If you’re reading this blog, it should come as no surprise
to you that I was intrigued when I heard a new TV show had come along featuring
the King in Yellow and Carcosa. That TV
show is HBO’s new anthology series, True
Detectives. (Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.)
Relax. I’m not here
to give you yet another opinion on why the show is the greatest thing in the
history of ever, or why it was a big fat letdown. Overall, I will say that I found the show to
be thoroughly entertaining, for all the reasons everyone says—outstanding
acting, amazing production values. I
binge-watched the whole thing this past week, devouring it the way I would a
novel, staying up late to get in another chapter because I simply had to find
out what would happen next. Even though
the visuals gave me nightmares every night, I couldn’t tear myself away. The show left me with some extremely mixed
feelings that, I confess, I’m still trying to sort out. (I agree with
everything
Emily Nussbaum said about the misogyny of the show.) I’m bothered by the bad guy turning out to be
another Deep South sister-fucking redneck because—cliché much?
Still, I think the show got a lot of things right. It must have, because I imagine it’s
something that’s going to be rolling around in my brain for months, if not
years, to come. I already plan to
re-watch it as soon as possible. (I’m
thinking sometime after the nightmares die down.)
But what I want to talk about is the show’s use of
Lovecraftian themes (though Carcosa technically predates Lovecraft’s work by a
good 30 years) and occult imagery. It’s
a tantalizing mythos that has inspired my own work, along with thousands of
other writers the world over. It’s also
inspired art in other mediums besides literature. As a devotee of Lovecraft, Chambers, and the
rest, it’s exciting to see these stories transcend the halls of horror geekdom to
find a mass audience.
In addition to my works that deal directly with the King in
Yellow and Carcosa, I have had a lifelong interest in the occult and all things
supernatural. So, from that perspective,
here are my thoughts:
The “mythology” that the show hinted at but never fleshed
out was quite muddled, a jumble of paganism, Celtic mythology, Wicca and
Jungian archetypes, with an overlay of ontological angst. I didn’t see anything particularly New
World—no voudun, no Santeria, which I found strange. Why have the show set in coastal Louisiana,
and even toss around verbal references to local religions, but have none of the
actual rituals or images present from
those religions? I’m fine with inventing
a new religion whole-cloth, especially since they were creating a fictional
cult to the King in Yellow—but then why not come up with something entirely
imagined? To use something from a
pre-existing work created a certain set of expectations that I am not entirely
satisfied were met.
But let’s talk about the occult imagery for a second. One of the recurring set pieces in the show
was “devil’s nests.”
In my many sojourns
into things horror and occult related, I have never seen or heard of such a
thing. The closest might be a witch
ball, which were sometimes made out of threads or twigs, to help ward off
witches. Otherwise, the only other thing
I’ve ever seen that looked remotely similar was those twig formations in
The Blair Witch Project. Now, I am not against the idea of pure
invention. Sometimes, striking the right
balance between fact and fiction is what makes a story so compelling—truth
embedded in lies and so forth. The twig
sculptures were equally disturbing in
Blair
Witch and here, possibly because they look so crude. They look exactly like something an ancient
cult would create as a warning, a curse, a communication device between
themselves and some malign nature spirits.
So basically, while I found the devil’s nests effective, I don’t think
they were authentic.
Another recurring image in the show is antlers, which points
to the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos, or, in Wicca, the masculine aspect of the
divine.
Marty Hart, one of the main
detectives, has a name that means “stag.”
Yet, in the show, the antlers usually crowned a female, whether a female
murder victim, or a female representation (the art found on the burnt out
church wall). Women as a sacrifice
hinted that the killers were, perhaps, looking for some sort of rebirth,
confirmed later when one of the murderers (yes, it’s that kind of show) Errol
Childress mentioned being close to the “infernal plane.”
This would make sense, given the show’s finale in
“Carcosa.” The other symbol the show
referenced repeatedly was a spiral—again, possibly Celtic, though I found it to
be Jungian. The spiral as a universal
archetype, associated with goddesses, the womb and change. They are inked on the victims' bodies. Cohle sees a flight of birds form a spiral in the air. In the finale, when we are finally shown
Carcosa, we see Rust Cohle follow Childress into a series of subterranean
chambers—it looked to me like a cathedral, though I found out that the set was
created within Fort Macomb, a 19
th century fort. The shape of it suggested a spiral. Spirals are also connected with journeys,
with the centering of consciousness—both Cohle and Hart are certainly travelers
on a long journey. Like Theseus, they
pursue the (horned) beast to the center of the labyrinth. Like countless other heroes, they descend
into the underworld. They experience the
metaphorical death and rebirth. The
underground scene is their descent into the axis mundi, the Omphalos, the
center of the world. At the center of
Carcosa was a wide, domed room, with an oculus in the ceiling.
