Lili Simmons & Michelle Monaghan: True Detective [S1E6]

Lili Simmons the anal queen in True Detective [S1E6] 

"I Want You To Fuck Me In My Ass"......betting the moment those words left Lili lips, Adam @ VisitorQ fainted in happiness : )
You can take the hooker out of the brothel but you can't take the brothel out of the hooker. Beth is now part of the mainstream society, doing honest day's work but still a whore at heart. Marty remains a consummate slut. Potent combo that was certain to ignite when Beth introduced herself to Marty. 
In reality, you can't blame the guy. It's an intrinsic nature embedded in guys DNA to play around with much younger women. Honestly, you can't point the finger at Beth. It's a part of being a young and single woman to be drawn to much older taken men. The illusion of security and perceived sexual experienced is a major turn-on. 
[ PW: SJ37282 ]

Michelle Monaghan the schemer in True Detective [S1E6]

When Maggie discovers Marty has returned to his old stinking ways, the raging fury turns a mild, cynical housewife into a brutal avenger, a devious creature with Cohle the unsuspecting victim. Who can resist Maggie in that doggy position? Cohle goes in deep, fires off penetrative shots and was swift to withdraw.  
[ PW: SJ37282 ]

The Horrible Things That Men Do to Women

Yes, True Detective treats its female characters badly. That's the point.

By Willa Paskin

Presenting women as a parade of scolds, sluts, and the strung-out typically makes me hate a television series. But I love True Detective.

In the second episode of True Detective, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) find themselves at a seedy trailer-park bunny ranch, where Marty becomes outraged at the presence of an underage prostitute named Beth (Lili Simmons). Marty lays into the madam, Jan (Andrea Frankle), for employing a girl clearly younger than 18. But Jan isn’t having it. She tells Marty he has no idea of Beth’s circumstances, what she’s left behind, and besides, “Girls walk this earth all the time screwing for free. So why is it you add business to the mix and boys like you can’t stand that thought? Because suddenly you don’t own it the way you thought you did.” Still disgusted, Marty hands Beth some cash and tells her, “do something else.” Back at their car, Rust asks Marty if he was making “a down payment.”

Even at the time, the show seemed to be on Jan’s side: Marty had already shown himself to be a high-order hypocrite. After Sunday night’s episode we can be sure: Calling it a down payment may have been a crude way for Rust to put it, but it was not inaccurate. Seven years later, Marty cheats on his wife with Beth, the troubled former underage prostitute whose innocence he had once been so keen to protect.

True Detective, let me concede upfront, does not come close to passing the Bechdel test. The show opens with the violated body of a dead woman crowned with antlers, and it has consistently objectified the naked bodies of the young women Marty has slept with—particularly during Sunday night’s extended, groaning, porny sequence with Beth. Michelle Monaghan, who plays Marty’s wife, Maggie, has done well with the material she’s been given, but before this week that consisted almost entirely of her being a (completely justified) nag. In the previous episode, Elizabeth Reaser showed up for a minute so she could deliver one line as Rust’s long-term girlfriend. The other women on the show have been mistresses, prostitutes, corpses, or some combination thereof, most of them barely memorable.

Presenting women as a parade of scolds, sluts, and the strung-out typically makes me hate a television series. But I love True Detective. While it is possible—by which I mean undeniably true—that I am completely in thrall to the ever-captivating McConaissance, I think True Detective has not triggered my usual response because it is, at least on some level, very aware of how stereotypically and perfunctorily it treats its female characters. When it comes to women, True Detective is undeniably shallow—but I think it’s being shallow on purpose.

Ignoring women may be the show’s blind spot, but it is also one of its major themes.  True Detective is explicitly about the horrible things that men do to women, things that usually go unseen and uninvestigated. No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up. Another little girl was abducted, and a report was never even filed. “Women and children are disappearing, nobody hears about it, nobody puts it together,” Rust told his boss Sunday night, outlining what he believes is a vast conspiracy in the Bayou. Rust is haunted by women who aren’t there—his ex-wife and his dead daughter—while Marty cannot deal appropriately with the women who are.

