Speaker 1: Day I saw you are my dreams called Coax. Paul
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Speaker 1: Hey, what's up? Guys?
Speaker 3: Welcome to No Way Jose. Today I am joined by
Speaker 3: Steven Delay and we are doing a True Detective Season
Speaker 3: one analysis. I've been looking forward to doing this for
Speaker 3: quite a long time. I was blown away when I
Speaker 3: first watched that first season, and I don't know if
Speaker 3: I'll necessarily ever watch any other seasons from what I've
Speaker 3: heard of reviews of them, but man, maybe we'll have
Speaker 3: a little side discussion on that.
Speaker 1: I'm not worried about though.
Speaker 3: I'm not a huge cinema guy, so I mean it's
Speaker 3: not like somebody need in my life. But Season one
Speaker 3: definitely was a pretty mind blowing experience, and I would
Speaker 3: recommend it for a lot.
Speaker 1: Of for most people.
Speaker 3: And we'll get into that today, the reasons why and
Speaker 3: why it's such a great masterpiece in my opinion. But
Speaker 3: before we get into that, before we bring under your guests,
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Speaker 3: I sencha with that. Let's get into the show. Let's
Speaker 3: get Steven on here and get into some true Detective analysis.
Speaker 1: What is up, Stephen? How are you today?
Speaker 4: I'm good?
Speaker 1: How are you good? Glad to have you here.
Speaker 3: Been looking forward to this, We've been probably least a
Speaker 3: month ago. We talked and we kicked around this idea.
Speaker 3: I think you'd seen when my appearents there's some thing
Speaker 3: I just kind of naturally fell together that I don't
Speaker 3: know if you'd heard me talk about True Detective or what,
Speaker 3: but you've you've done this before. This is kind of
Speaker 3: your thing, you seem to. I mean, this is a
Speaker 3: cultural milieu. Is your thing is analyzing that? So I
Speaker 3: guess kind of let people know who you are, what
Speaker 3: you're about, so my audience could get a feel for
Speaker 3: you before we get into today's episode.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I learned if your show through your appearance on
Speaker 4: Sam Tripoli's podcast, And Yeah, I immediately recognize that you're
Speaker 4: interested in a lot of the work that I've been
Speaker 4: interested in for a number of years as well. I'm
Speaker 4: a writer and a philosopher, so some of the work
Speaker 4: I do is academic, scholarly philosophical work, particularly excuse me,
Speaker 4: and a field of philosophy called phenomenology in existentialism. And
Speaker 4: I'm also a fiction writer. And then at the same time,
Speaker 4: I'm also interested in film study studies and film phenomenology,
Speaker 4: but more particular I'm interested in cultural engineering studies and
Speaker 4: how cinema and television can be used as well in
Speaker 4: effect weapons of psychological warfare. And at the moment, I
Speaker 4: have an interest particularly in the genre of film noir.
Speaker 4: So I've been working on a noir book, and I've
Speaker 4: recently written on Chinatown for a publication called Cultural Engineering Studies,
Speaker 4: which is founded by the guys that do Sye Up Cinema.
Speaker 4: And so I've had noir on my mind for a while,
Speaker 4: and we recently did an episode on True Detective last year,
Speaker 4: and so I really just jumped at the chance to
Speaker 4: be here with you tonight to talk more about True Detective.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad to have you here.
Speaker 3: This is something that I've I've been itching at I
Speaker 3: mean literally, I see in almost everything I do now,
Speaker 3: especially given the realm, the area that I dig into,
Speaker 3: the parapolitical, the Dutros, the Finders, all these awful cases,
Speaker 3: I get drawn to them. I am very much identify
Speaker 3: with a Rusty Cole when he says, you know, I
Speaker 3: I won't look away again. I know there's something too
Speaker 3: that there's there's a great message to this movie. I mean,
Speaker 3: then you have the the inverse of that, which is Marty,
Speaker 3: who kind of his whole shtick is he doesn't want
Speaker 3: to look like he's kind of the average well meaning
Speaker 3: person that just doesn't just wants to pretend there isn't.
Speaker 1: This evil side of the world. And I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's I think that's part of why this show had
Speaker 3: such a big impact in me, because I'd already been
Speaker 3: so I just came across the show, like in the
Speaker 3: past year, but I'd been already so inundated in the
Speaker 3: parapolitical world, like I you know, Oklahoma City Bomb, Like
Speaker 3: I just studied so much of this shit now that like,
Speaker 3: and then I came across this, and then it just
Speaker 3: it was so far advanced revelation and method wise, it
Speaker 3: compared to like other things that I had seen, and
Speaker 3: then I come to find out that it's actually been
Speaker 3: out for a decent amount of time, and I believe
Speaker 3: it happened before really. I mean, I know people will say, like,
Speaker 3: you know, things like Epstein were talked about to be
Speaker 3: full like on Alex Jones, you know, prior to this
Speaker 3: around this time, but it was like, culturally speaking, it
Speaker 3: was a non existent thing, like people didn't know about him.
Speaker 3: So at the time when this came out, like, yes,
Speaker 3: I guess sure if you were super duper into the know,
Speaker 3: maybe you would know these sort of things, but for
Speaker 3: the most part, it was nowhere near what it is
Speaker 3: today the level of like a cultural understanding of these
Speaker 3: sorts of things. And this is when it came out,
Speaker 3: and I already I was astounded the level of like,
Speaker 3: holy shit, this is so many parallels to the things
Speaker 3: I study, Like I was already as sounded by that
Speaker 3: watching it in twenty twenty four. So it's been out
Speaker 3: for a believe over somewhere in the realm of like
Speaker 3: a decade. So I just I guess I've kind of
Speaker 3: like to hear about your initial experience with the show.
Speaker 3: Where were you in your journey parapolitically or conspiracy wise
Speaker 3: or whatever. Were you was this something that you picked
Speaker 3: up on that, because I guess a lot of people
Speaker 3: don't pick up on that, and so I think maybe
Speaker 3: they're missing, maybe maybe doesn't speak to them as deeply
Speaker 3: as it does other people who are kind of interested
Speaker 3: in that stuff. But I mean, even then, I watched
Speaker 3: my wife, who is kind of a little bit more,
Speaker 3: and she still thought liked it.
Speaker 1: She wasn't like blown away.
Speaker 3: Clearly, I was like, damn near crying by the end
Speaker 3: of the first by the end of the first season,
Speaker 3: like it was beautiful.
Speaker 1: So I guess it passed enough to you. Just your thoughts.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm kind of pregnant with thoughts when it
Speaker 3: comes to this show.
Speaker 4: Well, this season is in a way the holy grail
Speaker 4: for conspiracy researchers, isn't it, Because in a way it
Speaker 4: confirms one of the fundamental theses that those who work
Speaker 4: in parapolitical research and conspiracy research for so long I've
Speaker 4: talked about, which is the expression you just mentioned in passing,
Speaker 4: namely revelation of the method and the idea that number
Speaker 4: of researchers have had, really now for many decades, is
Speaker 4: that in cinema and in television and other art. The
Speaker 4: occult and the people who really run the world will
Speaker 4: expose the public to secrets about the criminal underworld and
Speaker 4: the world of blackmail and extortion, and in the case
Speaker 4: of what's shown Intro Detective, the ritualistic abuse and torture
Speaker 4: and murder of children. And of course there's a question
Speaker 4: about why it is that they would reveal these things,
Speaker 4: and that's a question that I think we can turn
Speaker 4: to at the very end of the discussion, once we
Speaker 4: sort of work through what's in the show and the
Speaker 4: parallels between what's shown in the season and a number
Speaker 4: of real life cases. You mentioned some of them already,
Speaker 4: the Finders, the Franklin cover up, the Presidio, McMartin preschool,
Speaker 4: and then of course more recently Pizzagate and Epstein, and
Speaker 4: then also Jerry Sandusky situation in Penn State. For me personally,
Speaker 4: the show immediately gripped me because when it was released
Speaker 4: in twenty fourteen, I was already really down the rabbit
Speaker 4: hole with conspiracies. So like back in college in the odds,
Speaker 4: like in two thousand and five, I figured out about
Speaker 4: nine to eleven being an inside job and I was
Speaker 4: watching INFO Wars, so I learned about Bohemian Grove and Moloch,
Speaker 4: and so I was aware of vip pedalphile rings and
Speaker 4: that kind of activity. What I didn't understand until later
Speaker 4: was that it's actually much more pervasive. And of course
Speaker 4: it's not something that's relegated only to these really truly
Speaker 4: powerfully leaked circles. It's really something that has saturated really
Speaker 4: all dimensions of society, all social classes. And that's something
Speaker 4: I think comes out in season one is that you
Speaker 4: see that this network or this ring really goes all
Speaker 4: the way down to like what we call like trailer trash,
Speaker 4: all the way up to the governor of Louisiana. And then,
Speaker 4: of course, as we know from doing research in other cases,
Speaker 4: it's not even just something that occurs in a place
Speaker 4: like Louisiana. But it happens in Washington, DC, it happens
Speaker 4: in Los Angeles, that happens in New York, it happens
Speaker 4: in the United Kingdom in London, and it happens in Europe.
Speaker 4: It happens everywhere. So when I saw the show initially
Speaker 4: in twenty fourteen, I was blown away, and I wondered, well,
Speaker 4: how is the show even made, because one thing to
Speaker 4: note is that, of course, as people have seen the
Speaker 4: show will know the the events that are take place.
Speaker 4: It spans a seventeen year chronology, So in a way,
Speaker 4: the story begins in ninety five with the door Lang murder,
Speaker 4: when Marty and Russ are called to the scene of
Speaker 4: the body that they find, and then the show concludes
Speaker 4: in twenty twelve, and there's a sort of like turning
Speaker 4: point in two thousand and two, and so the way
Speaker 4: that the show is structured is in kind of like
Speaker 4: classic noir styles through voiceovers and recollections of Marty and
Speaker 4: Russ thinking back in twenty twelve while they're being interviewed
Speaker 4: by these other investigators about the events from ninety five
Speaker 4: onward into two thousand and two, and then the show
Speaker 4: culminates in what happens in real life at the time
Speaker 4: in twenty twelve, and in some of the early episodes
Speaker 4: that are focused primarily on what was going on with
Speaker 4: the initial investigation into the first murder in ninety five,
Speaker 4: there's allusions to what people will know is the Satanic
Speaker 4: panic from the nineteen eighties. And so the interesting thing
Speaker 4: about this show as a cultural artifact coming out in
Speaker 4: twenty four is that it's referencing the real life. People
Speaker 4: called it hysterio, though it really wasn't It wasn't a panic.
Speaker 4: It was well founded about ritualistic abuse and child abuse
Speaker 4: that occurred in the eighties, and then there was a
Speaker 4: kind of awareness of this with missing children and you
Speaker 4: think about, like, you know, the Walsh disappearance and all
Speaker 4: this stuff into the nineties, and then by the time
Speaker 4: we get into the Odds, a lot of that kind
Speaker 4: of awareness and consciousness. I think it sort of receded
Speaker 4: from the public domain, and it was the people who
Speaker 4: were still engaged in parapolitical analysis and ritualistic occult activity
Speaker 4: who never lost sight of the fact that some of
Speaker 4: the things that it bubbled into the surface of the
Speaker 4: public awareness in the eighties and nineties had been legitimate
Speaker 4: and that they had continued on. And it wasn't until
Speaker 4: actually after the release of this show, with Pizzagate and
Speaker 4: then with Epstein, that the public kind of caught up
Speaker 4: and realized, hey, wait a second, we've sort of had
Speaker 4: this thirty four year hangover where we've all sort of
Speaker 4: collectively forgotten that a lot of these cases that drew
Speaker 4: national attention back in the eighties and nineties were real
Speaker 4: and they were genuine, and so what the show had
Speaker 4: shown in twenty fourteen, it was kind of like interestingly,
Speaker 4: like poet poised between what had happened in the eighties
Speaker 4: and nineties and then what it had been forgotten and
Speaker 4: then what was shortly revealed right a few years afterwards
Speaker 4: with Pisagate and then Epstein. And so it's open to
Speaker 4: interpretation about why exactly the show was released, but one
Speaker 4: of the consequences, whether it was intentional or not on
Speaker 4: the part of HBO and those who were behind it,
Speaker 4: is that the show actually lent a lot of credence
Speaker 4: to researchers who for years have been saying that these
Speaker 4: kinds of things really happened. Because of course, right after
Speaker 4: when the show was released and Pizzagate came out and
Speaker 4: then Epstein, people could point and say, this is what
Speaker 4: we're talking about, And so True Detective really is revelation
Speaker 4: of the method. This isn't just fantasy, this isn't just art,
Speaker 4: this isn't just imagination. This is really grounded in how
Speaker 4: the world really works. So I think for that reason,
Speaker 4: the show in a way kind of backfired against people
Speaker 4: who may have put the show out with the intention
Speaker 4: of sort of refber refurbishing the idea that these kinds
Speaker 4: of things were just imaginary, that they were just uh,
Speaker 4: creative illusions, that there really was only a satanic panic.
