True Detective and a return to heroes

I binge-watched HBO’s True Detective this weekend. Have to say I was surprised that it was as good as the buzz about it claimed.

After I finished watching it, I went back and read this post by Ace.

The True Detective Finale and The Left's Inability to View Art As Anything Other Than an Ego-Flattering Political Affirmation

I think he nailed it on every particular.

One thing I really liked about it is something Ace picked up on:

The show ultimately was, as Pizzolato said, not about the serial killer at all, but about the two men, Hart and Cohle, and their long, rocky relationship with one another.

And it's about mystery. The serial killer plot is a pretext to explore mystery -- and evil -- and philosophy -- and sex -- and all the rest of it, but in the end, the show was about the mystery and muddle of life. Not about some Hannibal Lecter-like supercriminal and his lunatic beliefs.

In the end, he wasn't the interesting one; the heroes were the interesting ones.

Back in the very early days of this blog I wrote this:

Figures like Holmes or Peter Wimsey are fictional and bear little resemblance to real detectives. But they are hyper-realistic compared to the serial killers in modern thrillers. Writers like Thomas Harris have turned the detectives into somewhat intelligent bureaucrats while making the killer the one endowed with the rare mind. Philip Marlowe is only the " personification of an attitude, the exaggeration of a possibility;" Hannibal Lector bears no resemblance to real serial killers. He is the personification of an impossibility as a criminal, but the perfect example of moral rot as an "artistic" creation.