Once upon a time, I made the mistake of caving into peer pressure…
…and watched the entire season of a dark T.V. series called True Detective – in, like, three days.
Now, this isn’t going to be a popular thing to say, but out of all the disturbingly horrible facets of this show (and there’s the worst kind, which I won’t spoil for you by sharing), the most egregious for me was this brain inoculation by McConaughey:
“Time is a flat circle.”
You know, the first time I heard this idea was from Kevin Spacey in sci-fi flick called “K-Pax”. Yeah, I’m not going to pretend I heard Nietzsche say it first. #productofmysociety In the movie, he plays this dude claiming to be from another planet. We all think he’s just mentally ill until the end where everyone wonders if his consciousness really does beam off into neverneverland. For some reason, his words assumed cerebral squatting rights in me every since.
Even though Prot the protagonist is just a bit of Hollywood astral fantasy, nobody outside of near-death-ers really know where we go following the cessation of this animated flesh show we call living. (And NDE’s are a bad gauge ’cause they’re like sex: that’s nice for you, but it didn’t happen to me. Also, you might be making it sound cooler than it was. Also, you might be lying.
That’s why I short circuited at the mere idea of his utterance (similar to the “flat circle” thing) that went something like: “Dr. Jeff Bridges ….The world’s gonna expand and contract on itself. Everything you’ve done in this life, you’ll do over and over again. So make it good.”
(To which he obviously replies, “I’m not the doctor. I’m the dude. So that’s what you call me, man”)
But, ya know. Kevin Spacey has this kinda quality to him where he could tell me to suck a bag of dicks, and I’d probably just ask him to throw in some mustard and ketchup (if it’s not too much trouble because I know he’s super busy effortlessly seducing anyone in his vibrational radius). That same concept bothered me before. However, the existential gut-blow was dampened in the delivery. I mean, the character had this serene Jesus-like quality about him. He always had an impressive answer to stump the doctors and guided the patients into tapping into their inner beauty and heal themselves. So, yeah. My negative reaction to space-Spacey was lilliputian compared to the hemorrhagic mental shart McConaughey issued.
Likeable fantasy personality issuing plausible bad news? Edible. Depressed introspective savant junkie detective lugubriously relaying the same prospect? Nightmare fodder – fake or not.
And I’ve been committing psychological seppuku every night since.
Should’ve just watched House of Cards.