Existentialism issues in “True Detective” (season 1)

Philosophical interrogations can be found everywhere, even into a US crime drama series like “True Detective”. 

The main character, Rust Cohle, is very complex. He struggles with a troubled past and seems to be overwhelmed by dark thoughts. His whole life turns around his work. He lost his family, has neither friends nor hobbies… nothing but the investigations he works on. He has thus a very settled vision of human condition.

“-  I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

-          So what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

-       I tell myself I bear witness, the real answer is it’s obviously my programming and I lack the constitution to commit suicide.”

According to Rust Cohle, life is devoid of intrinsic meaning or value: human species is insignificant, without any purpose… we should simply not exist. Rust demonstrates here a sort of cold consciousness of the meaninglessness of life. He clearly denies the importance of the existence. In this sense, we can easily make a parallel with the existentialist nihilism: “it is futile to seek or to affirm meaning where none can be found” (Donald A. Crusby)

 Throughout the series, we notice that Rust is somehow disconnected from the world he lives in, from the people around him and their concerns, their conception of the good and the evil, their faith in God... In many ways, he seems to be really far from them, a little bit like if he didn't belong to this world. He is disenchanted because he is convinced to have discovered the truth (--> human species is a kind of anomaly that shouldn’t exist) and doesn’t expect anything from the life.

If he was a character in Waiting for Godot, he would without any doubt embody Vladimir. Like him, he is the only one to realize the futility of the existence. Besides, both are forced to keep living, even though they don’t give any value to the human life. Indeed, in the end of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and his friend try to kill themselves but they cannot achieve their project because the rope that they use to hang themselves breaks down. Whereas in True Detective, Rust Cohle asserts that he is programmed to live. In other words, the human survival instinct is extremely strong and suicide is against the human nature. Day after day, both characters must thus wake up the morning and live one more day a life they consider as pointless.