Speaker 4: People who watched the show were kind of inducted into
Speaker 4: this occult world. And then just a few years after
Speaker 4: seeing the show, there were these mainstream international headlines with
Speaker 4: pizza Gate and Epstein showing that no, actually this stuff
Speaker 4: really does occur.
Speaker 1: Mhmm, yeah, I did want.
Speaker 3: I did want to take a second and to analyze
Speaker 3: something that you said. I was just thinking about it,
Speaker 3: and it's never occurred to me, and I had I
Speaker 3: had thought about the the parallels about the initial like
Speaker 3: the opening scene of this entire show is, uh, the
Speaker 3: was the field on fire and they find the they
Speaker 3: find a body, and I believe there's an anonymous call
Speaker 3: or something that that was called in or something to
Speaker 3: report the fire, I believe, and then that's when they
Speaker 3: discover a body.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't know to what degree.
Speaker 3: You've delved into the Detroit case, but in the Detroit case,
Speaker 3: the kind of I guess you could almost call it
Speaker 3: like the heart of the Detroit case is a Christine
Speaker 3: van heast case, and the reason and being is X
Speaker 3: one or Regina Loof like the probably the best person
Speaker 3: to corroborate these claims. She made a bunch of sub
Speaker 3: claims that were backed up in the Christina van Heyst case.
Speaker 3: You know this, there was no way she could have
Speaker 3: known all these details without having been there kind of deal,
Speaker 3: and there was. It was some ridiculous amount that iron
Speaker 3: the irony is and they put they take one or
Speaker 3: two little examples of something that would be easily you know, misremembered,
Speaker 3: and and they use those as reasons why she was
Speaker 3: not credible later. But I digress. The point being is
Speaker 3: it starts off in that case. In the Christine van
Speaker 3: Hee's case, there was it literally was the house, the
Speaker 3: this mushroom farm was on fire, and that they set
Speaker 3: it on fire after doing essentially you know, I think
Speaker 3: it's heavily implied it might be ritual, but some sort
Speaker 3: of sadistic, sadistic you know, rape of a child and
Speaker 3: they kill her and leave her there and set the
Speaker 3: farm on fire. And there's an anonymous call. So that's
Speaker 3: kind of the initial jump. Also, I was thinking, you know,
Speaker 3: there's also the there's a parallel there because the idea
Speaker 3: of the Christine van Hee's case, the way that played
Speaker 3: into the dutrou case is it was kind of a
Speaker 3: jumping back in time. So it reminds me of the
Speaker 3: second case that they when they're running into. I forget
Speaker 3: the name of the second girl, and I believe that's
Speaker 3: the one ends up being the girl in the video.
Speaker 3: But the idea that initially they're on they start this
Speaker 3: one one case and then they dig into this one
Speaker 3: that seems unrelated and they come to find out it's
Speaker 3: obviously a huge revelation later. And so obviously there's these
Speaker 3: parallels here. I mean, the more I dig into it,
Speaker 3: the more I'm like convinced that this guy was super
Speaker 3: inspired by Dutroux. Fair I just I struggled to believe
Speaker 3: he did it hadn't dug into it. I see too
Speaker 3: many parallels, But I just want to point that one
Speaker 3: out because that was the first one from the jump.
Speaker 1: I know we had wanted to. It sounds like you
Speaker 1: may have already.
Speaker 3: If there's any more exposition you want to give on
Speaker 3: the plot, feel I just want to go into that
Speaker 3: before I lost that in my head that I remember
Speaker 3: that there was that parallel between there, But is there
Speaker 3: anything more you want to go into the plot before
Speaker 3: we started dissecting more of this film, because I know
Speaker 3: you kind of we wanted to lay out the plot
Speaker 3: a little bit first, because I mean, it's kind of
Speaker 3: almost necessary to go into that so people have an
Speaker 3: idea of what exactly we're talking about first.
Speaker 1: You know, Hey, by the way, spoilers alert.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I think the name of the girl from
Speaker 4: the show you're thinking is Olivier is her last name.
Speaker 4: So you know, the way that I think about this show,
Speaker 4: there's really I think three stages to any sort of
Speaker 4: rational logical discussion of the show, because there's just so
Speaker 4: much material that it can quickly become I think, unwieldy
Speaker 4: to try to digest all of it. So and just
Speaker 4: thinking about it myself. This is a season I've watched
Speaker 4: now probably seven or eight times. I rewatched it over
Speaker 4: the weekend in preparation for tonight, so I have it
Speaker 4: fresh in my mind, and I was trying to think,
Speaker 4: how in the world am I going to organize my
Speaker 4: thoughts to try to get into this, And so what
Speaker 4: I thought we might do is just quickly work through
Speaker 4: episode by episode. The plot exposition, so that listeners who
Speaker 4: either perhaps have never seen the show or at least
Speaker 4: haven't seen in some time, can really just kind of
Speaker 4: imbibe the atmosphere of the show. And the thing about noir,
Speaker 4: right is that typically the way that it works is
Speaker 4: that the viewer in a way is supposed to identify
Speaker 4: with the protagonists. One's supposed to become the detective because
Speaker 4: of course one is piecing together the case along with
Speaker 4: the detectives oneself. So part of what's going on as
Speaker 4: viewers is that we're trying to figure out what's really
Speaker 4: going on, but we can also notice things that the
Speaker 4: detectives themselves overlook, and so there are certain things that
Speaker 4: Marty and Rust, as great of detectives as they are,
Speaker 4: and even though they do in a way get to
Speaker 4: the bottom of much of the case, I think if
Speaker 4: you pay careful attention to the events across the show,
Speaker 4: you find out that there's actually really important things that
Speaker 4: they do overlook. So what I was thinking was just
Speaker 4: run through the episodes, highlights some of the key events,
Speaker 4: the characters, certain details that are worth mentioning, I think
Speaker 4: with an eye to the second part of the discussion,
Speaker 4: which is how is what's being shown in the show
Speaker 4: pertained or parallel a lot of these real life cases.
Speaker 4: And then the question that follows from there, the third
Speaker 4: and final question is then what was the intention behind
Speaker 4: this show? Like, why would it put so much real
Speaker 4: information into the show. What's the intention behind releasing this
Speaker 4: kind of this kind of art. So let's see episode one.
Speaker 4: It's called The Long Bright Dark, and as you say,
Speaker 4: begins with the discovery of a dead woman, twenty eight
Speaker 4: year old prostitute Dora Lang, who's discovered naked, blindfolded or
Speaker 4: wrists abound, and she's posed in a prayerful position on
Speaker 4: a tree, beneath a tree, and she has stab booms
Speaker 4: on her and she also has what we now know
Speaker 4: is the FBI confirmed pedo swirl. And again, of course
Speaker 4: this isn't news to anybody, but it's important, I think
Speaker 4: to mention anyhow, when the show was released, those swirls,
Speaker 4: so far as I know, were not public record. So
Speaker 4: the pedo swirls and the FBI documentation about these symbols
Speaker 4: that came out after this show, So whoever was involved
Speaker 4: in the show somehow had access to that information, and
Speaker 4: that's a question. To my knowledge, it's never been answered
Speaker 4: how it exactly.
Speaker 3: You don't think that was So you don't think that
Speaker 3: was deep lore that we knew, that was known by
Speaker 3: some super in the know at that point, because I mean,
Speaker 3: it's hard to say what is known at what point
Speaker 3: in time, Because I know what you mean, it did
Speaker 3: become more it did become more pervasive, and the cultural
Speaker 3: understanding after Pizzagate, that's when the swirl came out or
Speaker 3: not came out. It's when it kind of like people
Speaker 3: started connecting these symbols. But you probably sounds like you
Speaker 3: were deeper down the rabbit hole earlier than I was.
Speaker 3: So I mean, so you're saying you don't think it
Speaker 3: really was at all, Like so this would be super
Speaker 3: deep cut knowledge type deal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But what I'm saying is that that symbology, that symbolism,
Speaker 4: and everybody knows the basics. You know, the pyramid, the
Speaker 4: the one CNI, the six sixty six, all that kind
Speaker 4: of stuff appears throughout film and television going many years back.
Speaker 4: But in cleaning I would assume the pedos world as well.
Speaker 4: But what I'm saying is that that that particular symbol
Speaker 4: didn't really come into the public awareness until the pizza
Speaker 4: Pizza Gate files.
Speaker 1: So whoever after this, yeah.
Speaker 4: After that, So whoever put this in was in the know,
Speaker 4: is what I'm saying, because typically the way that this
Speaker 4: kind of stuff will be explained away when it starts
Speaker 4: to look like somebody involved in the production of the
Speaker 4: of of this kind of work was inserting something from
Speaker 4: direct a knowledge of the of the occult, or something
Speaker 4: that wouldn't have just come through cultural osmosis, is namely
Speaker 4: that well, they just saw it as a common symbol.
Speaker 4: It's already circulating, but this symbol really wasn't circulating that
Speaker 4: so commonly. And it's very important to the show because
Speaker 4: there's many characters who say specifically, including I think Charlie
Speaker 4: Lang in one of the episodes when Marty and Russ
Speaker 4: Goo to interview him that it's Ldue Reggie Ledoux, who
Speaker 4: says that that symbol is a sign of the cult
Speaker 4: that they brand people with, which of course will sound
Speaker 4: reminiscent of something like from Nexium. So anyway, Dora Lang
Speaker 4: has this symbol on her body, and one of the
Speaker 4: sheriffs who's even there, says all these symbols are satanic,
Speaker 4: and he says they had a twenty twenty on it
Speaker 4: a few years back, and I don't know what the
Speaker 4: police code is for twenty twenty. I looked it up.
Speaker 4: Maybe he just meant like they had come across these
Speaker 4: symbols before, and they had noticed them in previous cases.
Speaker 4: But I thought that was kind of interesting that one
Speaker 4: of the police at the original scene of the crime
Speaker 4: mentions having come across these symbols before, and then we
Speaker 4: get a little bit of character.
Speaker 1: Real quick.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I don't I don't want to step on you,
Speaker 3: but I just looked up just because I was thinking
Speaker 3: about it, and I don't know if you're aware, Voodoo
Speaker 3: Donuts has that exact same, basically the exact same little uh,
Speaker 3: you know, spiral triangle symbol, and I just, you know,
Speaker 3: just because I was curious. I looked it up when
Speaker 3: they were founded and when the logo was created, and
Speaker 3: it was two thousand and three.
Speaker 1: So I just I found that interesting.
Speaker 3: And it's weird that the the voodoo is seated in
Speaker 3: a voodoo Obviously that's going to have allusions to what
Speaker 3: is it the the I mean obviously voodoo, but there's
Speaker 3: a term for it, but essentially the uh, the Santa
Speaker 3: Ria type stuff. So I mean, I assume maybe it's
Speaker 3: tied into that symbology, but it definitely obviously has an
Speaker 3: overt pedophile meaning too, So I don't know. I guess
Speaker 3: I'm just trying to reach and see if there's any reasoning.
Speaker 3: But either way, it does seem ahead of its time,
Speaker 3: so oh yeah, oh yeah. And then the Voodoo Donuts.
Speaker 3: That's another rabbit hole some people go down. I don't know, I've.
Speaker 4: Never heard of that. But then of course, like the
Speaker 4: best of pizza stuff, it's there. And then we get
Speaker 4: character introduction. So again this shows at noir. And you
Speaker 4: might think it's a neo noir because it comes out
Speaker 4: in twenty fourteen, but in some ways it's actually a
Speaker 4: classic noir because it doesn't really subvert the genre of
Speaker 4: the classic genre in the way that many neo noirs do,
Speaker 4: particularly in how it handles the archetype of the hero.
Speaker 4: And so what you get in effect are two kind
Speaker 4: of classic archetypes, and Rust and Marty. So Rust is
Speaker 4: like the obsessive, right, So this idea of noir that
Speaker 4: the good guy, whether he's the private detective or whether
Speaker 4: he's the police detective, he has problems with authority. Marty
Speaker 4: even says that in his interview in episode one, will
Speaker 4: guys have to learn how to manage authority. So the
Speaker 4: idea is that the hero, the archetype, the obsessive, is
Speaker 4: the one who bucks the cys, defies authority, runs an
Speaker 4: end runned around the corruption, but he always does so
Speaker 4: at some kind of great personal cost to himself. Usually
Speaker 4: that what ends up happening is he becomes some kind
Speaker 4: of antisocial and so that's why, like Russ he lives
Speaker 4: in a very spartan baron apartment. All he has or
Speaker 4: like you know some books, a mattress at the beginning,
Speaker 4: he doesn't even have a chair, right, So he's unmarried,
Speaker 4: and of course we learn why what have happened with
Speaker 4: the death of his daughter and so on and so on.
