The Dora Lange Archive: Jacques Derrida Watches True Detective

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The Dora Lange Archive: Jacques Derrida Watches True Detective

Jens Christian Borrebye Bjering and Isak Winkel Holm

[pre-print, Journal of Popular Culture, 49(4), 2016, 705-721]

“Nothing is thus more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this word ‘archive’” (Derrida Archive Fever, 90). So writes Jacques Derrida towards the end of his long meditation on the archive in his Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The frustration or even unfairness that such an assertion is expressed at the end of a book on the archive, and even a complicated and hard book, seems to be a part of Derrida's point: no matter how long and winding the road, we can never arrive at a solution to the trouble archived in this word "archive." And such a point could arguably also be applied to the highly acclaimed first season ofthe HBO crime series True Detective authored by Nic Pizzolatto: no matter how long and winding the road towards solving the murder of a young woman, Dora Lange, we will never truly get to the bottom of it all.True Detective does not even begin with the problem of a murder case, but with the problem of how to archive the facts of an already solved murder case.

In 1995, the two Louisiana State Police Detectives Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey) presumably solved a case involving the ritual murder of a young female prostitute, Dora Lange. In the present of the narrative, the two now former Detectives are interviewed by Detectives Maynard Gilbough and Thomas Papania (Michael Potts and Tory Kittles) with the intention of reconstructing the archive of the case, the original archives being lost in a hurricane: "Files got ruined. Hurricane Rita."

As viewers will know,True Detective is, in a sense, two shows in one: roughly the first five episodes are a frame narrative taking place in 2012, with the two detectives sitting in separate interview rooms, meticulously recounting how they shot and killed Dora Lange's killer, Reggie Ledoux, back in 1995. Around episode five, however, we come to realize that Ledoux was not the actual killer, and that the story we have spent five episodes following was nothing but a red herring: the killer is still out there, still killing. After this realization, the detectives leave their respective interview rooms, the frame narrative breaks down as the story moves fully into the narrative present, and they eventually team up to, once again, catch the Dora Lange killer. The show’s archival problem turns out to be also a narrative problem and, as we will show, a political problem.

The question of the archive undoubtedly plays a role in most, if not all police procedurals; as the criminal case is investigated, the well-known whiteboard in the incident room at the police station fills up with images of faces, bodies, and cars, and with maps, names, and documents.[1] Any police investigation involves an archiving practice, a technique for handling, recording, and storing information about a crime. However, in True Detective, the archiving practice has moved from the background to the foreground of the story with the whole show being predicated on the fundamental precariousness of the archive and the archiving practice—on a constant back and forth between rigorous documentation and archival disaster. In the case of True Detective, the archive is therefore not just a neutral tool in the investigation, it is in itself a problem to be investigated. If the sub-genre of the police procedural is defined by the stress on the methods and procedures of police investigations (Scaggs 93), in this case, the stress concentrates on the methods and procedures of archiving.

The Dora Lange Archive

The first scene of episode one--the interrogation of ex-Detective Martin Hart--begins with a shot of a camera set up to film the interrogation, signaling the beginning of archiving. On the lens of the camera the word "REC" flashes in bright red, undersigning and almost demanding importance as the very first word of the episode, the season, and the show. The second scene, the interrogation of Detective Rustin Cohle, also plays with the techniques and aesthetics of archives with the aged Cohle sitting in an interview room in front of old case files, printers, typewriters, computer screens, and hard disks. Both scenes highlight the modern and not-so-modern technology used for handling, recording, and storing information—that is, they highlight the archive and the technologies that go in to creating it.

The third scene of episode one, the first one in a series of flashbacks central to the show's narrative structure, takes place in a field where the body of Dora Lange is found murdered. The dead woman is naked, wearing a pair of antlers as a makeshift crown, blindfolded, painted with mysterious tattoo-like symbols, and suspended in a kneeling, prayer-like position facing a huge tree. When Hart and Cohle see the body, they start their forensic archiving practice; Hart by taking photos of the victim with a small digital camera and Cohle by making a free-hand drawing in his notebook.

