The song that plays in the fourth episode of HBO's True Detective, when Matthew McConaughey's detective Rust Cohle hustles his way into a rowdy biker bar, is "A History of Bad Men," a tune from American sludge metallers Melvins' 2006 record, (A) Senile Animal. (Yes, the song's use in the show's '90s timeline makes it an anachronism, technically. Let it go.) The song, even the title, is a nifty detail for a show that prides itself on its painstaking construction. The name alone could serve as the subtitle for the show's first season: True Detective: A History of Bad Men.

But there's another song on that same Melvins record that suits True Detective even better: "A History of Drunks."

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Plenty of theories have been pushed around the Internet concerning what True Detective is about: Christianity, macho masculinity, Vietnam, "philbrosophy." But these opinions, from the cogent to the crackpot, all fall victim to what Woody Harrelson's detective Martin Hart calls "the detective's curse." Everyone's looking all over the place for answers, when the key to unlocking the show is right under their noses. Like, literally right under the characters' noses: brewed, bottled, dispassionately slugged, the oxygen that keeps the show's fires burning. Booze. The show is about booze. True Detective is a history of drunks.

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Everything in True Detective is lubricated by liquor. The Southern Gothic tradition that the show operates in has long used alcoholism to signal decay and the decline of civility. (Look at the hard-drinking Stanley in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.) Alcohol is a form of currency.

From the start, investigators Gilbough and Papania buy a wearied Rust's tentative trust with a sixer. Likewise, Marty attempts to woo his chilly mistress with shots at the line-dancing bar. And in last week's episode, estranged partners Rust and Marty are reunited over a bottle of beer. Marty boasts about having not touched a drop in weeks, but before long he's slurping on a flask in order to manage his disgust over the Saturnalian snuff video. As for Rust, he makes no bones about his alcoholism, approaching drinking with a kind of mythic reverence. For the past ten years, he tells Marty, he's been "functional, but hammered."

The ability to handle booze is a measure of manliness. In True Detective's inside-out moral universe, that these characters are so drunk and fucked up ennobles them. It makes them more alive. They're messy, selfish, and shit-headed, but they're right.

Or are they?

Watching, and re-watching, True Detective's first seven episodes in advance of Sunday's big wrap-up, I have become less and less certain of Marty and Rust's boozy dignity. True Detective is a lot of things. But above all else, it's self-aware. Even the show's dopey title is a joke on the dopey titles of pulpy crime magazines.

Throughout the series, characters constantly call attention to how batshit-crazy Rust sounds, shaking their heads at his baffling, nihilistic gibberish, suggesting that he's just a drunk who's full of shit.

It's an antagonism that drives the show, dictating the bad cop/bad cop chemistry between Marty and Rust, defining the contours of McConaughey's dead-eyed swagger. This is the "macho nonsense" Emily Nussbaum identified in her New Yorker piece, "Cool Story, Bro." This is the "philbrosophy" Sam Adams called out on Indiewire. They're right, of course. But the difference, as I understand it, is that True Detective is at some level about, and is rather obviously engaged with critiquing, this macho nonsense: specifically, the boozy, pseudo-spiritual nonsense that ostensibly elevates the show, making it something other than another pulpy whodunit. True Detective's final trump card may be that Rust is just a drunk who's full of shit. That he's only that.

It's not incidental that the characters are almost always drunk, or that they seem to believe that they need to be drunk to do their jobs. Marty and Rust regard alcohol, like countless Southern Gothic archetypes before them, as at once the curse of their heavy existence and a warming palliative to that same miserable condition.

In one episode, Rust reveals that he's read Nietzsche, a thinker whose work seems to inform his character's belief in a godless universe. He even recites Nietzsche's idea, outlined in The Gay Science, of the horror of time recurring endlessly. But Nietzsche was no drunk. He regarded booze as a corrupting evil equal to Christianity. He never touched the stuff. Alcohol, for Nietzsche, weakened "our resolve to garden our problems." It is ennoblement's opposite.

Going into True Detective's finale, it seems like this idea is bound to come to bear. Rust's functional alcoholism (if there's such a thing) has to reach a breaking point. Marty being back on the bottle (and drinking on a fishing boat in the early morning) has to mean bad things. If Nic Pizzolatto's series is half as "dark" as it seems to be — or a quarter as dark as everyone says its is — there has to be a reckoning. And not just for the cabal of wealthy, child-murdering pagans. For its other bad men: the callous, self-justifying drunks drowning their own demons in spirits, the guys whose hunches and premonitions come in six-packs, the men whose hearty pursuit of their own self-destruction may finally be rewarded.

As a crime drama, and as a piece of fiction writ large, True Detective is pretty incredible. But as an ad for Lone Star beer? Just lousy.

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