UNITED STATES
Salon
The final message of the HBO series reinforces a dangerous American mythology — that the end justifies the means
JOSEPH LAYCOCK, RELIGION DISPATCHES
For the first seven episodes True Detective was actually a struggle between two modern and intertwined mythologies of evil. In last night’s finale one of those mythologies won in spectacular fashion.
Nic Pizzolatto constructed True Detective’s plot from a pair of sources, the first of which occurred in Ponchataoula, Louisiana, in 2005, when a former pastor told police that his church had turned from “Jesus to the devil.” He claimed they’d been holding Satanic rituals for years that involved animal sacrifice and the molestation of children. Or, as Jezebel put it in its headline, “Did a Horrifying Real Satanic Sex Abuse Case Inspire True Detective?”
While the case in Ponchataoula generated headlines about Satanic cults on both sides of the Atlantic, the details of Satanic worship were wholly invented. Accounts of black robes, blood orgies, and the rest appear to have been an “atrocity tale” in which accused child molesters sought to gain sympathy with claims of Satanic brainwashing. Buried in the bottom of one story about the case was a report from an FBI agent that no pentagrams or animal blood were found at the church—even with a “cult informant” guiding the investigation.
The second source is the book The King in Yellow, written in 1895 by Robert W. Chambers. Part of the fin de siècle decadence movement, this work is an anthology of horror stories about a fictional play called “The King in Yellow,” which renders anyone who reads it insane. Chambers presents snippets of this play that allude to a forbidden city called Carcosa—a trope first introduced by Ambrose Bierce in 1891. The King in Yellow mythology has since been invoked by H.P. Lovecraft and The Blue Oyster Cult.
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