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TCR0010.1177/1362480617737761Theoretical CriminologyLinnemann

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Theoretical Criminology

Bad cops and true detectives:

120
The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617737761
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617737761
unthinkable world journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr

Travis Linnemann
Eastern Kentucky University, USA

Abstract
The first season of the HBO series True Detective has drawn attention to Eugene
Thackers horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world
and the subjects relation to it. This article is an effort to read Thackers speculative
realism into a critique of the police power. Where the police concept is vital to
sustaining the Cartesian world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation,
the limitations, failures or absence of police might also reveal horizons of disorder
primitivism, anarchismthe world-in-itself. A critical reading of True Detective and other
police stories suggests that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable
from security, law and order, the police power is never beyond redemption. What is
rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological positiona world-without-policeas
it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the challenges of thinking outside
the subject.

Keywords
horror, ontology, police, speculative realism, True Detective

In the title role of the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel plays a vicious and deeply
compromised NYPD detective. Known only as the Lieutenanta move that announces
and reaffirms his alterityhe engages in all the behaviors police insist they guard against.
An unfaithful husband, absent, abusive parent, alcoholic, junkie, degenerate gambler,

Corresponding author:
Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University, 467A Stratton, Richmond, KY 40503, USA.
Email: travis.linnemann@eku.edu
2 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

thief, rapist, racist, sexist, there is no bridge too far. This is not a man with a name, this is
a copa bad cop. Assigned to investigate the brutal rape of a Catholic nun, the Lieutenant
metes out his own brand of street justice, while juggling his estranged family, sex and
drug habits and gambling debts. As one critic remarked, in a world, where everyone
seems to do drugs and the system lets young hoodlums walk and no one cares, he may
be a bad cop, but hes just one of many (Howe, 1993). The brutality and desperation
embodied by the Lieutenant distinguished the film from its genre contemporaries, win-
ning it critical praise and a sustained cult following. While it is meant to be a journey into
one mans self-degradation and death, there is another reading of Bad Lieutenant, which I
will suggest animates nearly all police stories.1 While clearly not a good cop by any
measure, waging a revanchist campaign in dogged pursuit of two street kids, the Lieutenant
remains indisputably a cop. With few exceptions, this rule guides the police storyno
matter how bad the copliberal understandings of law, order and violence remain the
symbolic core of the police project. Because the police power is inseparable from domi-
nant understandings of safety, security and social order, its adjoining stories, even those
taking up the subject of the bad cop tend to somehow reaffirm the symbolic order2 and
bourgeois ideology. This is why police, as theatrical prop and material practice, has proven
indispensable for political power. Yet this is not simply a question of ideology, as an alter-
nate reading of the figure of police hints at other, perhaps deeper ontological tangles.
Another police story, the first season of the acclaimed HBO series True Detective,
has drawn attention to philosopher Eugene Thackers (2015) Horror of Philosophy3
trilogy, which he elaborates through a critical reading of supernatural horror films,
novels and related texts. However, the horror of Thackers concern is not the genre
itself, but those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitation and con-
straints [] the horizon of its own possibility (Thacker, 2011: 2). In other words, the
genre provides a heuristic landscape upon which to engage unraveling and unthinkable
ontological worlds. For Thacker, there is a human-centered world in which we live,
what he calls the world-for-us. This is an ontological prison of sorts, difficult to escape
because it is we humans who think it (Thacker, 2011: 2). The world-for-us is the
Cartesian world of order, inseparable from its economies and institutions, least of all
police. Where police is vital to sustaining the civilized world of mass-consumption
and brutal privation, the limitations, failures and absence of police might also reveal
horizons of disorderprimitivism, anarchismthe world-in-itself. This is an objec-
tive state of nature, one beyond the reach of human interference, or the world that
returns following it. To reckon the cultural texture of the world-in-itself, one need only
consider a few of the many contemporary films and novels taking up disaster, the
apocalyptic and dystopian (see Yar, 2015). In Cormac McCarthys (2006) novel The
Road, for instance, the lawless, violence of its post-apocalyptic landscape can be read
as precisely the inverse of the late capitalist world-for-us, a world utterly dependent
upon the police power. Similarly, in the graphic novels and subsequent television
series, The Walking Dead,4 the struggle to reestablish social order amid hordes of rapa-
cious biters, is led by Rick Grimes, who before the fall worked as a small town cop.
Grimes, who commands and polices his fellow survivors and uses violence indiscrimi-
nately in order to ensure their survival, thereby reminds, not so subtly, that the police
power is essential to the survival of western capitalist civilization.
Linnemann 3

The centrality of the world-for-us and the interminable concern for the post-human
world-in-itself, eclipse a third ontological position, an unthinkable world-without-us that
exists apart from the subject and sociality and beyond collapse and extinction. Where
Thacker uses world and earth to denote the subjective world-for-us and the objective
world-in-itself, he uses planet to invoke a cosmological view of the world-without-us,
the fuzzy domain of the not-human. As he makes clear, this speculative non-human
world is as much a cultural concept as a scientific one and as such, it is through everyday
cultural texts that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the
difficult thought of, the world-without-us (Thacker, 2011: 6).
If supernatural horror can be read as an attempt to confront the unthinkable, might we
then similarly employ the cultural texts of police? In the effort to read Thackers specula-
tive realism into a critique of police, this article undertakes some detective work of its
own, tracing the motif of police as a figure central to the Cartesian world-for-us and its
terrifying binary, the world-in-itself. As with Bad Lieutenant, a critical reading of True
Detective and other police stories suggest that even in its most violent and corrupt
formsas inseparable from security, law and orderthe police are never beyond
redemption. Yet, if there is one fact that haunts the minds of even their most earnest sup-
porters, it is this: police offer no real protection and uphold the miseries of the present
social order with coercion, violence and murder. This is the unassailable limit of the
police projectthe horizon of its own possibilitythe horror of police. In order to
confront the ideological fantasy of the benevolent police, this article offers the proposi-
tion that all police stories are in fact horror stories, depicting plainly the brutality and
violence of police and of the social system in which they serve. What is rendered unthink-
able then is a third ontological positiona world-without-policeas it exposes the frail-
ties of the present social order, the difficulties of thinking outside the subject and the
limits of human thought.

