“7” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
7
True Detective’s Folk Gothic
Dawn Keetley
The critically acclaimed first season of HBO’s True Detective (2014) has already garnered significant critical attention, including numerous essays that take up the series’ representation of the ecological damage wrought by the petroleum industry. Riding around the flat terrain of southern Louisiana with oil refineries omnipresent in the background, the two protagonists, Detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), rarely comment on the taken-for-granted landscape of their lives. In one striking exception, though, Rust comments, “This pipeline is carving up this coast like a jigsaw. Place is gonna be underwater in thirty years” (1:3). The intertwined petrochemical industry, climate, and devastated communities of the Louisiana bayous that Rust describes here have attracted most of the criticism on the series.1 Delia Byrnes writes, for instance, that the series is preoccupied with the “intimate entanglement of bodies and oil,” and Min Hyoung Song adds that “bodies and landscapes are intermingled” as “part of some combined ecology.”2 Through attention to the ways in which refineries shape lives and permeate bodies, the criticism on True Detective has tended toward a presentist focus (with gestures toward an apocalyptic near future), a focus that tends to flatten both space and time. As Christopher Lirette eloquently puts it, in the Louisiana of True Detective, “pipes and roots and crosses and truck stops and abandoned schools and caves and the good life and the sad withering of imagination and bigger, national and global things are so enmeshed they flatten out.”3 These flattened landscapes of the series resonate with a phrase spoken twice (including by Rust and drawn from Nietzsche): “Time is a flat circle” (1:5).
True Detective certainly seems “flat,” its story line spread out across the even landscape of the present moment. It thus seems the perfect text to read alongside certain posthuman/speculative realist/ecological theories that insist on the enmeshment of human lives with the agential nonhuman—the elements, the weather, the land, and refineries. True Detective offers up, in both its visual and narrative logics, the “flat ontologies” of posthuman theory, things entangled with people. Rob Coley epitomizes this dominant reading of the series when he names what he calls Rust Cohle’s “geo-material sensibility”: Rust engages in an “ecological detection,” as he is able to attune himself to “the weird aesthetic entanglement of human culture and planetary matter.”4 As illuminating as such readings are, they also inevitably obscure; they exert pressure to emphasize the present and, in their propensity toward “flatness,” tend not to see the unevenness of the effects of such things as the transnational petrochemical industry and hurricanes. As Jennifer Wenzel has claimed, “Anthropocene species talk” can be a “troubling new universalism that disregards the highly uneven roles that different groups of humans have played in the transformation of the planet, and the uneven distribution of risk and resilience in confronting this human-made world.”5 The “flat” readings of True Detective also fail adequately to recognize both race and the history, as well as the more recent history that lies between the present and what Coley calls the “temporality of the Anthropocene: a deep time, a planetary time.”6
A more human, more recent history—the history of the sugar plantation and of race and slavery—is crucial to the plot and the landscape of True Detective, however. The dead white body that begins the series, the body of the murdered Dora Lange, is found in a sugarcane field. And that’s important. It has also scarcely been addressed, with the exception of Sharae Deckard’s provocative claims about the show’s deployment of “the resource Gothic of the sugar plantation” and its linking of the “petroleum uncanny” to the “sugar uncanny.”7 Dora’s body has instead been read primarily through its enmeshment with the petroleum industries of Louisiana. Dora Lange, Song writes, “embodies what humans become, even in life, if the extractive zone depicted in the show grows and proliferates.”8 But Dora Lange’s body is inextricable from the cane fields of Louisiana and its racialized history. We must look, as Wenzel insists, to the intractability of “environmental racism and the toxic burdens borne unevenly by racialized minorities.”9 We must look to the monoculture—sugar—that created Louisiana’s wealth, along with its slave system and its poverty.
To unearth the residues of sugar and slavery in season 1 of True Detective is also to recognize its gothic nature, specifically what I call its “folk gothic.” Two critics have mentioned the gothic in relation to the HBO series, but only dismissively.10 Attention to gothic objects, place, and time can, though, adumbrate a depth hidden within more “flat” readings. While the refineries are integral to the flat landscapes of the series, captured in the many wide-angle and extreme long shots, the gothic intrudes in tight close-ups, shots that emphasize foreground over background, detail over distance, the proximate over the remote.11 Whereas the shots that capture the refineries, moreover, express a self-evident causality—literally linking the petrochemical industry to the eroding land, the encroaching water, the desperate poverty, and the ruined buildings and land—the shots that capture the gothic are isolating, atomizing; on the surface, they appear to inhibit connections rather than clarifying them. The elements of the gothic are also displaced from the self-evident contemporaneity of the petrochemical landscape, hinting at a lost pastoral, a more untouched nature—what one critic has called a “wilderness” that only appears to be separate from the pipelines and refineries scarring the landscape.12 But the gothic objects and “wilderness” of True Detective, along with the “folk” who own, create, and inhabit them, are profoundly implicated in the Anthropocentric logic of the series, opening up a history of sugar crops and plantations that is more entangled with present ecological destruction than is apparent in the series’ overwhelming visual focus on the petrochemical landscape.
