Reply to New Season of True Detective on HBO

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]Ugh, I hated the ending[/b]. I’m supposed to believe that an entire group of dorky scientists killed a young woman and then a group of cleaning ladies figured it out and enacted vigilante justice? Nope. No. No. Not on your life. Issa Lopez should stick to telenovelas. Shame on you HBO. Shame! Shame![/quote]

My friends all hated it.  too woke.[/quote]

This is such an incomplete observation. You need to be a lot more specific if you expect someone to understand what you’re trying to say here.[/quote]

DP. The wokeness is so obvious PP didn’t think it needed to be made any clearer. Since you’re being obtuse, I will spell it out for you:

Bad guys = men, mostly White ones
Good guys = women, mostly Indigenous ones

Let’s see, the scientists are bad guys, so focused on their research, they don’t care about destroying a town or about polluting its pristine nature. The male cops are corrupt, too, except for Pete. Why is Pete good? Because he’s young and represents the hope that future men will be better, but only if he kills and buries his evil father and only if he  submits to his Indigenous wife. Of course, Navarro’s boy toy is good for the same reason (submission) and his ethnicity.

And then there are the amazing women. Annie represents perfection, even though she’s breaking and entering and destroying private property. The ends justify the means (but only when it involves the pursuits of women—it doesn’t work that way for evil, mostly White male scientists).

Speaking of which, the cleaning ladies did nothing wrong. What’s the point of law and order? Fair trials? The police don’t care about Indigenous women, so why bother trying to use the system, ‘em I right?

No! If you look at the actual data, yes, many murders and disappearances of indigenous women do go unsolved and don’t even get investigated. But the evil White man actually has nothing to do with this. The murders and disappearances occur on autonomous Native American territory, where the evil US local governments have no jurisdiction and cannot investigate.

If you want to get real about helping indigenous women crime victims, you should put blame where blame is due: on tribal leadership.

But, that’s not here or there in this world, where the crimes committed by women are negligible and justified. It’s only men who must be punished for their transgressions.

I could go on, but I have work to do. Does that clear things up a little? [/quote]

This is well put.  [/quote]

So what if it's woke? Or white men are portrayed as bad here. White men have had a good run as the good guy in entertainment, the stars, the ones that make the money, the ones that control the narrative, white washing all sorts of characters of color . . . . so what if that is changing?

I don't care. Not even a little. Not even at all.[/quote]

Sure, you do you.  De gustibus, and I’m glad you liked it.  I personally think that “woke” storytelling isn’t good for anyone including those marginalized groups that it intends to center.  Where to start?  To me it’s an interesting narrative choice to center a Black actress whose character is entirely unable to control her violent impulses; she’s a murderer, assaults a man on the street merely because she is upset about her sister, and apparently has zero doubt or self-awareness about any of that because she has to be portrayed as strong and a bad-ass.  The intention was “woke,” I believe, but the outcome was a racist fever dream about a violent and out-of-control POC who cannot be trusted with responsibility.  (Jody Foster cops out at the end, saying she would have done the same; hmm, I doubt it—but Navarro has to be let off the hook because Black characters cannot be held accountable for their violent acts in the woke world view.)

So too with the indigenous women’s posse at the end.  Let’s recap:  acting on a hunch, a crew of native women show up with automatic weapons to inflict collective punishment on a group of whites, some of whom may have been involved in a murder.  Ok, it strains credulity in my mind, but let’s go with it.  I could respect it, and would have respected it, if they had just opened up on those guys with their machine guns and taken them out.  Hard core, but the native population is legitimately pissed about the mine so payback is on the table.  But the show can’t have indigenous people do anything bad—not woke.  So instead of giving them agency to make choices, they instead turn those guys loose onto the ice to face the judgment of whatever mystical force rules the tundra, making it painfully explicit that the men “could have made it back”.  They aren’t really accountable for the deaths, it was on some spiritual force.  It’s a cop-out narratively, but also plays into (racist) tropes about native Americans being closer to the spirit world and verging on holy as a result.  The trope of the “magical Negro” in spades (if you pardon my little pun).

To sum up:  “woke” storytelling tends to tie itself into knots in ways that lead to vastly more racist tropes than anything Pizalotto could have done on his worst day.  Compare S3, which centers a Black cop, isn’t “woke” at all, and is a much better story IMO.  Representation over quality is the wrong path.[/quote]

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