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True Detective Weekly 6: Church in Ruins

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True Detective Weekly 6:

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Church in Ruins

With an impressive infiltration-gone-wrong setpiece spanning much of its final third, this episode of True Detective Season 2 was among our favorite yet. The investigation chugged along, and our principal characters got to dive into some heady emotional material (well, maybe not Paul). We're only two episodes away from the end, and it feels like we're well on our way to wrapping things up.

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Okay to drag our discussion over from the Episode #5 thread:

 

I feel vindicated about my early feelings on how Ani's characterization was going to continue throughout the show. Pizzolato is going steadily down the route of Ani being a damaged individual at the hands of men and while I really enjoyed the backhalf of this week's episode - the camerwork was chaotic and dreamlike, the sound design was pretty top-notch and added to the mood, Rachel's acting was really on key, the fact that it revealed what I had sort of suspected all along was a little disappointing. I feel like I see all of Pizzolato's cards regarding how he views a woman like Ani and how he's built her up into a person, without a real consciousness as to how tropey these kinds of women characters are at the basement level. It sucks because I really love Ani in spite of it, mostly due to the fact that I feel like I have a lot of things in common with her. This kind of character is the most you get in certain TV quarters, barring something like Twin Peaks or other such things. It's a step up from his lack of writing for women in the first season but if this is what we get now, I'm not super happy about it. 

 

I know no one is going to agree with me about this, but as someone who has the same kinds of abrupt and walled-off feelings that Ani does and her life situation, it gets super tiring what kinds of stereotypical character traits get applied to women who have been abused or hurt by men. I still got another sort of queer-esque vibe off her but I still can't tell if that's me reading too heavily into her long and uncomfortable glances at women's bodies and how hard it is to tell those types of moments apart from the kind of alienation you can sometimes feel towards other people's sexual attitudes. 

 

That being said, the kind of quiet knife stabbing of the gross businessman while she's drugged out, the flight down the hill with the other girl was pretty heart-pumping. It was fucking good television. 

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GUYS Ani used the her wicked cool knife skills! Hoorayyy!

(I bet the guys mention sleep no more this week)

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Man oh man the saddest thing to me is that Ray's kid probably asked to watch Friends because it's an old show that he assumes his dad would probably like it too.  I bet he walked around all week thinking man this Friends show from my dad's era is great!  I'll show my dad that I like the kind of tv he used to like too!

 

Hey was this the first ep of season 2 without a scene in the bar?

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I really, really disliked the Ani's childhood thing. And I just don't see the need for it. I don't see its necessity in this season, and especially in this episode. I feel like Ani's knife-arc is so much more interesting. She talks a big game, almost has to resort to the knife in a firefight, finally uses the knife, and instantly regrets it. There's something so human about that and I loved it.

 

Aside from that, another great episode. What I'm bummed about though, is that this could have easily been episode 3. Frank only works--in my mind--when he's playing off Velcoro. I don't really care about any of his personal shit, cause he's just a shithead. And Woodrough's stuff just isn't going anywhere. I don't even know why he's in the show. He's not even plot relevant.

 

The more things I find to enjoy about this season, the more upset I get about all of the wasted potential.

I found Ani and Velcoro's partner relationship to be endlessly fascinating. These two people who relating to each other and starting to respect each other despite the orders they've been given to try to fuck each other over.

 

I'm glad Velcoro decided to let go of his son. He's an unfit father, and even though I've come around to him as a character, I actively didn't want him to be in that kid's life anymore.

 

I'm really left somewhat mystified by this season. It was ambitious as hell to try to tell a story with 4 separate POV characters with only 8 episodes. but instead of feeling like there wasn't enough time given to the characters, it feels like there was way too much time spent on nothing. I think Pizzolatto really needs an editor. Hopefully he'll learn a little humility after this season.

 

And I'd really really love for season 3 to not be set in some big Metropolitan. I just really don't feel interested in a Southern California setting. I'm tired of big cities. I want the weird backwoods shit like season one.

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Here's a thing I'm not sure about:

 

Ray had to get drug tests for his visitations...

So did he get high to psyche himself up to give up his son, or did he give up his son because he'd gotten high.  

 

Not that there's much distinction, but I like when a scene has two parts each of which motivates the other.

