Psychedelia in Film & TV #2: TRUE REFLECTIVE

All men’s lives, everything was Maya, a kind of childishness, a spectacle, theatre, an illusion, emptiness in bright wrappings, a soap bubble – something one could laugh at and at the same time despise but no by no means take seriously.

– Hermann Hesse.

//////////////////

I absolutely adored TRUE DETECTIVE ’s first season (as of right now, only the third episode of season two has aired). The character of Rustin Cohle is utterly faaaaabulous – his point of view on life (spanning all episodes) I find both utterly compelling and relatable, and his actions end up going far beyond anything I ever imagined him doing. To create a character that is so full, so nuanced and so human (taking into account his predisposition) in only eight episodes is astounding. This comes down largely to the writing but equal weight is owed to Matthew McConaughey’s performance – ARE. YOU. MAD. Woody Harrelson’s performance is also worthy of acknowledgment. His portrayal of a man struggling with the ‘detectives curse’ is maybe some of his best work to date. Cohle as a character would never have worked on his own and needed the awe- (dumb)((“what’s scented meat?”)) –struck Marty to bounce off of. This Tumblr page homage to the tone that their car conversations take: http://truedetectiveconversations.tumblr.com

I could gratuitously mention how much I enjoyed the narrative structure and how having ­­­­­­­Cary Fukunaga directing the entire season was absolutely the best choice (shame they haven’t done something similar this season)((THAT SIX MINUTE TRACKING///FENCE-TRAVERSING SHOT)). But this isn’t a review. This is psychedelic a take. So lets get down to it.

///////////////////

TRUE DETECTIVE features some serious stuff. A 17 year-old unsolved murder. Child kidnapping. Child molestation. Treatment of women. Corruption of power. Conspiracy. Neo-Nazi bike gangs. Needless to say, the show is pretty dark. But the thing that really set it apart for me was the world building and the tone that the occultism brought to the show. It added a whole new dimension: the secret, the hidden, the unknown, our mutual illusions. It is as if the occultism almost makes room for the psychedelic slight of hand.

At the end of episode three The Locked Room we are treated to one of Rust’s many unsettling sermons, skip ahead to 0:55.

Wow. Good stuff.

“This, this is what I’m talking about. This is what I mean when I’m talking about time, and death and futility. There are broader ideas at work; mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions. Fourteen straight hours of staring at DB’s knee’s – these are the things you think of. You look in their eyes, even in a picture, doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive, you can still read ‘em. And you know what you see? They welcomed it. Not at first. But, right there in the last instant, it’s an unmistakable relief. See? ‘Cause they were afraid…and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go. And they saw in that last nano-second, they saw what they were; you, yourself, this whole big drama: it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will. And you can just let go. To finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight… To realise that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain – it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person.”

TRUE DETECTIVE isn’t psychedelic in the way that INCEPTION is –its psychedelia appears in the ideas touted and words spoken by various characters, rather than its conceptual basis. The first example of this is given above. To be clear, it’s obvious that what Rust is referring to is death (and by psychedelic extension the context that the experience of death gives to life). After this episode finished, I scoured the internet frantically searching for an interview with Nic Pizzolatto that specifically dealt with his idea behind the ‘locked room’. Not to my surprise, it wasn’t about a specific part of the psychedelic experience. But you know what? It’s a really fucking accurate description of how the psychedelic experience of death (ego death) recontextualises life.

Ego death is a very strange experience to put into words. It’s difficult to tell from any narrative point of view, whether that is first, second or third person simply as there isn’t ‘anyone’ to have the specific experience. It happens to ‘you’ on high doses of psychedelics, but at the (very long, everlasting) moment of ego dissolution you stop identifying with any singular form and ‘dentify’ with ‘all forms’ (the only form). ‘You’ ‘lose’ ‘your’ ‘I’. There is no name, no mind, no form and no names or minds or forms of or for anything else. There are many phrases used that attempt to describe the phenomena such as a drop of rain falling back into the ocean or a wave returning to the sea, but I think the following quote encapsulates it best: “The essence of metaphysical realization is the discovery that the conscious self, the 
ultimate knower in man, is substantially identical with the infinite.” (http://www.lsdexperience.com/part-2/ultimate/)

