'what a blessing it is to be moved'

a quickie

on what’s moved me lately (x)

(CW for sexual assault. and spoilers for true detective s1.)

/ True Detective Season One

“I don’t like this place. Nothing grows in the right direction.”

I told y’all months ago that I would rewatch True Detective, and then we could talk about it. But honestly, I think I could watch it 1,000 times and write 100 essays and still not come close to processing. People talk about True Detective (season one) a lot. The expectations of it, the storytelling, the performances. It’s always in conversation in viral discussions: best television scene, best television actor, best television character. I listened to McConaughey’s memoir on audio while road-tripping with my dad last week, and I never shut up about True Detective, and how special it is to me.

I talk a lot about one scene in particular, in the second episode. Rust, in the present day, in the police station, is talking about his daughter, who was killed in an accident when she was 3 years old. And he says that now, sometimes, he’s grateful. Because he thinks about what she was spared.

We talk about True Detective. But when I watched True Detective, I found it impossible to articulate or discuss. Rust articulates it. And all of those engagement-bate discussions…there isn’t a “best scene.” It’s all woven together: glimpses, moments, lines. “Nothing grows in the right direction.” “Someone once told me, ‘time is a flat circle.’ Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” “I contemplate the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.”

“This place. It’s like you eat your young.”

“That little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again. And again. And again. Forever.”

“As for my daughter…she spared me the sin of being a father.”

None of these moments would be as impactful without the next, the surrounding imagery, and connections. Rust says: everything we do, we do over and over again. And we watch. We watch him stand at the same crime scene for 17 years. We watch him carry a dead child, over again. We watch him walk up to a dinner party, on repeat.

Nic Pizzolatto, who created True Detective, and wrote every episode of season one, said, “Nobody was gonna let me make a TV series that was just about two men riding around talking, so I put murder in there.”

And still, it is about two men riding around talking. It’s about liminal space, what happens on the walk to the front door. It’s about Rust saying that he will not look away. It’s about Marty breaking down sobbing, in the end, in the hospital, when he wakes up and Rust hasn’t.

I think that what I can’t let go of, about True Detective, is Rust’s articulations. Stories that stay with me are always the ones that don’t look away. I guess it’s kind of bleak, or jarring.

But in the end, it’s Marty carrying Rust out to the car. Riding around talking.

RUST: You know, you’re looking at it wrong. The sky thing.

MARTY: How is that?

RUST: Well, once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.

/ Californication ‘Fear and Loathing at the Fundraiser’

BECCA: Remember what you used to do for me when I couldn’t sleep?

HANK: Dose you with opiates?

BECCA: No. You’d look at the ocean and count the mermaids.

HANK: I did do that.

I put this season one episode on randomly before bed the other night, and keep turning this moment around in my head. Mostly, the delivery. The look that washes over Hank’s face, when he pauses, takes a breath, and says “I did do that.”

I keep turning it around in my head, because…he’s remembering. You can see, in that look. And unlike most reminiscence in this series (which excelled mostly in its flashback episodes), he isn’t remembering the “Before.” Before the drinking got so bad. Before Karen met Bill, and left. Before all of the women. The Good Old Days when everyone was together, and everything was good, that every character is always talking about. He’s remembering himself.

Hank Moody was a character defined in self-hatred (a well-repeated line from both Charlie and Karen was always: “the self-loathing is strong in you tonight”)- that’s what makes the hijinks fun to watch. Flagellation as gratification. But he hasn’t always been the perpetual fuck-up who lost it all, he was once the dad who stayed up to count mermaids. And he’s still the dad who stays up to count mermaids, weaving in jokes between Becca’s giggles.

This show, and this character, decays. Each season a little sillier, a little more depraved. In the first year’s California Son, Hank’s dad tells him, “You’re not going in the right direction.” It becomes something of a thesis statement.

I love the illustration of this progression, I love the devolution. The way that the first time Becca ever broke down and yelled at her dad, he turned down a woman’s advances that night. “I've just got a little too much of my daughter's voice running around in my head right now to be good company for anybody.”

In season four, when she breaks down sobbing in front of him that she just needs “a fucking father,” the episode hard-cuts to him being slid a drink.

The first time she broke up with her boyfriend, Hank missed his flight to New York to come hold her while she cried. “I can always get one tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next day. There’s no place I’d rather be.”