It’s with Marty that True Detective most often tries to have its misogyny and get away with it, too. (“How good is cake if you can’t eat it?” he says to his girlfriend Lisa when she chides him for wanting a mistress who doesn’t sleep around.) The show presents Marty’s women as kinky and crazed and seems overly sympathetic to Marty’s skewed view of them. But if Marty’s peccadilloes have been used for titillation they have also been used for character assassination. While True Detective has luxuriated in the tawdriness of his particularly pronounced virgin-whore complex, it has also interrogated it: Marty’s inability to control himself with women is his defining, disfiguring character flaw.

Marty fancies himself a protector, but again and again he is an aggressor. He becomes almost as violent when controlling women as he does when protecting children: slapping his daughter, methodically beating the boys she had sex with, breaking down his girlfriend’s door, wrapping his hands around his wife’s throat. His sexual double standards are staggering: Whatever he does is fine; when women do it without him, it’s disgusting. In his interviews with detectives Papania and Gilbough, Marty talks endlessly about the way that a family can ground a man—then we watch him use his married-father status as a cover to misbehave, praising propriety while doing nearly anything he pleases. (If this doesn’t set your Yellow King nerves jangling, you have no Yellow King nerves.)

The show seems cognizant of the gendered nature of perspective, even if the men behind the camera occasionally expose their own. (The actress who plays Lisa is clearly conscious of just how long the camera lingered on her décolletage.) When Maggie arrives at the police station for her interview, the cops say they are looking for her “perspective,” which she methodically, calmly denies them. And while Maggie having sex with Rust seemed inevitable from the moment they hit it off over a family dinner, I was impressed with the way True Detective complicated this particularly clichéd turn of events. Maggie was the one with the agency: Rust and Marty both became, however briefly, pawns in her story. (Monaghan, you will note, has yet to be topless on the show. Don’t sign those nudity waivers, ladies!)

Granted, we have had very little insight into Maggie’s character outside the context of men: What are her Marty- and Rust-less desires, needs, wants, wishes? But this sequence made it clear that she does have all of those things, and thus a real three-dimensionality, even if we have not been privy to it, focused as we are on Rust or Marty, who are so wholly caught up in themselves.

That self-absorption is typical of all the men on True Detective, who often don’t even notice female insight. Maggie is able to conceal herself from Gilbough and Papania in part because they’re clearly not inclined to consider her very deeply. Marty didn’t even seem to register Jan’s character-flaying speech. Last week, Marty’s daughter Audrey told him over supper, “Women don’t have to look like you want them to.” Maggie gave him a “she’s got you there” look and Marty barely took it in. In an earlier episode, when Marty asked his younger daughter to leave the room, she only did so after Maggie nodded in agreement. (This echoed Beth’s behavior at the bunny ranch: She waited for a nod from Jan before agreeing to show Rust Dora Lange’s diary.) Marty may be the law, but he doesn’t have all the power. There’s an entire female hierarchy he is completely oblivious to.

In a post about the Carcosa–Yellow King mythos’ relationship to True Detective, Alyssa Rosenberg pointed to a story by James Blish called “More Light,” in which a character named James Blish visits a friend named Bill Atheling, who is in poor health because he has been reading The King In Yellow, the mythical play that drives its readers insane. Atheling tells Blish that he hasn’t shown his wife the text, and Blish understands why. “Female common sense would blow the whole thing sky-high in a minute,” he says. True Detective is a man’s story taking place in a man’s world, a world in which ignoring women has been the cause of untold horror—and has probably delayed that horror’s resolution as well. Would fully realized female characters be preferable to these fleeting glimpses, however well those glimpses highlight the limitations of our leading men? Yes, definitely. But I can wait until next season for that.

‘True Detective’ Episode 6: Michelle Monaghan On That Sex Scene and the Show's View of Women

by Andrew Romano

Inside Episode 6 with the actor who plays Woody Harrelson’s wife, Maggie Hart, who reveals the one word that describes how HBO’s dark, brilliant crime drama will end.

Since the start of True Detective, we’ve known that something big happened in the year 2002—something that tore apart the investigative partnership of Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson). But we never knew what it was.

Until Sunday night.

(Warning: stop reading now if you want to avoid spoilers.)