Speaker 4: So that's one sort of classical noir archetype of the hero.
Speaker 4: And then you have Marty, his partner, who in a
Speaker 4: ways another classic noir archetype, and he's kind of like
Speaker 4: the well intentioned, generally good hearted, but sort of fallible one.
Speaker 4: And so in his case it's it's alcohol and in
Speaker 4: it's women. And this is kind of blended together in
Speaker 4: a very nice way because there's this sort of tension
Speaker 4: in what's running throughout this show, which is this question
Speaker 4: of everyone's complicity in these most heinous of crimes in
Speaker 4: terms of the exploitation and abuse of women and children.
Speaker 4: And so, you know, Marty, he dislikes obviously what's being
Speaker 4: done to these children, and he wants to protect his
Speaker 4: own children. But then at the same time he recognizes
Speaker 4: that he's far from a saint himself because of his philandering, womanizing,
Speaker 4: and his alcoholism. So the show, I think is one
Speaker 4: of the major themes in the show philosophically, is this
Speaker 4: question about original sin or sex. And you know, Rust
Speaker 4: is a nihilist, and he tends to think that in
Speaker 4: a sense, existence is a crime. It's almost a crime
Speaker 4: to exist at all. And this is why he even
Speaker 4: says explicitly at one point that when his daughter died young,
Speaker 4: in a way, she unburdened him of what he says
Speaker 4: is the sin of being a father. So they get
Speaker 4: onto this first case, and shortly after being given the case,
Speaker 4: there's a task force that is formed by Billy Lee Tuttle,
Speaker 4: who's a prominent pastor or reverend, the kind of magachurch
Speaker 4: sort of Billy Graham, Jerry Fowell sort of sort of type,
Speaker 4: and Rust and Marty want to get him the case
Speaker 4: stay on the case. Rust quickly suspects that there's something
Speaker 4: suspicious going on with the Task Force. He doesn't trust it,
Speaker 4: but they are they don't have a suspect, so eventually
Speaker 4: they ended up going to a church revival and they
Speaker 4: meet a pastor there, talk to him, and they interview
Speaker 4: a couple of women who give them a description of
Speaker 4: what they think maybe the first description of the potential suspect,
Speaker 4: which is that he's a tall man with scars and
Speaker 4: that he had been hanging around with Dora Lang. They
Speaker 4: go and they interview Charlie Lang, who is Dora's ex
Speaker 4: husband who's in prison, and Charlie Lang eventually ends up
Speaker 4: telling them about a guy he knew, Reggie Ldeu, who
Speaker 4: is his ellmate, and it turns out that Reggie Ldeux
Speaker 4: had a connection to a second dead body. They find
Speaker 4: this is the Olivier girl who had gone missing years previously.
Speaker 4: I think it was like in nineteen ninety or nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety two. Her body had been discovered in a flood.
Speaker 4: But when Russ was going back through the cases, he
Speaker 4: noticed that there were certain forensic details that matched the
Speaker 4: description of what had happened to Dora Lang with these
Speaker 4: stab wounds and then also the same swirl on her body.
Speaker 4: So in the fact, what happens is they discover that
Speaker 4: there have been children going missing for some years at
Speaker 4: one point, and it's like episode three or four when
Speaker 4: Rust and Marty really start to unravel the case. Rust
Speaker 4: is going through old cases and he starts finding a
Speaker 4: pattern where there's what are called airs missing persons made
Speaker 4: in air reports, and there's these missing children going back
Speaker 4: to is late as I think as early as nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy nine that he finds out had been reported missing
Speaker 4: and then later the I was corrected to claim that
Speaker 4: the missing person report had been made in error. And
Speaker 4: of course the key, the key example of this is
Speaker 4: the Marie Fontineau girl who had gone missing and I
Speaker 4: think it's nineteen ninety and Rust and Marty learn about
Speaker 4: her disappearance when they're out canvassing and looking for information
Speaker 4: about who may have known Dora Lang's killer. They find
Speaker 4: out that this girl, Marie Fonteau, went missing in nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety and the sheriff, Ted Childress had claimed that he
Speaker 4: had interviewed the family, and that the family had said
Speaker 4: that Marie Fonta had gone off with her father, but
Speaker 4: it didn't check out, And so as the story unfolds,
Speaker 4: what basically ends up being the case is that Marty
Speaker 4: and Russ discover that whoever killed Dora Lang was also
Speaker 4: involved in the Marie Fontna disappearance, was also the one
Speaker 4: who murdered Olivier and then also this woman in twenty
Speaker 4: ten at Lake Charles and so, and then of course
Speaker 4: going back into the eighties and episode one, Marty and
Speaker 4: Russ are driving down a road and there's a billboard
Speaker 4: for a missing person, a girl named Stacy Gearhardt who
Speaker 4: had gone missing in nineteen eighty seven. So there's dozens
Speaker 4: of these missing children, many of whom disappear without any trace.
Speaker 4: And turns out that, of course that they're being abducted
Speaker 4: and murdered, sometimes ritualistically, and they hear this from Charlie
Speaker 4: laying himself in a later episode, I think it's episode five,
Speaker 4: when Charlie confesses that his cellmate Reguladue had said that
Speaker 4: there was a human sacrifice ring that was abducting children,
Speaker 4: where rich people would go out into the woods.
Speaker 1: And do this.
Speaker 4: So they go out to the compound, they track down
Speaker 4: regular Do, and then of course there's the really famous
Speaker 4: shootout where Marty kills Regu La Du after they find
Speaker 4: the two kidnapped children in the compound, the boy and girl.
Speaker 4: The boy had just died, and so then it appears
Speaker 4: for a time that maybe the case is solved. They'd
Speaker 4: found their man because they thought it was regular Du
Speaker 4: in ninety five, But in light of the fact that
Speaker 4: these other children had got missing and had never been
Speaker 4: accounted for, and that the subsequent murder that happened at
Speaker 4: Lake Charles later on, they realized no, whoever killed Dori
Speaker 4: Lang must still be out there. So when we fast
Speaker 4: forward to twenty twelve, of course Rust has stayed on
Speaker 4: the case, and basically what he figures out is that
Speaker 4: he was right to suspect in ninety five that Billy
Speaker 4: Lee Tuttle had really been up to no good, because
Speaker 4: it turns out that Billy Lee Tuttle had a snuff
Speaker 4: film of the Marie Fontnau murder, and that Marie Fontneau
Speaker 4: had actually gone to a school which I think is
Speaker 4: called the Light of the Way Academy in the show,
Speaker 4: and she had been one of the children who was
Speaker 4: actually evidently molested at that school, and it turns out
Speaker 4: that one of the reasons that she was abducted and
Speaker 4: maybe murdered is because when Rust interviews one of the
Speaker 4: other children, one of the men who had gone to
Speaker 4: the school, who's now a male prostitute in the time
Speaker 4: in twenty twelve, this man has a recollection of having
Speaker 4: been molested and photographed back at the school with Marie Fontina,
Speaker 4: which corresponds to what the preacher at the Traveling Tent Revival,
Speaker 4: Reverend Terry, had said he had come across as well.
Speaker 4: Back in the nineties when he was working for Tuttle.
Speaker 4: He had discovered a folder full of images of children
Speaker 4: that was in possession of one of the Tuttle ministers,
Speaker 4: and that had been covered up. And of course that guy,
Speaker 4: I think his name is Austin Farrar, he later got
Speaker 4: busted for embezzlement and then died, presumably by suicide, but
Speaker 4: it's clear that actually Billy Lee Tuttle had him bumped off.
Speaker 4: So Russ Brake breaks into I think it's the Shreveport
Speaker 4: residence of Billy Lee Tuttles in twenty ten, discovers this
Speaker 4: snuff film of Marie Fontino, so we know that Marie
Speaker 4: Fontina in fact didn't run off with her father. She
Speaker 4: was abducted and she was murdered. And then one of
Speaker 4: this kind of important details about this as far as
Speaker 4: police corruption is concerned, is that one of the detectives
Speaker 4: that were introduced to ninety five Steve Jerrasi, who never
Speaker 4: likes Marty and never likes Russ from the very beginning. Well,
Speaker 4: we figure out why that was the case, because it
Speaker 4: turns out that back in the nineties, when Mariefonteau had
Speaker 4: gone missing, he had been the deputy who took the
Speaker 4: missing person report on Reefontna. And then what had happened
Speaker 4: is that Ted Childress, who was the sheriff, had hidden
Speaker 4: the report, claimed that Mariefontnau was actually fine, and then
Speaker 4: given him a promotion to transfer to State c ID
Speaker 4: in Louisiana. So in ninety five, when Marty and rust
Speaker 4: were looking into the Mariefontina disappearance, Jerrasey doesn't come forward
Speaker 4: and tell them anything because he knows he's complicit in
Speaker 4: the fact that that had been covered up. So they
Speaker 4: tracked down Jerrasy, who's now the sheriff I think of Iberia.
Speaker 4: He's been promoted right, and they basically course him into
Speaker 4: admitting what he had known when they show him Refontnau
Speaker 4: snuff film, and that's when we find out that actually
Speaker 4: the real killer is a childress who is one of
Speaker 4: the sons that's from Sam Tuttle, who's the father of
Speaker 4: Edwin Tuttle, the governor, and then Billy Lee Tuttle. So
Speaker 4: what happened is that there's actually this secret family that
Speaker 4: the Tuttle patriarch had and the serial killer there's no
Speaker 4: date of birth for him, there's no social Security records
Speaker 4: and the only reason they track him down is that.
Speaker 4: And I think it's episode two in ninety five when
Speaker 4: Rust and Marty are scouring and canvassing the neighborhoods, there's
Speaker 4: this shot where you can see Russ taking up photograph
Speaker 4: of this little green house, and it turns out that
Speaker 4: later on they figure out that the green spaghetti monster
Speaker 4: that one of these children had claimed had been chasing
Speaker 4: her through the woods is actually the killer who was
Speaker 4: a painter and he had painted the greenhouse, and Marty
Speaker 4: remembers this greenhouse, so they pull out the photograph and
Speaker 4: they realize, oh, if you can figure out who painted
Speaker 4: this house will track down the killer. So they go
Speaker 4: through and they get the task records, and they track
Speaker 4: down the woman who remembers hiring the company childrens and
Speaker 4: son to paint the house, and that's what leads them
Speaker 4: to Earl Childress, who is the killer who had been, yeah,
Speaker 4: the secret son of one of the Tutteles. And of
Speaker 4: course that's another fantastic illustration of revelation of the method,
Speaker 4: because we know that these intergenerational Satanic covens very often
Speaker 4: will breed children with no record of their birth so
Speaker 4: that they can be used for these purposes, whether it's
Speaker 4: for sacrifices or whatever else it maybe, and so that
Speaker 4: that happens to be the what's the case with with
Speaker 4: the killer Childress in this show?
Speaker 3: Okay, that was a lot, But now now that we
Speaker 3: laid that out for the people, I think that now
Speaker 3: we have a place to kind of start. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's a lot lot to work with there. I mean,
Speaker 3: is there anything I guess for you at the jump
Speaker 3: that you really want to dig into of that, because
Speaker 3: I mean there's a lot. I mean I could pick
Speaker 3: us a random spot and just slice into it, but
Speaker 3: I don't know if you you anymore thought, I guess
Speaker 3: we could easily go into kind of.
Speaker 1: I guess now, let's let's take a philosophical look at this.
Speaker 3: Do we just kind of broke down the plot before
Speaker 3: we get to too leyden in into digging too specific examples.
Speaker 3: Let's kind of look at the philosophy a little bit,
Speaker 3: because I actually this was wild.
Speaker 1: I mean, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 3: I like the the revelation of the method stuff here.
Speaker 3: I think there's something incredibly beautiful about the philosophical arc
Speaker 3: throughout this story between both characters really and then honestly
Speaker 3: the juxtaposition of the two. I think there's something particularly
Speaker 3: beautiful about you know, Russ's you know, changing from you know,
Speaker 3: being you know, I don't know. Yeah, he's a nihilist,
Speaker 3: but then too, they find some way too. It's it's
Speaker 3: almost as if he's found a way within his own
Speaker 3: lens to find something I don't know, beneficial, you know,
Speaker 3: as so far as like a philosophy, a way to
Speaker 3: look at the world, you know, way way to look
Speaker 3: at morality, you know, good bad stuff that like, while
Speaker 3: still somewhat maintaining his secular worldview. And I'll be honest,
Speaker 3: and I believe you. You've said, I've listened to your show,
Speaker 3: and you said you're a little bit Really I'm I'm
Speaker 3: admittedly an agnostic atheist, whatever you wanna call it, So
Speaker 3: I very much identify with Rust and a lot in
Speaker 3: that way. Although I'm someone who's thought a lot about
Speaker 3: philosophy in the past, I mean I don't as much now,
Speaker 3: so I have kind of worked through those things for myself.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously me and you'd have.
