True Detective and the Challenge of Nihilism
10 years on, Rust Cohle's philosophy reveals a lot about 2024
This is a suitably dark and insightful guest piece by journalist Ed Prideaux, which *contains spoilers* for the first season of ‘True Detective’.
In other news, there are just a handful of places left on my Embodied Sensemaking training. For any Dutch readers, Erik Davis is running a unique seminar on psychedelic history at the University of Amsterdam this summer. Also, my friends at Perspectiva recently launched a great film about their ‘Antidebate’ process.
True Detective’s groundbreaking first season aired ten years ago, while its fourth just finished to mixed reviews. The first season plays on the strange interactions of time, narrative, and the nature and purpose of human beings. Ironically, it is considerably more relevant to society today than the latest season.
Its philosophical meat comes from the soliloquies of its central character, Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey. Cohle is a talented detective grieving the death of his infant daughter, and harbouring a death wish. While an impassioned nihilist and anti-natalist, he maintains a sincere desire for justice and resists the allures of suicide.
Together with his colleague Marty Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, Cohle investigates a series of ritual murders across Louisiana, which are connected to a church network run by the oligarchical Tuttle family. The cult deals in a strange blend of occult paganism and Nietzschean concepts of time: in particular, the spiralling symbols of the “flat circle”, which they emblazon on their victims’ bodies.
The “flat circle” is a view of the cosmos of total equality: nothing gained, nothing exceeded, only eternity, where different directions of time can be harnessed for power. Cohle is haunted by this same vision of the world. “Someone once told me, ‘Time is a flat circle’”, he says, quoting one of the cult members. “Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again.”
The Exhaustion of History
Cohle is speaking directly to us in 2024.
“Why should I live in history, huh? I don’t want to know anything anymore,” he asks the two detectives interviewing him years after the case. “This is a world where nothing is solved.”
When True Detective first aired, Obama was President and the arc of progress seemed precarious and doubtable, but not unbelievable. The news at the time - not yet the surreal shit show it is today - was occupied by controversy over Obama wearing a tan suit, and whether it was “unpresidential”.
In 2024, we are exhausted by a history that seems like ‘one damn thing after another’, now hyper-reflected in the hall of mirrors of our digital media. It seems we live in weird, repeating cycles, the dreary repetitions of our politics and culture, ever groaning for the new and the vital.
Like Cohle, our age is one of collective suicidal ideation, shifting between a ‘lol’ passivity to apocalypse and an annihilationist welcoming. Writing in 2003, the critic David Bentley Hart declared that “we modern men and women… believe in nothing”.
On both left and right, the sole moral axiom it seems we share is the individual will: free to choose, to pursue desire, and squeeze as much substance out of life as possible before death comes. Every other concrete accumulation of tradition and the sacred has been destroyed.
The Problem of Suicide
Much like the zeitgeist’s “lol” and “YOLO” nihilism, Cohle’s anti-natalist ideas have gone mainstream in the decade since the first season aired. Cohle believes that committing suicide may form a sound response to life, which links him to two of his philosophical influences: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
For the latter, suicide was the ultimate act of self-assertion and will: the forces that he believed should be extinguished through resignation. For Nietzsche, suicide concretised the anti-human and will-negating tendencies he diagnosed in Buddhism and Christianity, and all metaphysics and pretenses to absolute truth. Today, the problem of male suicide has never been greater: 2022 marked the highest annual number of suicides ever recorded in the USA.
“I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it's obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide”, Cohle tells his partner, Marty Hart, seventeen years before the police interview that forms the frame for the show.
He hasn’t seen Hart for ten years when the interview takes place. The original True Detective treatment summarised Hart as “obsessive and semi-intelligent”. Played by Woody Harrelson, Hart professed himself a "regular type dude...with a big-ass dick”. He plays as a ‘family man’, praying before meals and holding to Christian values. But Hart mirrored Cohle’s nihilism through misdeeds - in a way Cohle’s practised devotion to justice often doesn’t - and reveals the inchoate nihilism at the heart of any unpractised and “empty belief system”. When Hart realises his fuck-ups, the treatment describes, he heads to “culturally convenient forms of redemption” like “discovering Christ, joining AA, etc.”
However, Cohle eventually turns away from total nihilism. He has a shattering near-death experience in the series finale and glimpses the outlines of real movement in history towards goodness. Yet his ‘conversion’ is left ambiguous. As such, it betrays the vulnerability of the Christian “open circle”, and its metaphysical radicalism, to closure and collapse: a trend visible throughout the series, and philosophical history.
For Nietzsche and Heidegger, Christianity and its kingdoms formed the midwives of modern nihilism: its story was so expansive that its struggles to meet modernity’s demands would cause all to crumble.
