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Meat is Murder: Hannibal, True Detective, and the Anthropocene Extinction

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The anthropocene extinction, which Jack quite reasonably argues should be called the capitalocene extinction, is by some margin the most urgent philosophical issue facing humanity today. So let’s talk about a pretentiously well-directed television show that purports to be a crime drama, but is really just a vehicle for two men to urgently discuss the nature of the universe.

Let us suppose for the moment that I am talking about True Detective. Certainly I am not mischaracterizing it, although in its second season it made a substantial effort to engage with the question of what role women have in a universe that exists primarily for men to urgently discuss the nature of. (And indeed, of white men; were I to make one and only one suggestion for a third season, it would be for a main character of color who might prove capable of deflating the pretensions of the other detectives in the way Ani did this season.) Indeed, in many ways it is this second season that is easiest to start with; the most straightforward way to understand what sort of show that it is, thus understanding why its failure to quite be that in its first season was so electrifying.

On its most basic level, True Detective is a piece of noir. The plot of the second season – criticized by unimaginative reviewers as a convoluted mess – is in reality no worse than the legendarily incoherent classic The Big Sleep. And Chandler is certainly a major touchstone for the specifically Califronian subgenre of noir that True Detective works in this season – it’s all very “down these mean streets a man must go.” (In contrast with its first, southern gothic-inflected take on noir.)  

Within noir, at least in the Chandler model, the story is not so much a mystery as it is a test of the detective’s soul. The investigation of a crime is merely a vehicle for this trial and tribulation. And that’s very obvious in Season Two of True Detective, where the overall structure is primarily that of a classical tragedy – the falls of Ray and Frank, presented in parallel at the story’s climax. But crucially, their downfalls are then subsumed by the third strand of narrative, Ani’s successful escape and eventual telling of the story. True Detective becomes, in other words, not a story about the tragic downfall of the male heroes, but about the act of surviving a Greek tragedy, Ani being, herself, named after a character who failed to do just that.

(This is one of the most basic themes of True Detective: the failures of masculinity. All of the leads of the show, Ani included, attempt to perform masculinity and, in crucial ways, fail and are shown to be inadequate: Frank’s blue balls in his heart, Ray’s pathetic threats to the father of his son’s bully, Ani’s self-destructive determination to fuck like one of the guys, Paul’s entire plot and conflict in a thuddingly literal way, and, for that matter, Rust and Marty in a variety of ways.…

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Shabcast 11

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Here’s Shabcast 11, featuring myself in conversation with Phil Sandifer.

This was recorded before Eruditorum Press went live, so events have overtaken it somewhat.

We discuss Doctor Who (before the start of Series 9), Susan, Gareth Roberts, Thomas Ligotti, God, Alan Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Jimmy Saville, Frank Miller, Vox Day (because Phil just can’t help himself), Hegel, Marxism, technological determinism, the Situationists, Engels, evolution, revolution, the Anthropocene extinction, Jonathan Jones, and the existential terrors of the Right.

But the main attractions of the podcast are our discussions of Hannibal (which had just ended when we taped), True Detective, and the life and crimes (artistic and otherwise) of John Nathan-Turner.

Chatting about Hannibal, we coin the term ‘hannibalism’, decide how to do Buffalo Bill in 2015, and come to the conclusion that Hannibal himself is a Miltonic Lucifer in a gnostic universe created by a deistic god and, possibly, Hannibal himself.

Be aware of spoilers and triggers (note the references above to Jimmy Saville and JN-T).

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P.S. – Phil’s mention of “the fucking Thales idiot” refers to a passing right-wing pillock calling himself a ‘Philosopher DJ’ with whom Phil (and, to a lesser extent, I) had an argument on twitter, during which I (somewhat sarcastically) asked him what he thought about the tripartite anatomy of the Doctrine of the Notion to be found in Hegel’s Logic, whereupon he responded (after a few days) with some vague stuff about Hegel’s dialectic (which is a distinct thing), which is why Phil asks me about the tripartite anatomy of the Doctrine of the Notion during the course of the conversation (a question I don’t get around to properly answering, tragically for all of you Hegel-fans listening).…

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Oh Fuck Off

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Oh, True Detective.  True Detective, True Detective, True Detective.  What are we going to do with you?

Spoilers

Season One’s undoubted quality was marred by the stock and shallow nature of the woman characters, by the show’s unrelenting focus on manfeels and manpain and the tortured, disoriented experience of masculinity in a world where the traditional masculine virtues are no longer zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. 

And you actually seem to have taken note of the criticism.  So for Season Two you’ve given us a woman character as co-lead.  She’s one of the three cops whose paths converge at the end of the first episode, and will presumably end up investigating this season’s plot alongside (in some sense) the highway patrolman one who can’t get his willy to go hard (at least in non-abusive situations) and the hard-drinking, miserable, semi-criminal Colin Farrell one.