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I'm glad that a lot of you got something out of this episode, because I was bored and baffled from end to end. I knew it was going to be rough going for me from the first scene, picking up the finale of the previous episode, pregnant with violence, to take the two characters to a breakfast nook where they have an overly portentous yet still vapid conversation that ends in absolutely nothing. It wasn't a realistic rendering of such a confrontation or even a hyperrealistic rendering, which is how I hear a lot of Pizzolatto's more excessive floridity explained, but a seeming recreation by aliens or foreigners of a partial written account of that confrontation. This was repeated with Frank's totally nonsense conversation with Stan's wife and then his son, bringing up Who the Hell Is Stan for the nth time since Stan's ignominious death, as well as with Paul's touching but utterly disconnected reminiscence with the former cop about two children orphaned by a decades-cold case.

 

Some things clearly connect up: the cabin in the woods for torturing women in private, the missing hard drive full of sexual misdemeanors, the twice-stolen blue diamonds, the Russian connection in the slave trade and the rail project. Others, though, like the aggressive presence of that random Mexican cartel, the non-lethal trap laid at Caspere's second house, the stolen car set alight by a clumsy fugitive, and everything in the above paragraph, continue to come off as filler in a show that's struggling to give its important plot points the limelight. I know we're sick of comparisons to the first season, but all of its major incidents had a haunting similarity to them, exploiting the audience's tendency as collective possessors of human brains to see patterns everywhere. This season has none of that: maybe I'm slow, but I look at the blackness and see only blackness, lying in wait for something to direct my gaze to what actually matters. It's just not fun to indulge in the mystery here, probably in a big way because the first season seeped with sex that was occult, but the second season seeps with sex that is merely transgressive. Where's the "great moral evil" of the first season, or does Pizzolatto think that prostitution is it?

 

And yeah, that brings me to the final set of scenes. Wow, what an utter mess! Leave aside, for a moment, Ani's ridiculous Old Hollywood-style intoxication, which seems to have affected her, the person for whom she's looking, and none of the dozens of other girls, who are having glamorous fun or faking it in a way that mostly undercuts the surreal horror of sex work en masse, an angle that the direction couldn't seem to decide whether to push or not. Leave aside the revelations about Ani's childhood abuse, the disappointing aspects of which Apple Cider and richardco point out just fine: it brings nothing to her character that wasn't introduced by her speech to Ray and then (in my opinion, unnecessarily) restated with her panic during the firefight, besides getting to see a woman suffer in personal distress.  Leave aside the sundry plotholes about Ani's recognizability as the perpetrator and survivor of a much-publicized shootout a couple months back as well as having personally met the party's host, about vomiting doing nothing to relieve intoxication from an aerosol mouth-spray, about infiltration with a transponder being unnecessary when Ray and Paul tailed the bus anyway... In fact, let's just leave aside everything, because I was going to type a rant about our three intrepid heroes going to Plot-Point Chateau, a closely-kept secret frequented by the rich and famous, and getting out scot free with every MacGuffin in the show, short of the much-discussed blue diamonds, which would be tedious for all my dear friends here to read.

 

Yeah... Suffice to say that this was a frustrating episode for me to watch. Even when Pizzolatto is bodily shoving the plot forward to make up for so many episodes full of nothing, he still can't resist filling his characters' mouths with self-important (and more infuriatingly, utterly humorless) rambling that mostly fails to connect up. He refuses to leave anything worthwhile to his actors or his directors, and it's ruining the show for me. If not for this podcast and the continuing enthusiasm of a couple of my friends, this episode would have been my last.

 

I feel like Ani's knife-arc is so much more interesting. She talks a big game, almost has to resort to the knife in a firefight, finally uses the knife, and instantly regrets it. There's something so human about that and I loved it.

 

It's bizarre to type these words, but I really enjoyed the stabbing and its aftermath. For all that this show has problems with depicting violence with weapons convincingly, I loved i) that Ani executed that maneuver with her knife perfectly, ii) that it didn't bring the guy down immediately, so that he was still able to do serious harm to her, iii) that that clearly frightened her in a way that made sense and was affecting, and iv) that the guy's dying words being an extremely human "The fuck you doing...?" to which Ani just shrugs helplessly in response. It was a masterful series of moments for which I really can't account in an episode that ran so against my taste. The closest thing was Ray's awkward meeting with his kid, the attempts to engage the court observer on a human level, and then his utter despair at the glimpse he got of himself through her eyes, played out with drugs and an ill-considered phone call.

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While I was checking which The Black Angels song was playing during credits ("Black Grease"), I also found out that the music that was playing during the sex party was apparently "Harmonielehre: Part II. The Anfortas Wound" by John Adams / San Francisco Symphony. The piece is also featured in Civilization IV.