The prime directive that anyone who undertakes purposeful psychonautic work ought to be mindful of is: LET GO. Just like Rust says, you let go. You let go of ‘life’ and ‘you’ and realise how much you’ve been struggling and worrying and paining – and you laugh. You can’t believe it. WHAT?! THAT’S ALL I’M LETTING GO OF? MY LIFE AND MY I ARE THE SAME THING?! LIFE IS A SELF INITIATED, CONSTRUCTED TRICK FOR MYSELF, BY MYSELF FOR THE SOUL PURPOSE OF REALISING, KNOWING AND EXPERIENCING THAT I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT TO, JUST FOR THE SAKE OF EXPERIENCE ALONE?! IT DOESN’T ULTIMATELY MATTER IF I DO OR DON’T AS THERE IS NO FAILING!? LIFE IS MY OWN LITTLE IMAGINATIVE DREAM-GAME THAT I’VE CONJURED UP SO THAT I CAN ACCEPT MY INEVITABLE DEATH THAT ISN’T A THING AND DOESN’T EXIST ANYWAY?!

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF I FAIL?!

That inner dialogue but without the “I’s”. In that moment of self-death, self-actualisation, you see what everything is, was or ever will be: you. You experience that there is no you, no separation and finally that there is no death. The (flat) circle, which began with your birth combined with the knowledge of impending death, is completed. There is no “I” at all, in very truth.

“…this whole big drama: it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will………. To realise that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain – it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream.”

 Of course, the whole ‘life is only a dream’ angle is not new or novel in any way shape or form. We hear it (and love it) as children in the form of a well-loved nursery rhyme. The reason I chose TRUE DETECTIVE to illustrate the experience of ego death instead of another piece of fiction is its tone – the overly dark, brooding, sincere, slow burning world we enter into. We believe Rust believes what he is saying. For his character it makes fucking sense. He deals with death daily. He meditates every morning to the Christian cross thinking about allowing his own crucifixion. Everything in this world has weight, has gravitas. Which just makes the ‘life is but a dream’ angle that much more affecting. It is wholly consistent with the character and the world.

However, there is more to the darkness. Pizzolatto has created a character that has direct knowledge of some of the most morally skewed acts that we can think of. And said character writes it all off as a dream. This duality///polarity of existence is extremely reminiscent of the ambivalence, confusion and mind-fuckery of high dose psychedelic experiences; specifically, the polarity between seriousness and folly. (I am not suggesting that Pizzolatto views that these acts are just “meh” – Rust is simply a character with his own worldview).

CHILD KIDNAPPERS, MOLESTORS AND KILLERS? – MEH, ITS ALL A DREAM.

OH MY GOD I’M FUCKING DYING – WAIT, THERE IS NO DEATH.

OH MY GOD I’M LOSING MY MIND – WAIT, I WOULDN’T MIND.

This intense feeling of experiencing two totally mutually exclusive opposites and being able to honestly accept them both as equally happening and affecting is incredibly… freeing? restricting? crazy? NEWSPEAK(y)?! Many a time whilst on LSD a friend would ask me to explain, define or verbalise thoughts on a particular subject and in my attempts I’d end up pin-balling between two equally believed opposing trains of thought, with all sincerity, making it impossible to answer the question. It’s as if I’d “zoom in” on one train of thought as an answer, but slowly and surely as I’d verbalise it I would make all these mental connections that “zoom out” on that answer and reveal the exact opposite///mutually exclusive thing to be as accurate as my initial answer. Frustrating stuff for my friend – a woah dude moment for myself. Life can take the form of the most all-encompassing seriousness in one moment and the cognition of which will catapult me to the conclusion that it is nothing but fun and folly. I mean, sweet and sour flavour sauce IS a thing, folks. To paraphrase Terence Mckenna: if you’re into psychedelics, you’re into everything.

The experience of ego death is probably the best example of this sweet and sour mind fuck. We, in the west, approach the subject of death with the utmost seriousness and ego death essentially trivialises it. It is simultaneously the most and least serious experience I have ever had. All of our western stigma and fear about death, all the connotations, all we believe about death points us to expect that it is the end. There is nothing else. Once death happens, there is no going back. It is static. Unchangeable. Literally, zero neural (anything) plasticity. Is the experience of realising our cultures most seriously approached subject, actually isn’t all that serious at all, a serious experience? Yes, it seriously is. Experiencing how unserious our most seriously approached cultural construction actually is, is one of the MOST SERIOUS experiences I’ve ever had. (You know when you repeat a word aloud for a long time and it begins to lose whatever meaning there was associated with that particular sound – this is precisely that.) ‘Possibility’ gains a new definition. ‘Life’ becomes something totally different. Even the concept of ‘being high’ is completely eradicated and moulded anew, after a reality shattering psychedelic experience.