Gothic Objects
The strange gothic objects of True Detective include Dora Lange’s body itself, reified and out of place lying under an isolated oak tree in a sugarcane field. These objects include her spiral tattoo, the antlers and crown set on her head, and the strange objects woven of branches that both stand and hang nearby. The objects consist of a girl’s drawing of the “green-eared spaghetti monster” who chased her through the woods; references to the “Yellow King” and “Carcosa”; a painting on the wall in an abandoned church; other strange objects made of twisted branches; a photograph of masked figures on horseback; and a videotape of more masked figures performing a strange, horrifying, and ultimately unseen (by the viewer) ritual. These objects will get repeated, always visually and narratively unmoored from explanatory context. These are the “clues” that Rust and Marty strive to link together in their work of pursuing the killer.
Figure 7.1. The object found in Marie Fontenot’s playhouse. True Detective (1:2).
In the second episode, the camera dwells on the shape made from branches found in the playhouse at the home of Marie Fontenot’s uncle and aunt’s house, where Marie used to play before she went missing five years before Dora Lange’s body was found. The shot tells us the object is “Evidence,” but of what nobody knows. All Rust can do at this moment is draw (rather than interpret) the strange things he sees—more details that are awaiting the “whole,” the “system” that will (eventually, he hopes) explain them. In refusing any relation with what is around them—in refusing assimilation into the perceptual schemas of those who struggle to see them—these objects all persist in their strangeness: what Graham Harman has called a “weird realism,” although, as he says, “realism is always in some sense weird,” as it is about “the strangeness in reality that is not projected onto reality by us.”13 The very title of this second episode, “Seeing Things,” draws attention to the series’ weird “things,” which defy explanation, and it suggests that these “things” may well contain a truth that could be hidden by the imposition of familiar systems. As Marty says to Rust, “you attach an assumption to a piece of evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it” (1:1).
In their simultaneous visibility and withdrawn obscurity, the gothic objects of True Detective draw our attention away from the flat expanses and global entanglements of the petrochemical landscape to the strange, isolated detail. And there is nothing insignificant about the detail. As Rust, notorious for taking copious notes, says to detectives Maynard Gilbough and Thomas Papania (who are investigating a 2012 murder that uncannily resembles Dora Lange’s), “you never know what the thing’s gonna be, do you? A little detail somewhere down the line . . . breaks the case” (1:1; emphasis mine). Details carry weight. Details can illuminate a whole that is otherwise occluded. Details are synecdochic of systems we don’t understand (yet), of ways of knowing that are visually represented in True Detective in their being cut off from their surroundings in close up, not splayed out and always already illuminated in wide-angle shots.
As detectives, Marty and Rust not surprisingly position “things” as evidence. But mystifying objects are also part of the gothic tradition. As Fred Botting has described it, the gothic includes “the partial visibility of objects, in semi-darkness, through veils, or behind screens . . . denying a clearly visible and safe picture of the world.”14 True Detective’s gothic objects, however, are not concealed by darkness or veils or screens; they are always fully illuminated, fully visible in the camera’s close-ups. They are obscure in and of themselves, the series insists. While Rust and Marty certainly hope that they will become explicable, the gothic objects of True Detective persist in defying the main characters’ prevailing systems of knowledge.
Folk Gothic
The objects of True Detective, and the details to which they draw our attention, constitute a specifically folk gothic in that they are, it turns out, created by the “folk,” a category grounded in what James Thurgill has called “perceived division in social classes, specifically between the burgeoning ‘mainstream’ of the middle classes and working rural communities: the ‘folk.’”15 Thurgill roots this class-based understanding in Alan Dundes’s seminal study of folklore, in which he describes the “folk” as “predicated upon a two-tier system whereby folklore and folk communities were seen as the subjugated element of a classist society.” The “folk” represent what Dundes calls the “uncivilized element of a civilized society,” distinct from the entirely “primitive” but nonetheless “believed to have retained survivals of savagery.”16 The gothic objects of True Detective are folk gothic objects, then, in that they are created by largely invisible “swamp folk” who are “dug in off the grid” and who are definitely associated with the savage and the primitive (1:4); they are the impoverished, the marginalized, and the left behind in Louisiana’s global petrochemical economy, and they can thus orient us to the uneven effects of the Anthropocene.