Speaker 3: Disagreements, probably, but generally speaking, like kind of like you know,
Speaker 3: the beginning when Russ Cole is kind of this, like
Speaker 3: you know, angry nihilists of the world, I honestly kind
Speaker 3: of see that, and I see that as like a
Speaker 3: foolish version of nihilism. It's like, what kind of way
Speaker 3: is that to fucking live? Even if you are a nihilists,
Speaker 3: like I don't know, might as well have to be
Speaker 3: the sort of like nihilist that's a yeah, maybe there's
Speaker 3: no cosmic meaning, but I can make meaning for myself,
Speaker 3: which I think he kind of gets there by the end.
Speaker 3: I think also, you see, I love the progression of
Speaker 3: Marty and the idea I think the the one line
Speaker 3: from Rust, but like I won't I won't look away again.
Speaker 3: I think that I think that really has a that
Speaker 3: means a lot, I think for Marty's progression more so
Speaker 3: than it does russ progression. I think, you know, the
Speaker 3: the idea that he's starting to open his eyes he's
Speaker 3: not content with and there is something too where you're like.
Speaker 3: I know, some people might think it may detract from
Speaker 3: your family life or this or that, and you might
Speaker 3: even say that this thing that he got sucked up in.
Speaker 3: But if anything, the theme is to open your eyes.
Speaker 3: And if you had paid attention, if he hadn't looked away,
Speaker 3: I think he would have been more in touch with
Speaker 3: his family. Obviously, that not looking away has multiple meanings.
Speaker 3: It means like looking away from the dark, fucked up things.
Speaker 3: But sometimes I can just be the monotonous day to
Speaker 3: day things that you may not pay attention to because
Speaker 3: you're too busy looking at the.
Speaker 1: Dark, fucked up things or whatever. It's. I guess it's
Speaker 1: finding balance as a man. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I just I guess kind of any thoughts on you,
Speaker 3: and there's a lot to go with that. I just
Speaker 3: particularly find it beautiful, the whole juxtaposition of all of it.
Speaker 3: And then just really the individual darcs as well. It's
Speaker 3: just beautiful. It's a master base. In my opinion, I.
Speaker 4: Have a lot to say about the role of philosophy,
Speaker 4: particularly the problem of nihilism. So I'll start there, but
Speaker 4: before I get into that, just so that you can
Speaker 4: make sure you can refresh my memory when I want
Speaker 4: to come back to and I don't forget you mentioned
Speaker 4: one thing that I wanted to come to as well,
Speaker 4: which is this idea of inattention. So at one point
Speaker 4: one of the later episodes of the show, Marty says, well,
Speaker 4: I see now that you know infidelity is once in
Speaker 4: but my true sin was the sin of inattention. And
Speaker 4: then he had talked about in an earlier episode when
Speaker 4: he's been again interviewed by these two detectives in twenty
Speaker 4: twelve about the detective's curse, and he says that the
Speaker 4: Detective's curses, you know, you're looking at everything except for
Speaker 4: the right clues, which are right in front of you.
Speaker 4: And so just remind me to come to the question
Speaker 4: of his daughter, Audrey, because I think there's a lot
Speaker 4: that's going on there with her specific situation that actually
Speaker 4: shows just how truly expansive this network really is. And
Speaker 4: then I also want to talk a little bit more
Speaker 4: about police corruption and some of these other more minor
Speaker 4: characters and how they kind of try to steer the
Speaker 4: investigation off the rails. So philosophically, you know, a lot
Speaker 4: of people have already noticed and commented fairly extensively on
Speaker 4: the fact that two really important philosophical figures that are
Speaker 4: looming largely in the show are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But
Speaker 4: before I come to Schopenhower and Nietzsche, because in some
Speaker 4: ways Russ is quoting Schopenhower almost verbatim, particularly in episode one,
Speaker 4: and then his entire theory of time being a flat
Speaker 4: circle is really very much a Nietzschian doctrine, the idea
Speaker 4: of the eternal recurrence. So I can talk about that,
Speaker 4: But then the question is like, well, what is nihilism?
Speaker 4: And so in every day parlance, you know, it usually
Speaker 4: means that like, nothing really matters, is what we usually
Speaker 4: mean with that by that that there's really no meaning
Speaker 4: or ultimate meaning to anything. So you get into this
Speaker 4: idea of illusion that somehow the idea that things really
Speaker 4: matter is an illusion, and you see that kind of
Speaker 4: bothering Russ. So part of us metaphysics the schopenhowerre in
Speaker 4: part about is that he thinks that we're all sort
Speaker 4: of biologically and inherently subject to these kind of delusions
Speaker 4: or illusions that are necessary for us to get by
Speaker 4: in everyday life. But the term nihilism is actually coined
Speaker 4: originally in the eighteenth century by this now obscure German
Speaker 4: counter Enlightenment Christian philosopher named Friedrich Yakobi, and by nihilism,
Speaker 4: what he meant was he was responding to the philosopher
Speaker 4: Emmanuel Kant. And basically what Kant had tried to do
Speaker 4: was develop this metaphysical system that he thought would preserve
Speaker 4: the basis to believe justifiably that human beings have freedom,
Speaker 4: that there is immortality, and that God does exist. Those
Speaker 4: were the three big ticket items that Kant was interested
Speaker 4: in preserving. But what Kant thought he had to do
Speaker 4: was in order to, as he says, make room for faith,
Speaker 4: he had he said, deny that we can know these
Speaker 4: things come what in quantum philosophy are called reguative ideas
Speaker 4: or postulates of practical reason. The idea is that in
Speaker 4: order for there to be a moral order we can't
Speaker 4: thinks that we have to posit a God who will
Speaker 4: ultimately be our judge, and that he thinks that in
Speaker 4: order to hold one another responsible for our actions, we
Speaker 4: have to posit that human beings are free. And what
Speaker 4: Yakobe did, in effect was to say that, well, actually,
Speaker 4: despite CONT's good intentions, this actually fails, and that this
Speaker 4: kind of philosophical attempt to justify the idea of immortality,
Speaker 4: the idea of the existence of God, and the idea
Speaker 4: of human freedom, it actually backfires and you end up
Speaker 4: coming to see that all this would be an illusion.
Speaker 4: And so Yakobe basically thinks that once you get the
Speaker 4: philosophical ball rolling in that direction, you're going to be
Speaker 4: led to nihilism, which for Yakobe means no immortality, no freedom,
Speaker 4: no God, which is in a way basically where Rust
Speaker 4: is at the beginning of the show. But so what
Speaker 4: Russ does is he kind of takes that nihilistic conclusion
Speaker 4: that Yakobe had identified that he thought philosophy led to,
Speaker 4: and he kind of dressed it up in Schopenhauer's particular
Speaker 4: metaphysical system. So he says things like in the Car
Speaker 4: with Marty in episode one consciousness is a tragic misstep
Speaker 4: of evolution, that the world is just a gut or
Speaker 4: and outer space, that we labor under the illusion of
Speaker 4: having a self, that we think that in fact, you know,
Speaker 4: everybody thinks he's somebody when really he's nobody. That really
Speaker 4: which we should all do is deny our programming, stop reproducing,
Speaker 4: and opt out of an existence, which is a raw deal.
Speaker 4: And then Marty sort of asks him existentially, right, well
Speaker 4: then why do you get up out of bed every morning?
Speaker 4: And then Russ kind of like in this moment of
Speaker 4: kind of like ironic self awareness, says, well, you know,
Speaker 4: I tell myself that, like you know, I have a reason,
Speaker 4: but really it's because I can't deny my programming. And
Speaker 4: he says I lack the constitution for suicide, which is
Speaker 4: of deeply shopen how Ay insight, because Schopenhower basically thought
Speaker 4: that the entire point of life was to wean yourself
Speaker 4: from it. And you see this actually in a later
Speaker 4: episode when in the montage sequence, Rust is going through
Speaker 4: all these old case files and he's looking at photographs
Speaker 4: of dead people, and he tells the detectives in twenty twelve, well,
Speaker 4: when you look at these photographs of these people, you
Speaker 4: can notice that the very last nanosecond of their existence,
Speaker 4: they realized that their entire life had been this drama,
Speaker 4: that they had been locked up in their own minds,
Speaker 4: and that everything that they thought matter was an illusion,
Speaker 4: including their own self. And so they can let go
Speaker 4: and they return to this kind of monistic sense or
Speaker 4: state of oneness. So Rust is basically a kind of
Speaker 4: Chopin Howery and nihilist or monus. So he doesn't believe
Speaker 4: that individuals are individuals. He thinks that in some sense
Speaker 4: that is an illusion. He thinks that people don't really
Speaker 4: have free will and so, and then for that reason,
Speaker 4: he also thinks that love is an illusion. Right At
Speaker 4: one point when Marty says, do you think it's possible
Speaker 4: for a man to love two women at once? Because
Speaker 4: he's thinking of his wife and then this woman that
Speaker 4: he's having an affair is mistress Lisa, and Russ comes
Speaker 4: back and says, well, I don't think actually man can
Speaker 4: even love in the way that he means it. So
Speaker 4: that's kind of one aspect of Russ's philosophical view worldview,
Speaker 4: as he's a kind of Schopenhowry and nihilist and then
Speaker 4: the other component is the nietzsche and so that's where
Speaker 4: you get into the more metaphysical thesis of the eternal
Speaker 4: recurrence recurrence. So Russ at one point talks about the
Speaker 4: children that are discovered at the the Dew compound. He says, well,
Speaker 4: they're going to be in there over and over and
Speaker 4: over again forever. And he asks the detectives like, well,
Speaker 4: how many times do you think we've had this conversation before.
Speaker 4: So there's almost this kind of like reincarnational metaphysics, the
Speaker 4: idea that your life as you're living it is something
Speaker 4: that you've lived many time times before and something that
Speaker 4: you will live precisely as you've literal for forever. And
Speaker 4: the Nietzschean gloss on this is the idea of amor
Speaker 4: fati that you're supposed to somehow will the fact that
Speaker 4: you're going to be living the same life over and
Speaker 4: over again. That's the kind of Nietzschean component. And then
Speaker 4: the little ambiguity. The final side note is that and
Speaker 4: this comes out I think when Marty and Russ go
Speaker 4: to the Tent Revival. They're the disagreement between Marty and
Speaker 4: rustover Christianity is partly a question about, well, is Christianity
Speaker 4: true or is it a fantasy or an illusion? And
Speaker 4: then the kind of subsidiary question to that is like, well,
Speaker 4: does it actually matter if it's true or not? In
Speaker 4: other words, could it be a good thing even if
Speaker 4: it is false? Right? So there, what's going on is
Speaker 4: this kind of Nietzschean and Freudian thing, because you know,
Speaker 4: the classic Freudian conception of an illusion isn't something that's
Speaker 4: necessarily false per se. It's something that you believe for
Speaker 4: reasons other than truth. And so that's when you get
Speaker 4: into the idea of like metaphysical consolation or the idea
Speaker 4: of believing a lie because life requires lies. So the
Speaker 4: early Nietzsche actually thought that what matters in life isn't
Speaker 4: whether something is true or not. He thinks it what
Speaker 4: matters in life is whether it's life affirming. And so
Speaker 4: there's a way in which actually Rust is kind of
Speaker 4: cutting against Nietzsche, because Nietzsche might see Rust as somebody
Speaker 4: who's still too obsessed with truth. Because Nietzsche thinks that
Speaker 4: in a way, what you ultimately have to do is
Speaker 4: even get over the desire for the will to truth.
Speaker 4: Because Nietzsche thinks what matters isn't finding out what's true
Speaker 4: or believing what's true, but affirming life. And it could
Speaker 4: be that actually illusions are useful to that purpose, to
Speaker 4: making life bearable and tolerable. And so there's a lot of,
Speaker 4: like I say, different things going on here, the Schopenhauerenism
Speaker 4: and the Nietzscheanism, and it's all sort of blended together
Speaker 4: in a very interesting way. And of course there's also
Speaker 4: Buddhism going on. But then yeah, to come to a
Speaker 4: kind of conclusion with regard to that issue. By the
Speaker 4: end of the season, there is some kind of apparent
Speaker 4: transformation in Rust where he's not so bleak and cynical
Speaker 4: and dark as before. He seems to be some kind
Speaker 4: of optimist. So that's an interesting, interesting character arc certainly
Speaker 4: in that regard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, and I think it's a you know, his
Speaker 3: idea of as I said, I do think is weirdly
Speaker 3: comes to this idea of almost like a secular understanding
Speaker 3: of like, I know, morality or religion or whatever, because
Speaker 3: there's so many ways to understand where he comes to
Speaker 3: at the end. But I mean, I know, I guess
Speaker 3: the biggest takeaway for me, I know, me someone who's
Speaker 3: like I guess, you know, explored some of these ideas.
Speaker 1: I always found the beginning.