As a mental exercise, imagine that you’ve stopped taking death seriously, what is there to take seriously now? Life? – for sure. But is that seriousness now applied to life one of bureaucracy or staleness? Not at all! It becomes imbued with opportunity, possibility, joviality! But there’s no need to worry about not succeeding at the things you want to do, as…. ///Erm, Sam – we already lived our lives this way. It’s great that you’re finally on our page, I’m glad, we’re glad, but move along!\\\…. life is a game, in that it doesn’t matter if you fail.

In Seeing Things, the seasons second episode, we see what could be taken as an ‘acid flashback’ from Rust’s point of view. As he exits the car upon discovering a church connected to the case, a flock of birds soaring past in the sky morph into the shape of the spiral that is connected to all the murders in the case. Moreover, earlier in the episode when we learn about his hallucinations for the first time (what he calls ‘neural damage’), we are treated to what is without a doubt the best visual representation of ‘tracers’ I have ever seen.

The particular visual phenomena known as ‘tracing’ is par for the psychedelic course and is usually the first visual tell that the drugs are working. If you ever see anyone sitting down or walking around waving their hands in front of them, extremely wide eyed with a curious smile plastered on their face – they be tracin’. What Rust is experiencing here is HPPD or Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. Funnily enough I found a link that explains this particular ‘disorder’ using my examples:

(I have not and will not do an article listing each film that attempts to depict a psychedelic experience overtly because they mostly all always make it about the visuals. Not only is this an extremely shallow one-sided way to bring and represent the psychedelic experience to a wider audience but a lot of the time it is done with complete insincerity ((the above link features a few examples of this)). As previously stated, I don’t believe there is one correct reason for use of psychedelics (((everyone is different and has different needs))) but I believe in accurate and responsible representation. Since these films take a different angle on the psychedelic experience, they wont be included.)

Right at the end of Seeing Things when Rust discovers the creepy fucking painted mural on the church wall, we hear him talking to the detectives:

“…back then, the visions. Most of the time I was convinced then, shit I’d lost it. But there were other times.. I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe.”

Feeling like I had literally worked it all out whilst under the influence is a common experience. For all the good that it is to ‘work it out’ in that exact moment (it being the subject of total comprehension yet total ineffability simultaneously), by the time it came to spatially record the working out, my consciousness has returned to earthly reaches and the completed cosmic dot-to-dot of god///consciousness///existence has all but faded.

My theory as to why the dot-to-dot fades is somewhat related to Rust’s monologue about M-theory and viewing our space-time from a fourth dimensional perspective. Basically, on psychedelics our consciousness is expanded above that of our sober level (theta brain waves etc). We perceive everything differently, including space and time (they both ‘disappear’). Our brain makes connections that it wouldn’t normally and we are cognitive of this, we experience this and we experience these newly made connections ‘in our heads’. But since what we are experiencing is beyond our usual cognition, culture and language we don’t have the ability to express whatever it is that we’ve landed on clearly and accurately enough. It’s all just OHMYGODWOAHWOWTHISISITIVEGOTITWOAHWOWOHMYGODWOAH. Getting wrapped up in holding onto these cosmic cognitions is risky territory as fixations on things (thought loops) sometimes lead to freak-outs and ‘bad’ trips (the repeated idea of “time is a flat circle” chimes eerily well with the experience of thought loops). Perhaps we haven’t really figured out anything, and it’s just a high intensity-training course on learning to let go, courtesy of your psychedelic drug of choice.

TRUE DETECTIVE ended perfectly. For all the darkness, brooding and violence that featured it was all about two friends reconciling with each other, their respective families and themselves. It was just “one story, the oldest story”, good vs. evil////light vs. dark – externally in Louisiana and internally within themselves. Rust mentions the idea of us (as a society) being owed something for our “mutual illusions”. (Mutual illusions aren’t inherently detrimental – we wouldn’t have agreed to host any if they were. However, the binary inherently produced by the word ‘illusion’ is problematic within a Buddhist///Psychedelic context, but anyway.) This is extremely vague and can mean a lot of things but within the larger context of what he talks about, I think the mutual illusion he is referring to is death. Death is our biggest mutual illusion and fear of it, or just fear itself, is generally the price we pay for believing in it. Our almost allergic reaction towards death, our longing to hold onto life, our inability to let go all compound and reinforce the continual cultural fear of death. We owe it to ourselves to live a life, maybe not free of fear, but one free of the ‘burden’ of ‘death’.

Let’s all make like Rust, and not be afraid to feel our definitions fade.

 

\\\\\\\\\IDMIYF////////

 

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////