“Female common sense would blow the whole thing sky-high in a minute,” he says. Atheling tells Blish that he hasn’t shown his wife the text, and Blish understands why.
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In a post about the Carcosa–Yellow King mythos’ relationship to True Detective, Alyssa Rosenberg pointed to a story by James Blish called “ More Light,” in which a character named James Blish visits a friend named Bill Atheling, who is in poor health because he has been reading The King In Yellow, the mythical play that drives its readers insane. Granted, we have had very little insight into Maggie’s character outside the context of men: What are her Marty- and Rust-less desires, needs, wants, wishes? But this sequence made it clear that she does have all of those things, and thus a real three-dimensionality, even if we have not been privy to it, focused as we are on Rust or Marty, who are so wholly caught up in themselves. Maggie was the one with the agency: Rust and Marty both became, however briefly, pawns in her story. And while Maggie having sex with Rust seemed inevitable from the moment they hit it off over a family dinner, I was impressed with the way True Detective complicated this particularly clichéd turn of events. (The actress who plays Lisa is clearly conscious of just how long the camera lingered on her décolletage.) When Maggie arrives at the police station for her interview, the cops say they are looking for her “perspective,” which she methodically, calmly denies them. The show seems cognizant of the gendered nature of perspective, even if the men behind the camera occasionally expose their own. Rust is haunted by women who aren’t there-his ex-wife and his dead daughter-while Marty cannot deal appropriately with the women who are. “Women and children are disappearing, nobody hears about it, nobody puts it together,” Rust told his boss Sunday night, outlining what he believes is a vast conspiracy in the Bayou. Another little girl was abducted, and a report was never even filed. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up. True Detective is explicitly about the horrible things that men do to women, things that usually go unseen and uninvestigated. Ignoring women may be the show’s blind spot, but it is also one of its major themes. When it comes to women, True Detective is undeniably shallow-but I think it’s being shallow on purpose.
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While it is possible-by which I mean undeniably true-that I am completely in thrall to the ever-captivating McConaissance, I think True Detective has not triggered my usual response because it is, at least on some level, very aware of how stereotypically and perfunctorily it treats its female characters. Presenting women as a parade of scolds, sluts, and the strung-out typically makes me hate a television series.