Indeed, the folk gothic objects of True Detective are associated almost exclusively with poor whites who cling to existence in the pockets of land and ruined buildings left behind by the processes of global industry.17 But the notion of the “folk” as a (single) subjugated class—predicated on a “two-tier system” that separates the “middle class” and the “rural,” as well as the ways in which environmental destruction is lived—is complicated in True Detective by race. If the poor whites of the Louisiana “wilderness” are hard to see, African Americans are as good as invisible. Song aptly states that African Americans, “with their few speaking parts and spectral presences, are depicted as mere objects.”18 Certainly Marty and Rust never recognize that race has anything to do with the crimes they are investigating; they never mention race as important. Rust ignores it entirely, and Marty recognizes it only to manipulate the presumed racism of his white colleagues (keeping his place as “one of them”) and his boss (so he will allow them to continue their investigation).
It matters, though, that the cult to which the series’ “monsters”—Dewall and Reggie Ledoux and Errol Childress—belong is explicitly white. While the Ledoux cousins and Childress are certainly “rural” and “uncivilized”—left behind by global capitalism and its urban, upwardly mobile middle class—they both enjoy and cling to a white heritage and privilege. It is no coincidence that Errol Childress is discovered to be living in a former plantation.19 The cult includes not only poor, marginalized whites but also some of the most powerful white men in the state: former sheriff of Vermilion Parish Sam Tuttle; his son, Christian ministry magnate Billy Lee Tuttle; and his nephew and governor of the state Edwin Tuttle (none of whom are ever brought to justice). The “folk” in True Detective, then, are a cross-class group firmly rooted in racial privilege. Importantly, one of the two glimpses we get of this “cult” is in a photograph of Dora Lange as a young girl with five horsemen wearing pointed hoods that clearly evoke the Ku Klux Klan (1:2).
That the “folk” of True Detective’s folk gothic constitute an explicitly racialized community is evident in the reason Billy Lee Tuttle set up the rural Christian schools, the Wellspring Program, which served to supply the cult with its (always white) sacrificial victims. The official explanation given to Rust and Marty is that Tuttle wanted to provide “an alternative to the kind of secular, globalized education that our public schools were promoting” (1:6). The “cult” is, then, bound up with both religion and the local and rural as opposed to the secular and the global, a very familiar dichotomy in folk gothic and horror. We also learn, though—more fleetingly, as race always flickers only fleetingly into view in this series—that the schools were also expressly designed to circumvent federally mandated “busing” designed to ensure the racial integration of the public school system. As one man on Pelican Island tells Rust and Marty, the local children either went to the Christian Light of the Way School “or they were bused to Abbeville. State said a kid got to be bused two hours to school,” he comments in disgust. When Rust looks, a bit later, at the Light of the Way yearbook, the children are exclusively, and not surprisingly, white (1:3).20 This reference remains undeveloped, but it is crucial to understanding the way in which the “cult” reinforces cross-class white power, erects an unbreachable racial divide, even as it sacrifices poor white children to do so. The often-invisible centrality of racial division to the narratives of folk gothic and horror emerges into view.
Anthropocene Gothic Place and Time
A critical gothic object in True Detective is the tree by which Dora Lange’s body is found. The prominence of the tree highlights the particular place of the crime, and yet it is almost completely irrelevant to the detectives, as the series draws a stark line between the detective and the gothic imagination. When Marty and Rust arrive at the crime scene, Rust heads immediately for the body, and the camera dwells, with him, on the distinctive aspects of the crime, narrowly defined as Dora Lange’s naked body, the tattoo on her back, the crown and the antlers, her tied hands, the marks on her body, and her teeth. Rust gets up close, sketching her body in his notebook and talking to Marty about the ligature marks and blood pooling. Rust later describes to Marty how the killer used Dora’s body as a “paraphilic love map,” attaching to her body “practices forbidden by society.” Rust says, “This kind of thing does not happen in a vacuum.” But the context in which he is interested is the entirely psychological relationship between the killer and his victim. Rust pulls his attention from the body, which Marty explicitly calls a “piece of evidence,” only to look at the strange wooden structures placed on the ground and hung from the tree, and then he joins other police officers walking through the sugarcane to find more “evidence” as the camera cuts away (1:1). For Rust, and the police in general, all that matters is what strictly belongs to the victim and the killer—the properties of the murder, a very narrow and clearly bounded crimescape in which everything else about the place, including its particular history, fades into nonexistence.
