Tag: True Detective

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Music Music Features

Shape Shifter

CREDIT: Alysse Gafkjen

You may recognize Lera Lynn as the bar-room singer from the second season of the HBO show True Detective, but the Nasvhille recording artist has a lot more to offer than the sad songs that set the mood for the somber detective drama that aired last year. I caught up with Lynn days before she plays a free show at the Levitt Shell to talk about her new album, Resistor, and more.

Memphis Flyer: Obviously we’re going to have to talk about True Detective a little bit. Now that there’s been some time removed from the season you were on, what’s your biggest takeaway from that experience?

Lera Lynn: There’s a lot of things that come to mind. I was so impressed by Vince Vaughn, Taylor Kitsch, and Rachel McAdams. They really did a great job. I think they got screwed, man. They worked their asses off and they performed really well, and I hate that there can be one person with a big mouth and it can tank this whole massive project that people put their hearts and souls into. Once your show has been shit-canned, it’s impossible to climb out of it. I’ve been known to go on rants about this.

Do you think it’s fair to label your music as “dark” or “haunting”? Those adjectives seem to come up a lot when reading about your songs.

I think some of it is, but that is just a small part of the story. I don’t think [the song] “Shape Shifter” is dark or haunting. Neither is [the song] “Drive.” There’s plenty of other things going on in my songs, and I think when people come to a concert, they are expecting to see my performance in True Detective, but my shows with the full band are much more dynamic. We have rock songs and songs in major keys. There’s even some humor sometimes.

Let’s talk about your new album, Resistor. How would you describe the overall mood of that record?

I can only describe it in a scene. To me, it’s late night driving with the windows down in the summer time. That’s how it makes me feel. That’s what I was hoping for in an abstract way. It’s hard to describe in one word, because it covers a lot of territory, which is what a good record should do.

Alt-country is such a vast word for a genre that has many sub-sects. How would you describe Resistor? Is goth-country a thing yet?

That’s funny, because right after I wrote the song “What You Done,” I called it something like doom country. I don’t think there’s much country going on with this record. The song “For the Last Time” was written two or three years ago. I almost didn’t include it [on the album] because it was too different, but that’s the song that’s doing the best in the U.K. and in Europe.

The songwriting approach for Resistor was so different. In the past I tried to focus on telling a story. With this record I wanted to be as succinct as I could and describe a single moment in time.

Album closer “Little Ruby” has an almost glam element to it, especially the vocals and the guitar twang. The song is a great closer, and I feel like it kind of wraps up all the different genres you’re experimenting with on the album. Is that accurate?

I can see that. There’s definitely some ’70s stuff going on. I wanted to write like a light-hearted J.J. Cale song for the closer since there’s some heavy shit going on in the album. I thought it would be nice for the end of the record. We wrote it in an afternoon and recorded it the next day. We just kind of threw it together, which sometimes can be the best approach.

Lera Lynn, Friday, July 8th at the Levitt Shell, 7:30 p.m. Free

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Master Debaters, Near and Far

Boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, TRUMP!

That was the most concise analysis of last week’s GOP presidential candidate debate that I read. And that was on Twitter. It was a lot like the final episode of True Detective, except you’d replace “TRUMP!” with “KA-BLAM!”

The candidates spent most of the debate trying to convince viewers that they would be the best man to control American women’s uteruses, and denying any possibly sensible positions they’d held in the past. I fully expected Chris Wallace to end the debate by saying, “Final question: Which of you is the absolute batshit craziest, and why?”

The aftermath of the GOP debate was almost as much fun as the debate itself, as The Donald seemingly shot himself in the foot with misogynist comments about Fox moderator Megyn Kelly, who had the audacity to ask Trump about his many past mysogynist comments. Pundits immediately proclaimed that Trump had jumped the shark and that his campaign was over, unless he apologized.

Trump, as anyone who has observed his career could predict, didn’t apologize, and instead ramped up his rhetoric another notch. Naturally, his lead in the polls grew and Fox groveled, withering under Trump’s verbal assaults on the network.

I fully expect Trump to pull out a bunch of bills at the next debate and “make it rain” on the other candidates. What could it hurt at this point? He’s the Teflon Man.

It was a big week for debates, with Monday night’s Memphis mayoral forum coming just on the heels of the GOP’s extravaganza. Five candidates — Mayor A C Wharton, Jim Strickland, Harold Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — vied to impress Memphis voters with their rhetoric and political acumen.

