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True Detective IX - Cohle Logic


Stubby

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Can you imagine the in-dialogue citation during an episode?

Rust Cohle, bleary-eyed and fatigued to Marty: 'Time is a flat circle'

Rust turns directly to the camera: 'Nietzsche, Notes on the Eternal Recurrence'

And would he have used MLA or APA for the works cited scrolling through the closing credits of each episode? I'm guessing MLA.

Anyways, where were all the cries of plagiarism in February? I made that font purple.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/02/philosopher-assesses-true-detective-characters-rust-cohle-marty-hart.html

Are there specific scenes or bits of dialogue that made you realize that True Detective was a show actually wrestling with philosophy versus simply throwing around words to sound heady?

His dialogue with Marty in the car. It would have sounded eerily familiar to anyone who has been exposed to Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. [Editor's note: Early on in the series' run, shorunner Nic Pizzolatto gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which he talked in depth about Ligotti.] In many ways, it’s a paraphrase of the central argument of that text. However, we witness a generalized pessimism throughout the interviews. Perhaps the second stand-out scene in this regard is his meditation on the eyes of murder victims. The idea that they would have welcomed it, that they were being released, is a very Ligotti-esque notion, but one that would have chimed well with many pessimists. I am sure that to many people that dialogue may have felt cheesy or obvious, but as a visualization of what the pessimist ultimately holds — that death is to be welcomed — it is pitch perfect and signals, to me, some wrestling with philosophical questions.

However, this only works if you have been through the mill of these texts. For example, Ligotti buys the arguments of some contemporary neuroscientists, which Rust would surely be familiar with, that there is no self and there is no free will. I see this strain throughout his monologues that life is a trap, a dream, or a program. Once you grasp that, and truly believe it, then you cannot help but see the self as akin to being trapped in a kind of nightmarish loop. In many ways, the self is the micro-scale of this nightmare and time is the macro-scale that he also touches on in terms of a ceaseless loop. There are some tensions between these positions, but common to both is the idea that we are puppets at the mercy of wider forces.

True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has recently talked about texts that influenced his writing of Rust, describing him as an "anti-natalist nihilism." What can we learn about Rust as a person informed by works like Jim Crawford's Confessions of an Antinatalist, Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of this Planet, David Benatar's Better to Have Never Been?


We would know that he is drawn to the extreme fringes of philosophical speculation and that much of the material he is reading is unpalatable to most people. We would also know that he sought out these texts perhaps after being dissatisfied with more mainstream mediations on our place in the universe. He is not at home in the world, expects nothing from it, and has a fundamental mistrust of all discourse of hope. It is also likely that he sees hypocrisy as the norm and is attuned to delusion as the natural state of the human mind. This is perhaps why he is so good at soliciting confessions.

Nuances dividing these thinkers aside, I’d say philosophically Rust considers consciousness an aberration or evolutionary error/mistake, that he is not concerned with filtering knowledge according to "the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem" [to quote philosopher Ray Brassier], and that, as an anti-natalist, he subscribes to the old maxim of "better to have never been born." Better yet, many of these thinkers argue, as Rust mentions, that we should stop reproducing in order to end the cycle of existence.

This worldview is often correlated with self-destructiveness and I would say Rust’s fascination with murders, drugs, and the criminal lifestyle flower naturally from it. Despite this, I do not expect him to be the killer. It’s the fact that apparently normal people are killers that, I suspect, intrigues Rust, and since he knows what he is, the need to act out violently against others is likely lacking. He’s a bad man, but he knows the real bad men wear masks.

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Can you imagine the in-dialogue citation during an episode?

Rust Cohle, bleary-eyed and fatigued to Marty: 'Time is a flat circle'

Rust turns directly to the camera: 'Nietzsche, Notes on the Eternal Recurrence'

And would he have used MLA or APA for the works cited scrolling through the closing credits of each episode? I'm guessing MLA.

Considering the fondness writers have for having their "smart" characters directly tell us who they're quoting I can totally imagine it. One might say that it already happens.

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I am not sure what your point is in linking that article. The premise of the original article accusing NP of plagiarizing specifically addresses that WSJ interview NP gave out.

I haven't found anything on Ligotti and HBO agreeing on any sort of deal, but I mostly agree with all of what John has posted above.

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Ser Scot,

I disagree with your original argument that switching mediums means that it's not plagiarism. What's happened here with NP is not a good example of that because I'm not even sure if it's plagiarism or not. I will say though, the more I read interviews of NP, especially his comments regarding Emily Nussbaum's criticism of the show, the less I like him.

Like John said in his earlier posts, it seems odd to me that a man who was more than willing to talk about his influences, left Ligotti out completely more often than not when he was interviewed by critics and also supposedly during the dvd commentaries.

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Raja,

Is it possible he forgot to mention him given his willingness to talk about other influences? My point is that outside the context where formal attribution is required and a structure is in place to provide it how can plagarism be shown?

Possible (though it's a pretty charitable explanation). And possible that he's also just...that guy. As Raja points out he doesn't seem to feel the need to react kindly to critics, so someone emails him asking about Ligotti after he doesn't mention him for whatever reason and he just ignores it until bad press forces him to deal with it.

I will say though, the more I read interviews of NP, especially his comments regarding Emily Nussbaum's criticism of the show, the less I like him.

It's really strange how petulant he sounds, like a redditor being called out. And it's not like he doesn't have a valid (if insufficient for some) reason. He finishes explaining it and immediately becomes a cliche .

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My point is that outside the context where formal attribution is required and a structure is in place to provide it how can plagarism be shown?

That's not a point, that's a question. :P

But to answer it - by blogging, evidently.

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John,

But, again, there is no agreed upon method to make such an attribution. Is an oblique reference to Ligotti by the Character in the course of the discussion enough? What about an addtion to the credits that for 3 seconds appears on screen at the end of an episode?

If no method is formalized, there can be no plagarism.

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