Rustin Cohle: The Path to Consciousness

True Crime

True Detective is a mini-series put out by HBO in 2014, it fits into the True-Crime genre but it is much more than a typical “Who done it.”  A running series is difficult because it forces the writers to maintain the interest of an audience over the course of years, it is difficult to keep the content engaging when it is that stretched out.  Movies are difficult because it is about condensing themes, character development, scenes, etc into a span of 2 hours.  A mini-series is the in-between where you can expand on themes and characters over the course of a longer timeline than a movie without over-extending the way series often do.  Because of this, it is unfair to compare apples to apples, however, of all movies, shows, mini-series, I would consider season one of True Detective to be one of the closest-to-perfection that I have ever seen.  True-Crime is the backdrop but the depth and layers that is infused throughout the series is incredible.  In another blog post I made reference to Archetypes and the reoccurring theme of the hero’s journey, the patterns exhibited by the protagonist in literature and film.  Rustin Cohle, the character played by Matthew McConaughey is what I consider to be one of the greatest characters ever featured in film.  The character journey that we’re taken on is filled with deep seeds of symbolism and after completing the annual bingeing of the series, I wanted to do an in-depth examination of this character.

Tax Man

Rustin Cohle is a man of intelligence with a fixation on detail, the nickname that he gets called behind his back is “Tax Man” due to this extreme hyperfocus and diligent note taking.  Cohle battles deep seeded demons that stem from the death of his daughter and then the divorce that followed.  When we’re introduced to Rust Cohle it is following a crime scene that resembles a ritual sacrifice in an open field.  Following the crime-scene, Cohle and his partner Maty Hart played by Woody Harrelson start a conversation that goes into faith and meaning.  Cohle gives us insight into his perspective at this point of the story with this quote, “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.”  To dissect this, the central point to this is that us gaining awareness of ourselves and the world was a mistake, we as humans do not possess an Individual identity, rather, we are all meaningless and useless creatures fooling ourselves into thinking we’re individuals but instead we’re just a part of the mindless collective.  There’s a scene where they’re questioning possible suspects in a back-woods Louisiana tent church where they get onto topics of religion.  We get insight into Cohle’s thoughts on religion with the quotes, “What’s it say about life that you gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?” “If the common good has got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.” “If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then that person is a piece of shit and I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.” And finally talking about for how long belief has played a role in culture, “It’s been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey that he said for you to give me your fucking share, people, they’d rather throw a coin in the wishing well than buy dinner.”

Opium

Clearly Cohle is no fan of religion and considers it to be a mind virus that is a lie perpetuated to control the population.  This is an outlook shared by Karl Marx and his famous quote, “Religion is the opium of the masses.  It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul or our soulless conditions.”  Again, this theme of the mindless collective taking part in a fantasy void of the reality that everything is random and meaningless.  On matters of family and having children Cohle posits, “I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this.  Force a life into this thresher.  As for my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father.”  Another quote that gives us insight into his perspective when asked about the human race, “I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming.  Stop reproducing.  Walk hand-in-hand into extinction.” 

Alice

As the series progresses, the two detectives go down this rabbit hole of what initially appeared to be an isolated murder that quickly spiraled into a much deeper and broader investigation.  The investigation leads them down this journey of conspiracy between important societal figures, backwoods criminals, kidnapping and murder.  The surface-level true crime aspect to the series is remarkable, the best true-crime mystery I’ve ever seen.  However, I am going to fast forward to the end of the series in order to highlight the transformation of character.  At the climax of their investigation, they arrive to the source of where these kidnappings and murders are taking place.  In a struggle for life with the antagonist, Cohle takes a blade to his side and up his stomach leaving him bleeding out and into a coma.  It is here that we are introduced to the transcendence of character.