The camera, however, does not only adopt Rust’s point of view; it intermittently pulls out from the “clues” to show the oak tree by which Dora’s body is placed, the dirt tracks for which it marks a crossroads, and the sugarcane that surrounds it on all sides. In these shots, the gothic objects that are the focus of Rust’s strictly criminological attention pull another context into sight, a gothic context that insists on the centrality of a place that is marked by its past. “Place deeply involves time,” as Timothy Morton puts it.21 Indeed, the murder of Dora Lange—one of many sacrificial victims, it turns out—is integrally bound up with the history of the place in which she is found. As in all gothic narrative, what Tim Ingold calls the “temporality of the landscape” is critical—the landscape as a record of those who have lived there and “have left there something of themselves.”22
While Dora Lange’s body is visually detached from the otherwise almost ubiquitous refineries, it is nonetheless connected to the anthropogenic landscape of rising waters, pipelines, and petrochemical plants. The cane fields in which her body lies significantly appear in the opening iconographic image of the credit sequence—a photograph by Richard Misrach, Sugar Cane and Refinery, Mississippi River Corridor, Louisiana, 1998.23 With the exception of Deckard, who eloquently notes that “oil and sugar frontiers are superimposed in the credits,”24 critics have focused almost exclusively on the refinery in their readings both of this image and of the series itself. The cane fields are in the foreground of the shot, however, thus insisting on the entwinement within the Anthropocene of both the petrochemical industry (Louisiana’s main industry in the present) and a sugar monoculture (Louisiana’s main economy in the past and still thriving in the present). This image gestures to the centrality, in short, of sugar as well as oil in True Detective’s representations of ecological damage. The series makes manifest what Michael Niblett has argued: that “oil and sugar have been deeply imbricated in histories of colonial conquest, imperial domination, and the gross exploitation of human and extra-human nature.”25
Figure 7.2. Dora Lange’s body posed by the oak tree. True Detective (1:1).
Certainly the Anthropocene “originated” before the petrochemical industry—before, in fact, the date many offer as the opening of the Anthropocene, the “Great Acceleration” beginning around 1945.26 It originated even earlier than the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century.27 At a theoretical level, Morton has argued that the “Anthropocene is an event within agrilogistic space,” while, more empirically, William F. Ruddiman has proffered extensive evidence of his “early anthropogenic hypothesis,” arguing that the Anthropocene began with widespread land clearing for agriculture as far back as seven thousand years ago.28 The origins of the Anthropocene may indeed lie in agriculture, but humans’ profound impact on the Earth escalated when agriculture was spurred by the intertwined forces of technology, capitalism, global migration, and the slave trade. Indeed, some argue that the Anthropocene originated with the Columbian Exchange, the moment when “Old” and “New” Worlds became linked as Europeans sought “to extract wealth from the Americas.”29 Explaining her preference for Capitalocene over Anthropocene, Donna Haraway argues that the former term “suggests a longer history” than the latter, elaborating that “I think we are looking at slave agriculture, not coal, frankly, as a key transition.”30 Jason W. Moore has explicitly articulated the role of sugar in New World imperialist capitalism, arguing that the combined “New World sugar frontiers and African slaving frontiers” “freely appropriated (and exhausted)” land and humans and that the commodification of sugar “consumed forests, soils, and workers (usually slaves) at a ferocious pace” beginning in the fifteenth century.31 True Detective, read through a gothic lens, illuminates the centrality of slavery and the sugar monoculture within discourses of the Anthropocene.
That Dora Lange’s body is found in what Morton calls an “agrilogistic space”—by an oak tree in sugarcane fields—has been generally overlooked. Indeed, one critic, Casey Ryan Kelly, only notices it to erase its significance. He writes that Dora Lange’s body was found in a “serene cane field” and then analogizes her body to “the other industrial waste products that pervade the rest of the contaminated community,” thus actively expunging the violence and ecological damage wrought by agriculture, replacing sugar with oil.32 The tree becomes more visible within the gothic register of the series, however. In the U.S. literary tradition, gothic trees are frequently entangled with the history of colonialism and slavery: the South Carolina tree where Crèvecoeur found a beaten slave suspended from a tree in a cage, for example, as well as the linden tree in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, from which the slave Rose and her dog were hanged and left to die.33 True Detective extends this gothic tradition as its prominent tree invokes the violent appropriation of both people and nature.