In this and subsequent episodes, the detectives' main task is archiving: of attempting to gather and organize every relevant nugget of information into one coherent story or timeline of the events that led up to the murder. As if to stress both the task and the skill of archiving, Detective Hart in episode one explains to Detectives Gilbough and Papania that Cohle's way of doing police work earned him a peculiar nickname from his colleagues in the department: "That's why they called him The Taxman. The rest of us had these little note pads or something. He had this big ledger. Looked funny walking door to door with it like the tax man, which ain't bad as far as nicknames go." "Taxman" is, of course, the perfect name for a master archivist, since tax accounting consists of archiving all and everything into one big archive to make possible correct taxation. But even though this name seems to imply that the archiving practice works exactly as it should—that it works perfectly, in fact—there is something slightly off-putting in Hart's characterization: we learn that the nickname was Cohle'sback then, establishing thatthe days of the Taxman are over.

Hart's description of Cohle with its subtle past tense thus awakens a suspicion that this smooth archival activity has somehow gone wrong or is not quite as perfect anymore. And, as it turns out, this is not an empty threat; in fact, Hart’s past tense appears to be a preview to the season, as the viewer comes to realize that the detectives' archiving practice and the problems they encounter end up being the major theme of the whole season. True Detective is thus not only filled with archival activity, but also haunted by an incessant questioning of this activity, questions specifically about what should be included in the archive of the criminal investigation and questions about the very reality of the world in which this archiving takes place.

Archival Problems

The first problem of what should be included in the detectives' archive relates to what we will call its temporal extension. As we follow Hart and Cohle on their trips into the bayou, we quickly realize that the murder of Dora Lange is not the only problem from which South Louisiana suffers.Instead, it is the latest tragedy in what appears to be an endless series of tragedies that has befallen the land. The landscape is a chaotic swamp in which everything seems to live in the shadow of past disasters, a desolate region already destroyed by violent hurricanes and by monstrous oil extraction facilities long before the events of the show. The landscape in True Detective therefore appears as the sad remains of an event that never takes place in the narrative present, but always already has taken place; a destructive event of an irretrievable past that, for all its non-presence, keeps dominating the present moment.[2] And as we continue into the wilderness with Cohle and Hart and meet the inhabitants of the small settlements, the sense of a colossal decay always already having taken place is only confirmed. Appearing as the embodied negative stereotype of the American South, the people of Louisiana are presented as unclean, badly dressed, sickly, fundamentalist Christian, sexually abhorrent, and with no respect for any law but that of tradition. Here again the viewer never gets to see any of the dilapidated buildings (or people for that matter) before they reach their present sorry state. Rural Louisiana is almost a post-apocalyptic world, a world that went to ashes long ago—or, as Detective Cohle says, it is "like someone's memory of a town. And the memory's fading. It's like there was never anything here but jungle."

The absence of the events that nonetheless define the topology and socio-economic conditions of rural Louisiana seems to be the template for the way the past works in True Detective:It is as if the many flashbacks in the first five episodes never reach far enough back in time to arrive at the primordial event which started the chain of events culminating with the murder of Dora Lange. For every stone Hart and Cohle turn, an older stone newly appears, threatening to destabilize not only their investigation but also the structure of the archive and the narrative itself. The past remains an endless trove of new questions, of new ghosts; and Detectives Hart and Cohle remain modern day Horatios, scholars in the field of crime charging these ghosts to "Stay, speak, speak," as Horatio does to the ghost of Hamlet's father.

However, the hurricanes and the general state of the region do not just create problems concerning the temporal extension of the archive. They are also a symptom of another archival problem, namely of what we will call the archive's topical extension, i.e. how much material and how many of the plethora of people the detectives meet should be included in their murder archive. It thus quickly becomes unclear to both the viewer and to Hart and Cohle whether they are investigating the singular murder of Dora Lange, or if, in fact, they are investigating a satanic cult with connections to the very top of society, since Billy Lee Tuttle, founder of Tuttle Ministries, a number of evangelical schools, and presumably the arch villain of the series,happens to be the cousin of Louisiana governor Edwin Tuttle. The implication and danger with regards to the latter is, of course, that the investigation ends up being an attempt to outline the disaster at the very core of the fictional Louisiana; the whodunnit of a single murder threatens at every turn to become the whodunnit of a whole state.

The ever-present threat of an uncontrollable extension of the Dora Lange archive has a direct bearing on Hart's and Cohle's investigation. Many of the people the two detectives interview thus have serious illnesses that often manifest both physically and cognitively. In episode one, the detectives seek out the uncle of a missing child, the ten-year-old Marie Fontenot, whose disappearance five years ago may in some way be linked to Dora Lange's murder. They find the uncle lying wretched on a couch, clearly marked by serious illness and unable to speak properly, perhaps another victim of the satanic cult. His wife tells the detectives, "All they ever told us was a cerebral event. A series of strokes." In episode two the trend of inexplicable illnesses continues when the detectives meet a woman who shakes incessantly and claims she "get[s] these headaches. It's like storms."