This conjoinment of Christianity and Nihilism is emphasised throughout True Detective. As the show’s creator Nic Pizzolatto, who was raised devout Catholic, has said, it explores the “earnest urge to merge the secular with the sacred”. And the one book which he recommended viewers to read to accompany the series? The King James Version of the Old Testament.
The Cain and Abel of Christian Nihilism
Where the programme mentions Christianity, though, it’s mainly in disparagement. Cohle shares the cult’s implied contempt for the religion. And as several critics have noticed, the cult takes Cohle’s views to their darkest endpoint. The detective views nature as a “thresher”, humans as “sentient meat”, and the sense of self as an illusory “secretion of sensory experience”.
Applying it practically, the cult hides its victims’ and members’ identities in ritual masks and buried in the outgrowths of Nature. Indeed, much like the deranged islanders in The Wicker Man, the cult’s “closed circle” view reveals the dark potentials of antique paganism. Traditions around the world engaged in a great cosmic economy of bargaining through gifting sacrifices of animals and children to the gods. The engine of such a system is Death, and its harvesting of life force.
The cult reveres Nature as a deity variously named ‘The Yellow King’ and ‘Carcosa’: names and motifs from The King In Yellow, a book of weird horror by Robert Chambers from 1895. When Cohle causes a cult member to trip on an explosive, they deem it a “blessing”; Carcosa is “Him who eats Time”, one member confesses.
Cohle is entranced by the Tuttles’ symbols, but “too passionate” to really commit to his nihilism, as Pizzolatto has said. But he takes their metaphysics more seriously over time: in particular, their idea of the “flat circle”, which echoes Nietzsche’s thought experiment of the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’.
Nietzsche used this to encourage prospective Übermenschen, or Overmen - of which the cult’s leader seems to view himself a member - to revive the Dionysian strains of Western culture. In a world bereft of any objective truth or higher purpose other than power, the true Übermensch must passionately will that any and every moment, no matter its degree of suffering, be repeated eternally.
“It's important for us to confront the potential of the true abyss”, the creator of True Detective, told an interviewer. For Cohle and the cult, the “true abyss” is the “flat circle” that drives the cosmos.
In a “flat circle” universe, there is only a changeless eternity, from and to which a series of flickering epiphenomena arise and fall. The “flat circle” is the fourth-dimension that transcends and undergirds three-dimensional spacetime, Cohle explains to the puzzled detectives.
“In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into.”
The Flat Circle
The “flat circle”, and its collapse of identity and history, are encoded implicitly in a host of ideas predominant today. It is a ‘social fact’ of a culture in which the internet has collapsed the distances we held from decades past, and in which constant recombination and pastiche are taken as analogical to innovation.
More subtly, a “flat circle” cosmos is common among secular humanists, atheists, Stoics, materialists and species of secular Buddhists, for whom the self is as an “illusion”, “a bag of neurons”, a “machine” or a “computer”, love and compassion as mere “survival mechanisms”, and the world a realm of “chaos” we imperfectly order.
For Valentin Tomberg, the Christian mystic, the “flat” or “closed circle” is implied in a rootless view of empirical science: that of only a quantity of energy and mass that always exists within, with no miracles and invasions from without, and which will eventually collapse in a catastrophe several billions of years from now. Popular modern varieties of pantheism have such an implication, too. With no distinction between the world, God and individual beings, the foundations of ethics, historical movement and proper separations of beings are shaken.
Despite deeming himself a “realist”, one who appraises religion through the lens of “linguistic anthropology”, Cohle seems to take the “flat circle” literally. A similar tension is revealed in Cohle’s relationship with Christianity. Whether ironically or not, Cohle tells detectives that he returned to police work from his self-imposed exile doing hard labour in Alaska after reading a passage in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many”, he sighs. “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ.”
A recurrent symbol in the series is the face: stripped, fulfilled, a revelation of ourselves. A couple of chapters later in the same letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes that “[f]or now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face”. Still addled by grief, Cohle never gazes at his reflection. His apartment mirror is so small as only to reflect his eyes, likely to check for redness after a night of drinking and staying up with the case.
Cohle ridicules Christians for their stupidity and “yen for fairy tales”, but sleeps with a crucifix above his bed. When asked why by his Christian partner, Cohle explains that he uses it “as a form of meditation”.
It’s no wonder the cult calls Cohle the “little priest”. But his attitudes toward faith are radically ambiguous.
Cohle brings this ambiguity into his interviews with criminal suspects, whom he goads into confessing through the promise of ultimate forgiveness. “You're not bad. It's not you. There’s a weight,” he says to a paedophile he questions in Episode 3.
“It’s got its fish hooks in your heart and your soul. There’s grace in this world, and there’s forgiveness for all—but you have to ask for it. You got one way out, and it’s through the grace of God.”
