Mother Night took its name from a passage from one of the most famous works of fiction about Mephistopheles, Goethe's Faust. In a song that also references sin, it's easy to make the jump to the angel of light, the "morning star," aka Lucifer. "Just call me angel of the morning," the song goes. Consider the song that ends up playing as the episode starts, "Angel of the Morning" as performed by Juice Newton. But just hear me out, Marty, this goes deep.Ībout that jukebox. Sounds like all I've got here is conjecture, as Hart might say. Is she also pretending to be someone she is not? And what of the role of the religious? "Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side," from the book, brings a certain reverend to mind. The sudden reappearance of a wife figure, Resi, in fact Campbell's sister-in-law, who returns after many years wearing a mask with a secret of her own, reverberates through Maggie's story in True Detective. So what, if anything, does this have to do with True Detective, besides the presence of unthinkable evil and the deciphering of clues and narrative devices? There are a number of other moments throughout the book that are worth considering, if only just for the trap we've all ensnared ourselves in here despite our best instincts, in chasing down the real meaning behind True Detective's mystery, so let's spin the jukebox and pick a few at random. He no longer knows which of them is real anymore. Campbell, by the end of his life, has pretended to be many things. The book, like the show, takes a metafictional framing structure, with Campbell relaying the events of his life from a later date, and Vonnegut, characteristically, popping in to explicate from time to time. He doesn't ever understand the clues that he's seeing right under his own nose. Campbell becomes a reluctant tool of the United States as a spy, transmitting clandestine codes over the radio once he ascends the ranks of the party to become the voice of a propaganda program under Goebbels. Campbell Jr., an American playwright living in Germany who stays behind even as the Nazi party comes to power and war seems inevitable. The story, for a quick refresher, is about Howard W. Mother Night, like True Detective, is essentially about a man pretending to be something that he's not, and becoming much better at it than he ever expected, or wanted to be. "You end up becoming something you never intended," Marty agrees. As he writes in the introduction to Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." That quote, while perhaps not a direct echo, brought to mind instantly a similar quote, one that should be well-known to readers of Kurt Vonnegut. (We've become accustomed to thinking of the duo in precisely that sort of characterization throughout: the brawn and the brain.) Cohle might have been a painter, or a historian, he says. So be careful what you get good at," he says, as the two men, now reunited, much older, and reconsidering the choices they've made with their lives, share a rare moment of honesty. "Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So it's with a grain of salt that I mention another text that this most recent episode called to mind, knowing full well that it could just be another example of me having been alone with my thoughts about True Detective for far too long.Ĭonsider one of the more memorable Cohleisms in an episode relatively short on them. That, too, could be another layer of metafictional commentary threaded throughout by Nic Pizzolatto. "Do you know how fucking crazy that sounds? It's like you've been alone too long." "All this sprawl, as you call it, is what I would call conjecture," he says, having been confronted with the evidence Rust has been accumulating in his absence. There's a moment in Sunday night's episode, before Rust has completely won over Marty in his attempts to get the band back together, where the latter describes this succinctly. And, as many reviewers have pointed out, that hunger for deeper meaning ripples outward on multiple levels from the texts mentioned in the show - the play within the story of The King in Yellow driving the people who read it mad, just as Cohle is driven mad in pursuit of his own Yellow King, just as we the viewers drive ourselves mad trying to make sense of the unfolding layers of symbolism. Why he did it, or why anyone does anything, well, those are the province of Rust Cohle.
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