ABSTRACT
Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective explores the storylines and characters of white protagonists over and against an assortment of undeveloped, flat black characters: a pair of ineffectual, acquiescent black detectives; a secretary obscured behind a tall desk; a kidnapped man bound in a neo-Nazi’s closet; a neighbourhood full of drug dealers, users, and their children in need of Child Protection Services; a crooked police chief who dies violently on screen; a high-ranking LAPD officer whose politics get her killed mid-season; and more tangential black figures. True Detective attained critical acclaim in its first season and maintained cult-like viewership through its second. Its sophisticated script and cinematography combine multi-syllabic vocabulary alongside timely social commentary on issues like environmental injustice. Even the chorus of critics who panned the second season remained silent about its treatment of race. Maucione contextualizes Pizzolatto’s series in terms of the racial politics and climates of its various settings – 1990s Louisiana; early 2000s Los Angeles; TBA in Season 3 – as well as contemporary popular media and movements, including Black Lives Matter. In further conversation with works by Michel Laguerre, Slavoj Zizek, bell hooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Claudia Rankine, Maucione argues that True Detective’s representation of white characters as compelling drivers of plot against a backdrop that casts black characters as insignificant and impotent (yet somehow threatening) manufactures a stereotypical black/white dichotomy that renders black bodies and spaces synonymous with violence while at the same time obscuring the systemic violence to which black people in the U.S. are most vulnerable.
