| Popis: |
The first season of HBO’s popular series True Detective (2014), set in rural Louisiana, has garnered critical attention due to its postmodern sensibilities, postsecular metaphysics, and its star-studded cast, yet the show’s navigation of the industrial Gulf Coast remains under-examined. This essay focuses on what creator Nic Pizzolatto designates the “third lead” of the show—the poisoned landscapes of Louisiana’s ubiquitous petroleum industry. In a narrative that ostensibly invokes the Southern Gothic to cast its fictional corruption as regional peculiarity, the omnipresent spectacle of the petro-industrial complex implicates transnational networks of capital in the region’s “slow violence.” In this way, True Detective’s oily aesthetic provides a crucial framework through which to examine the ecologies of violence sustained by oil capitalism. Drawing on materialist ecocriticism such as Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeMenager’s “petromelancholia,” this essay argues that True Detective’s visual emphasis on oil, which emerges most provocatively in the main title sequence, offers a crucial aesthetic strategy for representing the ambivalent pleasures and anxieties of US fossil-fuel modernity. As images of bodies and oil continually entangle through superimposition and dissolve, True Detective mobilizes a queer intimacy of human and environment that insists on apprehending petromodernity through its making and unmaking of identities. |
