TV Corner: True Detective

[Content Note: Rape culture. Spoilers for the finale of True Detective.]


So, last night was the finale of Season Two of True Detective, and ahh haha lots of people did not like it, if my Twitter feed was any indication!

Also: I did not like it! The whole season was, for me, a muddled mess with awful dialogue. The best part of it was watching four terrific actors—Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch, Rachel McAdams, and Vince Vaughn—try to battle their way through the muck given to them in order to deliver performances that significantly exceeded the material.

Who was the true detective this season? I've got to give it to Rachel McAdams, for magically detecting from a boat many miles away that her new boyfriend had been killed!

(Btw, about 8000 people made that same joke on Twitter last night. My apologies to whomever made it first!)

Anyway.

I honestly don't even know what the point of this season was. (It definitely wasn't to entertain me!) So, we went all that way in order for cynical and experienced police officers to discover that corporate dealings are super corrupt and powerful people do anything to stay in power? Uh, I'm pretty sure cops know that. As did I. And most humans over the age of 12, I think?

TRUE DETECTIVING!

The real mystery was why Taylor Kitsch's character was even in the show. Maybe that can be the set-up for Season 3!

Finally: I am so fucking over any storyline about a "complicated" female character—especially where "complicated" is reductively defined as "broken" and "fucked up" and "slutty" by male writers who lack imagination and human empathy with non-male people—whose supposed complexity is nothing but emotional trauma arising from surviving sexual assault.

Now, listen, I'm a female person who has survived sexual assault and has lasting trauma as a result, and there are female survivors who have less lasting trauma than I do and some who have more, because we are all individual humans with individual experiences and perceptions and access to the things we need to heal, so I'm not saying at all that female survivors of sexual assault who have lasting emotional trauma don't exist.

But what I am saying is that not every woman who has ever been sexually assaulted turns into a shell of a human being who is forever defined by that experience. And yet basically every woman who has ever been sexually assaulted on television and in the movies is a shell of a human being who is forever defined by that experience.

There's never a female character who has integrated survival into her daily life, the way most of us are obliged to do. Whether we want to or not. Because what choice do we have? Countless women around the globe survive rape. Most of us don't have the luxury of being totally dysfunctional forever after, spending days in our apartment stabbing a dummy with knives and vaping our nights away.

I'm so, so, so tired of the "tragic broken rape victim" trope—and don't even get me fucking started on the "tragic broken rape victim who gets magically fucked back to emotional health by the right man" trope.

Also? Women can be fucked up and emotionally troubled for reasons other than having been sexually assaulted.

FREE WRITING TIP, MALE WRITERS!

Anyway again.

Did you like it? Did you not like it? Would you watch Season 3? Tell us everything!