Christ

The final two scenes in the series opens with the vision of Cohle in a hospital bed, awakening from his coma, seeing himself in the window reflection with his long hair draped on his shoulders, a blackened eye, bruised and beaten.  The image of Cohle is made in the image of depictions of Jesus on the cross.  Whether the image is meant to be a literal representation of Christ or a symbolic one is unclear, however, what is crystal clear is that this image is meant to represent self-sacrifice and the shedding of former self in death and resurrection of the new self.  In the final scene, his partner Marty is wheeling Cohle outside of the hospital for fresh air who is still in his tattered hospital gown, talking with one another under the night sky.  Cohle describes what he felt while in his coma, he describes a deep darkness where he felt what he described as pure love, he felt the presence of his deceased daughter and father.  “It was like I was part of everything that I have ever loved, and we were all, the three of us, just fading out. And all I had to do was let go, man. And I did. I said, ‘Darkness, yeah.’ and I disappeared. But I could still feel her love there. Even more than before. Nothing. Nothing but that love. And then I woke up.”  The awakening that Rust is referring to is the transcendence of being and formation of a new identity.  In the darkness that he described, he was searching and what he found was himself.  He was able to reconcile the death of his daughter, finding peace and ridding himself of the guilt that acted as anchors, shaping every perspective he had about life itself.  The end scene has Cohle ask Marty to walk him to the car despite him being in a gown and in no physical position to leave the hospital.  Marty asks Cohle if he wants to go back and get his clothes in which Cohle responds, “There’s nothing for me back there.”   The clothes were what was worn before his induced coma, the clothes are meant to represent Cohle prior to his reemergence of the new self.  His “There’s nothing for me back there” is meant to represent him no longer having need for the former self, he has shed the skin of nihilism and has entered into the body of consciousness.

Consciousness

There is a theory in the fields of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience that centers around a void that we all have within us, a literal or symbolic religious hole.  While Cohle mentions that religion has been around since the dawn of time, he does not acknowledge the possibility that this in itself may be evidence that this is an innate aspect of us.  In every single culture, in every single era, anywhere in the world since the beginning of time there is evidence in the belief of god or gods and religious ritual practices, it is so engrained in our nature that there is even evidence of symbolic ritual-like behavior within great apes.  In the cross roads of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology is the belief that over 500,000 years ago as we evolved, so did our brains, tripling in size.  Robin Dunbar is a evolutionary psychologist and the head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.  Dunbar has a theory that is near-conventional thought in the field that when our brains tripled in size that it was primarily our neocortex that expanded and the neocortex is the part of our brain that is associated with social phenomena such as language and religion.  What Dunbar is claiming is that when our neocortex expanded, what came within it was the formation of religious like structures within our brains.  To quote Oxford psychologist Justin Barrett, “Belief in gods and God particularly arises through the natural, ordinary operation of human minds in natural ordinary environments.”  Sigmund Freud believed that when our brains grew, we gained the ability of human consciousness.  Consciousness is the awareness self and an understanding of the world around you. It seems that when you combine all of these evolutionary, biological, neuroscientific and psychological fields theories they all point to this belief that it is something that is engrained in our nature where we have a part of us that needs to be filled by what religion offers a shortcut to, consciousness.  Mind you, these fields are primarily made up of self-professed atheists, they are not preachers attempting to convert people, rather they are objective scientists that evaluate history, neuroscience, biology, and behavior to arrive to the conclusion that we come pre-made with a religious void within us that needs to be filled by something that provides us with meaning.  The religious approach would say that it needs to be filled by faith, the scientific approach would say that this void must be filled by consciousness, both approaches argue that consciousness comes with the formation of an individual identity and self, gaining awareness of who we are and seeing the world as it is.  When we don’t fill that void with individual consciousness we fill that void with materialism, addiction, work, politics, activism, external identity features such as race, sexual identity and preference, the categories are endless.  In short, we attempt to find external sources of meaning rather than finding meaning from within which leaves us building the foundation of ourselves on unstable grounds, forever searching but never finding.  Rustin Cohle’s hero journey tale was perfect in that it began with an immature psyche as a result of undealt with personal demons but through the self-sacrificing and death of the former self came the resurrection of the new self.  This is the symbolic journey of being lost and on the journey finding individual consciousness and enlightenment.  “Salvation lies within.”

“It’s just one story.  The oldest. Light versus dark.  Once there was only dark, you ask me, the light’s winning. “

True Detective