The horror of police

The failures, limitations and outright illegality of police, the something rotten in law
famously diagnosed by Walter Benjamin in Critique of violence (1978), is well-worn
territory in scholarly critiques of state power. While often the core of the bad cop nar-
rative, and at other times simply ignored, policings festering sepsis nevertheless abounds
within its cinematic and televisual representations. Here police stories can be understood
as a realm of mis-identification and self-deception (Hall and Winlow, 2015: 111) that
reaffirms, however subtly, what Benjamin saw as the law-making and law-preserving
function of police violence, marking the very moment at which the states authority and
social order begins to break down (Benjamin, 1978: 286287). Like Keitels Bad
Lieutenant who remained ostensibly in service of the law while operating outside of it,
Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) of HBOs much lauded crime drama The
Wire, provides another example of the contradictory figure that breaks the law to uphold
the law. In Adam Kotskos (2012: 68) view, McNulty is a sociopathic enforcer, that
familiar figure whose violence and transgressions are essential skills employed for a
higher calling. In one exchange with Lester, a seasoned and particularly wise colleague,
the brash McNulty sets the two out as different, part of a rare few, natural police:
4 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

McNulty: You know something, Lester, I do believe there arent five swingin dicks
in this entire department who can do what we do. Im not sayin like all
chest out and shit. Its just, you think about it. Theres maybe, what, 3000
sworns, right? One hundred or so are bosses, so not a fucking clue there.
A few more hundred is sergeants and lieutenants and most of them wanna
be bosses one day so theyre just as fucked. Then theres 600 or 700
fuckin housecats, you know. Deskmen and in the patrol division, theres
probably a little bit of talent there, but the way the city is right now, thats
1500 guys chasin calls and clearin corners. I mean, nobodys knowing
his post, nobodys building nothing, right? And CID is the same. Catching
calls, chasing quick clearances keeping everything in the shallow end, I
mean who is it out there that can do what we do with a case? How many
are there really? Don Worden, Ed Burns, Gary Childs out in the county.
John ONeil and Steve Cleary over at Woodlawn oh, they bring it in, but
theres not many. Were good at this, Lester. In this town, were as good
as it gets.
Lester: Natural police?
McNulty: Fuck yes! Natural police.

Whereas Benjamin would see all police as agents who, through the force of legitimate
violence, reproduce the law, McNultys rant advances the notion that only he, Lester and
a few other natural police possess the attributes or perhaps will to act on behalf of the
community and social order. This understanding of the police power can be traced in its
filmic form to the archetype natural police or rogue cop, Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood)
of the 1970s Dirty Harry franchise (King, 2013). In Nicole Rafters (2006: 112) view,
Dirty Harry marks a rupture in the police imaginary, departing from staid television seri-
als like Dragnet and Mayberry and films that tended to position police as unsophisticated
beat cops, crusading G-men or dashing private eyes. Emerging at a time of marked social
discord, alongside a conservative tough on crime politics and the war on drugs,5 Dirty
Harry represented a new kind of cop, tailored perfectly for the rising tide of authoritarian
populism, powerfully foreshadowing the growing centrality of police in US social life
(King, 2013). From Dirty Harry henceforth, in Neal Kings (1999: 2) view, the cop film
genre reflects the tough on crime era, a stridently conservative, revanchist vision
where working class community protectors [] retake the center of the stage they feel
theyve lost. However, in Bad Lieutenant and a few other films,6 Rafter locates a break
from the Dirty Harry rogue and a critique of the police power. For her, Bad Lieutenant is
not simply a graphic film about a bad cop, but instead an altogether unique development
in the genre, a category she calls alternative-tradition or critical cop films. Set apart
from noir, which feature a cop/detective hero awash in a world of seduction and shadow
and postmodernist films somehow absent of heroes, alternative-tradition/critical cop
films aim at negating the very idea of a hero. Thus for Rafter (2006: 131), films like
Bad Lieutenant make the singular point there is no such thing as a good cop and by
implication, no such thing as a good man. While some films do perhaps offer a more
nuanced critique of police, as we have seen with Bad Lieutenant, violence, illegality and
revenge in service to broader understandings of security, law and order nevertheless
Linnemann 5

remain the symbolic core of the police story. This is not so much a sign that the genre and
its critics have failed to take the police power seriously, but rather a demonstration of the
irrevocable union of police and liberal capitalist social order. Even in its abstract filmic
forms, police, as Gorgio Agamben (2000: 103) put it, are the place where the proximity
and the almost constitutive exchange between violence and right that characterizes the
figure of the sovereign is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else. Similarly,
Georges Bataille (1986: 8688) saw the police story as a site of order reaffirming spec-
tatorship, offering the relatively safe, vicarious experience of criminal transgression and
the righteousness of punishment. As such, the misdeeds of even the most irredeemable
cop remain part of a symbolic order that reaffirms the necessity of police violence and
the righteousness of sovereign power. Of course, implicit in the very notion of the bad
apple is the understanding that the rest of the apples protect and serve benevolently.
As Dirty Harry was meant to suggest, bad cops diagnose the failures of liberal social
order and of a criminal justice system so tangled in bureaucracy that it repeatedly fails to
protect the innocent or act on behalf of the aggrieved (King, 2013). Perhaps most impor-
tantly, in the cinematic imagination as well as the workings of actual police, the political
theatre of singling out and expelling the violator, shields the policing institution from
scrutiny, allowing it to recover and return to its old path [] stronger than ever
(Kotsko, 2012: 76).
Nevertheless, whether it emerges from the imagination or the shadowy terrains of city
streets, scaffolding the view of the bad cop as a necessary evil is the objectless anxiety
born of the always present and yet to arrive threat of crime and violence (Hall, 2012b:
191). Like Agamben and Bataille, Jean and John Comaroff (2016: xxii) see the tidy nar-
ratives of police procedurals, tales of hyper-masculine super cops and of crime scenes
deconstructed with magico-scientistic precision, conjuring a world where no mystery
goes unsolved and the wicked never elude justice, thereby preforming over and over,
the phantasm of sovereign authority. The symbiosis between the police and their adver-
saries, twins what Marxist literary critic Franco Moretti (1982) calls the dialectic of fear.
For Moretti, the monsters of the Gothic imagination usefully diagnose the anxieties of a
burgeoning bourgeois modernity. Reading Shellys Frankenstein (2014 [1818]) as the
portents of scientific rationality and Stokers Dracula (2003 [1897]) as the horror of
landlordism and dead labor, the Gothic literature of terror documents the tremors of an
emerging capitalist dystopia. As Mark Steven (2017: 40) puts it, the dialectic of vampire
and monster, propertied and propertyless, bourgeoisie and dispossessed powerfully
depict the two poles of capitalist society. If the hulking wretch and bloodsucking pro-
prietor diagnose the anxieties of their day, what then can be said of their antagonists? In
Morettis (1982: 68) view, whoever dares to fight the monster automatically becomes
the representative of the species, of the whole of society. In other words, the enemy of
the monster is always a stand in for the social order and in the case Shelley and Stoker,
the monsters rivals mirror the whole of 19th-century mediocrity with its backwards
nationalism, superstition and ill-informed hubris (Moretti, 1982: 68). Today, monsters of
a more familiar form haunt the televisual and cinematic imagination. From the villains of
Poe, Doyles archrival Moriarty, the psychopaths and gangsters of Hammett and
Chandler, on through to the serial killers and terrorists of the present, it is the police story
in its various forms, which provides the vernacular of the monstrous. Accordingly, as
6 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

