In Which Woody Harrelson's Toupee Is The Cruelest Animal

Home Life

by ALEX CARNEVALE

True Detective
creator Nic Pizzolatto

Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) has a very efficacious mistress. "The key to a healthy marriage," he intones to his partner on the police force Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), is adultery. Marty's distinctive characteristic is the lack of any dominant aspect in his personality, plus his occupation: a Louisiana homicide detective in the 90s.

Playing against type, Harrelson inserts a markedly different litany of tics and reactions here, embodying a more subdued role; his partner's expression remains unmoved by these toned-down versions of his trademark hysterics. Harrelson appears more youthful by simply not having to give his usual hyperactive line readings. He and McConaughey are a model of the angels that ride men's shoulders, and there is something quite absolute about them both, a solemnity that is only belied by their respective cycling of hairstyles.

The killer ends a woman (a prostitute, how'd you know?) and attaches her, posed, to the antlers of an elk. The detectives find an image of this beast on the walls of a burned down church, and pursue those responsible, while realizing the perpetrator may... strike again. It's supposed to feel familiar.

Thrown together, quietly grateful each is not the other, Harrelson and McConaughey begin to ape their partner's behavior at the strangest times, and their combined hair slowly coalescences into one horrible combover between them, bad enough that it should have itself been a crime worse than murder.

For his part, Rust Cohle is a physical marvel who beats on three men at a time. Rust has a major dark side, sounding like Nietzsche after only one beer. He is also a terrible alcoholic and drug addict dating back to his days catching drug dealers. You could spend a long time searching for wherever the plastic surgeon had to cut to restore MM to his full, robust beauty, but after four years as an undercover cop and/or playing opposite Kate Hudson, he probably deserves it.

Harrelson's wife is portrayed by Michelle Monaghan, a sort of dreary woman of fate who demands too much from all the people around her. Her intimates react to these stipulations by giving her everything except what she actually wants. Michelle's earthy sexuality is deliberately muted so that we may forgive her husband for straying. He wants his home to be a place of peace, and his wife is challenged to fulfill this desire by every aspect of her nature.

It is shortly after this that Marty begins to mirror his more desiccated partner, drinking and wandering off on a lark. Monaghan sometimes shouts at her husband, but this is too direct to get his attention. He responds by lecturing her, the wrong instinct. The drinking worsens, you can guess who he calls:

In contrast to his wife, his mistress Lisa Tragnetti (Alexandra Daddario) is adventurous and carefree. She consistently exceeds Marty's expectations, so much so that he has learned it is most ethical to dial back her ambitions. He does want to leave his wife for her, but he must make sure the grass is really greener.

For obvious reasons, Marty does not feel all that comfortable in a church, although the concept of atheists patrolling the stomping grounds of believers only briefly gets its due in True Detective. For the most part, there is an odd lack of belief in anything even before the horrors of the case unfold.

Louisiana is a terrible site of murder and prostitution, it can no long be glamorized as in the light musicianship of Treme or the sally vampires of yore. Treme took up disappointment as a theme; True Detective hopes for a way to skate above the negativity by ignoring the racial and governmental dilemmas that most likely caused these problems in the first place. Killing can now just be death-making. It is a relief to be anything important in these environs, and minor kings populate the retinue.

Treme contained several positive white characters, a delicate minority. There is not really much in the way of people of color when the investigation into the elk/woman murder begins in 1995, but two black detectives interview the cops long after the events being described.

True Detective falls apart during these cheesy interviews from the Present Day, where the main actors in the drama reveal their opinions about the past. These are far and away the worst parts of the show, both because they endlessly repeat churlish summations of how great a detective Rust is and because such concepts add a campy note absent from the time where Woody will ever be young:

In one scene Marty visits his self-loathing father-in-law, who prowls a lovely estate with a scenic pond, looking like a mongoose in the sunlight. He is unhappy despite all the things he possesses, and in that witnessing that, Marty feels both vindicated and disgusted by how bad we can make our lives. These sorts of dioramas reappear frequently, a familiar trope. True Detective mimics its source material as often as the characters in the milieu seem purposed to repeat something ineffable. We know virtually every serial killer story, although the final catharsis remains unique to its creator. The reflection generally contains the more consummate truth.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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In Which The Life We've Been Living Will Bleed Us Dry

Messing Around

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Indecent Proposal
dir. Adrian Lyne
121 minutes

When Robert Redford first sees Demi Moore in Adrian Lyne's 1993 movie Indecent Proposal, she's taking a handful of free chocolates from a dress store in Las Vegas. I'm not sure why they offered chocolates to their customers. Her husband is Woody Harrelson, an architect. A few years earlier, Demi grudgingly became a real estate agent to fund his dream: a house built on the beach. Woody works tirelessly on his plans for the house. When it's almost completed, it looks like this:

Perhaps disturbed by how ugly her husband's dream house is, Demi is prone to incipient rage about how she has to pick up his clothes, how he leaves the toilet seat up. Coincidentally, every fictional husband in history shares these exact same things. Maybe Woody has never seen a television show before, since there is no evidence of the appliance in his house.