But her bits of the episode are the weakest by far.  By far.  Noticeably weak, melodramatic, straightforward and rubbish compared to the less-scrutable strands concerning the other two.  So jarringly crap that they almost seem to belong to a different, inferior show.  One of the bits of the Law & Order franchise, for example.

She’s got an unsatisfactory relationship with her needy boyfriend, towards whom she is perfunctory and cold, apparently just using him (not very effectively) for sex.  Aww, poor him.  His girlfriend must have ISSUES of some kind if her primary focus in life isn’t servicing his emotional and penile needs.  (We meet the highway patrolman’s girlfriend later.  Her primary focus in life seems to be servicing his emotional and penile needs.  Funnily enough, there’s no indication at all that she has ISSUES of any kind… aside from pouty jealousy when he leaves her for even 8 seconds.)

Cop woman’s got a schizophrenic younger sister (we know she’s schizophrenic via the highly original and unclunky line “have you gone off your meds again?”) who is hostile towards her.  Cop woman had to look out for when their mother died which led to said younger sister being rebellious towards her and going off the rails, ending up on drugs and petty crime and porn (because, of course, no woman is a sex worker unless she has ISSUES).  Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that on TV before.

The woman cop finds out that her rebellious younger sister is doing porn by happening to raid the place where she happens to be doing porn.  So that’s not contrived at all.

We later learn of the underlying problem with Cop Woman’s life, and guess what… it all traces back to a man!  Guess which man.  Go on, guess.  Yep, you guessed it: Daddy.  She’s got Daddy issues!  Colour me fucking astonished.

You know how we find out about said daddy issues?  She goes to see her partly-estranged father during the episode as a result of picking up a missing person case directly linked to his hippy self-help commune.  So she goes to investigate (’cos, on TV, detectives are always allowed to investigate cases involving their own families) and ends up having a fraught chat with Daddy… during which we learn, in dialogue so leaden and expository that it belongs in the early scenes of an 80s Bond film, that she holds him responsible for her mother’s suicide (what a fucking surprise) and that she joined the police as an act of rebellion against his hippy lifestyle (again, unprecedented in TV drama).…

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Even Furiosa

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Further to some objections I’ve had to my description of Mad Max: Fury Road as having reasonably good gender politics.  Trigger and Spoilers, obviously.

What Mad Max: Fury Road does – with its depiction of Furiosa – is to refuse to make violence the exclusive province of men, or to make men the only ones who are any good at it.  (Not unprecedented – but quite good.)  Furiosa gets to do all the trad-masculine things that Max does.  She’s just as good at them as him.  This, apparently, is a big problem for those kinds of insecure, reactionary misogynitwits who drivel on about how women are weaker than men.  According to such douchenozzles, this is just a scientific fact, and it’s not a man’s fault if he just repeats the incontrovertible findings of Science.  In actuality, of course, what such bigoted ninnies are actually doing is regurgitating some half-digested sociobiologistic bullshit.  They then accuse feminists (who control Hollywood in their ideologically distorted, bass-ackwards bizzaro world) of playing a dirty, emasculating trick and oppressing men by spreading the vicious civilisation-eroding lie that not all women need a man to open jars for them.

The thing is, there is a rational kernal to some of these complaints (wait).  The complaint comes as a response to a genuine threat (I said wait).  The genuine threat which is correctly perceived by the bawling manbabies is a threat to their privilege.  You see, when Furiosa beats up some man just as well as Max can (including Max himself), or shoots a gun just as well as Max can, or drives a car just as well as Max can, what is being done is that these traditionally masculine behaviours are being completely detached from masculinity.  And what is being detached from masculinity is violence.  So the threat to male privilege is about as primal as you can get: male privilege is threatened with losing its monopoly on violence.  Given that violence, in one form or another, is at the root of how all systems of oppression function, this could hardly be more threatening (at least within the confines of a mainstream popular movie).

This isn’t some submerged theme in the film that you have to hunt about for.  It’s front and centre.  The violence Furiosa excels at it specifically and explicitly a violent response to a patriarchy which itself openly functions through violence.  Most obviously, there is the implied violence of rape (and kudos to the film for not directly and unnecessarily showing sexual violence).  But there is also the structural violence.  The system is literally patriarchal, in that Imortan Joe’s fertility seems to be inextricably linked to his rulership – either materially or ideologically, or perhaps both.  He rules partly through his family.  It is stated that several members of his ruling elite – and his Imperators (bosses-cum-generals) – are members of his family.  Brothers, etc.  Several are sons.  They all seem ‘disabled’ in some way.  One seems unable to breathe without a mask and oxygen tanks. …

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