Speaker 3: While it makes he is a compelling character at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the show, I do find him to be
Speaker 3: foolish because it is like I am more than the
Speaker 3: realm of like even if, like I say, something like
Speaker 3: a good example would be something along the lines of
Speaker 3: free will, like I actually probably somewhat technically agree with him.
Speaker 3: I've thought these things through, but it's almost like it's
Speaker 3: almost like a distribratory like thought process like thing when
Speaker 3: you think about something like free will, because it's like,
Speaker 3: even if it doesn't exist, you have to.
Speaker 1: Behave as though it doesn't it does exist.
Speaker 3: So it's like it's kind of a and that's kind
Speaker 3: of how I look at a lot of these like
Speaker 3: deep questions. It's like, Okay, yeah, sure, maybe technically we
Speaker 3: are just like a biological AI, but it's like, okay,
Speaker 3: who cares, Like I mean, in the day, like I mean,
Speaker 3: we functionally speaking, it's as if we have free will,
Speaker 3: so it makes no difference, and you kind of have
Speaker 3: to hold people responsible, so it makes no meaningful difference
Speaker 3: really whether we have free will or not. Everything acts
Speaker 3: the same. So I mean, and I know some of
Speaker 3: the deeper thoughts that he went into, I did find
Speaker 3: him foolish. But it is like I guess, you know,
Speaker 3: as as we were talking about I was thinking about
Speaker 3: it if he did have this similar type mindset before
Speaker 3: having his child, Like let's say he was, you know,
Speaker 3: agnostic atheist or somebody somebody who had to and he
Speaker 3: was like that type of nihilist.
Speaker 1: I forget.
Speaker 3: There's a term for it that people use where you're
Speaker 3: someone who doesn't believe in an ultimate meaning, but you
Speaker 3: will create your own meaning in you. Considering that he
Speaker 3: lost his wife and child, I think there could be
Speaker 3: something to that, like maybe there's a lesson there and
Speaker 3: the idea of someone who doesn't have it some sort
Speaker 3: of you know, you know, belief system or higher belief
Speaker 3: system or something, and then going through some sort of
Speaker 3: life altering trauma, Like what does that do to you?
Speaker 3: Something that removes your reason whatever you would have set
Speaker 3: up as your reason. Uh, Because I mean, I'm I'm
Speaker 3: very much like the It's it's in some ways, I'm
Speaker 3: very much the Marty character because I have the family
Speaker 3: I have, I have a wife, I have kids. Like
Speaker 3: but you know, I'm also in some ways the cold
Speaker 3: character in like that way, but like they are my
Speaker 3: family's kind of like is that meaning?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 3: I guess I could also understand if something awful happened
Speaker 3: to them and they all were gone, how would I
Speaker 3: come to terms of that as a human being with
Speaker 3: no actual higher you know, meaning to me than like
Speaker 3: raising my children and living a good life deal like
Speaker 3: what would that do to a man? And I think
Speaker 3: that might be that answer might be russ Cole.
Speaker 4: Well, So one thing I wanted to mention initially when
Speaker 4: I was going to work through the episodes with the
Speaker 4: plot exposition, but I just didn't get to it because
Speaker 4: I was already going to go on for too long
Speaker 4: as it was. As far as revelation of the method
Speaker 4: is concerned with the character of Rust, there's clear indications
Speaker 4: that he is a trauma survivor potentially interfered with psychiatrically
Speaker 4: through potentially mkltree even and one of the tensions that's
Speaker 4: going on throughout the shows people will know who have
Speaker 4: seen it is once deliberately the viewers deliberately led to
Speaker 4: consider the possibility that Rust himself actually is the murder murder,
Speaker 4: or that he's somehow involved in the ring, and the
Speaker 4: detectives who are interviewing Marty and Rust in twenty twelve
Speaker 4: and then also Maggie, Marty's ex wife, They eventually, I
Speaker 4: think it's like in season five, they just come out
Speaker 4: and say that they think that actually Rust is the
Speaker 4: killer and that he's been producing Patsy's Now. There's another
Speaker 4: of things to say about this. One thing is that
Speaker 4: it's interesting that on a few occasions Russ mentions the
Speaker 4: fact that his dad was a Vietnam War veteran and
Speaker 4: the sort of survivalist who lived up in Alaska. So
Speaker 4: he checks the box on that he comes from a
Speaker 4: military home. Then there's the fact, and this is mentioned
Speaker 4: right at the outset I think in episode one, maybe
Speaker 4: episode two as well, that Russ comes to Homicide State
Speaker 4: CID in Louisiana after having previously worked undercover NARCO for
Speaker 4: four years in Texas. And the reason why he worked
Speaker 4: undercover for four years is that and this is like
Speaker 4: familiar territory to anybody who's read the Dave McGowan program
Speaker 4: to Kill Stuff. We know all about this. The Rust
Speaker 4: shoots somebody and then so he pleads out to turn
Speaker 4: to avoid the sentence for the shooting. He ends up
Speaker 4: working undercover for four years and then he kills some
Speaker 4: cartel members is the Port of Houston and he has
Speaker 4: a psychiatric breakdown, and then he's sent to a psychiatric
Speaker 4: facility in Lubbock, Texas. And then he talks about how
Speaker 4: because of his rug addiction that he had when he
Speaker 4: was working undercover, along with the trauma from the murder
Speaker 4: and then the baggage she was carrying already from the
Speaker 4: fact that his daughter had died when she was very young,
Speaker 4: he had PTSD and flashbacks and hallucinations. So you have
Speaker 4: to wonder though whether or not actually he's been interfered
Speaker 4: with by either military or the psychiatric community. And anybody
Speaker 4: who's read the Tom O'Neal book Chaos about the Manson murders,
Speaker 4: we know that there were intelligence students that were embedded
Speaker 4: in the police forces, even in the La Sheriff and
Speaker 4: LAPD police forces. So Russ talks about, well, my files
Speaker 4: are sealed and they're all readacted, and so people think
Speaker 4: I'm a fad. So it looks like even though in
Speaker 4: the show, by the end of it we're supposed to
Speaker 4: think that Rust actually wasn't really a mind control MK
Speaker 4: ultra killer, that he actually is a good guy and
Speaker 4: he really wasn't the one out committee the murders finding Patsy's.
Speaker 4: It's still consistent with what we're shown that actually he
Speaker 4: has amnesia and these other personalities that he may laughs
Speaker 4: into he has no record of, and we're just not
Speaker 4: shown that. So in the cinematic grammar of the show,
Speaker 4: it's still actually possible that really there is something else
Speaker 4: going on with him. And I'll just adduce one sort
Speaker 4: of example. I'm not saying that I think this is
Speaker 4: really the case. I'm just saying that it's clearly consistent
Speaker 4: as possible. So as a matter of revelation of the method,
Speaker 4: Pizzolato is showing us that people who are embedded in
Speaker 4: these police forces have intelligence connections, they work under cover,
Speaker 4: they tend to come from military backgrounds, they have psychiatric records,
Speaker 4: and so on and so forth. Russ kind of fits
Speaker 4: all of that profile to a t. But there's this
Speaker 4: scene where he's speaking to one of the prostitutes. Her
Speaker 4: name's Lucy the Blonde. He meets her at a trucker
Speaker 4: bar and he buys pills from her. When he's asking
Speaker 4: her and the other prostitute about whether they know any
Speaker 4: John who may have been the one responsible for killing
Speaker 4: Lang later on, when he visits her. I think it's
Speaker 4: like an episode three. He goes to her apartment to
Speaker 4: get more pills and she tries to seduce him, and
Speaker 4: he rejects her. She gets angry, and then he stands
Speaker 4: up and there's this shot looking up at him and
Speaker 4: he says, well, I'm police, so I can do horrible
Speaker 4: things with impunity, and then it cuts. And this is
Speaker 4: an early episode where by the time you get midway
Speaker 4: through the season, you might think back to that scene
Speaker 4: and say, well, wait, what exactly happened in the apartment
Speaker 4: with the prostitute, Because unless you think that actually Russ
Speaker 4: is a good guy and that the detectives who are
Speaker 4: interviewing him and Marty in twenty twelve are totally off
Speaker 4: on the wrong track and that Rust actually isn't in
Speaker 4: on all this stuff, you would think, well, maybe what
Speaker 4: did he exactly do to there? Did he actually kill her?
Speaker 4: So I'm not saying that in that scene that's actually
Speaker 4: what happened, But what I'm saying is that I think
Speaker 4: it's interesting that that scene is put there because it
Speaker 4: is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that Rust has amnesia
Speaker 4: and altered personalities and may not actually himself be aware
Speaker 4: that the events that were being shown in the show
Speaker 4: are only following one of his personalities. Perhaps he's off
Speaker 4: doing other things and we're just never shown it, and
Speaker 4: it could be that actually there's other stuff going.
Speaker 1: On with the results.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, even with the perspective we're given, he's
Speaker 3: not a reliable perspective. And I was thinking about, as
Speaker 3: you said, I was like, well, I mean when they
Speaker 3: show it from his perspective, I think a lot of
Speaker 3: times you could make the case that maybe was a
Speaker 3: third person perspective when they show it to show him.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think there were times where they're definitely showing that
Speaker 3: it's supposed to be from his perspective, because one of
Speaker 3: the things about his h he sees things that aren't
Speaker 3: there sometimes and we see it too, so that would
Speaker 3: denote that we're seeing it from his perspective. So the
Speaker 3: point being is he's not a reliable, So in those instances,
Speaker 3: he's not a reliable narrator or whatever the situation. So
Speaker 3: you can kind of take leeway of if you have
Speaker 3: some case, if it's packed up by some instance of
Speaker 3: when we only see his POV, you may want to
Speaker 3: hold end doubt. So yeah, and I just thought, as
Speaker 3: you said, I was thinking that that's that would actually
Speaker 3: kind of add to that, because I think the only
Speaker 3: things that would push away push back against that would
Speaker 3: be instances of his story where you're seeing things from
Speaker 3: his perspective and you're like, well, he's not a useful
Speaker 3: narrator exactly.
Speaker 4: That The whole point is that what is the story?
Speaker 4: As you know, we're getting memories from Marty, we're getting
Speaker 4: memories from Maggie, these are these are people's recollections of
Speaker 4: ninety five of two thousand and two. So it's selective
Speaker 4: just in that regard that we're only seeing so many
Speaker 4: people's perspectives. So what about all the other people who
Speaker 4: are involved that we don't hear from? For one? But
Speaker 4: then yeah, in the case of Russ in particular, how
Speaker 4: do we know that he has complete access to his
Speaker 4: own memory? Right? And in fact this is also something
Speaker 4: that the character's name is Toby Bulair. He's the male
Speaker 4: prostitute in New Orleans that Russ tracks down towards the end.
Speaker 4: I think it's episode seven. He's the one who.
Speaker 1: Had been the class memories rejumbled too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he says, well, I just told myself that
Speaker 4: it was a dream, right, And so we everybody who's
Speaker 4: delved into this realm understands that one of the common
Speaker 4: consequences of that kind of trauma and abuse, whether it
Speaker 4: occurs in childhood through ritualistic sexual abuse or whether it
Speaker 4: occurs later on through more like MK ultra military intelligence
Speaker 4: psychiatric interference, is the amnesia. So it's entirely possible that
Speaker 4: Russ has Missy memories. And then that brings me though
Speaker 4: also before I forget to the issue of Audrey. So
Speaker 4: there was a time where, having watched this this this season,
Speaker 4: I was convinced that actually Maggie may be part of
Speaker 4: the cults. And I'm still open to the idea that
Speaker 4: she knows more about what's really going on than what
Speaker 4: most people who think watched the show think.
Speaker 3: It makes some of her extreme decisions make more sense,
Speaker 3: because I will say, you know, watching that was one
Speaker 3: of the things that even me, like I get sort
Speaker 3: of You're like, oh, this sort of it still seemed
Speaker 3: too dramatic for a character.
Speaker 1: Some of the actions she took.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah it could when I meant like her fucking
Speaker 3: Russ basically her sleeping in the ross. Like I mean, like,
Speaker 3: don't get me wrong, like I get it, the drama
Speaker 3: like it. But it seemed, and I've heard you speak
Speaker 3: on some another show where like the idea being like
Speaker 3: she needed to throw it, she needed to do something
Speaker 3: to throw them off the that would make sense.
Speaker 1: Whereas I mean, don't get me wrong, I get.
Speaker 3: It, she's a wife spurned, she knows Genie again like
Speaker 3: blah blah blah, but like it still seemed it didn't
Speaker 3: seem to fit to her character in my opinion, it
Speaker 3: seemed too extreme.