One of the most striking aspects of the particular southern live oak tree by which Dora Lange’s dead body is abandoned is that it stands solitary. This is unusual for trees and immediately signals the intervention of humans, who either planted it there alone or cut down the other trees around it. The oak tree is an immediate and graphic reminder of violent human manipulation of the natural world. The tree stands, moreover, at the crossroads of dirt tracks that cut through sugarcane fields, immediately broadening the scope to an entire agricultural system predicated on expropriating natural resources. The tree and the cane fields position nature as enmeshed, as Wenzel puts it, “within a resource logic, in which nature is understood as natural resource, disposed for human use and subject to human control.”34 While the petrochemical landscape invokes the vulnerability of all humans, the oak tree in the sugarcane fields insists on a history—specifically a slave economy—in which racialized bodies were designated as inherently precarious, disposable, and less than human. We might call this a shift in focus from the “Anthropocene” to what Haraway has called the “Plantationocene”—that is, the “devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.”35 Both the tree and the cane fields, in short, invoke southern slavery, without which Louisiana’s thriving sugarcane industry—“white gold,” as one book calls it—would not have been possible.36
While the southern live oak is native to the region, and thus a “natural” part of the landscape, its location is at the same time “unnatural” within the diegesis of the series. The series diegetically locates Dora Lange’s body in Erath, in Vermilion Parish, but the scene was filmed in a remote part of Oak Alley Plantation in St. James Parish, farther to the east, surrounded by the former great sugar plantations (almost all of them now tourist destinations). Built in the 1830s, Oak Alley is so named because of the avenue of twenty-eight large live oak trees that led from a nearby levee to the house. It was “built almost entirely by slave labor,” which allowed its white inhabitants, the Roman family, to live in “princely style.”37 Jacques Roman was an “ante-bellum sugar baron” who owned 108 enslaved people at his death.38 The oak tree by which Dora Lange’s body is found, marker of the grandeur of Oak Alley, built entirely on slave labor, brings race and slavery from the periphery to the center of True Detective.
It is significant that Dora’s body was found in a remote part of Oak Alley Plantation and thus away from the house—the seat of power. Dora’s abandoned body in the first episode is mirrored by a scene we hear about in the last episode. Errol Childress’s half sister and lover, Betty, describes how their grandfather (Sam Tuttle) caught her “alone in the cane fields” and raped her (1:8). Betty’s brief story marks how distance (the remoteness of both the fields and those who worked in them) made plantation slavery, as well as murder and rape, possible. The geographical remoteness that amplified the ontological distancing of Black slaves from the human was itself inextricable from the appropriation of natural resources. As Wenzel puts it, “the species divide is the ideological fiction that colonialism uses to justify the material expropriation of the natural wealth of the colonized world, including enslaved human labor.”39 Like the ghosts of slaves who worked and died in the cane fields of Louisiana, Dora Lange’s dead body and Betty’s raped body are similarly far from the center of the plantation and from the powerful elite of the cult who sacrificed them. The antlers affixed to Dora’s head evoke the species divide manipulated by those who lived in the plantations, who wielded the distinction against those who worked in their fields, and who appropriated both human bodies and the land.
Dora’s crown, however, signals her difference (and Betty’s) from enslaved bodies; she is white and thus, by southern planter logic, able to attain the sacredness demanded of the sacrificial victim. She is even associated with Christ through her “crown” of “rose thorns” (1:1), the wounds on her abdomen (akin to the wound on Christ’s side), and her proximity to the tree: as the Acts of the Apostles claims, Jesus was “hanged on a tree.”40 Again, then, the oppression of poor whites by the elite is signaled only to also make it clear that even poor white bodies are higher on the scale of privilege and power than Black ones. Dora Lange and the other always white female victims of the cult were sacrificed, which must be distinguished, as Rey Chow points out, drawing on Giorgio Agamben, from the mere “extermination” of “bare life” in, for example, the Holocaust and, of course, southern racial slavery and its violent aftermath in Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and enduring systemic racism. This violence, the expendability of “bare life,” is not covered with “sacrificial veils,” Chow remarks.41 Song has pointed out that the nonwhite characters of True Detective “blend into the background of the show, and as such are markers of the landscape.”42 While Dora Lange was manifestly sacrificed, Black people, both enslaved and free, are more akin to the warm soil Betty says she feels on her back as her grandfather rapes her.
Numerous critics have pointed out the perceived inadequacy of True Detective’s ending, in which Marty and Rust track down Errol Childress to “Carcosa” and kill him. Song reads the finale as merely “uncovering a conventional serial killer,” who, Lili Loofbourow adds, “has nothing to teach us.”43 I would argue, though, that Errol Childress is profoundly significant, although his significance eludes Rust and Marty. Childress intentionally puts Dora Lange’s body by the oak tree, in the cane fields; his murder of Dora Lange is a ritual sacrifice, and he is part of a larger cult predicated on racial segregation and oppression; his sacrificial murder is steeped in the centuries-old history of slavery, and specifically sugarcane farming, with its exploitation of people and things, of people as things. True Detective thus loops the older history of agriculture, growing and manufacturing “white gold” on the backs of enslaved people, into the petrochemical present. Both are equally dependent on global flows of humans and goods, both create similarly uneven effects on disparate groups of people, and both are equally implicated in humans emerging “as a ‘great force of nature’ in the historical record of Earth.”44 With its close attention to how “humans” are divided by race, class, and access to capital, however, True Detective orients us to what we may better call the Plantationocene than the Anthropocene.45
Mowing Devils
Each pair of detectives sees and talks to Errol Childress before Rust and Marty confront him in “Carcosa” in the final episode. Marty and Rust see him mowing the grass at an abandoned school on Pelican Island in 1995, and Rust asks him about the school (1:3); Papania and Gilbough see him mowing a cemetery lawn in the penultimate episode, and they stop to ask him directions (1:7). In both instances, the detectives see without seeing; they encounter their “monster” without realizing it. In both instances, curiously, Childress is mowing in a circular fashion.46
Childress’s circular mowing evokes, I argue, agricultural practices that exceed the particular practices of growing sugarcane in nineteenth-century Louisiana; it evokes the harvesting of grain.47 Morton begins Dark Ecology with a scene from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) in which people follow the reaping machine as it moves in ever-narrowing circles around the field, inexorably trapping wild animals in its tightening loops.48 For Morton, this passage, with its blurring of human and machine, represents the “twelve-thousand-year structure” of “agrilogistics” that is the “slowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devised.”49 Childress’s circular mowing seems a vestigial, unconscious mimicry of the reaping that Hardy depicts, and it is another image that roots Childress and his cult in agriculture and its originary damaging exploitations.