Well, except for Webb, who appeared to have wandered onstage by accident. As one person tweeted: “I’m sure Dr. Sharon is a sweet woman with a great heart, but this is not her element.” That would be correct, if by “her element,” you mean Earth. Prediction: You will not read or hear the term “Webb-mentum” in the next few weeks.

Each of the other four candidates made some points and took some shots at their opponents. Wharton gave as good as he got (and he got fired upon more than Detective Ray Velcoro in that True Detective finale).

I still think the race is going to come down to Wharton and Strickland, based primarily on the fact that they are by far the best-financed, and that beating an incumbent in a field split four ways is tough without serious cash. I don’t think race-based voting will be much of a factor. Memphis voters have shown time and time again that when it comes to city-wide races, crossover voting is the rule rather than the exception, especially when party affiliation is not a factor.

One thing is certain: This fall in Memphis will not be boring.

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

True Detective Season 2

The cops in True Detective‘s second season are so world-weary, it’s a wonder they’re able to move. They’re so stern, grim-faced, and defined by work, they’re puritan. They wrap themselves in strip clubs, perps, and denial as they move about their fallen world. In real life, in the age of small cameras, cops can be terrifying. An iPhone can take corruption and put it online for all to see. But in fiction, police are vehicles for philosophy. The detectives and officers who solve the world’s mysteries on our screens always have reasons to step over the line and are always negotiating them. They’re the protagonists. The citizens they rough up are, depending on the show’s level of grit, incidental to the larger goal of getting the bad-guy-of-the-week.

Their weariness is part of the time-honored existentialism of detective noir, making sense of a world and finding your own code within it. True Detective‘s Season 1 wore this on its sleeve. Its most pure expression was its opening credits, which took images of the actors and story and mixed them like a soup. The appeal in Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle was his ability to take atheistic observations about the world, sprinkle in some nihilism, and serve them in a movie star’s mouth. Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s more lived-in Marty Hart were both fully realized characters, darkly funny amid all the Gothic imagery. Most everyone else was Southern stereotypes, and HBO-mandated nudity ate the agency of the female characters whole. But ultimately, everything was abandoned in an unconvincing last-minute switch to optimism by Cohle.

This season the grimness takes the forefront. The weary cops’ stories unwind in much more regular fashion. We have no Cthulhu mythology and unreliable narration to sift through. Rachel McAdams’ Bezzerides has problems with sex caused by her growing up in a cult her father ran. Her most prominent quality is that she smokes an e-cigarette. Taylor Kitsch’s Woodrugh’s sexual repression is defined by an unhealthy relationship with his mother. He likes to drive fast on his motorcycle, on highways we’re repeatedly shown in beautiful aerial shots. Farrell’s Velcoro is a crooked alcoholic cop who beats up the father of his son’s school bully. He works for mob boss Semyon (Vince Vaughn), after the former helped him kill his wife’s rapist years ago. They’re terse, they’re pissed off, they’re told they need therapy, and all they’ve got in the world is this case they’re obsessed with unraveling.

They aren’t different enough from the thousand previous iterations of these archetypes. Learning about their ex-wives and boyfriends feels like work. Some of the most effortless, efficient characterization so far has been Farrell’s hair. The Cape buffalo bangs and droopy moustache scream that this man has stopped caring.

Promisingly, each episode has gotten weirder, with small Lynchian touches. Water stains on a ceiling crossfade into carved-out eye sockets. A Russian trophy wife huffs pot smoke out of a bag. A character shot with rock salt hallucinates a Conway Twitty impersonator singing “The Rose.” Oral sex is a running theme.

But the weirdness isn’t enough to help Vaughn’s delivery of a speech about having to crush a rat with his bare hands as a child. It’s the moment when things should come together, told in a dead-eyed close-up at the start of the second episode, when his mobster’s money worries should take center stage. Vaughn always seemed capable of more since he carried the movie Swingers 20 years ago, but instead he has gotten less and less expressive with each role. He is better irritated and frantic than mournful and sad. His flashes of anger work, but the glum nervousness about his position in life doesn’t come across.

It’s a slow burn with wet kindling. Unless the weirdness builds or the performances build — or its depiction of police corruption comes to feel as immediate as watching a viral video — it might be more interesting if the characters actually went to therapy.

True Detective Season 2
HBO
Sundays

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

2014: The Year Television Kicked The Movies’ Ass

Television continues to be the narrative televisual storytelling medium par excellence. It allows you to identify traits with human faces over a longer period of time, instead of for two hours, and thereby more easily dupes you into believing fictional people exist.