 

 

With songs by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, The Raveonettes, Black Mountains, The Black Angels, etc. I'm really digging the soundtrack of this series.

 

More thoughts about the episode later...

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I'm glad Chris brought up that trauma victims do sometimes have memories or en media res perceptions of events in the third person because that's definitely something that happens. That kind of 3rd person shot with adult Ani being lead with the molestor superimposed over what would be the child version of herself was actually kinda poignant for me. It's a bit of a heavy-handed visual metaphor that unfortunately feels really true sometimes - that you don't emotionally get past a particular moment in time, even when you're far older. 

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Here's a thing I'm not sure about:

 

Ray had to get drug tests for his visitations...

So did he get high to psyche himself up to give up his son, or did he give up his son because he'd gotten high.  

 

Not that there's much distinction, but I like when a scene has two parts each of which motivates the other.

 

I see the binge scene as a direct response to the visitation scene, his failure to connect on any level despite his desire to do so. On some level he had to know that the drugs were a choice to stop seeing his son. 

 

I am generally liking this series overall. I hear a lot of the criticisms of people not buying into it or things feeling fake, and I think you could say that about any film or TV show that you don't buy into. A lot of the problem is the swirl around the show, the expectations, the Hype, the anti Pizzalato sentiment. I feel lucky at this point to have never read an interview with Nick Pizzalato. I actually think I give the show more slack because of the negative reaction it has gotten, I tend to always re-actively look to go in the opposite direction of the majority in most instances. For instance I almost always play the least played character class in any game. 

 

I do agree that a universal director would be a better way to go. I really love Cary Fukunaga's visual style and I miss it. His Jane Eyre was amazing from a visual perspective, and I will look forward to any thing else he does.

 

Not to say you don't have a right to your feelings about this show for what ever the reason. I for one can't stand the show parenthood, even though my wife loves it and recently watched the entire series in two months. It is a pretty universally respected and liked show but for what ever reason i decided I didn't like it early on and that never waned. The characters seemed manic and contrived to me and I still won't watch it even though i am pretty sure i am being judgmental and irrational about it. But, who cares it's only entertainment.

 

P.S. I agree that the musical choice for the "party" was a good choice, it reminded me of something DePalma or Roman Polanski would select, also kind of reminded me of the musical choice in Blue Velvet. 

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I said most of my thoughts on Ani's storyline in the previous thread and in the interest of not belaboring the point, I'll try to keep this brief. Pizzolatto is preoccupied with masculinity and the pain it inflicts on men and women (but mostly women). In the first season, he focused on that theme on a larger scale, by looking at the abuse of men in power and how that abuse gets replicated. He gave individual examples in characters like Dora Lange, but the show never significantly focuses on the victims of The Yellow King. Dora Lange is no Laura Palmer. In season 2 of the show, for better or for worse, Pizzolatto seems to really want to drive home individual examples of bad men doing bad things. Ani and Ray's wife both have sexual assault histories that clearly influence their present day characters; Frank and Ray are damaged by abuse given by their fathers and are trying (but failing) to stop that cycle by attempting to be better than their fathers; Paul's closeted shame and irrational desire to raise a family with a woman he does not love stems from his mother's poisoned view of what a man who looks like Paul should be; every one of these characters has father issues. All of this parallels the plot of wealthy men abusing women for sex and possibly torture. These themes are not as well-conceived as the first season and are not nearly as deftly executed, but I can give Pizzolatto credit for trying to give weight to the individual experience. Hopefully he will have the sense to tighten up his writing for a third season and combine the best elements of the first and second seasons.

 

I started reading The Black Dahlia because of a recent reader mail that mentioned Ellroy as another possible literary influence for this season. I've never really read crime fiction before so I had no idea what to expect, but so far I'm really enjoying myself with it. The book feels like it has more in common with the first season though, since the female victim is secondary to the two male detectives and the different aspects of masculinity that they both represent. I am fascinated by expectations men face in society because they are so different from what I experience as a woman and I'm happy when men like Ellroy or Pizzolatto try to shed light on something that I do not have personal experience with. 

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I saw Velcoro's rage-binge as a way of working up the nerve to sever his relation with his son (plus, him giving into despair after his perhaps last failed attempt at bonding with Chad). He needs to be frustrated and coked-up enough to destroy his dreams of having a relationship with his son (ie the model planes) and then needs to be drained enough to have a calm conversation with his ex-wife, so she will believe him and agree to keep the paternity test results from Chad.

