show, nihilism is a story he’s been telling himself. In the end, Rust’s nihilism softens into what we might call classic existentialism, the idea that we give our own lives meaning. Life isn’t defined by a cross or a devil net, but nor is it entirely meaningless.
When you think about it, there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between Christianity and the Yellow King mythos and Rust’s nihilism - they’re all stories that characters told themselves to give meaning to their lives, and they’re all ultimately destructive and delusional. The show isn’t so much anti-religion as anti-self-delusion, of which religion is only one manifestation. This is entirely correct, but I’d argue that True Detective‘s conception of storytelling as an escape from the truth extends beyond religion. On the other hand, there’s religion - storytelling as an escape from the truth.”
On the one hand, there’s investigation - storytelling as a search for the truth. The most succinct formulation of this idea comes from The Daily Beast‘s Andrew Romano, who wrote this morning, “In the earliest episodes of True Detective, Pizzolatto established a clear dichotomy. (I’m not the first to argue this - Pasha Malla’s excellent piece for Slate last week came to a similar conclusion.) The show takes many different approaches to the theme, but the finale suggested that perhaps the most important was an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves. Nic Pizzolatto’s narrative is about many things, but most importantly, it explores the nature of storytelling. The idea of True Detective being anti-Christian, or even anti-religious, misses a much deeper point. It didn’t take people long to complain that True Detective was “anti-Christian,” but honestly, that complaint only served to illustrate how people tend to pick and choose the things that offend them (especially on the internet.) Spoilers ahead, obviously, so don’t read unless you’ve watched the season finale.įrom the beginning, religion has gotten pretty short shrift on True Detective - particularly from Rust Cohle, the show’s endearingly nihilistic antihero. Clearly, there are all manner of recaps to read on the web (and on Flavorwire), but I want to focus on one particular aspect of the show: what it has to say about religion, and the way we define the meaning of our lives.
#True detective rust cohle jesus series#
The past eight weeks have seen all manner of internet speculation on what the show is about, and in the wake of last night’s excellent finale, we have a complete series to which we can apply such theories. And so True Detective is over and done with - for this season, anyway.
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