The title of Episode 6 of the hypnotic HBO series—“Haunted Houses”—was fitting: this was the episode in which we finally discovered that it hasn’t just been a gruesome murder that’s been haunting Rust and Marty for the past decade or so.

Turns out a domestic drama has been haunting them, too—and Marty’s wife, Maggie, is at the center of it. When Maggie discovers that seven years after his last infidelity, Marty is now cheating on her again, she decides to do something drastic. First she visits a cocktail bar and strikes up a conversation with a stranger. But that doesn’t seem devastating enough. So in the middle of the night she shows up at Rust’s door with a bottle of wine in her hand. One thing leads to another. Minutes later, a regretful Rust is shouting at Maggie to “get the fuck out of here,” and Maggie is heading home to tell Marty what she’s done.

Much has been said already about McConaughey’s mind-blowing performance, and the sex scene at the heart of “Haunted Houses” is no exception. But the real revelation Sunday night was Michelle Monaghan (Mission Impossible, Gone Baby Gone), the gifted Iowan who plays Maggie. Monaghan has been on the sidelines for much of the series, but now she’s center stage; divorced from Marty, she’s even become part of the 2012 investigation into the “copycat” killings that happened after the initial murder 17 years earlier. She brings a steely, earthy sensitivity to the role—a welcome contrast to Harrelson’s callous machismo and McConaughey’s mystical nihilism.

To delve deeper into Maggie’s psyche, we gave Monaghan a call. She explained why Maggie is attracted to Rust; why sex with him was a way of setting herself free; and how Marty’s family is going to factor into the remaining two episodes. Excerpts from our conversation:

Critics have said that True Detective is male-centric, that it’s the Rust and Marty show, and that female characters have been marginalized. What’s your response?
I think Episode 6 is a good rebuttal to that critique. The reason why I signed on to the project is because I loved Maggie. I thought she was a completely fleshed out character. She has this very meaningful arc. She starts out as a nurturing person—a very protective wife and mother. She’s trying to keep her marriage intact. But ultimately, in Episode 6, after Maggie finds out about Marty’s infidelity once again, and she sees her own daughter’s behavior unraveling, no doubt because of Marty’s absence, she realizes she really needs to do something critical in order to save herself and her daughters. And the ultimate revenge for her is to have an affair with the person Marty is most threatened by—his partner. She knows that Marty will never, ever be able to recover from that.

I’m curious about Maggie’s motivation for going to Rust’s apartment. You used the word “revenge.” Was it revenge? Or was she trying to free herself? 
Oh, I think she was freeing herself. Definitely. There’s some revenge there, certainly, and I think you see it when she sits down at the kitchen table and really sticks it to Marty. But the ultimate choice—the choice to sleep with Rust—was made to free herself from the marriage.

The moment when Maggie comes to Rust’s apartment—there’s been an attraction there since the beginning. Was it always sexual?
Maggie has this really engaging relationship with Rust—a friendly relationship—at the same time she almost has a non-relationship with her husband. And I think that’s the attraction she has to Rust. From the moment they sit down to supper together in the first episode, she sees somebody who’s a little awkward, a little uncomfortable, a little vulnerable. She’s a very curious and inquisitive person, and when Marty leaves the table she takes the opportunity to ask his new partner the questions she’s been dying to ask, and Rust answers them truthfully. And I think that shocks her, because Rust engages her in a way that Marty doesn’t. He seems to be open with her. He enjoys spending time with her. And she starts to sincerely care about his well-being. She becomes a matchmaker for him. She wants him to look after himself.

I thought the sex scene in Sunday’s episode was remarkable—such a complex and believable mix of lust and anger and regret. You and Matthew McConaughey nailed it.  
Thank you! When Maggie takes advantage of Rust, it hurts her as much as it hurts him. She’s not proud of herself. That is the most devastating thing for her, ultimately—that by being selfish, by using him, she hurt this person she really cared about.

When the police ask Maggie whether her divorce had anything to do with Rust, she lies and says no. Why? 
Once a cop’s wife, always a cop’s wife. She knows the game. She doesn’t trust Marty, but she definitely doesn’t trust these guys. She’s a very smart woman. And no matter what, she has integrity. She’s not going to throw anybody under the bus.

