Search and regret in a mediocre life

In the public evaluation, the 2 and 3 of this series have been unsatisfactory. Many people are still immersed in the atmosphere of the first season's masterpiece, and they disagree with the mediocre characters in the second season and the narrative of the magic stick in the third season. But I prefer the last two seasons instead.

The third season returns to the "two-hero mode" of the first season, telling the case-handling process of two police detectives with very different personalities. However, although the protagonist of this work has the same strange personality and is rebellious towards his boss, he is not as talented as Matthew O'Connor, and he has no strange and evil personality charm. More often, we only see two detectives discovering small details, then making judgments, and then oversighting or missing the moment and acting clumsily.

But that's the real detective, isn't it? The "good" of the True Detective series is partly reflected here. In statistics, there are two types of errors: "judging the truth as false" and "judging the false as true", but in general detective novels, we basically only come into contact with the error of omitting evidence, and basically never encounter the error of "discovering false evidence". "mistake. But those who have played the escape room will know that there is nothing more terrifying than missing clues to lead to a level, than the wrong clues that lead you into the ditch. And how complicated the real world is, not like the single-line world of novels or escape rooms, every Conan-style epiphany has to bear a huge price of misjudgment behind it.

The story of True Detective 3, precisely because of this price, led to the occurrence of three timelines, which lasted for 35 years.

Many people say that the story of True Detective 3 is boring. The first seven episodes buried a lot of foreshadowing, but the eighth episode introduced an external variable to solve the problem. A person who has not appeared before, a hallucination of the male protagonist is basically equivalent to a mechanical seance. In retrospect, True Detective 2 also has this phenomenon. In that season, the truth was completed through the dictation of the two protagonists in the last episode, and there was no memory flashback. But this may just show that the case itself is secondary in the True Detective series. Even in the first season, I think most people can now remember O'Connor's anxiety and determination, not the process of deciphering the case. How ingenious.

As many comments have pointed out, the True Detective series is about the exploration of people and the human nature of the detectives, not the case. So the case is just an introduction to our observation of human nature, a clue to create conflict in the plot and guide the motivation of the protagonist. And since it is to explore human nature, the second and third seasons' attention to "mediocre people" should have a more general meaning than the "genius detectives" in the first season. Genius has his own misunderstandings, but his sidekick Marty, all the protagonists of seasons two and three, actually shares the same grief and helplessness with ourselves. Wayne is as mediocre as we are, and maybe we all have some known specialties, a little charm, but none of this can change our destiny, nor can we stop us from regretting life again and again. That kind of repeated replies, constant unwillingness, irresistible and powerless remorse.

True Detective 3 is about the life of two people affected by the case. And I think, in fact, many people have such a life. It's just that what has been haunting them is not necessarily a murder case, but a more ordinary incident. For example, an incomprehensible farewell, an unknown frame-up, or any puzzle that is quickly worn down by time but will remain in my heart forever. There are too many accidents and misses in life. We regret it again and again at different ages, but we never catch the tail of fate. Because we have always been the same self, Wayne's actions at different ages can be repeated and continuous. This dry and unspeakable sense of fate and powerlessness may be what the film wants to convey to us the most.

However, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the show, and the handling of the last half of episode 8 made me very hesitant. Formally, it's not difficult to accept that the wife is an illusion telling the protagonist the truth, but is only a good story worth telling? Is it all worth it because the story has a bright ending? This kind of wishful thinking to prove faith is not acceptable to me. On the contrary, I prefer to think that accepting the helplessness of the ending and accepting that our efforts are in vain after all, but not regretting this life's search, makes the pursuit of truth and human happiness even more precious.

But in the end, the protagonist forgot the happiness worthy of criticism. In the end, he could not remember what the result of his lifelong pursuit of truth was. This final twist may represent a skepticism, another interpretation of life that I am not averse to: that our lives are like being in a tropical jungle forever, trying to find value in life with all our strength and futile effort. . Life is like a murder, a journey full of chance and absurdity.