#which means my culturally critical assertions don't cut much ice at the dinner table

[palmviolet]

true detective rewatch thoughts s1ep7: after you've gone (in which we get ecocritical, aka the symbolism of lawnmowing)

— this episode is all about showing and seeing. "i won't avert my eyes," rust tells marty, pretty much a thesis statement for the series' final act. what characters see is key for progressing the case and unlocking the secrets of the yellow king and his cult — when marty continues to call rust crazy, rust says, “there’s something you’re gonna have to look at, no other way around it”, and the viewing of the fontenot tape immediately changes marty's stance on helping him out. similarly, miss delores talks with reverence about carcosa only when rust shows her his drawings of the devil traps.

— but just as central to this episode are instances of not seeing. marty reveals he quit the police because he didn't want ever "to look at anything like that anymore" (referring to the baby in the microwave); maggie visits rust, asking him to tell her that marty will be safe in an instance of wilful ignorance, and he returns “it never sat right with me, and it doesn’t now, you asking me to lie to you about him”; papania and gilbough, lost in the bayou, ask errol childress for directions and, just like rust seventeen years earlier, fail to notice that he's the man they're looking for.

— this latter instance links back to the role of the louisiana environment in the series, as i talked about in my thoughts on ep2. childress is sitting on a lawnmower, tidying up a cemetery (whose graves are above ground, as is traditional in the region because of flooding). the act of manicuring an area marked by death, an area susceptible to natural forces far beyond the scope of a tidy lawn, works at odds with nature. it is connected to the golf club scenes between marty and geraci, wherein the perfect greens contrast sharply to the usual fare of oil refineries and swamps. golf is metonymic for business exchange, dubious political deals, and the veneer of polite society that conceals corruption from view, makes it look pretty — just the way the golf greens are falsely watered and treated, destroying an ecosystem in the process. childress, mowing the grass, is an agent of this veiled destruction, working on behalf of the institution (the 'parish').

— this is, of course, inescapably reminiscent of marty and rust's altercation regarding the mowing of the harts' lawn. the lawn is not only the site of institutional corruption but also masculine pride and ownership. marty views his place on the earth not as stewardship but as dominion (to borrow from christian theology, heavily present throughout the series) and, just like his wife, his lawn is his own to tend to and control. rust intrudes on his mastery of his environment — but in cutting the lawn, he's also contributing to that environment's oppression, manicuring corruption from sight just as he lies to maggie about marty's infidelity. this is representative of his involvement, however ambivalent, in the institutional cover-up of the murders.

— this is why it's significant that marty's second meeting with geraci is on a boat in the bayou. they're out of geraci's jurisdiction literally, yes, with him being the sheriff of iberia parish, but they're also out of the realm of regulated, manicured politeness, the veneer stripped away. we get long, sweeping shots of the watery landscape at the end of this episode and at the beginning of the finale — remember rust's assertion that the whole place would be underwater in ten years, nature reclaiming its oppressed territory — and it's here that geraci is forced to confront with his own two eyes evidence of his own corruption in the form of the fontenot tape. marty and rust can only work effectively free of the unrelenting forces of the coverup — both the police institution and the neatly trimmed lawn.