After he loses his job and the bank threatens to foreclose on his beach castle, Woody tells his wife he'll do something, he'll drive a cab, or wait tables. Apparently all those jobs were taken as well. He has never heard of the internet, he doesn't even have one of those AOL discs you could find in any magazine in 1993. He calls his wife 'D', like maybe she's his streetball partner in White Men Can't Jump.

Not watching television has its detriments. When the bank threatens to foreclose on Woody's house, he wakes up in the middle of the night with a capital idea: let's head to Las Vegas! Leaving Las Vegas, unluckily, was still two years away from being made at this point, which probably could have saved both these people a lot of trouble. Demi says, "I love you." Woody says, "I know." Demi says, "Even without the money," kind of a strange statement, given all they have to their name is $25,000 at this point.

Still, the sex is tremendous. At one point they do a position that I hadn't known existed, it was kind of a free fall into a half twist on a bed full of money. They lose the very last of their money at roulette. Bob Redford has been killing time playing blackjack, waiting for this eventuality to become reality. After luring Demi in by promising she's only to be his "good luck charm," he invites Woody and his wife to his magnificent suite. "He just won a million dollars!" Woody groans, as if this were a matter of simple luck.

After they accept an offer of $1m for one night with Demi Moore, Redford picks out a really steamy dress for her: its smell is redolent of pears. She is presented before servants, and it is clear she is going to be sacrificed, the only question is to what. A ceremonial gauze adorns her life fluid. Bob Redford is dressed in all white, a regalia akin to command in the armed forces. Suddenly he gets this really hopeful look on his face:

In the bracing exchange that follows, Robert Redford's little erection feels like a gloved hand. "If you were mine," he says, "I wouldn't share you with anyone." He flips a coin to decide whether to fuck her, and it says he should fuck her. They should release an alternate version of Indecent Proposal with an original score composed by Nickelback, simple piano and violin intros and outros don't do justice to the spiritual malaise.

For the money he transfers to their account, it appears he takes her ceremonial flower. Demi's scent is now onions and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Bob makes her labor at menial tasks for his amusement, and then releases her back to Woody Harrelson.

Melodrama recognized as real life is the recipe for satire, but Lyne is not really aiming at that. His problem is not with these pathetic people but with this place and time. Indecent Proposal constitutes a European's critique of an overly crass America, made on their terms with their movie stars, the most obnoxious ones he could find. More than anything, Lyne finds Americans to be overly sentimental, not realist enough to survive the perils of life.

Moore eschews the buttoned up sexuality of her other roles in which she invariably played a soldier or widow. Her lips constantly pursed, she seems on the verge of an orgasm that sadly never arrives. Her imitation of an ingenue rebounds on herself, bouncing back like a miscast spell, dimming her potential. Her lawyer (Oliver Platt) evens says, "You probably could have had two million."

Redford's inherent cragginess deepens as he continues to purse the married woman. He just wants to sweep her to Paris, he says. It's the city of his dreams. The way he touches her back informs her she is a cherished heirloom, like a brunette brooch. He tells her he needs her.

Whereas the original novel of Indecent Proposal featured Robert Redford as a billionaire Arab who takes the wife of a Jew for his own nefarious means, Lyne's version has none of that. Redford more resembles the fabled pre-socialism Dutch archetype of Das Hammerschlong, the wealthy landowner who does not covet his neighbor's belongings, but ends up with them in the story's unlikely denouement.

As for Woody Harrelson's character, he takes a job teaching, and his enthusiasm for the work of Louis Kahn is entirely misplaced. His female students stare at him in admiration. When he tells them how much he loves the library at Exeter, he is entirely blind to the irony. Woody donates a million dollars to an endangered species charity to get Demi back, but it doesn't work, so the wisdom of Robert Redford has to be enough to set these gentile Americans aright. Dutch archetypes have such strange taste in women.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Cameron Crowe's Singles.

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