This Anthropocentric image of Childress is also folk gothic in that Childress mimics not only harvesting generally but more specifically a “mowing devil” of Hertfordshire folklore found on the title page of a 1678 pamphlet called The Mowing-Devil; or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire. The pamphlet describes how, in August 1678, a wealthy farmer in Hertfordshire saw that his three-and-a-half acres of oats were ready to be cut down, so he approached a poor neighbor who worked in the summer harvesting the crops of others. The poor neighbor, “as it behoov’d Him,” attempted to sell his labor for a price a little above the going rate. This incensed the farmer, who then offered the man “much more under the usual Rate than the poor Man askt above it.”50 Angry words ensued, and when the poor man tried to mollify his wealthy neighbor by agreeing to mow his crop at much less than the usual rate, the farmer declared, “That the Devil himself should Mow his Oats before he should have any thing to do with them.”51 And, of course, that’s exactly what the Devil did. In one night, the fields aflame, the Devil cut all the farmer’s oats in a perfect circle. The farmer was too terrified ever to touch the field after that and it remained burned and barren. The Mowing-Devil thus demonstrates how a capitalist “agrilogistics” destroys both nature itself and a potentially equitable, cooperative relationship, as a field irreparably burns; and, like the devil, Childress sets the cane fields on fire in the very opening scene of True Detective.52 The plight of the poor rural white man, who sees the means of employment and income slipping away in an agricultural system that will increasingly privilege only a wealthy few, will become a staple of folk horror into the twenty-first century. Errol Childress is one of those left-behind men, literally inhabiting the margins of Louisiana’s sugarcane industry.53 But then there is, in True Detective, the profoundly determining intervention of race. Significantly, while a rich and poor white man squabble over wages in The Mowing-Devil, a “black” man ends up doing the mowing and everyone, and everything, is damned. Such are the wages of slavery.
Errol Childress’s reiterated circular mowing also definitively marks True Detective as folk gothic rather than folk horror. One of the most important characteristics of the latter is the sacrificial ritual, but the victim, importantly, is almost always an outsider, typically an avatar of the modern and the urban who has stumbled into the rural, archaic enclave. Borders are crucial to folk horror; they are what separates the two groups (urban and rural) who find themselves in conflict.54 Certainly Marty and Rust, as well as Papania and Gilbough, serve as the “outsiders” typical of folk horror. They are ultimately not the sacrificial victims, however. The cult sacrifices its own in ways that draw on arcane, long-standing, and local traditions. True Detective is driven less by the transgressing of borders crucial to folk horror’s narrative arc than by a vertiginous, inward circularity, exemplifying Chris Baldick’s definition of the gothic as combining “a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.”55 The cult in True Detective is in thrall to both the past and to the local, striving to renew lost power and privilege through what is in the end a form of self-cannibalization.
Figure 7.3. Errol Childress mowing in True Detective (1:7) and the “mowing devil” from The Mowing-Devil (1678).
Although Rust and Marty eventually find and kill Errol Childress, they can’t really be said to have solved the case, not least because they treat it as a murder case and not as a powerful ritual with a long history. They glimpse this truth, or at least Rust does, but only glancingly, only enough to see in the Dora Lange case a partial solution. Marty and Rust are never sure who is a part of this cult and, most important, what (and why) this cult actually is. Composed of wealthy and powerful as well as poor and disenfranchised white men, the cult is driven by a nostalgia for an agrarian past defined in Louisiana’s immediate history by plantation slavery and racial segregation and hierarchy. While individual pathology and a twisted sexual gratification are part of the ritual (the part Rust can see), they are not all of it. Without explicitly mentioning slavery, Nic Pizolatto has written of his principal “monster,” Errol Childress, that he is “a revenant of great historical evil,” connected to a place “where Voudon and Santeria are practiced along the bayous and a primitivism still maintains in many places.”56 The “evil” in True Detective is indeed old, although it does not abide in “Voudon and Santeria.” The “primitivism” of the cult’s practices and rituals are tied instead, like the agricultural history they evoke, to a history that is colonialist, capitalist, and white—to an ongoing history that appropriates and destroys both people and nature.