Less than a year later, the next break-up, he asked her, “Where the fuck was I?” (Her answer: “You went home and got drunk. For a month.”)

I’m touched by the deterioration. The gap between “There’s no place I’d rather be” and “Where the fuck was I?”

But maybe more affective is the remembrance. Is falling asleep on the porch, counting mermaids.

“I don’t think that he changed. I think his focus changed. To me this show was always about this guy getting his family right. It was always a matter of a guy not changing, but remembering who he really was.” - David Duchovny

/ House M.D. ‘One Day, One Room’

HOUSE: You’re gonna base your whole life on who you got stuck in a room with?

EVE: I’m gonna base this moment on who I’m stuck in a room with. That’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms. And who we get stuck in those rooms with, adds up to what our lives are.

Y’all, network television has always been its own beast, when will we return to respecting that? I will never forget this episode. I haven’t been able to shake it since watching, and its become an all-timer for me.

When One Day, One Room opens, it’s already a break from the format. Rather than a cold-open introducing the case-of-the-week, the first person that you see is Doctor House, trying unsuccessfully to get out of clinic duty. He tests three people for STDs, and one comes back positive, a young woman who starts crying, and jumps to be touched.

HOUSE: I need someone to cover a patient.

CUDDY: House, you’re committed to-

HOUSE: She was raped. Think I’m the right doctor for her?

The description of House M.D. on Amazon Video opens with this line: “Dr. Gregory House is devoid of bedside manner and wouldn't even talk to his patients if he could get away with it.”

That’s the whole concept of the show, right? He’s Sherlock Holmes. He’s brilliant. He doesn’t meet his patients. It’s why one of the most compelling episodes of the series is Euphoria, when Foreman is the dying patient, and House can’t handle it. Wilson says that it’s dangerous, for House to see patients. Because if he met them, he would care about them.

In One Day, One Room no one wants the “devoid of bedside manner” doctor to take the rape case. And it’s senseless, anyway, because there is no case. House says it himself: “The fact that you were raped holds no interest for me. It’s nothing personal. There’s nothing to treat. You’re physically healthy.”

But the patient, Eve, wants him. He was the first person that she told. She trusts him.

HOUSE: She doesn't know what she wants.

CAMERON: She knows she wants you. You're the first person she spoke to about this.

HOUSE: Fact that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, should be trumped by the fact that I'm useless at this.

CAMERON: No, you're not.

House M.D. is a serialized procedural. It follows a typical case-of-the-week format, and every episode goes relatively the same. The mystery disease, the differential diagnosis, the trial and error, the eureka moment, the final treatment. It isn’t lupus, it isn’t sarcoidosis either. Any fluctuating variable depends on how badly House’s leg hurts that week, how many pills he’s taking.

When Eve comes into the clinic, there isn’t anything wrong with her. There’s no mystery, no differential, nothing to be solved. There’s no “puzzle” for House, and everyone will tell you that House only cares about the puzzle, not the people.

The only thing that can be done for Eve is for her to talk to someone, share what happened to her, have time, community, and connection. But she doesn’t want the psychiatrist, and she doesn’t want another doctor. She only wants to talk about “nothing,” and she only wants to do it with House.

I think my favorite moment of this series might be when he stops arguing with her. He stops lying to her. He stops trying out different methods, different calculated approaches, different attempts to maneuver her. Different forms of treatment. And he just asks if she wants to go on a walk.

HOUSE: It was true. Wasn't my grandmother, but it was true.

EVE: Who was it?

HOUSE: It was my dad.

[They sit quietly for a few seconds.]

EVE: I'd like to tell you what happened to me now.

HOUSE: I'd like to hear it.

In the end, the only thing that helps, is House sharing his own abuse with her.

That’s what this episode is to me. It’s a character who doesn’t meet his patients, because he couldn’t help them if he knew them, left with a patient he can only help by knowing. It’s a character who can save or fix or figure out anyone, in a situation he can’t heal. It’s the abandonment of the puzzle.

One Day, One Room deviates entirely from the premise of its show, in favor of giving a survivor the only thing that they could, and knowing it isn’t enough. Ultimately, House denies having helped her. He never agrees that she’s going to “be okay.” It’s more personal to him than most know.

But he took the day, he took her on a walk. He tried everything, and eventually landed on being honest with her, connecting with her. Learning.

WILSON: You gonna follow up with her?

HOUSE: One day. One room.