Speaker 4: So yeah, so okay, So that that that was the
Speaker 4: kind of hypothesis Yeah, I had thrown out in the
Speaker 4: discussion I did uh with the syup cinema guys, that
Speaker 4: was kind of my my read at the time. Watching
Speaker 4: it again, I'm less confident on that specific claim, although
Speaker 4: I still think it could be the case. So just
Speaker 4: to kind of backtrack through the whole Maggie arc, because
Speaker 4: it comes to the question of Audrey and then also
Speaker 4: like the pervasiveness of this cult, like where is it
Speaker 4: and it's everywhere? That's even what Russ says right toward
Speaker 4: the episode seven when he's talking to Leroy Salter, the
Speaker 4: really corrupt major who I think actually is part of
Speaker 4: the cult. And I have a reason for thinking that
Speaker 4: I could mention that as well, but he Russ as well.
Speaker 4: It's like alligators in a swamp and they're everywhere. And
Speaker 4: one of the things that we come to figure out
Speaker 4: right is that Dora Lang was abused as a child,
Speaker 4: Marie Fonteau was abused as a child. This all occurred
Speaker 4: in the school environment. So this is McMartin. This is
Speaker 4: like the charitable organizations with Santusky. So if it's being
Speaker 4: done by people who have access to children in his
Speaker 4: school environment, that's the whole point behind the Tuttle schools,
Speaker 4: is that they were creating these schools as places to
Speaker 4: get access to the children. Then who's to say that
Speaker 4: people who are part of that cult didn't have access
Speaker 4: to Audrey.
Speaker 3: And I'm really interested to think if we looked back,
Speaker 3: if we be able to see any details that tell
Speaker 3: us what school they went to. Because those were Christian schools,
Speaker 3: there was so there's a religious component.
Speaker 1: So I'm wondering.
Speaker 3: I mean, I feel like that'd be two on the nose,
Speaker 3: and Marty probably would have had to have picked up
Speaker 3: on that if that were the case later.
Speaker 4: Well that's what I'm saying. I think, so, yeah, that's
Speaker 4: the kind of like thing, and that's an I think
Speaker 4: that's an assumption, right that these guys make. So I
Speaker 4: sit at the outset like they figure out a lot,
Speaker 4: but there's also things I think that we're in a
Speaker 4: position to figure out that they don't. And this could
Speaker 4: be one of those cases where they are focusing on
Speaker 4: the Tuttle schools which were bringing grounds for this abuse.
Speaker 4: But what's to say that the COLT isn't operating just
Speaker 4: outside of those those charter schools as well. And the
Speaker 4: reason I say this is that everybody talks about the scene.
Speaker 4: I think it's even an episode one or two where
Speaker 4: Audrey and Macy are playing in the room and Marty
Speaker 4: goes to call them to dinner and they have the
Speaker 4: female doll who's lying naked on her back, encircled by
Speaker 4: a group of men, which of it's very much akin
Speaker 4: to the kind of ritualistic stuff that we see later
Speaker 4: with the font note tape. So where did Audrey get
Speaker 4: the idea? Now? The point is is that Marty doesn't
Speaker 4: initially ask her about that. It's Maggie who later prompts
Speaker 4: him to do this when she then goes and draws
Speaker 4: some inner opriate tryan's at school of like couples having sex.
Speaker 4: And when Marty asks Audrey, well, where did you get
Speaker 4: that idea from? It's very interesting, but if you pay attention,
Speaker 4: Audrey avoids answering that question. What she answers is the question, well,
Speaker 4: why she drew it? Was that she says, well, the
Speaker 4: girls in the class like thought it would be funny,
Speaker 4: but she never tells Marty or Maggie where the idea
Speaker 4: came from. So, and then when Audrey when she's sixteen,
Speaker 4: when we fast forward to two thousand and two and
Speaker 4: she's caught having sex with the two boys, the twenty
Speaker 4: year old and nineteen year old boy in the car.
Speaker 3: I think her aesthetics I think are born there too,
Speaker 3: because she's very gothy. It's reminiscent of the conversation with
Speaker 3: the grandpa from earlier, or like all these kids these days,
Speaker 3: yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 4: And then also so then in twenty twelve, when when
Speaker 4: Marty goes to visit Maggie and Maggie gives Marty the
Speaker 4: update on how Audrey's doing. She also said, well, she's
Speaker 4: an artist, and it's also very well known that people
Speaker 4: who are trauma survivors, abuse survivors very often will find
Speaker 4: creative outlets to deal with that.
Speaker 1: So she's also you're thinking pizza Gate right now.
Speaker 3: You're thinking pizza Gate, the one girl so connected to
Speaker 3: Podessa that the one lady does all the arts brama
Speaker 3: Vic and I.
Speaker 1: Don't think it's Abramovic. I think it's somebody.
Speaker 3: There's somebody else who does those weird warped ones with
Speaker 3: a creepy looking dead faced children. Yeah, but she apparently is.
Speaker 3: I believe that's one of what Podessa's brother has a
Speaker 3: whole series of art I guess supposedly of this this chick,
Speaker 3: and supposedly I believe she even said this was like
Speaker 3: working through trauma or something or for her. So it's
Speaker 3: like this, I mean, let's be real, she probably is
Speaker 3: some sort of trauma person from that exact network.
Speaker 1: So yeah.
Speaker 4: So so my hypothesis is that actually, when Marty talks
Speaker 4: about the Detective's Cursed, even by the end of the show,
Speaker 4: he never figures out that Audrey herself was a victim
Speaker 4: of the cult that he had been investigating the entire time,
Speaker 4: because she has all the symptoms of someone who was abused.
Speaker 4: So that's my read on it. So then the question becomes, well,
Speaker 4: then what's Maggie's role in it? And so I've softened
Speaker 4: a little bit on her because at first I thought, well,
Speaker 4: she was more like a Nicole Kidman character from Eyes
Speaker 4: White Shot and knew everything. And so I had thought, well,
Speaker 4: in two thousand and two, when she slept with Russ,
Speaker 4: this was done deliberately to sabotage the investigation, because, if
Speaker 4: you think about it, at that point, was going on
Speaker 4: is that Russ was onto the fact that they had
Speaker 4: never caught the real killer. And so I have been thinking, well,
Speaker 4: if Maggie knew that, and she didn't want Russ to
Speaker 4: go digging back into the case, then she knew the
Speaker 4: best way to stop the investigation would be to break
Speaker 4: apart the friendship between Marty and Rust. I now don't
Speaker 4: think that's necessarily why she did it, But what I
Speaker 4: do think is that she knows more than she lets on,
Speaker 4: because in twenty twelve, when Marty goes to see her,
Speaker 4: everybody who watches the show, notice is that she's kind
Speaker 4: of leveled up socially, as it were. So she marries
Speaker 4: this guy whose last name is Sawyer. We never see
Speaker 4: him or meet him or know much about who he
Speaker 4: exactly is, but it's clear from our house that he's
Speaker 4: very wealthy, so we know that he's part of now
Speaker 4: the Louisiana wealth and elite that would be part of this,
Speaker 4: may you that goes up to the tunnels, and that
Speaker 4: goes up to the kind of people that Marty and
Speaker 4: Russ were investigating back in.
Speaker 3: Her father obviously was well to do as well, which
Speaker 3: I think it's heavily implied. Perhaps I think there's something
Speaker 3: poetic about the conversation he had with him, And if
Speaker 3: you do think about that and juxtapose it with the
Speaker 3: idea that possibly he's someone in the doing these sort
Speaker 3: of awful things, it would be kind of warped perspective
Speaker 3: where you kind of get to see from the perspective
Speaker 3: of the abusers here to where it's almost like there's
Speaker 3: this hierarchy of wh're above this, You guys need to
Speaker 3: fall in line. There used to be better days where
Speaker 3: people knew they were in the place blah, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: It's almost that kind of feeling. I mean, don't be wrong.
Speaker 3: I guess maybe the show makes you want to hate him, though,
Speaker 3: so I guess it's almost the obvious one if there
Speaker 3: is a character, although this is one that little, this
Speaker 3: little little lark that the show went on wasn't really
Speaker 3: an obvious tangent to begin with. So it is like,
Speaker 3: it's kind of it is one of those ones that
Speaker 3: we really don't know it's.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the thing with the grandfather, Marty's father in law
Speaker 4: is yeah, when they go to the house to visit,
Speaker 4: one of the first things that the grandfather asks Marty
Speaker 4: as well, how's the case going? And this happens like
Speaker 4: Maggie will ask too, like well, how's the case going?
Speaker 4: And it's kind of odd, it's like, are you checking in,
Speaker 4: Like what's really going on there? Bro right? And so
Speaker 4: I noticed that when Marty talks to Maggie in twenty twelve,
Speaker 4: and I don't think this can be coincidental on how
Speaker 4: to be put there? I think for a reason, she's
Speaker 4: sitting in a chair. Into her right is a photograph,
Speaker 4: presumably of her new husband, and they're standing at some
Speaker 4: sort of tourist attraction. I don't know whether it's like
Speaker 4: Egypt or whatever, in front of a pyramid, So get
Speaker 4: the pyramid symbolism right there in the frame with the
Speaker 4: husband standing in front of this like classic occultic scenario.
Speaker 4: So I think what happens to Maggie in effect is
Speaker 4: what you were saying was true about Marty at the beginning,
Speaker 4: which is that she turns a blind eye to this
Speaker 4: kind of stuff. And I think that's also why by
Speaker 4: the time she's interviewed in twenty twelve by the other detectives,
Speaker 4: she's kind of aloof and she's cold, and she's bitter
Speaker 4: and she's cynical. But I don't think that's just because
Speaker 4: of what had happened with Marty. I think it's because
Speaker 4: she figured out that whatever it was that Marty and
Speaker 4: Russ were digging into in ninety five is everywhere, and
Speaker 4: it potentially implicates even her new husband, and so she's
Speaker 4: just kind of decided that in order to cope with
Speaker 4: the scope of all this, she's just gonna not look
Speaker 4: into it. And the final thing I'll say about when
Speaker 4: it comes to police corruption and some of these more
Speaker 4: minor characters that tend to get overlooked to her. I
Speaker 4: think really essential to figuring out the dynamics of how
Speaker 4: this whole cover up works is that there's a series
Speaker 4: of majors throughout the progression from ninety five to twenty twelve.
Speaker 4: The first major's Casata. He's just kind of like, you know,
Speaker 4: a company man. He's not pernicious, he just wants to
Speaker 4: keep his bosses happy. But then when we come to
Speaker 4: two thousand and two, before when Rust resigns or quits,
Speaker 4: the new major is this guy named Leroy Salter, and
Speaker 4: he's clearly corrupt. I think he knows all exactly what's
Speaker 4: going on because he starts gaslighting Rust. So he says, well,
Speaker 4: I'm going to have you for a mental exhaustion. He
Speaker 4: writes up a report where he says that Rust is manic.
Speaker 4: So he's deliberately trying to attack Rust's reliability by claiming
Speaker 4: that he's mentally ill. And he slips up because in
Speaker 4: one of the scenes when Salter is grilling Rust and
Speaker 4: Marty telling them that they're not going to be allowed
Speaker 4: to look into any of these missing persons, Well, one
Speaker 4: of the guys, there's Commander Space, who's the one who
Speaker 4: wears the blue uniform. He was there all the way
Speaker 4: in ninety five. Spiece is the guy who accompanies Tuttle
Speaker 4: when they introduce the Task Force, and Speace to me
Speaker 4: is part of the colt also because he has the
Speaker 4: evil eye on Marty and Cole the entire time. And
Speaker 4: it's Space who tells Cole after Cole had gone to
Speaker 4: confront Tuttle. He says, well, you know, Cole says, I
Speaker 4: didn't brace him or something, and he says, well, it's
Speaker 4: not for you to decide what kind of conversation it is.
Speaker 4: So it's clear that Space is taking orders from the
Speaker 4: COLT from the beginning, because he's the one who basically
Speaker 4: wants to take the case off the hands of Marty
Speaker 4: and Rust all the way back in ninety five with
Speaker 4: the Task Force, and then in two thousand and two,
Speaker 4: he's the one there who's basically enjoying the fact that
Speaker 4: Salter is stonewalling and driving Rust to a point of
Speaker 4: frustration where he's just going to leave the department altogether.
Speaker 4: But Salter says to Rust during one of these confrontations,
Speaker 4: he says, oh, what do you want us to do?
Speaker 4: You know, put out like an app or something like
Speaker 4: on all missing persons within a ten mile radius of Walmart,
Speaker 4: and like, look, we're gonna go after Sam Walmart. Well,
Speaker 4: in the episode that comes later, when Russ takes Marty
Speaker 4: to the storage shed to show him all of his evidence,
Speaker 4: including the font No Snuff tape, it turns out that
Speaker 4: Rust had shown that all these disappearances occur within a
Speaker 4: ten mile radius of the charter schools, the Tuttle schools,
Speaker 4: and I don't think it's coincidental that it's ten miles.