Mark Neocleous (2016: 66) has recently written, it is the monster that always calls forth
the police. Like Neocleous and Egon Bittner (1970) before him, literary critic Leo
Braudy (2016: 141) sees the monster and the detective (police) as a dialectic of dis/order
and ab/normality. He writes:

The monster and the detective are opposite sides of the same coin: the monster is the embodiment
of disorder, an eruption into the world of normality, coming from some alien place, from hell,
from outer space, from wherever and whatever is not normal. The detective by contrast is the
seeker for order. Instead of the unprecedented monster, the detectives quarry is the criminal,
the monster reduced to a human scale.

Taking up the television series Dexter, which revolved around a serial killer-cum-
crime scene technician, Neocleous (2014) also shows how the monstrous is bound up
with the fundamental police problem, the question of order. In this way, the beat cop who
chases petty street criminals and the serial killer who preys upon the lost and dispos-
sessed, pursue the same endsdisposal of social refusecleaning up the streets. Where
Neocleous and Braudy might diverge however, is on the composition of police. Through
a reading of Hobbes Leviathan (Hobbes etal., 2010) and Behemoth (Hobbes, 1889),
Neocleous focuses our attention on the violent monstrosity of the sovereign. As Moretti
(1982: 68) similarly suggests, rapt by the horrors of the monster, liberal subjects must
accept the vices of its destroyer, thereby displacing the violent monstrosity of the social
order outside society itself. While Neocleous (2014) offers several examples where
police, as self-proclaimed monster fighters seem to have slipped over the Nietzschean
precipice and become monsters themselves, we should be clear in the view, as is he, that
whomever occupies the figure of police, is always already a monster. In other words,
rather than monster and police simply being two sides of the same coin, the fear and
insecurity which characterizes bourgeois modernity helps to fashion or reveal the terrible
unity of monster and police.7 For instance, consider the 2001 film Training Day, which
won Denzel Washington an Academy Award for his portrayal of a villainous LAPD
detective, Alonzo Harris. In the films decisive scene, when the street gang he had long
coerced into doing his bidding refuses to murder his trainee Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke)
and Harris launches into a now famous tirade, the monster in police comes into full view:

Aww, you motherfuckers. Okay. Alright. Im putting cases on all you bitches. Huh. You think
you can do this shit Jake? You think you can do this to me? You motherfuckers will be
playing basketball in Pelican Bay when I get finished with you. SHU program nigga. 23-hour
lockdown. Im the man up in this piece. Youll never see the light of who the fuck do you
think youre fucking with? Im the police, I run shit around here. You just live here. Yeah, thats
right, you better walk away. Go on and walk away cause Im gonna burn this motherfucker
down. King Kong aint got shit on me! Thats right, thats right. Shit, I dont, fuck. Im winning
anyway, Im winning Im winning any motherfucking way. I cant lose. Yeah, you can shoot
me, but you cant kill me. (Harris, emphasis added)

Like Hobbes Leviathan, Harris King Kong looms over the landscape, promising pun-
ishment and death to its unruly subjects. Even more explicitly, the monster in police
appears in the 2016 crime thriller Triple 9. In an all too familiar scene, where a grizzled
Linnemann 7

veteran (Jeffery Allen/Woody Harrelson),8 counsels a hopeful upstart (Chris Allen/Casey

Affleck) on the ins and outs of police work, the monster in police again emerges:

Jeffrey Allen: Hows your job going?

Chris Allen: You know, spend my time trying to make a difference. I know how
that sounds.
Jeffrey Allen: Youre gonna make a difference? You aint gonna make a fucking
difference. Forget about that. Your job: out-monster the monster then
get home at the end of the night. Out here there is no good, there is no
bad. To survive out here you gotta out-monster the monster. Can you
do that?