You've said that shooting True Detective was like making a long movie. Do you see True Detective as a tipping point—a show that will encourage more actors, directors, and writers who've focused primarily on movies to try their hand at TV?
I definitely do. Especially in terms of this format—eight, 10, 12 episodes and then you’re done. Beginning, middle, and end. It’s not a huge commitment. So you can get a great caliber of talent. And HBO leaves you to it. They put complete trust in the creative team. So I think we’ll see more of this. I’d love to be a part of something like this again.

Creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto was on set the whole time, Cary Fukunaga directed every episode, and you could sit down with them and talk through Maggie’s motivations. What’s an example of a scene where that dynamic was really crucial for you? 
Definitely my interrogation scenes. You don’t see Maggie for a while before the interrogation, so obviously a lot of time has passed. I really had to grapple with some big questions. Where is Maggie in her life right now? Has she forgiven Marty? Why isn’t she throwing him under the bus? And that’s honestly one of the things that appealed to me about True Detective—the fact that it spans 20 years. I’ve never done anything like that before. I was so interested in not just physically aging, but emotionally aging—seeing where Maggie goes emotionally. That’s why it was so important to have Nic there with us, to get inside his mind. He knew exactly who these people were in each point in their lives.

That’s a great point about “emotionally aging.” I’m so glad Episode 6 included Maggie in that process—not just Rust and Marty. What are we learning about Maggie now that we didn’t know before? 
I think that you’ll see that she’s really made a big change in her life, in terms of the people who are a part of her life now. She moves on into a new relationship. She’s always been the bigger person. That hasn’t changed. She still very much cares about Marty, but she’s let go of the past.

There’s a line I loved in this episode. Maggie quotes Rust as saying “There’s no such thing as forgiveness. People just have short memories.” 
I think Maggie kind of agrees. People move on. It’s not so much about forgiveness. It’s about time—it’s time that heals. For her, at least. She’s pretty evolved. She can forgive. I think she’s let go of Marty’s infidelities, as you’ll start to see in future episodes.

Still, Maggie has been hurt. One of the things Nic told me when I interviewed him was that True Detective is in part about the damage men do to women and children. 
Definitely. Look at any part of the series and you’ll see there are a lot of lost female souls. You ask yourself, “Why are women taken advantage of? Why are they lost?” And then you see it reflected in the Hart family. You see Marty’s absence. Even though he’s out investigating people who have victimized women and children, he’s making his wife and children suffer.

Now that Maggie and Marty are divorced, is Marty’s family still going to be part of the plot going forward?
You mean my family? As in, my mother and father and that sort of thing?

Sure. I was wondering mainly about your daughters, Audrey and Maisie, but Marty’s father-in-law—Maggie’s father—did show up earlier in the series, living in a big waterfront house and complaining about “kids these days.” Let’s put them all on the table.
Yes, yes. Our family—everybody—is still going to be part of the plot going forward.

Have you followed any of these speculations online about the supernatural elements of the show?
No, I haven’t. But now I’m completely intrigued!

It’s basically about how the mythology of these serial killers is tied to a collection of horror stories from 1895 called The King in Yellow. Did you ever puzzle over this stuff when you were reading the scripts? 
Oh, I am fascinated by Nic. I’m fascinated by his brain. He did an incredible amount of research and work. He’s extraordinarily well-read and aware of a number of different things that I have no clue about whatsoever. [Laughs.] I remember there was this picture he saw somewhere that inspired the end of Episode 3—you know, when we see Reggie Ledoux in his underwear, wearing that gas mask. The original image is out there somewhere.

So you haven’t downloaded the complete works of Robert Chambers? I’m curious whether everyone on set was indoctrinated in the mythology of Carcosa and the Yellow King—or if Nic left those themes on the periphery.
I think it was on the periphery. But Woody and Matthew might say differently! 

OK, final question: if you had to pick one word to describe how Season 1 of True Detective ends, what would it be?
Staggering.