Notes
Christopher Lirette, “Something True about Louisiana: HBO’s True Detective and the Petrochemical Aesthetic,” Southern Spaces, August 13, 2014; Delia Byrnes, “‘I Get a Bad Taste in My Mouth out Here’: Oil’s Intimate Ecologies in HBO’s True Detective,” Global South 9, no. 1 (2015): 86–106; Rob Coley, “‘A World Where Nothing Is Solved’: Investigating the Anthropocene in True Detective,” Journal of Popular Television 5, no. 2 (2017): 135–57; Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Toxic Screen: Visions of Petrochemical America in HBO’s True Detective (2014),” Communication, Culture, and Critique 10 (2017): 39–57; Helen Williams, “Petrochemical Families: Landscape and Lineage in True Detective,” in True Detective: Critical Essays on the HBO Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart and Michael Samuel, 29–50 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018); and Min Hyoung Song, “True Detective and Climatic Horror,” Post45, April 4, 2019, http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/04/true-detective-and-climatic-horror/.
Byrnes, “I Get a Bad Taste,” 88; Song, “True Detective.”
Lirette, “Something True.”
Coley, “A World,” 152–53. For a discussion of “flat ontologies,” see Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 93, 117, 127–28, 171.
Jennifer Wenzel, “Turning Over a New Leaf: Fanonian Humanism and Environmental Justice,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Nieman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 165.
Coley, “A World,” 140.
Sharae Deckard, “Ecogothic,” in Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 181. Deckard makes compelling claims about the series but does not develop her reading as her focus is on contemporary postcolonial fiction. Byrnes, too, mentions Louisiana’s history of plantation slavery twice, only to point out the “uneasy intimacy of Louisiana’s plantation histories and its petrochemical futures,” adding that it warrants further elaboration. Byrnes, “I Get a Bad Taste,” 102; see also 94.
Song, “True Detective.”
Wenzel, “Turning Over,” 172.
Rodney Taveira merely lists tropes of southern gothic deployed within True Detective—“the grotesque and irrational, the supernatural and fantastical, the outré and excessive”—and leaves it at that. Taveira, “True Detective and the States of American Wound Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 3 (2017): 586. Byrnes argues that such tropes limit the scope of the central murder and its causes, orienting the series toward the local when it is, she says, global. The series’ southern gothic tropes, she writes, “have long been used to shore up geographic boundaries and associate region with ontological difference.” Byrnes, “I Get a Bad Taste,” 89.
The prominence of the gothic in season 1 is made particularly apparent in its contrast to season 3, which also follows the trails of sacrificedchildren and is also set in the U.S. South (Arkansas), but which is not only itself signally bereft of the gothic but raises the narrative of season 1 only to strip away the gothic. Hart and Cohle were simply uncovering a “pedophile ring,” we are told in season 3 (3:7).
Williams, “Petrochemical Families,” 34, Williams’s essay very effectively shows how Errol Childress is aligned with the “more primeval forces of nature” (29) and how neither is at all separate from the spaces of modernity.
Harman, Speculative Realism, 92.
Fred Botting, Gothic (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6.
James Thurgill, “The Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes,” Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 5 (2020): 33–56.
Andrew Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 2. Williams claims that Errol Childress represents “a primordial force that impinges on modern suburban life.” Williams, “Petrochemical Families,” 30.
It’s worth mentioning True Detective’s evocation of another folk gothic narrative, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The opening scene of True Detective, in which an unknown man is artfully arranging a body, replicates exactly the opening of Texas Chain Saw; both TV series and film feature strange “folk art” objects; and both also feature the inextricability of the past (in which some characters are pathologically mired) and the petrochemical present (the gas station in Hooper’s film).
Song, “True Detective.”
Childress’s lair, “Carcosa,” moreover, was filmed at Fort Macomb, near New Orleans, where Confederate soldiers camped for a while during the Civil War. Ella Morton, “The Real Location of True Detective’s Carcosa,” Atlas Obscura (blog), March 11, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/03/11/here_s_the_real_location_of_true_detective_s_carcosa.html.
The only critics who reference this crucial comment are Lirette, who mentions that one of the “traumatic events” of the series is “the aftermath of desegregation,” and Deckard, who refers to the “incomplete process of desegregation” as one of the “compound catastrophes that structure contemporary life in Louisiana.” Lirette, “Something True”; Deckard, “Ecogothic,” 182.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 11.
Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152.
Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2012), 50–51.
Deckard, “Ecogothic,” 181.
Michael Niblett, “Oil on Sugar: Commodity Frontiers and Peripheral Aesthetics,” in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (New York: Routledge, 2015), 268.
See Morton, Dark Ecology, 76, and Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 51, 73.
Ellis, Anthropocene, 2, 49.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 76; William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); see also Ellis, Anthropocene, 90–93, and Richard Blaustein, “William Ruddiman and the Ruddiman Hypothesis,” Minding Nature 8, no. 1 (2015), https://www.humansandnature.org/william-ruddiman-and-the-ruddiman-hypothesis.
Ellis, Anthropocene, 95. The series actually explicitly, albeit fleetingly, evokes the migrations introduced in the Columbian Exchange. At one point, Rust and Marty realize the murderous cult uses the trappings of “Couris de Mardi Gras,” a rural winter festival that, as Marty says, “went heavy on the saturnalia, a place where Santeria and Voudon all mash together” (1:7). Santeria and Voudon are both African religious practices, presumably brought to North America via the slave trade. Moreover, the strange wooden objects, which appear on numerous occasions, including near Dora Lange’s body, are also connected to Santeria. The African American minister at the predominantly Black church in Erath tells Rust that they are what his aunt called “devil traps.” When they have this exchange, the minister, Rust, and Marty are all standing in the church, crosses featuring prominently on the walls. The minister added that his aunt “loved” Jesus but “had a bit dat Santeria in her, you know?” (1:1). What most call people call “bird traps” in a Christian context are also “devil traps” in Santeria, then; the wooden objects mix both, characteristic of the hybrid religious practices that often inform folk beliefs (see also 1:7).
Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nils Bubandt, “Anthropologists Are Talking—about the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 555.
Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2016), 110, and Moore, “Wall Street Is a Way of Organizing Nature: An Interview with Jason Moore,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 12 (August 16, 2017), https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/12-wall-street-is-a-way-of-organizing-nature. See also Moore’s study of the “sugar frontier”: “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: CommodityFrontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization,” Review 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–33.
Kelly, “Toxic Screen,” 47.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 178; Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Grand Central, 2002), 20–26.
Wenzel, “Turning Over,” 169.
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 162; see also Haraway et al., “Anthropologists,” 556–57, which is the transcript of a 2014 conversation in which the term “Plantationocene” was coined.
Glenn R. Conrad and Ray F. Lucas, White Gold: A Brief History of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1795–1995 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1995).
Lillian C. Bourgeois, Cabanocey: The History, Customs, and Folklore of St. James Parish (New Orleans: Pelican, 1957), 31–32.
Bourgeois, 32.
Wenzel, “Turning Over,” 168.
Acts of the Apostles 10:39.
Rey Chow, “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay),” Representations 94, no. 1 (2006): 134.
Song, “True Detective.”
Song; Lili Loofbourow, “Marty the Monster,” in “‘True Detective’ Finale,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 11, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/true-detective-finale/#!.
Ellis, Anthropocene, 2.
Both Haraway and others argue that the “Plantationocene” continues beyond the literal (southern, antebellum) plantation—into, for instance, factory farming and “monocrop agribusiness.” Haraway, “Anthropocene,” 162n5; see also Haraway et al., “Anthropologists,” 556–57.
That mowing grass in a circle is unusual is highlighted in that Rust cuts Marty’s grass at one point, and he cuts it, as is typical, in straight lines (1:3).
Williams mentions that Childress is mowing in circles but sees it only as a visual marker of the repetitions that punctuate the narrative. Williams, “Petrochemical Families,” 39.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 3–4. This continued practice of reaping in a tightening circle has caused enormous damage to certain species, not least, for instance, corncrakes on Orkney. See R. E. Green, “The Decline of the Corncrake Crex crex in Britain Continues,” Bird Study 42, no. 1 (1995): 73.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 5.
The Mowing-Devil; or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire, August 22, 1678, 2.
Mowing-Devil, 3, emphasis in original.
As Deckard points out, protesting slaves often set plantation fields on fire, forging another connection between Dora Lange’s body and slavery. Deckard, “Ecogothic,” 177.
As of 1995, even as sugarcane acreage continued to grow in Louisiana after losses to the oil industry in the 1970s and 1980s, “the number of farms continue to decline,” as larger farming enterprises are owned by fewer people. Conrad and Lucas, White Gold, 72–73.
See Dawn Keetley, “Defining Folk Horror,” Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 5 (2020): 1–32; Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Leighton Buzzard, U.K.: Auteur, 2017), 17–18.
Chris Baldick, ed., Introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xix, emphasis added.
Kate Aurthur, “The ‘True Detective’ Creator Debunks Your Craziest Theories,” Buzzfeed, March 6, 2014.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.