Instead of liberalisms dream of law and order, in this rendering, policing is simply a
project of superior violence and firepower. Here beyond good and evil, the bigger mon-
ster wins (see Anker, 2014). So while we might agree with Rafters assertions regarding
the critical potential of some cop films, the always already together unity of monster and
police marks a rupture in the police imaginary not adequately addressed by the strictures
of genre and convention.9 Given the irrevocable union of monster and police, I propose
a purposeful misreading of the police story, not as mystery or drama, but as horror. After
all, as David Russell (1998: 252) suggests, the basic definition of any horror film may
be centered around its monster character, and the conflict arising in the fantastical and
unreal monsters relationship with normality. Likewise, as Thacker (2015b) suggests,
textual encounters with the monstrous invite a competition between two poles of radical
uncertainty, thereby opening up particularly fertile avenues for critique.10 He writes:

The presumption of a consensual reality in which a set of natural laws govern the working of
the world, the question of the reliability of the senses, the unstable relationships between the
faculties of the imagination and reason, and the discrepancy between our everyday understanding
of the world and the often obscure and counterintuitive descriptions provided by philosophy
and the sciences. The fork in the road is not simply between something existing on not existing,
it is a wavering between two types of radical uncertainty: either demons do not exist, but then
my own senses are unreliable, or demons do exist, but then the world is not as I thought it was.
With the fantasticas with the horror genre itselfone is caught between two abysses, neither
of which are comforting or particularly reassuring. Either I do not know the world, or I do not
know myself.

(Thacker, 2015b: 6)

Thackers point is that horror lies not in the suspicion that one is insane, but rather in the
realization that one is not insane. Fit to the question of the police, it is not necessarily the
abhorrent acts of the rogue cop which are horrific, but rather, the sober recognition that
violence, coercion and murder are routine police practices. The horror then, emerges
from the realization that you saw what you saw, the face of the monster is in fact the
face of the police. On the street and in the imagination, liberal subjects encounter agents
empowered to act on their own volition and discretion and to employ violence and coer-
cion, with impunity. Whether justified or admitted, the violence of police is often
8 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

understood as an unavoidable consequence of the present social order (Weber, 1946).

Entwined and inseparable, sanctified victims and avenging cops signify the worrisome
reminder that police rarely prevent crime, appear only after the damage is done and often
inflict damage of their own (Dubber, 2006). Implicit here is the admission that the police
cannot keep you safe, are in fact under no obligation to do so (Greenhouse, 2005) and
quite often, view you and your kind as threats or worse, enemies (Neocleous, 2008).
These facts, with which most liberal subjects, particularly racial minorities and the
poor, are quite familiar, mirror what Steve Hall and Simon Winlow (2015: 110) have
called the abject concrete universal, the grim individual experiences that represent the
totality of the liberal-capitalist system. Drawing from Hegel, by way of Johnston (2008:
173) and iek (2000) the abject concrete universal aligns with Laclau and Mouffes
understanding of hegemony, suggesting that any universality, such as the inherent benev-
olence of police, is the outcome/product of a struggle for structural dominance. Yet, as
Benjamin (1978) recognized, police violence reveals the precise moment at which the
liberal capitalist fantasy of law and order begins to unravel. Accordingly, this unraveling
marks a gap in the symbolic order and offers a glimpse of the realthe horror of police.
The horrifying recognition that liberal capitalist order is unthinkable apart from the
violence and coercion of police, shares obvious conceptual terrain with Mark Fishers
(2009) capitalist realism. Drawing inspiration from Fredrick Jamesons well-known sug-
gestion, that it is for some, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capital-
ism, Fisher (2009: 2) diagnosed the pervasive sense that not only is capitalism the only
viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine
a coherent alternative to it. To elaborate his position, Fisher looks to dystopian fictions,
which were once sites to imagine avoidable futures (Yar, 2015) and instead finds in films
like Children of Men (2006) an extrapolation or exacerbation of our present. In this
world, as in ours, he writes, ultra-authoritarianism and capital have fashioned circum-
stances where internment camps and franchise coffee bars exist alongside one another,
where public space has been abandoned to garbage and stalking animals and much to
the chagrin of [n]eoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence the state soldiers on,
stripped bare to reveal its core military and police functions (Fisher, 2009: 4). Allison
Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge (2014) suggest that capitalist realisms strength
lies in its ability to articulate the violence produced by capitalism, the lived economic,
social and affective instabilities of a world governed by ruthless self-interest and special
liberties (Hall, 2012b) and how these forces align to disclose imagined alternatives
(Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2014: 6). While capitalist realism usefully marks the bounda-
ries of the thinkable, the pair argue, as does Fisher, that it can also operate theoretically
and critically, demonstrating the ways that representation can be a potential site for polit-
ical transformation (Shonkwiler and La Berge, 2014: 7). Following these insights the
aim is to adopt a parallax view (iek, 2006) of the contemporary police story, in order
to more fully apprehend a dystopian present conditioned by the horror of police.11

True Detective: Bad men at the door

For purposes of brevity, the focus here is the eight episodes, first season of True Detective.
Written by Nick Pizzolatto, it aired on HBO in early 2014, starring Matthew McConaughey
Linnemann 9

(Rustin Cohle) and Woody Harrelson (Martin Hart) as two Louisiana State Police detec-
tives set to solve a string of bizarre, seemingly ritualistic murders. While at its core True
Detective is a boilerplate buddy-cop, police procedural,12 there are a number of distinct
aesthetic and narrative elements that make it a useful case for analysis.13 Most notably,
Pizzolattos foray into weird and speculative fiction, his nod to the horror fiction of HP
Lovecraft and Robert W Chambers and the obvious influence of Thomas Ligottis anti-
natalism, sets the series apart from the typical procedural (Noys and Murphy, 2016). The
weird, as Lovecraft (2013: 6) defined, invokes a certain atmosphere of breathless and
unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces. Animating the dread of the unknown and
unexplainable, are bleak southern Gothic landscapes upon which, as Cohle observed,
nothing grows in the right direction. Not simply a scenographic backdrop, from
Pizzolattos imagination sprung a world where the weak are lost, ground under by per-
fidious wheels that lie somewhere behind the visible (Madrigal, 2014). Disembodied
aerial shots of Cohle and Harts car knifing through endless stretches of swamps and
bayous abandoned to the petroleum industry and encroaching sea call forth the sense that
the inhabitants of this world, in Cohles words, dont even know the outside world
exists and might as well be living on the fucking moon. In other words, Cohle and
Harts preserve is not the familiar city of crime fiction (Schmid, 1995), or even the balmy
south of In the Heat of the Night (1967), but a strange world-in-itselfa world that that
bites back (Thacker, 2015b: 4). Distinguishing the series further still, Cohles Lovecraftian
nihilism and pessimistic view of humanity as a tragic misstep in evolution presents a
fundamental contradiction to the aim of liberal order and renders the act of detection a
patently futile endeavor.
While the weird (the out of place) and eerie (the absent) (Fisher, 2017) might set it
apart from the typical cop drama, like all police stories, True Detective turns on the figure
of an enemy. In the opening minutes of its first episode, Cohle and Hart catch a glimpse
of their illusory, faceless adversary. Called by local police to an impenetrable cane field
punctured by a single tree, the pair find a murdered woman (Dora Lange) kneeling
beneath it as if at a prie dieu, a crude crown of deer antlers and roots fixed atop her head.
Observing the scene littered with strange symbols and twists of twigs and vines (devil
nets), a local cop blurts, them symbols theyre satanic, they had a 20/20 on it a few
years back. Reciting the profilers monologue, Cohles on scene analysis begins to
sketch the killers outline:

