This is never followed through on, though. If it's about relationships and "things happening in our homes," what happened in the home of the Yellow King? What were his relationships like? We never actually understand what is happening or what led to it, and more to the point, neither do the characters.
I like the idea of a finite character-world where not every last thread will be tied together to make a dramatically perfect story, but at the same time, I felt cheated by how little I did get dramatically speaking.
I won't deny, I really liked the dialogue where McConaughey complains about how they didn't get everybody involved and Woody responds, "And we ain't gonna get 'em all, that ain't what kind of world it is, but we got ours."
I hope you read all that's coming up. Maybe it will clear up some of this.
To begin, I'm not sure if you remember this bit:
"It's like in this universe, we process time linearly forward but outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist, and from that vantage, could we attain it we'd see our space-time would look flattened, like a single sculpture with matter in a superposition of every place it ever occupied, our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension that's eternity, eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it's a sphere, but to them it's a circle."
This was the little metaphysical soliloquy that told us what the show was about. It outlines the truth of our perceptions as audience members, no, fourth-dimensional audience members, looking in (at story). As an audience staring at our LEDs at a visual story, we have numerous luxuries. We can see Cohle and Hart in 2014, in 1995, in 2001. Given our fourth-dimensional vantage point, we can see the threads that connect one character to the next, one theme to a set of characters. Hence, it is natural for us to hypothesise, theorise, to try to find answers, to connect the dots. But, as fourth dimensional beings, to us "it's a circle". It isn't as multi-faceted as a sphere. It only exists so we can make broader connections, not connections that tell us about the yellow king specifically, but about men like the yellow king, men who, whether they are within the frame or without, constantly affect the circumstances of women and men.
This doesn't mean it's about men like you and me, necessarily. It's about men like Maggie's father, who metaphorically represents these men by running the same old line about how things were better in his day, and affecting others by these actions and words. It's about Hart, who looks at a set of dolls in compromising positions in his daughter's bedroom and makes assumptions about her innocence, when it's wholly normal for little girls to see these dolls sexually
even at that age. She isn't fucked up then. Maggie says, "Girls always know earlier. They have to." Hart doesn't see it. Note how the dolls are shot from
his point of view. Without knowing it, his male gaze affects his daughters, and one of them
does end up messed up as a result. "My sin was inattention." Such beautiful, genuine character arc, this realisation in 2014. It's about men like Rustin Cohle, who loses his daughter, and as a result can no longer make genuine connections with women. It's about men like The Yellow King whose influence extends decades later in the psyche of an old black woman who still feverishly remembers Carcosa.
All these things go on simultaneously within this story. Loss giving way to poor connection, poor connections giving way to shaky partnerships, shaky partnerships giving way to tunnel views of female sexuality. All of these pervade the lives of our characters. It's not necessary for us, as fourth dimensional viewers, to understand the specific thought processes of The Yellow King, but to understand it's place in the larger story.
So when Cohle is near death, he reaches out into this fourth dimensional space, and gets a sense of the view that we have as a fourth-dimensional viewer. He feels his own existence within the larger story. All this time he's
needed to find out the details (his crazy John Nash room) but once out there, even for the short time that he was, he sees only what we've seen. That The Yellow King is simply part of this larger story. That as a character within his story on earth, not only can he not see the threads that
we can, but he can't even see the rest of the members of the cult, because he is bound by the realities of being someone on earth, like you and me when we read about a captured serial killer and worry about whether he has influenced/affected/killed others.
And this is when Marty Hart rams it home: "We got
ours." They now understand the magnitude of their achievement. They had to project out into a place beyond, our fourth-dimensional space to be able to see how important their actions were, that they were part of this:
"It's just one story."
About light versus dark. It took their transcending to this other world, even if only momentarily, for them to understand that they wiped out a truly evil being, and that light had replaced it, however small the difference might appear in the night sky. And that this story is the larger story of our existence. We began as creatures, no morals, pure survival. This gave way to terrible things like genocide and human sacrifice and female infanticide, but as sentient beings, we developed conscience, which in turn gave way to a larger sense of civic responsibility, of humanity. And it is this larger conscience, this humanity alone, that can overcome true evil, which is exactly what Cohle and Marty do in killing The Yellow King. In spite of their flaws, the way they treat their women, even other men, their consciences grew to the point of being greater than the evil they had to overcome.
It's one thing to try to go a different route from the standard hour-long police procedural where every last loose end gets tied up before the end credits roll, but after eight episodes and however many diegetic years during which time McConaughey devoted his life to putting that puzzle together, I wanted a hell of a lot more than what I got.
If that's more me bitching than it is me identifying crucial flaws in the overall conceptual edifice, I'll accept that, but I think it's a valid criticism of elements which, if handled better, could've elevated the series rather than weigh it down.
I understand. Dramatically, the cause and effect nature of the case didn't quite make you hard. It's quite difficult to go from not actually enjoying the drama to taking the philosophies seriously in the larger context. This actually makes a lot more sense to me now that I've read your comments on what you like about the story dynamics of
Hannibal. It also explains a lot about why you don't like
The Wire. This stuff just doesn't move like
Hannibal or
True Blood.
Realism isn't my primary concern.
Neither is it mine, hence my "fuck veracity" statement. It should never matter that something on screen is true to life, it should simply matter that it is true to character in the world created. I only defended the realism in the context of your Wiki-existentialism critique.