Speaker 4: So I think what happened, in effect, is that Salter
Speaker 4: knew that these disappearances were localized within a ten mile radius,
Speaker 4: but he just changed the location to mock it. So
Speaker 4: rather than saying, well, let's look at a ten mile
Speaker 4: radius within all these Tuttle schools, he tried to kind
Speaker 4: of gaslight Rust and make a joke of it by saying, oh, well,
Speaker 4: why don't we look within a ten mile radius of
Speaker 4: all the Walmarts. So he clearly, I think, knew what was.
Speaker 1: Going on, all right.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to think if there's you let me know,
Speaker 3: is there any specific spots you really want to analyze
Speaker 3: before we go into the third part of this, where
Speaker 3: we kind of go into the why of the revelation
Speaker 3: of the method.
Speaker 1: I think we could.
Speaker 3: We could probably spend you know, you know, quite a
Speaker 3: bit of time going through anecdotal examples. It's kind of
Speaker 3: hard to prevent yourself doing it. But it's almost I
Speaker 3: don't know, there's so many different spots you can pick
Speaker 3: and be like, oh, this is just like this thing,
Speaker 3: is just like that thing. So I don't know if
Speaker 3: there's anything along those lines you want to go into
Speaker 3: before we move into the next part, which is kind
Speaker 3: of the just kind of theories on how this even
Speaker 3: got made, why it got made. But I don't know
Speaker 3: if there's anything you want to add to that. It's
Speaker 3: kind of to support that before we get to that
Speaker 3: last act, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So just I mean, by way of summary,
Speaker 4: some of the key aspects or components of revelation of
Speaker 4: the method in this show, so far as I can
Speaker 4: see it, one would be the police corruption that we're
Speaker 4: discussing the idea of the command structure being a mechanism
Speaker 4: by which they derail these investigations. And that's even what
Speaker 4: Jerraci said on the Fishing Boat. He says, well, when
Speaker 4: childrens told me not to look into the font note
Speaker 4: disappearance of what I was supposed to do is the
Speaker 4: chain of command, right, I was falling. Chain of command.
Speaker 4: That's how it works. So there's the police corruption and
Speaker 4: the idea that the cult infiltrates the police and law
Speaker 4: enforcement and the judicial system and basically weaponizes the command
Speaker 4: structure to shut down all these investigations through the chain
Speaker 4: of command. That's one thing. The other related thing, which
Speaker 4: I didn't really come to is this issue about blackmail
Speaker 4: and extortion and compromise, because of course that comes to
Speaker 4: the surface with regard to the tunnel being in possession
Speaker 4: of the font no snuff film. Rust himself is the
Speaker 4: one who says, well, he was probably bumped off by
Speaker 4: other people in the colt because he became a liability
Speaker 4: when they figured out that the snuff film that he
Speaker 4: had been in possession of was lost. So the show
Speaker 4: already openly talks about the idea of there being blackmail
Speaker 4: and extortion. Ye. But one thing that a friend of mine,
Speaker 4: Brett Corolla from Syap Cinema, drew to my attention is
Speaker 4: he was telling me that apparently in the Redout Chili
Speaker 4: Pepper's biography, Anthony Kittis's biography, it's called Scar Tissue. Apparently
Speaker 4: there's some kind of incident that's recounted in there of
Speaker 4: a woman who's a sex operative, who is the daughter
Speaker 4: of a Louisiana chief of police. So what I wanted
Speaker 4: to say here is that when it comes to the
Speaker 4: world of extortion and blackmail and compromise, look at Marty.
Speaker 4: He has a pension for philandering, right. So the woman,
Speaker 4: the mistress that he has in ninety five, Lisa, the
Speaker 4: court stenographer. The way it's depicted is that she's when
Speaker 4: he scorns her, she out of revenge, tells Maggie about
Speaker 4: the affair. But what I'm saying is that when we
Speaker 4: know how the world really works, it turns out that
Speaker 4: some of these women are sex operatives. So another aspect
Speaker 4: of what's going on with the corruption and the command
Speaker 4: structure is that through also sex operatives like a woman
Speaker 4: like Lisa, or like Beth who he reas with later
Speaker 4: at the T Mobile shop after he had first met
Speaker 4: her as a young girl at the Bunny Ranch. This
Speaker 4: is what we saw with Epstein, with like Glenn Maxwell
Speaker 4: and these other people. So a lot of the extortion
Speaker 4: in the blackmail is done through intelligence services, through honeypots,
Speaker 4: through sex operatives. And this is also how they maintain
Speaker 4: the corruption in the law enforcement. Is that if you're
Speaker 4: a genuinely good guy and they don't have leverage over
Speaker 4: you because you don't have a drug addiction, you don't
Speaker 4: have an alcohol addiction, you don't have gambling debts, you're
Speaker 4: not a closeted homosexual, you're not cheating on your spouse
Speaker 4: or whatever, they can't control you, right, So then what
Speaker 4: happens is they do in effect what they did to russ,
Speaker 4: which is they drive you out or they don't promote you.
Speaker 4: And so all they're going to do is promote the
Speaker 4: people who are either corrupt like Jerrasi, or people who
Speaker 4: happen to actually be from the cult itself. So the
Speaker 4: other example here is the guard from the prison who
Speaker 4: is a childress, who basically tells the guy Francis, who
Speaker 4: was going to divulge all this information about the Yellow King,
Speaker 4: to kill himself. So the other aspect is that another
Speaker 4: aspect of the revelation of the method I mean to
Speaker 4: say is that in addition to the world of blackmail
Speaker 4: and extortion and mk ultra stuff, you also have the
Speaker 4: sex operative angle. I think that's in there. And then
Speaker 4: the final bit is that the ritualistic component of all this,
Speaker 4: the Santa Ria, the Satanism, it's also controlled through the occult.
Speaker 4: The command structure is incest intergenerational incest. So that's the
Speaker 4: case obviously with Childress himself, who is the sun from
Speaker 4: one of the Tuttles, But it's also true it appears
Speaker 4: to be of Dora Lang herself, because actually, if you
Speaker 4: recall one of the early episodes when Marty and Russ
Speaker 4: go to interview Dora Lang's I think it's grandmother, there's
Speaker 4: a photograph that they look at of a young girl
Speaker 4: who's standing in front of these men who are on
Speaker 4: horseback with masks on. And when you look at the photograph,
Speaker 4: initially at the episode, you think maybe they're KKK people,
Speaker 4: but then you realize no, actually there in the same
Speaker 4: Marty Cross stuff that later on comes to be affiliated
Speaker 4: with all the Santa Ria voodoo stuff that they hear
Speaker 4: was going on at the Tuttle property from Dolores to Mate.
Speaker 4: So it appears what I'm saying is that actually Lang
Speaker 4: herself probably came from one of these intergenerational, abusive, incestuous
Speaker 4: families as well.
Speaker 3: God, there's one thing I want to point there, there
Speaker 3: was something the Jerracy I think is his name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he that guy.
Speaker 3: I feel like he's a worthwhile thing just to look at,
Speaker 3: to examine, because the one of the things I think
Speaker 3: people will be, you know, if we try to talk
Speaker 3: to NORMI is about something along these lines, they'll be like, well,
Speaker 3: how does this even happen? I think Jerrasy is a
Speaker 3: good example because it's very clear through you know, the
Speaker 3: interaction with him that he didn't know and really he
Speaker 3: could have very easily have been that could have been Marty,
Speaker 3: That really could have been the Marty character, that could
Speaker 3: have happened to Marty. I mean, I'd like to think
Speaker 3: that maybe Marty probably a slightly better character and it probably.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't happen to him.
Speaker 3: But really, I mean, it is just kind of a
Speaker 3: inatented in intentiveness, is really what you know, kind of
Speaker 3: the issue is here. I mean, that's I guess that's
Speaker 3: kind of almost a theme throughout because even with you know,
Speaker 3: somebody like a Jerrasi, it really is just kind of
Speaker 3: a okay, whatever, I'll take your word for it. Like,
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm sure he just didn't ask more questions.
Speaker 3: Maybe he thought something was weird, but it's like, hey,
Speaker 3: boss is saying this, Okay, who am I to question it?
Speaker 3: You just kind of you forget about it, and you
Speaker 3: just kind of you just assume everything's good and move
Speaker 3: on with life and just make that assumption and don't
Speaker 3: check even though you know there's that little voice in
Speaker 3: the back of your head that saying, I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe I should dot my I cross my tee.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: That's kind of and that obviously that plays into I
Speaker 3: think a lot of characters here, So I think I
Speaker 3: think maybe that was almost I think that definitely was
Speaker 3: a theme he was trying to make, and I think
Speaker 3: that kinda I do think that kinda is expressed through
Speaker 3: too Cole's little uh, you know, I won't look away again.
Speaker 3: I think that's that one little line that expresses it there,
Speaker 3: and it's kind of has another side of it too
Speaker 3: than just something inattentiveness. Although I guess even something is
Speaker 3: as crazy as like you know, looking as wanting to
Speaker 3: look deeper into things like I know, you know, SRA
Speaker 3: like satanic ritual abuse and stuff like that. I guess
Speaker 3: that kind of is like a shedding off in attentiveness,
Speaker 3: so because it is kind of like, I know, this
Speaker 3: stuff happens, and I think we need to be aware
Speaker 3: of it. So all right, let's get into the last
Speaker 3: portion here. It seems like you have some thoughts on
Speaker 3: why why this was made, how this was made, just
Speaker 3: kind of thoughts within that realm. I'm kind of interested
Speaker 3: to see what you have hooked cooked up because I
Speaker 3: haven't really looked too much into like the people made this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've looked a little bit into the writer.
Speaker 3: I know he's the one who wrote season one, two, three,
Speaker 3: I think, and I think that's it, and then four
Speaker 3: is like a new writer. I don't know enough. I've
Speaker 3: heard people I don't I don't know the source of it.
Speaker 3: I've heard people say he was inspired by the I
Speaker 3: can't think of it as a church scandal. It was
Speaker 3: a the Hosanna Churt scandal. I haven't heard anything else
Speaker 3: that he was specifically inspired by. I'm convinced, like one
Speaker 3: hundred percent he was inspired by Dudreux Fair. It just
Speaker 3: seems way too, way too close. But I mean, obviously
Speaker 3: there's a lot of other things that was inspired by.
Speaker 3: Uh just kind of I know, I just what what
Speaker 3: are your thoughts about?
Speaker 4: Where?
Speaker 1: Why? How? Why?
Speaker 3: I don't really know this is this to me is
Speaker 3: blew me away. This has even made I struggled to
Speaker 3: find an angle. I mean, I mean, even even if
Speaker 3: the things that happened like Pizzagate didn't happen shortly after,
Speaker 3: even absent all those things, is still kind of wild.
Speaker 3: This even I'm just blown away, this is even allowed
Speaker 3: to happen. So, I don't know, was there some sort
Speaker 3: of angle you think that somehow the powers that be
Speaker 3: were just like, oh, this won't be so explosive, or
Speaker 3: or or what. I just I struggle to wrap my
Speaker 3: head around the angle. It almost just seems like this
Speaker 3: one just slipped through. I don't know, you know, thoughts.
Speaker 4: I have a number of thoughts about this. The first
Speaker 4: thing to say is that I don't want to presume
Speaker 4: to be in a position to know what any particular
Speaker 4: person's intentions or making, including including Pisolado. So the analysis
Speaker 4: that I'm going to offer is deliberately just going to
Speaker 4: bracket any sort of speculation about any one part the
Speaker 4: person's motivations for making this, because I think you can
Speaker 4: still come to a considered view about how it was
Speaker 4: made and why with a degree of intention or a
Speaker 4: gentfuleness behind it, without having to say, well, this person
Speaker 4: was doing it for this reason, this person was doing
Speaker 4: it for that reason, we just don't know that. So
Speaker 4: with that out of the way, my view is that
Speaker 4: this is a classic case of revelation of the method.
Speaker 4: And in my view, that's a it's a form of
Speaker 4: psychological warfare, particularly what I call a form of demoralization.
Speaker 4: And this is a topic that I've explored, particularly with
Speaker 4: reference to film noir. And you think here of a
Speaker 4: film like nineteen seventy four is Chinatown by Roman Polanski,
Speaker 4: and Chinatown in some ways is very much a sort
Speaker 4: of guidepost for this film as well, because if you
Speaker 4: think about it, the sort of infamous conclusion to Chinatown
Speaker 4: is that Jake gittis Jack Nicholson character is essentially finds
Speaker 4: himself in a situation where he is forced to see
Speaker 4: the futility of knowing that everything he's done has been
Speaker 4: pointless because the evil in Los Angeles is so pervasive
Speaker 4: and so powerful that there's nothing he can do to
Speaker 4: stop it. And so in that regard, I call Chinatown
Speaker 4: a piece of demoralization because I think what Palanti was
Speaker 4: doing in the seventies was trying to accustom the audience
Speaker 4: to become apathetic to this kind of real world corruption
Speaker 4: by basically coming to see that if the events that
Speaker 4: are shown in a movie like Chinatown are truly representative
Speaker 4: of how the world really works, then what am I
Speaker 4: ever going to do about it? And so the idea
Speaker 4: is that these kinds of films and TV shows acclimate
Speaker 4: the audience to a level of corruption and immorality and
Speaker 4: evil that we just eventually take to be be beyond
Speaker 4: our control. And this comes out at the very end
Speaker 4: of True Detective because when Marty and Russ are talking
Speaker 4: to one another in the hospital room after Rust has
Speaker 4: woken up from his coma, one of the first things
Speaker 4: he says to Marty as well, we didn't get them all.