This is gonna happen again, or its happened before. Both. Its fantasy enactment. Ritual.
Fetishization. Iconography. This is his vision. Her body is a paraphilic lovemap. An attachment
of physical lust to fantasy and practices forbidden by society. Her knees are abraded. Rug burns
on her back. Cold sores, gumline recession, bad teeth, theres decent odds she was a prost. He
might not have known her, but this idea goes way back with him. This kind of thing does not
happen in a vacuum. I guarantee this wasnt his first. Its too specific.

(Cohle, TD1:1, 2014)

Authoring this particular killer, True Detective advances a well-worn narrative pitting
policepatrolman or profileragainst a spectral, sometimes-supernatural adversary.14
With the initiation of the investigation in 1995, the series sits amid the Satanic Panic,
10 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

which saw a cottage industry of social workers, therapists and cult cops spring up in
opposition to an imagined network of child-murdering occultists (Hicks, 1991). Despite
failing to substantiate any such conspiracy, fears of Ritual Satanic Abuse nevertheless
resulted in numerous criminal trialsthe most notable being those of the McMartin Pre-
school caseand in some instances, lengthy prison sentences for the wrongly accused
(Ofshe and Watters, 1993). While the panic was by definition misplaced, we should
not dismiss True Detectives satanic adversary as simply clichd fantasy. In Joseph
Laycocks (2015) view, tales such as this provide plausibility structures that bolster a
decidedly Manichean ontology. Indeed, as the history of the panic shows, a pastiche of
innocuous youth fadsrole-playing games, tarot cards, Ouija boards, heavy metal
musicwere important theatrical props for this particular iteration of a longstanding
battle with evil (DeYoung, 1998).15 Reaching deeper into the cultural register, historian
Philip Jenkins (2004: 37) traces the panic and virtually every allegation about real-life
American Satanism to the dubious anthropology of Margaret Murray (2014) and the
weird fiction of Lovecraft and Herbert S Gorman. Much like the Necronomicon, a fic-
tional grimoire which escaped Lovecrafts imagination to become, according to some
police and occult specialists, a real book used in Satanic rituals, Murrays (2014)
largely discredited The Witch Cult in Western Europe and the weird tales and horror fic-
tion it inspired, initiated according to Jenkins (2004), a cultural vocabulary and a body
of memories which have been put to work by police and prosecutors at various times
over the last century. While True Detective is certainly part of a longer cultural and liter-
ary lineage, the roots of its satanic adversary run far deeper than episodic panics, dubious
scholarship and pulp fiction kitsch.
In his writing on the 15th-century French child killer, Gilles de Rais, Bataille (1991)
suggested that the serial killers decadence actually springs forth from the Christian
duties of confession and forgiveness. As with the master and slave, Bataille (1991: 15)
famously suggested that Christianity relies upon its transgressors and must be recognized
for the demand for the horror that in a sense it needs in order to forgive. Paul OBrien
(2015: 188189) similarly suggests that various cultural forms including the satanic
killer emerge from a mutually reinforcing doctrine which positions altruism, reciprocity
and mutual concern, alongside a belief in Gods Satanic adversary and the righteousness
of eternal damnation for those who run afoul of Christian law. Much like Morettis dia-
lectic of fear, Hart and Cohles battle with a satanic adversary invokes a dialectic of
Christianity that draws upon and reinforces decidedly western Christian understandings
of social order and of course, the police power (OBrien, 2015). As Mark Neocleous
(2016) has also recently shown, the theology of evil and particularly Christian notions of
the Devil have long been integral to western political power. In the realm of security,
leaders of the earliest state formations in Europe quickly learned that their legitimacy
was dramatically enhanced by claims co-ordinating the war on the Devil as the Enemy
of All Mankind as well as the Enemy of God (Neocleous, 2016: 85). True Detective
represents the war on the Devil similarly, when in the first episode, Reverend Billy
Tuttle, a powerful politically connected church leader who had pressured the police into
launching a taskforce investigating crimes with an anti-Christian connotation, warns
Hart and Cohle of a war happening behind things (TD1:1, 2014).16 The dialectic of
Christianity, invoked by an imagined war between the righteous [police] and the
Linnemann 11

wicked [killer], reveals the outlines of what I call the political theology of the thin blue
line. As Carl Schmitt (2005) proposed, political theology holds that the theories of mod-
ern state formations are in essence secularized theology, both in their historical develop-
ment and contemporary practice (Kotsko, 2017). So as Schmitt (2005: 36) famously put
it, political power transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for
example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver, the most immediately
recognizable of which, is of course, the police. The political theology of the thin blue line
extends beyond cinematic representations to the theatrics of actual police who see them-
selves as holy warriors locked in a spiritual battle for civilizations salvation. Echoing
Benjamin, in his reimagining of the police power as cynegetic or hunting power, philoso-
pher Grgoire Chamayou (2011) seemingly concurs, suggesting that to be an efficient
hunter,

one must pursue the prey despite the law, and even against it. But this antimony was not born
in the imaginations of scriptwriters. In passing from the law to the police, we pass from one
sphere of sovereignty to another, from the theology of the statethe legal systemto its
material formthe police. From its spiritual existence to secular arm.