Her Looming Shadow Grows: The Complex Women of ‘True Detective’

by Molly Lambert

So far the conversation about True Detective has mostly centered on the show’s more outrageous and novel elements: the specter of tentacle monsters, the multiple-time-period structure, Alexandra Daddario’s rack. But equally compelling is the exploration of human relationships over a period of decades, most recently illustrated through the bizarre love triangle of Marty, Maggie, and Rust. It’s a credit to the acting abilities of Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, and Matthew McConaughey that they make this oldest of stories feel so vital — Rust is the deep-fried Lancelot to Maggie’s Guinevere.

Viewers had five episodes to wonder if we were imagining the attraction between Maggie and Rust, and whether they’d ever act on it. After seeing Beth’s ass shots on Marty’s phone (in 2002, during the dawn of nude selfies), Maggie has more than enough evidence to convict him of being an asshole. After testing her current value on the market at a bar, Maggie opted to visit Rust instead. Spoiler alert: They have incredibly intense sex to creepy music. They both orgasm quickly because the psychological intensity of the act is so unbelievably strong; they’re turned on by the idea of what they’re doing. And so is the audience, because we are a bunch of pervs. They feel terrible immediately afterward, their serotonin levels dropping through the floor in direct proportion to the thrill of the sexual high. This was another beautifully acted scene by Monaghan and McConaughey, and it’s clear that Maggie and Rust have a bond in their shared exhaustion with Marty. It’s a mutual respect that might also be founded in their unspoken illicit attraction, which Marty might not even have picked up on because he was too busy screwing around. The entire dynamic is exactly the kind of narrative tension you can only build on TV.

I take issue with the idea that Maggie is a lame character, because she seemed complicated to me from the first episode. Maybe some of that is due to Monaghan’s screen presence, which came into full bloom in Shane Black’s 2005 film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. This week it was as if the show heard and immediately responded to the complaint that Monaghan wasn’t being given enough to do, though it now seems Maggie is more pissed than anyone that she’s been stuck playing the neglected wife. In Episode 6 she confronted those criticisms head-on by making the ultimate power play.

True Detective has been accused of not caring about its female characters, charged with only putting women onscreen to take their tops off and harangue the male leads. But I’ve never felt that to be true, at least not any more than a lot of other well-respected cable dramas. The Sopranos always had topless dancers lingering in the background onstage at the Bada Bing, and Game of Thrones has its scores of brothels. While Marty often treats women as less than equal human beings, Rust provides a counterbalance in perspective. We’re not supposed to cheer Marty on when he cheats on his wife. We get to see how giving into a short-term temptation ultimately screws you in the long run, how a life lived selfishly is not empowering but extremely isolating.

A show that takes up misogyny as one of its main subjects isn’t necessarily misogynistic. The difference between portraying something and endorsing it is often lost by the time it passes through the cathode ray tubes into a fandom. Don Draper, Walter White, Tony Soprano, and the other difficult men of TV’s latest golden age were not intended to be role models. Their seductiveness as antiheroes is corrosive. Tackling the appeal of self-centered, angry men in order to solve the riddle of persistent gender roles is sort of a trap: What you are trying to critique might just look cool. Far from being awesome dudes to emulate, they are all cautionary tales. But once it’s onscreen, even the worst bad behavior can be accidentally glamorized. It’s a broader cultural issue, one that extends past TV into music (say, Yeezus), film (say, The Wolf of Wall Street), and beyond (say, real life).

Everyone identifies with powerful men onscreen, and nobody wants to identify with neglected wives and disposable sidepieces. Perhaps internalized misogyny has caused everyone, including women, to all want to be the hard-boiled cops. But not every female character can be Claire Underwood, knocking over every hurdle in her path. When we are shown female characters who have been forced into passive roles in their lives, we are usually meant to see they were just that: forced. It’s a very meaningful aspect of modern life, but inevitably thorny to discuss. Does the show want to have its cake (topless young hotties) and eat it too (misogynists get punished)? Yes, absolutely. But I don’t think the women on True Detective are mere virgins and whores. Far from it. I think that it’s through them we are made to see the very obvious problems with Marty’s view of women as virgins and whores. The show is also equally weighted toward Rust’s POV, which questions much of that worldview.

