Feminism and Pop Culture : The case of True Detective

This blog will be about a show that I love but in the same time that I have to criticize for the image of women it delivers. True detective is according to me one of the best shows of 2014, mostly thanks to its two amazing main characters played by Matthew McConaughey and Wooy Harrelson. True Detective is a serie about men’s world, in which every man is worse than the other. In this show we are given the point of view of two white heterosexual men, and the lack of female characters has upset many people. Indeed, in the whole season there is not even one woman detective or police officer. The only women that are in the show are either prostitutes, corpses, drug addicts, or cheated and cheating wife. The most important woman of the show is Maggie, Marty’s wife, a one-dimensional character, who is only depicted as “a cop’s wife”. Bu to take vengeance on her husband who cheated on her, she decides to have sex with Rust. But when Rust realizes that she used him to hurt her husband he blames her for seducing him, as if a men could not control himself from the moment he is aroused. She accepts the blame and we are given the message that anything a men does is the woman’s fault because she tempted him.

Moreover, in the second episode of True Detective, Marty seems really outraged when he meets an underage prostitute. When he starts to blame the woman who employs the young girl, she answers “Girls walk this earth all the time screwing for free. So why is it you add business to the mix and boys like you can’t stand that thought? Because suddenly you don’t own it the way you thought you did.” And even if at the moment Marty seems disgusted, he will prove 7 years later that the woman was right by sleeping with the young prostitute.

After being accused of giving misogynistic messages, True Detective creator, Nic Pizzolatto defended himself by saying that the show is given from two misogynistic men points of view, and that men hurting women is one of the major themes of the serie. It is true that True Detective also gives a bad image of men since they are either monsters, killers, alcoholics, or men who can’t love and respect women as they should. Instead of loving them, they hurt them, and the whole serie is about women killed in a mysterious way. There are no models in this show, and I think it is quite pessimistic, but it is what gives True Detective all its gloomy atmosphere that makes it different from other shows.