(Chamayou, 2012: 55)

Through its imagined battles with Satanic evil, the police story positions police as both
the omnipotent lawgiver and adjunct of a decidedly western Christian understanding of
God.17 We catch another glimpse of this when a lead takes the pair to a tent revival and
Hart offers Cohle his take on the functionalism of religion:

Hart: I mean, can you imagine if people didnt believe, what things theyd get up
to?
Cohle: Exact same thing they do now. Just out in the open.
Hart: Bullshit. Itd be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery and you
know it. (TD1:3, 2014)

Following Schmitts (2005) political theology, we can surmise that Hart sees himself
and his kind fashioning a thin blue line, which like belief in God, holds back the swell-
ing tide of murder and debauchery. In True Detective and the everyday, this murder-
ous tide is distilled down to its terrifying core, the serial killer, a figure that projects
societies blackest desires and enacts its most righteous vengeance simultaneously
(Seltzer, 1998; Tithecott, 1997).
Introduced in the first scenes, yet not revealed until the final episode, Cohle and Harts
adversary stalks the otherworldly Louisiana bayous hiding, in Pizzolattos words, like a
creature out in the tall grass that you cant see (BTS, 2015).18 But because the mon-
ster/enemy/adversary is unnamed through most of the series, the project of true detec-
tion is more accurately one of conjecture (Ginzburg, 1980; Valier, 1998), projecting the
killers shifting outline across each of its eight episodes. What this demonstrates then, is
that in order for the police story to deliver on its powerful ideological message, it is not
necessary to bring the killer to justice, the police power must simply invoke the
12 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

imagination of an enemy. Hart and Cohles foe and the criminal more generally then,
powerfully demonstrate how the politics of enmity are not a matter of simple binary
opposition. Indeed as Slavoj iek (2002: 109) suggests, because the enemy is by defi-
nition, alwaysup to a point, at leastinvisible, he looks like one of us a crucial task
for the police (political) power is to make the monster knownto give it a name. This is
perhaps why Pizzolatto says that he always meant for True Detective to take the form of
a manhunt [] than any kind of a whodunit (BTS, 2015). In other words, Pizzolatto
also recognizes the form which the enemy assumes actually matters little to the mobiliza-
tion of the police power, the point is that there is a monster/enemy/adversary somewhere,
whether hiding in the tall grass or in plain view. As Chamayou (2011: 2) similarly sug-
gests, this understanding of the police power breaks with conventional understandings of
linear and face-to-face oppositions and instead is accomplished by means of slow detec-
tion work where hunter-analysts piece together a cartography of social networks, in
order to trace the enemy to its hideout. Yet, as it does in True Detective, the slow work of
detection always leaves some questions unanswered, just as it creates or uncovers alto-
gether new questions. What were the killers motivations? Did he have help? Are there
more like him? That policingreal and imaginedalways manages to create more
questions than it answers and identify more suspects than it apprehends, is at once one of
its most deeply held secrets and repugnant horrors. For policing to endure, it must have
a monster to oppose (Neocleous, 2016).
Despite persistent allusions to the weird and eerie, in the end, True Detective failed to
deliver the supernatural. Instead, questions of Carcosa, the King in Yellow and
Lovecraftian monsters dissolve into Errol Childress, an unhinged but rather ordinary
man who lives with his wife/sister in a rotting plantation set deep in the bayou. Through
this particular enemy, True Detective lazily draws upon and reaffirms a clichd and
deceptively conservative narrative built upon the supposed biological inferiority of the
rural poor and the overstated, but tidy causality of interfamily sexual abuse and violence
found elsewhere in films like Deliverance (Creadick, 2017) and enshrined in the socio-
biology family studies of early US eugenics (Rafter, 1988).
Twinning the always present/yet to arrive enemy, is of course, the police. In one
scene for instance, Marty, having committed yet another offense against his wife and
family, self-loathingly asks Cohle, Do you wonder ever if youre a bad man? to
which Cohle replies: No. I dont wonder, Marty. The world needs bad men. We keep
the other bad men from the door (TD1:3, 2014, emphasis added). Contradicting his
pessimistic, nihilistic facade, Cohle endorses the rogues notion of breaking the law to
uphold the law, advancing a fundamentally Hobbesian view of social order. With Cohle
beating information out of suspects and Hart donning black sap gloves to merci-
lessly beat two boys caught in congress with his underage daughtersay nothing of
their cold-blooded execution of two drug-dealing child molestersrepresentations of
the brutal lawlessness of police appear throughout the series. In fact, one analysis went
so far as to record 57 individual crimes committed by Cohle alone and to estimate a
cumulative sentence of 781 years under the Louisiana criminal code (Cimino, 2016:
89). In another scene, where Cohle rousts Lucy, a truck-stop sex worker, he even more
plainly admits the monstrosity of the police power and the bad of his own
character:
Linnemann 13

Lucy: I thought you were gonna bust me.

Cohle: I told you, Im not interested.
Lucy: Yeah, I know. Youre kinda strange, like you might be dangerous.
Cohle: Of course Im dangerous. Im police. I can do terrible things to people with
impunity.
(TD1:2, 2014)

That police are empowered to do terrible things to people with impunity is precisely the
sublimated horror of police and because it is tightly bound up with the Cartesian subject/
object correlation and the ontology of the world-for-us, it is a horror that few liberal
subjects are willing to face or admit. Yet the horror of police is not simply a matter of
denial, as plainly depicted in myriad culture texts, police are the monsters preferred over
others, the Leviathan over Behemoth, the bad men who guard the door. This is the solici-
tation of the trap, the active production of subjectivity, whereby liberal subjects renatu-
ralize the gap in the symbolic order with the reaffirmation of the inevitable necessity of
the superior violence of police (Hall and Winlow, 2015: 112).
In the end, as Laycock (2014) notes, True Detective was not the Nietzschean fantasy
of men who hunt monsters becoming monsters themselves but instead, another itera-
tion of the intoxicating, yet dangerous mythology of the police storythe macho non-
sense of Cohle and Hart, their violence and crimes, all justified by a Manichean ontology
which positions the police as the thin blue line between goodness and evil (Nussbaum,
2014).