How Cohle himself feels about the promise is ambiguous: likely seduced but repelled. Indeed, later in the series, the only place at which Cohle seems really fazed is when a cult member finds in him a similar “weight”. "You got a demon, little man”, the gruff member, Reggie DeWall, tells him. “There's a shadow on you, son."
Cohle struggles to make sense of that weight, carried since the loss of his daughter and marriage. It’s a grief that strips his practised Stoicism to drunken despair; a literal haunting that tempts him to wonder whether fathering his daughter at all had been a “sin”.
One possible solution for Cohle is a retreat to Nature, to the expansive abyss of Alaska’s snowscapes. But ultimately Nature is no home for him, as he believes “[w]e are creatures that should not exist by natural law.”
In the show, the Tuttle cultists are proven right: the only principle that Nature seems to follow is its own will-to-power. “Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony”, the filmmaker Werner Herzog said in a popular online clip, originally filmed in the 1980’s, standing in a jungle. “It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”
Here, some interpretations of Christianity stand in strange agreement: they view the cosmos as governed by Satan, its patterns conforming to a circular and life-sapping tendency. The world is to be “hated” for its fallenness, Jesus said; the entire cosmos is “groaning”, even time itself, which will “be no longer” in the eternity of the New Jerusalem at History’s end. As much as we try to resign ourselves to a flat circle view, humans hold out a larger hope: the possibility of the Christian answer gazes out, but repels us.
“Fuckin’ nothings ever fulfilled—until the very end!”, Cohle barks at the detectives. “And closure– no, nothing is ever over.”
Spiritually Homeless
Part of our muddle in the present day is that we’ve no idea what humans really are or where we’re going.
“Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself?”, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944. “...If man insists that he is a child of nature and that he ought not to pretend to be more than the animal, which he obviously is, he tacitly admits that he is, at any rate, a curious kind of animal who has both the inclination and the capacity to make such pretensions.”
Secular empiricist narratives tell us we’re merely “social animals”, inheritors of evolutionary drivers. Trans-humanists agree, casting our bodies as “meat machines” and “wetware” prone to error, while seeking an “upload” and technological immortality. Such begs the question on how a normal creature could have such aspirations at all. Or consider what Bishop Robert Barron asked the atheist commentator Alex O’Connor: how can an evolutionary fitness view of ethics account for Father Maximilien Kolbe, who sacrificed himself to save a Jewish man’s life in Auschwitz? Or what of Auschwitz itself?
The theologian Niebuhr came to two conclusions. Humans are spiritually homeless and drawn indelibly to dark inclinations and self-worship. Our unique domain over Nature is that of History, that same process questioned so passionately by Cohle. While the natural world follows its own arc, human History isn’t bound to its metabolic necessity: the closed spiral glimpsed by the cult. Human History is rooted in the spiritual freedom of humans to pick, survey and shift the environment that surrounds them to its ideological demands.
Our shared sense of History seeks fulfilment in a longed-for community, the archetype of the “Kingdom of Heaven”, in which justice and proper recompense to the poor can prevail. The archetype is haunted by continual failure: our age expresses a long collapse of Modernism, whose purveyors hoped that humans could take charge of History through continual innovation and progress. What’s more, the Modernists believed that the values underlying our progress would be entirely human, without need for an external Revelation.
That is, a closed circle, without the invasion of Christ that communities around the world had taken for granted for several centuries. With the collapse of Modernism, we glimpse the limitations and derangements of the human heart. The perennial temptations of nihilism are obvious.
In his posthumous pamphlet Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, the polemicist Father Seraphim Rose assembled a series of connections between Nihilism, expressed formally “that there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs-no 'thing-in-itself”, and its culmination in the orgiastic desire to destroy. In a world whose only truth and certainty is Nothingness, Death must be idolised and worshipped, repressed, and reviled all the same. Nature abhors a vacuum; yet what if the vacuum is Nature’s highest form, if only at the End when all is destroyed? It must fill and revolve, as is the nature of the closed spiral.
Such a conclusion is evidently found in the cult, and likewise in Nietzsche. "Who wishes to be creative must first destroy and smash accepted values”, Nietzsche said. And since all that really exists and matters is power, war must be a necessary and vital force. Writing in On The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche looked longingly for “a conqueror- and master-race which, organised for war and with the force to organise, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and wandering.”
Indeed, ‘the Nihilists’ were so named originally for a group of dissident Russian philosophers in the late-19th-century, who sought to overturn all established institutions with extreme revolutionary violence. “He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world”, the nihilist Sergei Nechayev affirmed. “He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.”
