Rust is not prone to material desires and his apartment is bare, with only a simple bed and books on criminology. However, few details about his marriage to Claire Cohle are revealed. Rust is aloof at one point his partner Martin Hart says that he "wasn't big on talking except when you wanted him to shut up." He seemingly prefers living by himself, and he presumably hasn't been able to sustain a relationship for longer than a few years.
He carries an unusually large ledger which he uses to keep notes and sketches of crime scenes, earning him the nickname "The Tax Man" from his colleagues. But as an ad for Lone Star beer? Just lousy.Rust is a talented but troubled detective, dedicated to his work and renowned for his abilities, most notably his ability to get confessions from criminals. For its other bad men: the callous, self-justifying drunks drowning their own demons in spirits, the guys whose hunches and premonitions come in six-packs, the men whose hearty pursuit of their own self-destruction may finally be rewarded.Īs a crime drama, and as a piece of fiction writ large, True Detective is pretty incredible. And not just for the cabal of wealthy, child-murdering pagans.
#RUST COHLE GUN SERIES#
If Nic Pizzolatto's series is half as "dark" as it seems to be - or a quarter as dark as everyone says its is - there has to be a reckoning. Marty being back on the bottle (and drinking on a fishing boat in the early morning) has to mean bad things. Rust's functional alcoholism (if there's such a thing) has to reach a breaking point. Going into True Detective's finale, it seems like this idea is bound to come to bear. Alcohol, for Nietzsche, weakened "our resolve to garden our problems." It is ennoblement's opposite. He regarded booze as a corrupting evil equal to Christianity. He even recites Nietzsche's idea, outlined in The Gay Science, of the horror of time recurring endlessly. In one episode, Rust reveals that he's read Nietzsche, a thinker whose work seems to inform his character's belief in a godless universe. Marty and Rust regard alcohol, like countless Southern Gothic archetypes before them, as at once the curse of their heavy existence and a warming palliative to that same miserable condition. It's not incidental that the characters are almost always drunk, or that they seem to believe that they need to be drunk to do their jobs.
#RUST COHLE GUN FULL#
True Detective's final trump card may be that Rust is just a drunk who's full of shit. But the difference, as I understand it, is that True Detective is at some level about, and is rather obviously engaged with critiquing, this macho nonsense: specifically, the boozy, pseudo-spiritual nonsense that ostensibly elevates the show, making it something other than another pulpy whodunit. This is the "macho nonsense" Emily Nussbaum identified in her New Yorker piece, "Cool Story, Bro." This is the "philbrosophy" Sam Adams called out on Indiewire. It's an antagonism that drives the show, dictating the bad cop/bad cop chemistry between Marty and Rust, defining the contours of McConaughey's dead-eyed swagger. Throughout the series, characters constantly call attention to how batshit-crazy Rust sounds, shaking their heads at his baffling, nihilistic gibberish, suggesting that he's just a drunk who's full of shit. Even the show's dopey title is a joke on the dopey titles of pulpy crime magazines. Watching, and re-watching, True Detective's first seven episodes in advance of Sunday's big wrap-up, I have become less and less certain of Marty and Rust's boozy dignity. They're messy, selfish, and shit-headed, but they're right. In True Detective's inside-out moral universe, that these characters are so drunk and fucked up ennobles them. The ability to handle booze is a measure of manliness. For the past ten years, he tells Marty, he's been "functional, but hammered." As for Rust, he makes no bones about his alcoholism, approaching drinking with a kind of mythic reverence. Marty boasts about having not touched a drop in weeks, but before long he's slurping on a flask in order to manage his disgust over the Saturnalian snuff video. And in last week's episode, estranged partners Rust and Marty are reunited over a bottle of beer. Likewise, Marty attempts to woo his chilly mistress with shots at the line-dancing bar. (Look at the hard-drinking Stanley in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.) Alcohol is a form of currency.įrom the start, investigators Gilbough and Papania buy a wearied Rust's tentative trust with a sixer. The Southern Gothic tradition that the show operates in has long used alcoholism to signal decay and the decline of civility. Everything in True Detective is lubricated by liquor.
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