The unthinkable world

If we stopped here, True Detective would still be a useful but not necessarily unique jour-
ney into the noxious ideology of the police story. Yet, it is Cohles philosophical pessimism
and the paradox of a nihilist policeman, which provide one final and particularly powerful
avenue for critique. The obvious task here is how to square the disjuncture between Cohles
philosophical positions and his chosen profession. Why would a nihilist endeavor to solve
crimes, avenge the wronged, punish the violator? Early on, when Hart and Cohle are get-
ting to know each other, we are given a direct answer to these questions:

Hart: Can I ask you something? Youre a Christian, yeah?

Cohle: Look, Id consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms Im
whats called a pessimist I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep
in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature
separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law
We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of
sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we
are each somebody, when in fact everybodys nobody I think the honorable
thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing,
walk hand in hand into extinctionone last midnight, brothers and sisters
opting out of a raw deal.
14 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

Hart: So whats the point of getting out [of] bed in the morning?
Cohle: I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that its obviously my pro-
gramming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.
(TD1:1, 2014)

Here Cohle admits that even he, a man who sees humankind as a tragic misstep in
evolution, openly decries the futility of existence and advocates planned extinction,
cannot deny his programming and the inescapable solicitation of the symbolic order
(Hall, 2012a). Despite all his blustering nihilism, Cohle himself labors under the illu-
sion of having a self, is programmed with total assurance that he is in fact some-
bodya subject of liberal capitalist social order. As a representative of that order, Cohle
cannot escape the Cartesian world-for-us and its Manichean ontology of police. In the
waning minutes of the series as the pair revisit their near-deaths resulting from their
confrontation with Childress, Cohles subjectivity is further revealed as his nihilism
finally gives way:

Cohle: I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every
night here just thinking, its just one story. The oldest.
Hart: Whats that?
Cohle: Light versus dark.
Hart: Well, I know we aint in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot
more territory.
Cohle: Yeah, youre right about that. Youre looking at it wrong, the sky thing.
Hart: Hows that?
Cohle: Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the lights winning.
(TD1:8, 2014)

In her critique of the series, Erin K Stapleton (2015: 178) suggests that Cohle has sof-
tened his horror for the uselessness of life and the spirituality of his near-death experi-
ence has reawakened a latent nostalgia for the monotheistic dialectic between good
and evil. Yet, as we have seen, this is hardly nostalgia and Cohles is no conversion.
Rather, he simply reaffirms the position of the police within the oldest story, the story
of light versus dark, good versus evil, a story that he and Marty, as always already sub-
jects and servants of liberal capitalist order, were doomed to play out. Just as Hart and
Cohle are programmed in service of a particular type of order, so too are liberal subjects
who fetishistically disavow the inherent violence of police and actively solicit the trap of
a coherent symbolic order (Hall and Winlow, 2015: 111) and the place of police within
the ontologies of world and earth (Thacker, 2011). In regards to the former, as those who
enforce the wage, protect private property (Neocleous, 2000) and fabricate the color line
(Brucato, 2014), the police are vital to the creation and continuation of the late-capitalist
world, one that is always imagined as being for (some of) us.
That police are inseparable from the ontology of liberal capitalist order is all the more
apparent in attempts to imagine the objective earth. As Thacker (2015b: 5) is clear to
point out, while we might be able to imagine the objective thing in itself, the paradox is
that the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself
Linnemann 15

and becomes the world for us. Again, this paradox is neatly illustrated by the place of
the police within the dystopian imaginary. While texts like The Road (McCarthy, 2006)
portend the lawlessness of a world absent the state and its police, others such as Children
of Men (2006) conversely warn of a world beset by far too many, or perhaps the wrong
kind of police (i.e. militarized). Even more subtly, films that employ an asteroid strike
or earthquake to invoke the apocalyptic, powerfully illustrate the horror of policings
impotence through the singular warning that there are some, in fact many things, for
which they are simply of no use. In the zombie film World War Z (2013) for instance,
when in the midst of panic and looting, the films protagonist (Brad Pitt) kills two men
who were attacking his wife and immediately submits to a responding police agent, he
quickly learns that the agent is also looting and offers no protection. The representation
of policings human fallibility and impotence again illustrates the many ways that polic-
ing is tied to the collapse or continuation of the symbolic order. Together, the abject
concrete universal found here is that the police are often not there when you need them,
around when you do not and ultimately of no use either way (Hall and Winlow, 2015).
Capitalism, as Fisher (2009: 8) reminds, seamlessly occupies the horizons of the think-
able.19 Accordingly, we might say that we cannot imagine a changing world, or the end
of it, without also accounting for the police. The challenge for those who hope for a
world free of the violence of capital and police is how to escape this ontological trap
(Hall, 2012c). The Lovecraftian weird, which has been touted by Thacker (2011, 2015a,
2015b) and others, for its ability to help contemplate the unthinkable, offers a clue.
Despite its odious racism, Lovecrafts oeuvre offers a heuristic to those working within
the varied fields of critical animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, speculative
realism and object-oriented ontology (Sederholm and Weinstock, 2016: 4). Most promi-
nently, the philosopher Graham Harman (2012) advances a weird realism and object-ori-
ented ontology intent on challenging the correlation between thinking and being and the
assumption that if things exist, they do so only for us (Bogost, 2012: 4, emphasis in
original). As hinted by Pizzolatto in True Detective, Harman (2012) sees the Lovecraftian
weird, inhabited by indescribable monsters and otherworldly forces that defy human com-
prehension, as productive of the gaps between objects and their unknowable qualities.
This sort of speculative realism, does not mean that we are able to state correct proposi-
tions about the real world and instead concedes that (noumenal) reality is too real to be
translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action, or anything
else (Harman, 2012: 16). For Harman then, the promise of this sort of speculative thought
lies in its ability to undermine anthropocentric, human exceptionalism and offer a starting
point for a more munificent engagement with the world that each of us inhabits (Sederholm
and Weinstock, 2016: 6). Steve Hall and Simon Winlow (2015: 107) insist that crimino-
logical theory may benefit from such a speculative position, which could dispassionately
and without optimism apprehend the present and its consequences

as contingent realities in the cold world, and reflect on our role in their causation, and
speculate freely on how things might have turned out differently and might turn out differently,
should we choose to change our way of doing things.

