True Detective
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| True Detective
The murder-mystery show, which has been getting good ratings and buzz, is disturbing, but not necessarily because of its lurid imagery, violence, and explicit sex and nudity. What’s intriguing is that a show that’s such a big hit features so prominently a dark philosophy which suggests that humanity is an error of evolution and ultimately meaningless, and that we should stop reproducing. The planned anthology series, the first season of which is written by novelist Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, focuses on Detectives Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) as they investigate a brutal, ritualistic murder of a woman in 1995 and are also questioned by two other detectives 17 years later after a similar murder, even though Cohle and Hart supposedly caught the original killer. Hart and Cohle are practically opposites. Hart, at least on the surface, is the more sociable, traditional, macho, family man type of cop, while Cohle, whose marriage fell apart after his young daughter died in a car accident, is darker, more aloof. Cohle, when pressed, tells Hart he’s a pessimist, but he doesn’t mean “pessimist” in the everyday sense of simply being a sourpuss who’s “bad at parties.” He says he’s a pessimist in his worldview, the philosophical sense, although he pushes beyond mere pessimism and into anti-natalist territory. Here’s Cohle: I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. Chew on that for a second. When I heard McConaughey utter these lines in his spaced-out drawl, it reminded me vividly of the philosophical writing of Thomas Ligotti, a writer known throughout the literary horror world for his disturbing and blackly funny short works in the genre known as weird fiction. In his 2010 nonfiction work, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti calls consciousness “the parent of all horrors” and lays out an argument that would make Rustin Cohle offer a slow, stoned nod of approval. Here are some examples of Ligotti writing on nature and humanity in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: Now we know that we are uncanny paradoxes. We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does. And: And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people. And: For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Echoing Ligotti’s dark musings on human nature, True Detective could be revolutionary television. Millions of viewers are hearing Cohle’s worldview weekly, and many might just find that it makes some kind of troubling sense. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 9.38 Kb. Share with your friends:
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