Fair warning: if you haven't watched True Detective yet, I'm about to ruin some things for you.
I'm really, worryingly good at taking off my feminist hat when I invest in a TV show. I find myself chuckling and shaking my head as Don Draper horrendously neglects and subtly abuses the women in his life. I was nearly two seasons through The Newsroom before I realized that I'm supposed to be grossly offended by Aaron Sorkin's portrayal of women.
So when my boyfriend and I settled down this weekend to watch True Detective, HBO's latest sausage fest, I was expecting to enjoy myself despite all my critical faculties urging me otherwise.
But what I saw really disturbed me.
I understand that not every show is going to offer up empowered and empowering female characters, and this is a bit of a knee-jerk post, as I haven't given much thought to what I want to say or how I want to say it. But after watching a critically-acclaimed series in which women are systemically and unapologetically abused and brutalized over the course of eight episodes, I felt compelled to say something. Anything.
Season One follows detectives Marty Hart and Rustin Cohle (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey) as they attempt to track down a murderer/rapist in rural Louisiana, and I should state from the outset that I wanted so badly to enjoy watching them do just that. I love detective dramas. I was drawn in by the show's aesthetic. I thought the soundtrack was great. I desperately wanted Matthew McConaughey to prove to me that he's anything other than a mumbling, greasy creep.
And I wasn't even offended when one of the first images I was assaulted with during the show's highly stylized opening credits was of a woman's bare backside resting gingerly on the spiked appliqués of her stilettos.
Or of another woman gyrating as she seductively unties her American flag one-piece.
Or as images of a deserted playground are projected onto another woman's naked rear.
...wait a minute.
Taken on its own, the intro isn't especially offensive. It's sexy and provocative and beautifully shot, and I appreciate that. And the gratuitous female nudity is exactly what I've come to expect from HBO. But within the larger context of the show, the intro sets up one of the primary dichotomies of True Detective: that of authoritative men with gravitas and furrowed brows in suits and ties, and vacant, naked, fetishized women. Or at least parts of women.
In a show that ostensibly centres on pursuing justice for murdered and mistreated women, we are offered female characters who are choked, demeaned, slapped, and dominated by the very men who are supposedly their protectors.
The women of True Detective are vapid and transparent. They range from Dora Lange, whose naked corpse sparks the investigation that fuels the series, to Lisa Tragnetti and Beth, the equally buxom, stereotypically nymphomaniacal mistresses whose naked bodies are regularly shown pleasuring (a conspicuously clothed) Marty. Maggie, Marty's long-suffering wife, appears to have two objectives in life: to nag Marty about his prolonged absences from home, and to cook his suppers. I can't help but think that her (completely founded) tirades against Marty's neglect of his family are, in some way, meant to "justify" his extramarital affairs, and ultimately, Maggie, too, is reduced to and denigrated for her sex, relegated to a conniving jezebel who irrevocably terminates her disintegrated marriage by initiating sex with Cohle. Afterwards, Cohle, disgusted and furious, kicks a crying and apologetic Maggie out of his apartment. The implication here is that Maggie is somehow in the wrong, that she alone has initiated and performed this hasty, aggressive act, and it's infuriating to see a woman being vilified (however subtly) for taking a stand against a husband who has mistreated and humiliated her for nearly twenty years.
Then there's Audrey, Marty's angst-ridden, promiscuous, Goth daughter. Audrey is a stereotypically taciturn teenager who is clearly harbouring some very complicated feelings toward her father. They are completely incomprehensible to each other, and over dinner one night, Marty turns his gaze on Audrey's body, attempting to impose on it some sort of order:
Marty: "I'm just trying to understand - what is it that you're going for? What's the message?"
Audrey: "There is no message. It's just me."
"What's you? Your hair? Your clothes?"
"Women don't have to look like you want them to, Dad."
"No, women, but I'm talking about my teenage daughter [...] I'm just trying to understand."
"Well who told you you had to understand?"
Audrey is reduced by her father to a mass of clothes and hair, relegated to a body that he owns ("my teenage daughter"), but neither controls nor understands. Clichéd though she may be, Audrey is the only woman in the show who actively resists Marty's domination, and she is tellingly and quickly silenced - shortly after the above scene, a disgraced Audrey is driven home by her father, who has been called to collect her after she is found having sex with two older boys in a parked car. Again, Audrey is dismissed as irrational, incomprehensible, defective: "This is something I'll never understand," jeers her father, "being the captain of the varsity slut team." Audrey receives her father's fist to the side of her face, and virtually disappears from the remainder of the series, appropriately suppressed, humiliated, slut shamed. Both Audrey's and Maggie's story arcs climax with dubious sex acts that leave the audience ambivalent about both women.
True Detective's women are uninspiring at best and infuriating at worst, and while I understand that this is a show "about men," its phallocentric treatment of women and the female body is hackneyed in its brutality, deeply troubling in its ubiquity. The question that remains is: why? Why does True Detective make being "about men" synonymous with degrading women? Why am I being offered yet another show that alienates me as a female viewer, that makes me clench my thighs, raise my eyebrows, and feel uncomfortable in my own body?
Feminist responses to True Detective flooded the Internet within days of the first episode's release, and the reception of the show's treatment of women seems to be divided into two camps: "Ew, gross," and "Get over it."
On the one hand is someone like The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, who, like me, suggests that True Detective is essentially the same shit in a different pile. All the show does is repackage the shallow portrayal of women that's all too common on our television screens, depicting a series of "Wives and sluts and daughters - none with any interior life." On the other hand is Slate's Willa Paskin, who argues that yes, True Detective treats its women terribly - and that's the point. The show is self-awarely sexist, and the audience is supposed to appreciate that what they're watching is wrong. It's a story about the terrible things men do to women, and its male leads aren't exempt.
Logically and rhetorically speaking, I "get" Paskin's line of thinking. She's essentially arguing that True Detective isn't a misogynistic show, it's a show about misogyny. But I don't think we're yet at a place in our mainstream depictions of women where the nuances of that distinction are fully appreciated or understood. The thing is: I don't want to have to step back and think critically about whether or not a show is being self-consciously misogynistic. I don't want to accept that its sadistic, fetishistic portrayal of its female characters may very well be "the point" of the series. I don't believe that film or television is obligated to teach morals or offer utopian alternatives to the way our world currently works. But if I wanted to see all the ways in which women can be sexually objectified and exploited, I'd watch porn. Or turn on the news. Or take a history course. Or read the tabloids while I wait in line at the supermarket. Or walk into an American Apparel. I am daily inundated with reminders that society tends and always has tended to treat women badly. It's so clichéd and so uninspired. And I'm oh, so tired of it.