(Hall and Winlow, 2015:107)

16 Theoretical Criminology 00(0)

Elsewhere, Winlow (2016) following iek, calls for an enlightened catastrophism,

which abandons the myth of reform, incremental progress and easy solutions, for the
clarity of a grim realism better equipped to imagine the dystopian future, or perhaps
reckon the dystopian present (Winlow, 2016).20 Once we have imagined this future, he
writes, a shock of recognition and conscious acceptance must and will compel us to
be brave enough to face the future and look it square in the face, and then join with oth-
ers to fashion the forms of intervention that can arrest our slow descent into the chaos of
the future (Winlow, 2016). Turning the capitalist realist imaginary back on itself,
through a purposeful misreading of its own textsthose of the supposed Hobbesian
necessity of the brutal criminality of the monster-fighter bad copopens a parallax
view of the horrific present fabricated and occupied by always already militarized forces
of armed men, organized to uphold the racial/capitalist order. If the contemporary police
story helps reaffirm the Hobbesian view that the police are always redeemable, perhaps
then, what is offered by the horror of police is the pessimistic view that the police are in
fact irredeemable. Here in the cold light of day (Hall and Winlow, 2015: 107) we better
apprehend how and why liberal subjectsbeset by an objectless anxiety and fear of the
monstrouscling to and actively solicit the solipsistic Cartesian ontology of the world-
for-us and its intractable violence and inequality (Hall, 2012c).
Because the gap between appearance and essence is irreducible, as iek (2006: 100)
argues, the best way forward is to formulate the antagonisms necessary to better under-
stand a certain social order. The antagonisms offered by the police story powerfully
illustrate the fantasies that reproduce the dystopian present. The challenge then, as I see
it, is to think outside the subject in order to imagine the unthinkable, a world-without-
police.21 Characterized by the radical negation of the self, subject and its institutions, the
world-without-police perhaps then portends what Henri Lefebvre (2014: 912) saw as the
arrival of a new kind of thinking, that which does not shy away from the horror of the
world, the darkness, but looks it straight in the face, and thus passes over into a different
kingdom, which is not the kingdom of darkness.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. I use the term police stories loosely to include the broad array of textsfilm, television,
literature, commentary, communicating who and what police are, as well as their position
within the social order.
2. The symbolic order provides a predictable set of rules, which allow subjects to navigate eve-
ryday life. Following Adrian Johnston (2008), Hall and Winlow (2015) assert that the sym-
bolic order cannot be reduced to an Althusserian ideological state apparatus, or Gramscian
hegemony and instead, must be understood as a habituated practice of subjects everyday
sense making, accomplished in order to escape objectless anxiety and the horror of the real.
3. In the Dust of This Planet (Vol. 1) (Thacker, 2011); Starry Speculative Corpse (Vol. 2)
(Thacker, 2015a); Tentacles Longer Than Night (Vol. 3) (Thacker, 2015b).
4. In fact, Variety reports that NBC, which held the original rights to The Walking Dead, desired
to make the show a police procedural where protagonists solved the zombie crime of the
Linnemann 17

week. See http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/the-walking-dead-negan-gamechanger-season-

seven-exec-producer-gale-anne-hurd-1201845372/.
5. And with the rise of neoliberalism more generally.
6. Rafter also mentions To Live and Die in LA (1985) and State of Grace (1990).
7. Egon Bittner (1970: 7) used the imagery of the dragon within the dragon slayer.
8. Harrelsons character also warns how the monster has gone digital in relation to identity
theft: You should be smart enough to know that the monster has gone digital. Be careful what
you instagoogletweetface.
9. Indeed, as James Naremore (1995: 14) has argued, genre has less to do with a group of arte-
facts than with a discourse.
10. In the disjuncture between these two mutually exclusive poles lies ambiguous and uncertain
territory, what Tzvetan Todorov (1975) called the fantastic.
11. Following Raymen (2017) and Wakeman (2017), this article aligns with recent interventions
of ultra-realism to show how popular culture texts can be read as diagnostic of the symbolic/
imaginary realms.
12. http://deadspin.com/31-buddy-cop-cliches-on-true-detective-1540310306.
13. With an overarching philosophico-theological (Haycraft, 1968) thrust and a conclusion that
left many questions unanswered, True Detective can be considered a metaphysical detective
story (Merivale and Sweeney, 2011: 24).
14. Some examples: Cobra (1983); The Satan Killer (1993); The Hideaway (1995); End of Days
(1999).
15. Perhaps reflecting the ceaseless desire to locate the real within fantastic, Vice Magazine
(2014) produced a short documentary The Real True Detective? concerning a church-based
child molestation case in rural Louisiana, which inspired Pizzolattos early work on the series.
While police accusations of Satanism proved unfounded, the specter of ritual abuse continues
to loom over the tiny town (Laycock, 2014).
16. Yet, as such an interesting contradiction for Cohle who, as a nihilist and atheist, decries the
superstition of Satanism and quips, You know me. I dont see the connection between two
dead cats and a murdered woman, but Im from Texas.
17. As with the serial killer, Neocleous (2016: 66) makes a similar observation regarding the
secularization of Christian eschatology, invoked by the politics of apocalypse and the mon-
ster/figure of the zombie.
18. True Detective Season 1, Behind the Scenes supplementary material available on HBO Go
and Box Set.
19. That capitalist consumer culture even defines the boundaries of the dystopian only reaffirms
this suggestion.
20. The dystopian present which is of course characterized by police in the USA who kill unarmed
people, most of which are poor and people of color, at a rate not rivaled by other like nations.
21. This aligns with the growing call for police abolition (see Correia and Wall, 2018) and more
broadly with the politics of anti-security (see Neocleous and Rigakos, 2011).

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Author biography
Travis Linnemann is the Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.