One can’t help but hear echoes of these ideas today in the world of MAGA, troll culture, or the extremes of the far-left: indeed, in all pseudo-religious ideologies that subsume the world to a system of control.
The Shadow of Christian Hope
What role does Christianity play in this dynamic? In the telling of David Bentley Hart, the cultural retreat of the complete Hope offered by Christian faith could only have birthed the age of Nihilism in which we find ourselves.
We are haunted by Christendom’s failures, much like the desolate Louisianan bayous that form True Detective’s backdrop. The Judeo-Christian God is so big, so all-encompassing, that His shadow casts and projects a void.
Nietzsche saw the religion’s failure as caused by an internal contradiction: it prioritises “truth” over the will-to-power, but confuses truth, love and hope as categories, and can’t back them up against the rigorous demands of modernity. If false, the completeness of the Christian picture may render it the worst Satanism of them all. In an eerie mirror of the Nihilist Nechayev, Jesus Christ tells his followers with rhetorical flourish that “if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
Of course, Jesus also tells us “to love our enemies” and neighbours “as ourselves”. But the radical up-ending in priorities he implies - where the God revealed in Christ must be one’s centre, so much that our own lives are to be hated by comparison - leaves a dramatic fall from its heights. It is a summit down which we must, and perhaps ought, to plunge if Christ be revealed as false.
Cohle finds hope in the final episode, having come to the consummation of his own crucifixion. As if descending into Hell, he explores the catacomb lair of the cult and envisions the “flat circle”, gazing upwards and likely filled with confirmed dread. Stabbed and then comatosed, he has a profound near-death experience and feels the “Nothing... There was nothing but that love.” The description is indicative. He wakes up in a hospital bed, his long hair and moustache recalling the Shroud of Turin; he hobbles outside, held aloft by his partner like Christ by Simon of Cyrene, and gazes at the stars in the night sky.
“There was a moment... I know when I was under in the dark that something... whatever I'd been reduced to, you know, not even consciousness. It was a vague awareness in the dark, and I could... I could feel my definitions fading... And beneath that... darkness, there was another kind. It was - it was deeper, warm, you know, like a substance. I could feel, man, and I knew, I knew my daughter waited for me there... So clear. I could feel her.”
Cohle’s experience has been claimed as a religious conversion. But, really, his ambiguity is only affirmed. “It was like I was a part of everything that I ever loved, and we were all... the three of us, just - just fadin' out.” And all I had to do was let go... and I did. I said, ‘Darkness, yeah, yeah.’”, he tells Marty, shellshocked. “And I disappeared. But I could - I could still feel her love there, even more than before.”
In other words, he felt something bigger than Death: the demiurge of the cult and nihilism. Glimpsing that “substance” tempted him to end his life and escape the world. His suicidal drive seems to be left intact. True Detective’s creator suggests that Cohle has “moved maybe five degrees on the meter” away from nihilism after his near-death experience; whether his hope for his daughter’s continued existence will survive his empiricism, we never find out.
For the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, atheism in the face of evil and the reality of our “flat circle” cosmos was an entirely endorsable worldview. What would spell the difference was eschatology: that is, how the cosmos will culminate in The End. "Your sorrows pin you to this place. They divide you from what your heart knows”, the preacher Theriot tells his congregation in the show. “In the end, we will find ourselves at the beginning and at last will know ourselves, and our True Faces will weep”.
Rust is brought to tears in the hospital car park in the last moments of the show; his mirror, formerly a miniature parody, is opened in the night sky. Yet what exactly he, and we as viewers, are really gazing at with this Hope, we can’t know - until we do.
 | A guest post by
|
Thanks for this Ali. I really, really appreciate it when you get into culture from movies to tv shows to games. This is a good one! It made me think of recent quote that I've been holding from Ian McGilchrist:
“I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself. The goodness of loved can embrace its opposite; the evil of hate cannot.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1300). The tension between asymmetric opposites is creative, perfect symmetry is inert."
Seems like the nihilism of the cult fails to see this asymmetry, and like that is exactly what Rust gets a glimpse of.
"More subtly, a 'flat circle' cosmos is common among secular humanists, atheists, Stoics, materialists and species of secular Buddhists, for whom the self is as an 'illusion', 'a bag of neurons' a 'machine' or a 'computer', love and compassion as mere 'survival mechanisms', and the world a realm of 'chaos' we imperfectly order."
*****
Now there's a paragraph to digest for several weeks.
So the flat world is basically substance ontology, whereas the multidimensional world is relational ontology. Yup. That sounds about right. But no one can fathom to its fullest depths the world of relationality. That's why it is beautiful.
One can certainly be a non-theist and a secularist and be wide awake to the vast, heartful openness of the relational domain. Myself? I know almost nothing, and yet I'm alive in a relational kosmos.