This link between a disaster-struck region, individual pathology, and the detectives' frustrated attempts at archiving tells the viewer that the neat micro-narrative of a single murder—which is arguably the normal template for police procedurals—is not tenable; every person or site investigated seems to open up to new persons and sites, spreading the archive of the case as rings in the water. With this constant extension, the viewer is tossed into a strange and immensely wider series of symbolic and literal deterioration in which the solving of one crime necessarily links to, or is even predicated on, far larger questions about the general state of the state of Louisiana.

Writer Nic Pizzolatto has discussed this aspect of the show in several interviews, for instance by commenting on the members of the satanic cult that Hart and Cohle are able to discern in a horrendous snuff video from one of their sex rituals: "I think it would have rang false to have Hart and Cohle suddenly clean up 50 years of the culture history that led to Errol Childress, or to get all the men in that video. It's important to me, I think, that Cohle says, 'We didn't get em all, Marty,' and Marty says, 'We ain't going to. This isn't that kind of world.' This isn't the kind of world where you mop up everything. We discharged our duty, but of course there are levels and wheels and historical contexts to what happened that we'll never be able to touch" (Sepinwall).[3]What Pizzolatto here identifies as part of the philosophy behind the show is essentially archival problems, namely the temporal and topical extensions of the investigation into still wider circles in time and space that prevent Cohle and Hart's work from ever being complete or finished.

As if the above problems of the archive were not enough, Detective Cohle also appears to be struggling with the fabric of reality itself. At several points during the season he has strange, dreamlike visions or hallucinations that are visualized on screen and mentioned by him. The official explanation for this phenomenon is linked to Cohle's assignment before coming to Louisiana, where he spent four harrowing years as an undercover narcotics agent. The neural damage caused by the drug addiction he developed during this assignment still makes him suffer from chemical flashbacks.

The first example of such a hallucination occurs already in episode one. Sitting in the passenger side of the car, Cohle watches a girl, of approximately ten years, standing at a gas station waving at the car. Visibly shocked he asks Hart: "You believe in ghosts?" As it occurs, there are reasons to believe that the waving girl is a ghost: in a scene shortly after, the local sheriff shows Hart and Cohle a photo of the missing ten-year-old Marie Fontenot who is in fact identical or at least hauntingly similar to the girl at the gas station.

Visions of ghosts not only occur in direct connection with Cohle's hallucinations. In episode six, Cohle interviews one of Reggie Ledoux's surviving victims, a teenage girl now institutionalized with "regressive catatonia." He tries to make the girl describe some of the men that abused her, but after a while, she suddenly perceives him as if he were her third attacker and starts screaming.This time,then, Cohle himself takes on the role of the ghost, as if not only the reality of his perceptions were questioned, but also the reality of his actual being.[4]As a piece of noir crime fiction, True Detective tells the story of a katabasis in which the hero descents into an underworld peopled by ghosts (Lloyd).

But ghosts are not only the only thing that Cohle sees. During one of his and Hart's many car rides through the barren landscape in episode three, he remarks: "Place is going to be under water within thirty years." Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Cohle is haunted by visions of future disasters, and looking back at the time before he got clean, he explains: "Back then, the visions . . . most of the time I was convinced that I'd lost it. But there were other times I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe." By mainlining the secret truth of the universe, Cohle gains access to a privileged knowledge about the world, and this privileged knowledge is the knowledge about future disasters. When in an earlier vision he sees a flock of starlings swirl into a hurricane-like formation similar to the symbol on the body of Dora Lange it is as if he can read nature itself, and as if nature, when viewed by his prophetic mind, is an archive of its own impending destruction.

We are thus left with two sets of archive problems, one concerning, broadly speaking, the temporal and topical extension of the archive, and one regarding the very reality of the archive and the reality that this archive documents and exists in. At first glance, only the first problem seems to be related to the actual Dora Lange case, while the second problem seems to be of a more metaphysical type and part of Cohle's Schopenhaurian or Nietzschean ramblings. Yet, read through the archival theory of Jacques Derrida, they are not only interrelated; both problems pertain to the solving of the Dora Lange case.

Archival Breakdown