True Detective and Capitalist Development in Its Twilight Phase

Abstract

Set in the bayous, swamps and small towns of Louisiana, the first series of True Detective involved a self-contained story which played out over eight episodes and three separate time frames. The first period brought us back to 1995, where the corpse of a woman had been found at the edge of a thick grasslands, positioned by a gnarly, solitary tree. The sense of the gothic is heightened by the fact that the victim had been posed on her knees as though praying, her hands had been bound, she’d been blindfolded and a set of stag antlers had been mounted on her head. Several symbols had been daubed on her body. The two detectives investigating the case, Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle, eventually turn up more victims, which point towards the work of a ritualistic mass murderer.

Long the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

—Robert W Chambers