 

I also was struck by what a fucked up thing it is drag the paternity test into the custody fight. Sure, it would certainly weaken Velcoro's claim but it would utterly destroy the boy, forever, if he learned the truth, especially at such a young age. I mean, you want to keep the boy safe of course, but at what cost?

 

About Bezzeride's arc this episode; It's not that I don't like how her flashback was portrayed, it was really effective, I just dislike it being staged as a repressed memory, a Hollywood trope with little to no basis in reality. Even children remember the horrible things that happen to them. It's cheap storytelling, with no real psychological bearing. It also perpetuates a hack, new age belief that we need to lay to rest.

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I don't think it is supposed to be a repressed memory. I think she's just having a traumatic flashback because of the drug and the triggery surroundings. Her sister certainly seemed worried about something like that.

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Seems like Ani's memory is definitely a point of controversy. I was of the few apparently who thought it was well-handled, even though that type of situation could come off as cliched/trope-y/rote. As with most of the other stuff I liked in this episode I felt it was more due to the direction than writing - or to be fair, that it was a moment that required good direction to work and (in my opinion) received it.

 

I'm glad Chris brought up that trauma victims do sometimes have memories or en media res perceptions of events in the third person because that's definitely something that happens. That kind of 3rd person shot with adult Ani being lead with the molestor superimposed over what would be the child version of herself was actually kinda poignant for me. It's a bit of a heavy-handed visual metaphor that unfortunately feels really true sometimes - that you don't emotionally get past a particular moment in time, even when you're far older. 

 

Yeah, I think Sean mentioned being disappointed that they used the imagery of the little girl going to the van hand-in-hand with the hippie but I don't recall a shot like that in the episode. Instead I remember the one you are describing. I agree that the former shot probably wouldn't have worked and  would have felt too on-the-nose/exploitative. While the actual shot (with adult Ani) was weirdly powerful and MORE disturbing for the reasons you mention.

 

I said most of my thoughts on Ani's storyline in the previous thread and in the interest of not belaboring the point, I'll try to keep this brief. Pizzolatto is preoccupied with masculinity and the pain it inflicts on men and women (but mostly women). In the first season, he focused on that theme on a larger scale, by looking at the abuse of men in power and how that abuse gets replicated. He gave individual examples in characters like Dora Lange, but the show never significantly focuses on the victims of The Yellow King. Dora Lange is no Laura Palmer. 

 

Oddly enough, I felt the character who came closest to being a potential Laura Palmer on season 1 was Audrey Hart. It really seemed like the show was hinting at a really dark secret in her life and then not only did it not go there, it abandoned her completely which was one of the more confusing aspects of the series. Maybe that's one reason I did not have the negative reaction to this revelation of Ani's past; it felt like for once Pizzolatto was being (at least somewhat) true to his undertones.

 

About Bezzeride's arc this episode; It's not that I don't like how her flashback was portrayed, it was really effective, I just dislike it being staged as a repressed memory, a Hollywood trope with little to no basis in reality. Even children remember the horrible things that happen to them. It's cheap storytelling, with no real psychological bearing. It also perpetuates a hack, new age belief that we need to lay to rest.

 

This led me down the internet rabbit hole and I was surprised to find just how disputed the idea of repression is. Not in the obvious sense that sometimes memories have been falsely planted (most notably in the "satanic day care" hysteria of the late 80s), but as in there is apparently a widespread school of thought that believes it is scientifically impossible to actively forget a traumatic incident. Or am I misunderstanding the general objection?

 

I don't think it is supposed to be a repressed memory. I think she's just having a traumatic flashback because of the drug and the triggery surroundings. Her sister certainly seemed worried about something like that.

 

Agreed. That's how I took it. Even aside from the controversy MalcolmLittle alludes to, I think staging this as such would come off as too trope-y and too easily cathartic. I much prefer the idea that this was something Ani has lived with but tried not to think about. Then it bubbled back up at this moment of vulnerability. To me it was part of the tapestry of the sequence (albeit maybe the most important part on a thematic level) but not necessarily its entire crux.

