Who Killed Owen Taylor? A True Detective Season Three Explainer

My favorite film noir is The Big Sleep.  (Yes, I know the video clip is from The Maltese Falcon.  Calm down.  We'll get to that.) It's also my second (or third) favorite Bogart flick.  But for all of its crackling dialogue, dark twists and incendiary chemistry between Bogie and Lauren Bacall, the movie has one hole in the plot big enough to drive a Packard through.  From  Wikipedia:

The Big Sleep is known for its convoluted plot. During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler, who told a friend in a later letter: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".

In some detective fiction, such as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the story is entirely about the plot.  And sometimes, as in the case of The Big Sleep, the story is much more about the atmosphere. About characters so compelling you'll follow them into danger down dark alleys and into abandoned buildings just to see where they'll take you.  Just to see of they'll survive and if, in the end, some rough justice is meted out to the bad guys.

(What do you want me to do? Count three like they do in the movies? That's what Canino said to little Jonesy.)

This is what I think Nic Pizzolatto, was attempting with True Detective Season III, which, after commanding my attention for seven episodes, reached what felt like an unfinished and unsatisfying conclusion last night.

FYI,  from here on out There Be Spoilers, so if you don't wanna look, then turn back now.

(That's one Eddie!)

However mostly I'm going to violate the First Rule of Writing (actually the Sixth) that I try to impress on students when, every now and again, I find myself in front of a classroom or seated in a writer's semicircle.  That whatever meaning or feeling you, as the writer, intended your story to convey, if it baffles your audience or flies over their head, then you're doing it wrong.

I don't care if (as I have been told by more than one student) that whatever-it-was "really happened".  If it didn't happen on the page then, for the purposes of storytelling, it didn't happen.  Instead, what you the writer are seeing when you read your own words is only half the story -- the part you actually put down on paper.  But the the rest of it?  All that vital, visceral stuff that you think is obvious to everyone?  Those are intentions and imaginings which your brain is imparting to the story, but are not actually there, alive and on the page.

And the only cure for that I know of is to let your writing cool off and come back at it with the ruthlessness of an editor who, as Faulkner said, is perfectly willing to "kill your darlings.” (Hence the typos that always frequently occasionally and charmingly slip into my blog.  This is a fast-fast, hit-it-and-quit-it medium, and since I have no editor or First Reader but myself, I rarely have the luxury of allowing my posts to cool off for a few days and then coming back at them with my Merciless Editor Hat on.  And trust me, I do have a Merciless Editor Hat.)

So I am breaking that rule in order to tell you what I think Nic Pizzolatto (who has more accolades for writing than I have pairs of clean underwear) was trying and failing to get up to with the finale of TDIII.  An explanation which sorta fits the facts as we know them.

Put simply, I think the entire season was Amelia's novel.  Her second novel.  The one Wayne knew she really wanted to write and that he told her with great tenderness she should go off and write.

Consider that, of all the professions which Amelia could possibly have, Nic Pizzolatto made her an aspiring (and, later, very successful) novelist.

Just like Nic Pizzolatto.

A crime novelist.  Just like Nic Pizzolatto.

Which means it is perfectly plausible that this whole third season of True Detective was her novel, told from her third-person nearly-omniscient perspective of Wayne's perspective.

(That's two Eddie!)

If this was the case, I don't think Mr. Pizzolatto stuck the landing.  Kinda blew it, actually.  Which is a real shame.  Not nearly as bad as "the little boy fell out of bed at it was all a dream" but I think, if this is was the particular fence he was swinging for, he could have used another couple of drafts and a couple of episodes to smooth out the truncated and jangly way he brought the story to a close.

Next time just call me, Nic.  Happy to help and my rates are quite reasonable :-)

And whether or not we ever hear from Nic Pizzolatto what he intended, I think this theory bears up better than any other explanation I've heard.

Because, when you think about it. pretty much everything we the audience actually learn about the Purcell case comes from information Amelia could have gleaned from Wayne, or (in the manner of a novelist) she "discovered" by putting her character in the right place at the right time, or making her character capable of sweet talking detectives, or having key characters (like Junian "Mr. Exposition" Watt) available to her a critical moments.

As to the rest?  The connections she couldn't have known about or the conversations she couldn't have overheard?  Or the very literary device of using as the inciting action for the entire show the arrival of a True Crime teevee show documentarian.  One who asks Old Wayne probing questions and slowly reveals to him vital and recently discovered evidence ?

Amelia invented all of that as the needs of the story dictated.  Because that's what novelists do.

Because we as readers (or viewers) know that part of the story-telling game is allowing novelists to perform all kinds of tricks with space and time and memory that we agree to judge only by their verisimilitude.  By their appearance of being true or real.

Mark Watney was not stranded on Mars, but for 369 pages I was happy to let Andy Weir let me believe otherwise.

There is no Maltese Falcon, but for the price of an hour and a half of my time, I'm always delighted to let Sam Spade, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo, Kasper Gutman and poor Wilmer spin for me a tale of the stuff dreams are made of. 

And so it is here, with the very real Nic Pizzolatto inventing a crime novelist named Amelia Reardon who is, in turn, telling us a story about Life and Death and The Harvest Moon.

As the invisible narrator of the story, Amelia-the-fictional-crime-novelist has the freedom to zoom around anywhere she wished, in any timeline she chooses.  She can go in and out of strange and dangerous places.  She can reference other infamous child abduction cases that exist in the same fictional universe.  She can afflict Wayne with a memory that fails him whenever the needs of the story require it, and she can give him a happy ending sipping sweet tea on the porch with his children, grandkids and best friend.

She can also adjust the plot so that the poetry she is reading to her class whenever Wayne drops by always matches the mood of plot.  Of all the children's books in the world, she can make it so she was reading "Jungle Book" to her children -- the story of a young man lost in a hostile jungle -- as we learn hints about Wayne's harrowing time in in the jungles of  Vietnam, and as he see him getting more and more lost in the jungle of his failing memory.

She can shape the plot so that Wayne always manages to pick up her book (which he never read) on just the right page and just the right time, just as she can shape the plot so that sex with Wayne is always earth shattering.

She can do the very literary thing of "framing" her story so that it begins and ends on the same beat:  in this case, with two kids -- a boy and a girl -- riding away from home on their bicycles.

And most tellingly, she can write herself out of the story as needed -- a main character who dies at some point during the intervening years but whose specifics are never discussed -- and then insert herself back into the story as a recurring hallucination to comment on what's happening and advance the story forward in abrupt ("Maybe Julie Purcell isn't dead!") and specific ways. 

She is Nic Pizzolatto's own "Kilgore Trout": a fictional writer invented by a real writer as a device to tell the story in the way the real writer wishes it told.

But while I applaud the effort, the result left me shaking my head.

The Wages of Sin ... Barely Cover My Bar Tab.