Speaker 4: And then Marty says, well, we didn't get them all,
Speaker 4: but that he says, that's just how it is in
Speaker 4: this kind of world. So it's a matter of interpretation.
Speaker 4: Do you spin it positively and say, well, Okay, he's
Speaker 4: being a realist but still in a way optimistic because
Speaker 4: we did get some of them and we should be
Speaker 4: happy about that. Or is this really actually a way
Speaker 4: of trying to condition people to accept the fact that
Speaker 4: we live in a world where these kind of people
Speaker 4: do get away. And so, I mean, if you think
Speaker 4: about Dutroux, no one other than Dutrow was ever arrested
Speaker 4: and prosecuted, and there was a string of murders. I
Speaker 4: think it's like twenty people related to the case who
Speaker 4: died in mysterious circumstances. It was a complete, complete.
Speaker 1: Cover handyman slash kidnapper. That's all he really was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the same thing with Sandusky at Penn State, right,
Speaker 4: It's the same thing with the finders called It's the
Speaker 4: same thing with Presidio. No prosecutions there. Michael Lakino and
Speaker 4: everybody he was working with got away. It's the same
Speaker 4: thing at the West Point Children's Hospital. Ruby Giuliani evidently,
Speaker 4: according to Dave Mcowan came in and actually led the
Speaker 4: DOJ team that covered that one up. No one was
Speaker 4: arrested there, Epstein, I mean, whatever happened to that? I
Speaker 4: rail about this all the time.
Speaker 1: Eteine files are coming though.
Speaker 4: Well that's the point, and so you talk about like
Speaker 4: managed expectations, right, So now they have the public six
Speaker 4: years on after he was arrested, thinking, well, success means
Speaker 4: getting the names of the people who did this? What
Speaker 4: about the arrests?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Right, So what I'm saying is true, Detective, The question is.
Speaker 1: Managing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what are we gaining by watching it? So I
Speaker 4: can watch this show where these two guys are supposed
Speaker 4: to be heroes, they get to the box of everything,
Speaker 4: But then what happens in real life? Nothing? So, for example,
Speaker 4: McConaughey is like Friends with the Clintons, But we know
Speaker 4: all about the Clintons and their involvement in Haiti and
Speaker 4: all the kinds of stuff the Clintons were involved in
Speaker 4: going back to Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Like a feed or some shit something.
Speaker 4: So I guess what I'm saying is, like my views,
Speaker 4: I'm cynical. Is that? Like? For example, if Matthew McConaughey
Speaker 4: and Woody Harrelson were genuinely serious about getting to the
Speaker 4: bottom of these kinds of things, and they really were
Speaker 4: bothered by the fact that these kinds of things happened
Speaker 4: in real life, then why would they just shoot a
Speaker 4: show eleven years ago and then just more or less
Speaker 4: move on with their lives and act like all the
Speaker 4: kinds of things that were shown in the show, aren't
Speaker 4: still really happening? Why would HBO allow for the show
Speaker 4: to be released? So I think we have to, you know,
Speaker 4: think critically suspiciously about what is really the function of
Speaker 4: this show showing us all this stuff about how the
Speaker 4: world really works, Because of course, the point is is
Speaker 4: that a lot of times those of us do this
Speaker 4: kind of research, we think we're winning by exposing them.
Speaker 4: And it could be that we expose certain things that
Speaker 4: they don't want exposed at a certain time, or that
Speaker 4: we expose maybe more than they would like. But they're
Speaker 4: in a way the masters of exposure. That's the whole
Speaker 4: idea behind Revelation of the Method, is that they're showing
Speaker 4: us things that we as researchers might naively think we're
Speaker 4: winning by exposing, They willingly, willfully expose it. My final
Speaker 4: thought about it, what's really going on is that spiritually
Speaker 4: Russ talks about, oh, the psychosphere and the atmosphere, and
Speaker 4: everyone marvels about how the season is very atmospheric and
Speaker 4: very moody, and that's true, and Rust and some of
Speaker 4: the other characters talk about how they can feel the
Speaker 4: pervasiveness of the cult that like, as Russ said, that
Speaker 4: they're like alligators swimming in a swamp, and they could
Speaker 4: be anywhere. So there's a what you could call an
Speaker 4: omnipotence fantasy. I think that's going on in the minds
Speaker 4: of these people who are involved in this kind of
Speaker 4: a cult satanic corruption, where they deliberately like to project
Speaker 4: that degree of power. This is exactly what Michael Hoffman
Speaker 4: says in his famous book that kind of really popularized
Speaker 4: the term revelation of the Method. Is that there's a
Speaker 4: kind of power that they gain by deliberately allowing the
Speaker 4: public to know that this cult does exist. But then
Speaker 4: people are left in the situation where we feel like
Speaker 4: there's nothing we can do about it. And so I
Speaker 4: think that True Detective being released in twenty fourteen was
Speaker 4: this sort of exercise and sort of a cult revelation
Speaker 4: of the Method, where these people who are in the know,
Speaker 4: who are really engaged in this kind of stuff, decided
Speaker 4: to project that power by deliberately putting out a very
Speaker 4: kind of rich, detailed account of how this all works
Speaker 4: and this moment. Where as they had said at the
Speaker 4: very outset of today's tonight's discussion, people like us who
Speaker 4: are aware of the parapolitical world, and the world of
Speaker 4: a cult, trauma and sexual satan and ritual abuse, and
Speaker 4: intelligence operations. We know about all these cases from the
Speaker 4: eighties and nineties. But the app viewer who's looking at
Speaker 4: this as just a piece of innocent HBO and entertainment,
Speaker 4: they've associated all the stuff that they're going to be
Speaker 4: seen in the show with the quote so called satanic panic.
Speaker 4: And so then what happens is the blurring between reality
Speaker 4: and entertainment is such that when someone like that views
Speaker 4: the episodes, they go, oh, well, the show is making
Speaker 4: reference to how things felt in the nineties coming out
Speaker 4: of the so called satanic panic, and in the world
Speaker 4: of the show, we're being shown that this kind of
Speaker 4: stuff really does happen, but of course this is just
Speaker 4: a show, right. So there's this like bifurcation where the
Speaker 4: average person watching the show says, well, the show is
Speaker 4: referencing the fact that there was this apparent awareness in
Speaker 4: the eighties in real life that these things happened, but
Speaker 4: in the world of the show we're shown that, yes,
Speaker 4: they do really happen, but this is just a show,
Speaker 4: so ergo, they don't actually really happen. But of course,
Speaker 4: as we know they do, so I think there's this
Speaker 4: kind of feedback loop where the interaction action between real
Speaker 4: life stories and their depiction in cinema and television starts
Speaker 4: confusing people about what really is actual and what really isn't.
Speaker 4: But the overall kind of spiritual motivation behind in my view,
Speaker 4: why they do this is that it's ultimately, I think,
Speaker 4: designed to just get people to settle for less the
Speaker 4: idea that, as Marty says, well, we can't get them all.
Speaker 4: This is just the kind of world that it is.
Speaker 4: So it's ultimately, I think about getting us to resign
Speaker 4: ourselves to the fact that we shouldn't care. We shouldn't
Speaker 4: look into it, we should look away, because what's the
Speaker 4: point in looking into it? You're just gonna end up
Speaker 4: like get us at the end of Chinatown. There's no point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's there's something to that, But I
Speaker 3: think that they're they're you know, with all things in life,
Speaker 3: I think perspective matters, and I think, you know, kind
Speaker 3: of what we're describing when we're talking about revelation in
Speaker 3: the method is kind of an essentially is a limiting
Speaker 3: a limited hangout.
Speaker 1: Essentially, in a certain sense, it's a.
Speaker 3: Seating of the narrative ground by the powers that be
Speaker 3: there for whatever reason is they feel that they need to,
Speaker 3: you know, do exposure in whatever given thing and whatever.
Speaker 3: Give an example we're looking at the time. It's almost
Speaker 3: like a letting off of the relief valve. So just
Speaker 3: a simple idea that they have that they're doing it,
Speaker 3: I think is you can look at it as like
Speaker 3: this is a good thing. Obviously they're gonna try to
Speaker 3: they're trying to see a different spot in the narrative game.
Speaker 3: They're trying to dig their heels in there. But you know, hey, whatever,
Speaker 3: it's a slippage on their part. And so that's one
Speaker 3: way to look at it. And I think even on
Speaker 3: the in the new particular of the show, maybe maybe
Speaker 3: you're right, maybe there is the idea was from certain
Speaker 3: powers that this was resign us to complacency of like, oh,
Speaker 3: there's nothing we can do. But I would argue that
Speaker 3: the the theme and the the major themes of this
Speaker 3: story kind of buck against that. Obviously we you know,
Speaker 3: obviously we just mentioned at the very end they go, oh,
Speaker 3: we can't get them all and then we just But
Speaker 3: I think most people even agree when that happens you
Speaker 3: feel bizarre. That feels bizarre. This feels not right. It
Speaker 3: doesn't feel like it fits. It doesn't seem to fit
Speaker 3: the characters. I mean, if it's Mard, I mean, although
Speaker 3: that kind of doesn't fit his character arc, like because
Speaker 3: I think by the end of his arc that should
Speaker 3: the ideas that this would no longer be something. He's
Speaker 3: no longer supposed to be complacent, He's no longer supposed
Speaker 3: to be this person.
Speaker 1: I don't think it fits.
Speaker 3: And and I think the theme and you know, the
Speaker 3: idea of like you know, I won't look away again,
Speaker 3: or the lack, you know, being attentive, paying attention to
Speaker 3: what matters, I think all of those are themes that
Speaker 3: buck against it. So I would like to think that
Speaker 3: I don't know whether it's the writer himself or other
Speaker 3: people within it. Somehow, I think, you know, they found
Speaker 3: a way to put their spin on it while you know,
Speaker 3: while also maybe doing you know, doing the revelation the method.
Speaker 3: So it's almost like they they snuck in a secret
Speaker 3: meaning into the art that I think. I don't know,
Speaker 3: I think it matters, and I think people pay attention
Speaker 3: to analyze the show, they can get that from it
Speaker 3: and we can kind of get something positive out of
Speaker 3: it instead of something negative, regardless of how it was
Speaker 3: designed to be put out or what the the intent
Speaker 3: of it was. So but with that, Stephen, I think
Speaker 3: this has been a this has been a great episode.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3: I'd be happy to have you on again. So with that,
Speaker 3: let people know where they can find. You've got anything,
Speaker 3: you're working on, any books, any projects whatever. I think
Speaker 3: you said you had a burkie where you were just
Speaker 3: wrote or something along those lines. That would be a
Speaker 3: good time to let my audience know about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, as I said, I've been working on film
Speaker 4: noir recently. I have a serial that's being printed in
Speaker 4: Cultural Engineering Studies. The first issue came out last year.
Speaker 4: It's now available in a limited print run. It's a
Speaker 4: three part series. The first two parts focused primarily on Chinatown.
Speaker 4: Issue Too will be coming out in April, and then
Speaker 4: the third part of the essay will be focusing on
Speaker 4: You're at the Dragon and then in a classic noir
Speaker 4: film called Where the Sidewalk Ends. That will be put
Speaker 4: up on the Decoding Culture Foundation website. That's the foundation
Speaker 4: that runs the magazine. It's all run by the guys
Speaker 4: at SI UP Cinema Bretton Thomas, So, I highly encourage
Speaker 4: everybody to go check out Cultural Engineering Studies. It's really
Speaker 4: fantastic magazine with a ton of really great researchers who
Speaker 4: did good work for it, Jason Horsley, Jay Dyer, Jamie Hanshaw,
Speaker 4: the Collins Brothers. So I've been working on film noir stuff,
Speaker 4: and yeah, I have a monograph that'll be out hopefully
Speaker 4: this year, a philosophy monograph. But all my books you
Speaker 4: can find them at my publishers. You can also find
Speaker 4: them on my websitesevendelay dot com. And then I maintain
Speaker 4: a Twitter account, sort of minor small account, but I
Speaker 4: could always be reached there as well.
Speaker 3: So all right, well, appreciate you coming on the show
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Speaker 3: Make sure you follow me on Twitter at Targing Jose.
Speaker 3: Appreciate you guys support the show, helping us do what
Speaker 3: we do over here, and with that we are out
Speaker 3: of here by