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Re: the podcast itself, I'm really glad you guys discussed the direction in-depth and the ways in which it makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of Pizzolatto's work. I feel like often direction gets seen as the flashier details - the tracking shots, the inserts - but it's also about creating a general atmosphere through pacing, line delivery, and small gestures (think the vast difference in those two rehearsal scenes in Mulholland Drive - Betty & Rita in the kitchen, and then Betty with the actor and producers; same exact material, WORLDS of difference). In terms of direction, "Church in Ruins" was generally on par with Fukunaga in season 1. It seems like a lot of people's frustrations with the episode are still about the writing, although Gormongous raised some specific objections to Miguel Sapochnik's choices. And I think maybe the ability to really love the episode is tied to the viewer's inclination to appreciate filmmaking independently from the writing. I don't generally watch TV and am much more a film guy so for me coming at it, this was what stuck out. While I do feel that Pizzolatto's writing was stronger in many ways than in previous episodes (and apparently his collaborator was back for this episode? I missed that somehow...), I also think there were many, many moments that ONLY played because Sapochnik gave the material much more than it deserved. The Ray-Frank confrontation, Frank's speech to Stan's son, and Ray's over-the-top binge all fell into this category. I doubt they would play on the page at all (especially that "pure gold" monologue) but they worked onscreen for me.

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Also, I found Frank oddly endearing in this episode. For whatever reason he felt more like a character whose ridiculous quirks you tolerate out of affection than the annoying half-baked-cliche verbose mobster of episode 5.

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This led me down the internet rabbit hole and I was surprised to find just how disputed the idea of repression is. Not in the obvious sense that sometimes memories have been falsely planted (most notably in the "satanic day care" hysteria of the late 80s), but as in there is apparently a widespread school of thought that believes it is scientifically impossible to actively forget a traumatic incident. Or am I misunderstanding the general objection?

 

Agreed. That's how I took it. Even aside from the controversy MalcolmLittle alludes to, I think staging this as such would come off as too trope-y and too easily cathartic. I much prefer the idea that this was something Ani has lived with but tried not to think about. Then it bubbled back up at this moment of vulnerability. To me it was part of the tapestry of the sequence (albeit maybe the most important part on a thematic level) but not necessarily its entire crux.

 

Yeah, that's the general idea. The main thing with repression is that it is often coupled with the concept of repressed memories re-emerging. And that's where you get into problems with them being "planted" or created rather than being remembered (if there are no repressed memories, what are you actually remembering?). Of course, very young children might not remember things but that is most probably because they don't remember much of anything from that time in their life. Horrible stuff usually sticks though. Aversion or denial is one thing, the mind often wants to avoid revisiting traumatizing events, but not to remember them at all?

 

I might just being too pissy and not giving the creators enough credit. It could be that Bezzerides is just remembering the episode while she is mansion, with terrifying hallucinations to boot, and it is not that she's actually discovering a previously hidden past. We'll see if more comes up in the coming episodes.

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Here is that Welcome to Vinci podcast they were talking about. Haven't listened yet, but it sounds interesting.

http://www.scpr.org/programs/welcome-to-vinci/

 

I caught up with the Welcome to Vinci podcast, it does a good job looking at the real world references from True Detective. Now I have two podcasts related to one show, thank goodness there are only 2 episodes left. 

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There's been research lately that suggests that trauma/PTSD over time can have a profound effect on your ability to use your long-term memory. There's some stuff that I absolutely remember in sharp detail and then...nothing. There's entire huge gaps in my memories from certain time periods that are just gone. 

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I should have of course been more precise, repressed memories are often characterized as experiences so traumatic that the main chain of events of the trauma, in other words the trauma itself, is blocked out and forgotten, and they can be later be remembered through therapy or sensory triggers.

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Sean and Chris mentioned doing a The Americans podcast. Just wanted to pop in to say:

Yes please! :tup:

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Spoiler for episode 7, because I can't wait for the thread.

 

Pretty sure Aniray had more anti-shippers than shippers but here we are. I'm not entirely sure if the show wants us to see it as a good thing or not (leaning towards giving it the benefit of the doubt) but either way, I wish they'd just left well enough alone. These two had really good chemistry as partners, and that little bit of romantic/sexual tension was ok way, way in the background, but the hook-up just felt very forced and awkward.

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soooooo, the kids Paul was talking to the cop about who were orphaned. They're the mask killers right? They just straight up said they are the killers... didn't they? Why else would the cop mention they were wearing masks? 

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I fell behind on this show, and we watched this episode last night. Because this show is oftentimes well written, even if over written, but the last line of this episode was so silly. It was Taylor Kitsch's line as he's going through the papers and says "these contracts are full of signatures!"

1. that car is dark, how do you even read anything?

2. they're contracts. of course people have signed them.

 

He just seemed so shocked, and it just made me laugh as they drive off with the moon in the background.

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