Game Of Thrones

This year Game of Thrones continued to get better and better at being subtly modern, showing us a world in which major problems are ignored for short-term politics. It was nowhere near The Wire, but still unique in using the medium to create a complex, multilayered world, more than any large scale cinematic shared universe. The show’s problems continue to be its backwards treatment of women and women’s bodies. Women are naked in traditional male gaze fashion, while penises are mostly off limits. Elsewhere, the show added a sexual assault to the adapted storyline and seemed to be confused about whether there actually was one and why it was there. The director and showrunners gave different answers in interviews, and the character in question blithely pursued his heroic arc.

True Detective

True Detective also had problems writing its female characters, but was distinguished by a beautiful opening credits sequence and fun Matthew McConaughey monologues set in a generically miserable Louisiana. McConaughey’s philosophy wasn’t anything you couldn’t find on the atheist section of Reddit, but it was operatic, poetic and accurate. Almost everyone else around him was cardboard. The series undercut this exciting pessimism by ending with action scenes and hope, not horror, with all the resounding tonal shift of a wet fart.

Orange Is The New Black

The show that was best at humanizing even its most minor characters was Orange Is The New Black. Although it may not be the most accurate depiction of the prison industrial complex, wherein we throw everyone possible in prison and make money off it, it certainly stressed the dehumanization of our system and treated the prison population with empathy. Despite all the stand-up routine style jokes, that made it a political show. Those politics were a rarity even as mainstream attention to the way police and prisons can treat civilians (murderously or corruptly) came to the forefront of newscycles this year. Television is a landscape of cops eternally breaking rules to throw criminals away. As public discourse changes, media companies sometimes allow politics that actually concern us to appear on our screens, and this is an example.

Probably my favorite cringeworthy horrible show of our modern era, 24, a show that actively and aggressively tried to act as an apologia for torture and once cast Janeane Garofalo so that its main character could yell at her, returned this year, as stupid as ever. The few episodes I watched seemed slightly more tasteful and less likely to suggest that torturing the hell out of someone is a superheroic act, but it had also lost its campy, 80’s action movie vibe.

Agents Of Shield

A lot of shows are mostly concerned with cross promotion —for example, Gotham which was mainly meaningless call-forwards to Batman characters. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had the 24 aspect of praising rule-breaking government agents with no oversight, but when it tried to be morally gray it just came off creepy. It got better this year, but was still most clear about its goals when advertising other products or films.

A procedural I did like was Happy Valley, a Netflix British import, because of the strength of its acting and writing, with only a little War on Drugs paranoia thrown in.

Attack On Titan

Other standouts included the anime Attack on Titan, widely available in the U.S. this year. The actual writing was horrible but whenever its overtly psychological monsters appeared it was wonderful. Hannibal’s Grand Guignol improved its procedural, and Transparent took Jeffery Tambor’s crossdressing from Arrested Development and remixed it humanely into the story of a transgender woman coming out to her family.

Black Mirror

Another import, Black Mirror, was accessible previously in the U.S., but just became available to most U.S. consumers via Netflix less than a month ago. Its scant six episodes are nice modern Twilight Zone parables, none better than the science fiction worldbuilding in “Fifteen Million Merits,” which dramatizes how the emptiness in working towards buying meaningless things does not go away when consumers recognize it. A consumerist system persists because it is easy to co-opt rebellion against it as a critique. Here, that means a dystopian society composed of people looking at computer screens from elliptical bikes get no catharsis when they watch an America’s Got Talent show. Their attempts to disrupt it only upgrade its edginess.
In terms of direct politics, one half of Comedy Central’s continuous critique of mainstream news, Stephen Colbert, abdicated for CBS. Given how David Letterman lost most of his verve upon decamping there, it is not a good sign. Meanwhile Aaron Sorkin’s humorless but passionate retelling of news from a few years ago, The Newsroom, finally died. From what I’ve seen of the show it seemed to be so mired in Sorkin’s voice that its political opponents were strawmen.

Finally, one of America’s most beloved television dads was revealed to be a serial rapist. This was a fact long ago: we’re just learning it. It is better to know, and for a corrupt, powerful person to be shamed if they cannot be prosecuted. His downfall was brought about in part because his handlers did not understand how new media works. For as long as it takes them to learn it, the world will change.