The oculus indicates a union with the
divine. Cohle’s vision of a cosmic
umbilicus connecting him to the greater world seemed to me to be a very
deliberate visual. He and Hart emerge from
their very close brush with death as very different men—more centered, more evolved. Cohle makes peace with the death of his
daughter. Hart makes peace with his live
daughters. Time is not a flat circle, as
Cohle suggests; it’s a spiral. It exists
in multiple dimensions. Sometimes it’s a
maze. Sometimes it’s a wringer. You may emerge dizzy, you may emerge clean. Or you may be flattened. You can go up or down. Whatever direction you choose, the loop is
not necessarily an endless repeat. It is
the widening gyre, spinning us in circles around our point of origin—how widely
you roam is up to you.
Which, I suppose, brings us to the Yellow King and
Carcosa. Talk about a spiral—the tie-ins
were so twisty and oblique, I’m not sure it was successful. The viewer has to really be familiar with the
source material. Otherwise it just ended
up creating confusion, as evidenced by the thousands of viewers who are
screaming across the Internet about the show’s unsatisfying conclusion.
The main thing the show borrowed from Lovecraft, et. al, was
the paradigm—the existential horrors of living in a malevolent universe, where
the real threat is not to the body, but to the mind. The horror of witnessing something so
terrible that it can, quite literally, shatter your reality. The horror of comprehending how very small,
weak and inconsequential humanity is, so that if some Outer God decides to come
stomping through the Milky Way, we’ll be lucky if death is all It brings. Obviously, this is most notable in Cohle’s
nihilistic attitude, that humanity is a plague, ants, “sentient meat.” His entire outlook is pure Lovecraft. The end of the series has the men solve the mystery, but only bring two of the numerous offenders to justice. Some satisfaction is gained, but the heroes will forever remain uneasy, knowing that their victory was only partial, knowing that beasts still stalk their prey in the night. That's . . . actually more optimistic than Lovecraft usually is.
In addition to the fear of the universe being populated by
cruel, alien gods, there is also the theme of insanity in tales associated with
the King in Yellow. We fear Alzheimer’s,
we fear madness, because even though you’re still breathing, you have lost yourself,
your identity, your essence. There’s
nothing more terrifying than the idea that you could lose who you are. Again, Cohle embodies these ideas, as do the
victims and criminals he comes into contact with—there is the girl, Kelly, the
surviving victim of the cult who has been left catatonic by her experiences;
there are murderers and suicides—all things we view through Cohle’s jaundiced
eyes.
Yet, I think the show has the most in common with “An
Inhabitant of Carcosa,” by Ambrose Bierce.
It is the original and more obscure story that first introduced the fictional
town of Carcosa. It’s told in first
person, by a man undergoing a bizarre, shamanistic journey that ends with him
realizing he is dead. The end reveals
that the story had, in fact, been relayed through a medium. I feel like that’s more reflective of the
Cohle/Hart experience than Chambers’ stories.
Cohle is referred to as a “priest,” after he himself said that he
thought he was “mainlining the secret truth of the universe.” For an atheist, that sounds suspiciously like
making time with the Almighty, no? Not
to mention his visions, his synesthesia, his occasional flashes of some sort of
psychic ability. I know that cops are a
profession where it pays to have a well-developed gut instinct about things,
but Rust Cohle is a man who can literally sniff out psychosis, a scent he
describes as “aluminum and ash.”
True Detective’s
references to Chambers’ works feel more superficial—more like set dressing than
a thematic influence. Black stars appear drawn on walls, in a woman's tattoo, the black stars that so clearly demonstrate Carcosa's otherness. Childress wrote “Cassilda”
all over his slaughterhouse walls. There
is a sly reference to theater when Childress is watching North by Northwest, and he quotes, “. . . with such expert
play-acting, you make this very room a theater.” Men view a VHS tape, which we are never
shown—we only know that it drives them to extreme reactions, despair, and a
sort of madness, the way the King in
Yellow play is said to in Chambers’ stories. In the end, Childress demands that Cohle
“remove his mask” before the King. But
there is no mask. Or is there? When Cohle later awakens in the hospital, he definitely has the air of a man stripped to his barest components.
At the end of the series, when the heart of the mystery is
laid bare, I didn’t think for one minute that Childress was the King. (At one point, I thought perhaps Hart was,
since he’s a tall blond with the stag name.)
When that looming twig and skull sculpture, enshrouded in yellow cloth
appeared in Childress’ Carcosa, I thought that’s
the King—observe his yellow tatters.
Effigy of the King in Yellow
Maybe
the idea of the show was that Carcosa, the King in Yellow, all of it was
something decayed—Carcosa in the stories, after all, is a lost city. Maybe the cult that produced Childress and
his half-sister was once something grand and powerful in its sinister way, but
no more. With the inbreeding, the fading
rites and the crumbling temple, perhaps it is more Innsmouth than Carcosan. In which case, maybe next season, True Detective will explore the Esoteric
Order of Dagon.
I’d be down for that. 'Cause I mean, hey. Who needs sleep. Right?
