Rust, though a better actor, is less at home in the unadorned lie, because he is visibly conscious of complexity. (Marty: “There is nowhere else I want to be.” Maggie: “I wonder if you even know you’re lying.”) Marty can be unequivocally duplicitous because he is so simple. As in other contexts, Marty here does not recognize ambiguity, only exigency. Speaking of the Ledoux raid, he says this like he means it: “You know why the story’s always the same, seventeen years gone? Because it only went down the one way.” Between Marty and Rust, in this instance, Marty appears the more comfortable liar. One thing we re-learn here is that Marty is a very simple reader and teller, with a genius for suppressing ambiguity. Marty’s recognition of Rust’s reading skills brings us to this episode’s great set-piece, the raid on Ledoux’s cook house with collaborative voiceover from two lying detectives. At any rate, the cops should not take it lightly. (The one asking the questions is not always the one getting the answers.) We cannot know yet how significant this iswhether the “read” Rust wanted was just a glimpse at the discovery file on the Lake Charles murders, or whether he suspect the 2012 cops (“company men”) of involvement in a collusive bureaucracy.
But note again the power-inversion: Rust is doing to the 2012 cops what Francis had done to him in 2002. Marty says as much when warning the 2012 cops about their “consultation”: “If you two talked to Rust, you weren’t gettin’ a read on him, he was gettin’ a read on you.” That is the familiar M.O. Francis has gotten a read on Rust and used it to manipulate him. He knows exactly who you are.” But this is not reassuring. Other cops in attendance seek to lower the stakes by assuring Rust that Francis was making a cynical play: “He’s shuckin’ and jivin’. Y’all never caught the man that did that. I know about that woman y’all found out in the woods. Until Francis seeks a deal, using his own knowledge as power: “I know who you are. He has boasted before that he never needed more than ten minutes to determine whether his subject was guilty or not, and here he is doing his thing and making clear where the power lies. In a 2002 incident recalled in this episode, Rust extracts a confession of double homicide from a PCP addict named Guy Leonard Francis. It is important that his interrogation subjects not get an accurate read on his attitudes and motivations. It’s catharsis.” No less than the bombastic preacher, Rust is performative. Rust’s template for interrogation is the one he once applied to the old-time revivalist preacher: “Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. You got one way out, and it’s through the grace of God.” There’s grace in this world, and there’s forgiveness for allbut you have to ask for it. That doctrine guides his charismatic eliciting of a cathartic confession of “what it is” that is “wrong with them.” “There’s a weight,” he says to a suspect in Episode 3, “and it’s got its fishhooks in your heart and your soul. Rust’s trade secret is the doctrine of Original Sin.
Everybody wants confession, everyone wants some cathartic narrative. Preach it: “Everybody knows there’s something wrong with themthey just don’t know what it is. The cops in 2012 want to know, what was his secret as an interrogator? A dogma. You just look ’em in the eyes, the whole story’s right there.”īut Rust’s peculiar success in eliciting confessions has depended less on observation, perhaps, than on performance. Marty has noted Rust’s “eye for weakness” and his “nose” for guilt, and Rust has described his own hermeneutics: “You just look at somebody. In the years 1995-2002, Rust was known in Louisiana for his knack for getting a read on suspects, such that the police bureaucracy assigned him the somewhat irregular position of pinch-hitting super-confessor. He looks unsettled, and his unsettling sets the agenda for the episode, in which characters seek to get a read on others and not be read themselves. The cover is blown here, in a sense Rust is found out, albeit not as a detective. Dewall is the “cook partner” of meth chef and murder suspect Reginald Ledoux, and Rust is undercover. Rustin Cohle, in all his nihilism and shadinessextending even to a punning gloss on that nickname, a nickname that Dewall cannot know. There’s a shadow on you, son.” Dewall is strangely attuned to the terms and images that have characterized Det. In the opening of True Detective’s fifth episode, a man named Dewall gets a read on Rust: “I can see your soul in the edges of your eyes.
0 kommentar(er)