Am I bending over backward to defend this narrative trend because I know it’s not going away anytime soon? Maybe. But I don’t see Marty’s behavior as all that different from his fellow serial cheater Don Draper. Sure, it’s mildly dubious that hot young girls would be throwing themselves at Marty, but I guess the same muscle that allows me to suspend disbelief for some of True Detective’s other craziest aspects also accepts that Marty is a chick magnet. Honestly, in real life, the biggest womanizers aren’t always the most obvious. The characteristic alpha male mistake is to be dumb enough to think you’re smart enough not to get caught. The drama of a marriage crumbling from the inside can be just as fascinating as a violent crime drama, a horror story where the only corpse is an ailing relationship on the brink of death.

Rust may have some compelling arguments that forgiveness is just a byproduct of forgetfulness and that time is secretly a pizza, but the three leads do seem to change and grow over the course of the years covered by the show. Maybe not always for the better, but in lots of small, subtly acted ways. It’s possible they don’t so much change as become more lucid about the ways in which they fuck up, and whether they are fated to or can still exercise free will. That is still a kind of growth, an Aeolian process that erodes any remaining shreds of youthful optimism left on the bone. They evolve as time passes, with easily identifiable corresponding era-appropriate hairstyles.

Despite True Detective’s pulpiness, it doesn’t feel retro to me. Rust and Marty aren’t macho stereotypes of unfeeling men. They’re men who suffer from extremely powerful emotions, but react to them in very different ways. Rust practices a near-monastic nihilism, channeling his old addictive impulses into his obsessiveness about casework. Marty’s depression, possibly derived from years of watching terrible shit go unpunished, alchemizes into anger that he takes out on his family. His off-the-clock poison is young strange, another mode of acting out against domestic life. Maggie is long-suffering, but she’s not passive. She’s more of a Carmela Soprano than a Betty Draper. She’s not ignorant about her husband’s extracurriculars; she’s just opted to turn a blind-ish eye, but only up to a point. As she herself points out, marriage is a complicated thing, especially when there are children involved. She and Marty probably had a very passionate relationship at some earlier point, settled down too early, and endured a fairly common fate.

Where Marty is reckless, Maggie is patient. She seems to be more book-smart than her husband, and that is part of the attraction to Rust, who, unlike her husband, is a keen observer of feelings. Rust also treats Maggie like a human being instead of somebody’s wife, which she desperately needs. Maggie isn’t dumb or naive. She knows exactly what to do: Play the one ace a woman furious with a cheating partner has by fucking his best friend. Maybe it’s a stretch to describe Rust and Marty as best friends when they are much more like frenemies, but they’re also something more than friends; they are partners. Like being in a band or on a team, they are connected by a bond that goes beyond casual male friendship into the realm of real relationships, the kind that require fights, talks, and communication.

Because Maggie is such a well-thought-out and acted character, I also choose to see complexity in the characterization of the other women on True Detective. That Beth, the teen hooker who Rust and Marty encouraged to leave the brothel, is now working at a strip mall T-Mobile store felt pretty plausible to me. It’s a small-ass town. As for her choice to seduce Marty as a way to thank him for helping her to leave her old bad life at the bunny ranch, I just went with it. It does kind of feel like a crazy fantasy come true, that this hot underage girl he may have been fantasizing about for a decade since helping her would show up in his life and want to fuck him. But it also seemed straight out of a sex dream (or porn), which for me fit right into the tone of the show. If the encounter still seems a tiny bit far-fetched, it just adds to the eerieness of it.

It’s all in the episode’s title: “Haunted Houses.” The central encounters between characters in this episode are earthshaking, the culmination of groundwork laid in the first episode and embroidered on until now. People make choices from which they cannot retreat. Marty’s prolonged efforts to get promoted to Lieutenant Save A Hoe finally backfire on him, Rust blows up the possibility of friendship with Marty, and Maggie chooses to repay Marty in the most painful way she can think of.

Not that she gets off without any injuries. The about-face in Rust’s temperament after the seduction is absolutely terrifying. All of this was framed by the most recent spate of interrogations, in which Maggie’s short hair and chill countenance let us breathe a slight sigh of relief as she talks about finally separating from Marty. She got out! Of all the characters on the show, Maggie has always seemed like the one with the most potential to escape from the unspeakable horror poised to swallow us all.

(Illustrations by Lee Brown Coye, a 20th century horror illustrator famed for his creepy patterns involving wooden sticks.)