Penulis ‘True Detective’ Season 3 Premiere: New Mystery, Familiar Mood
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| Mahershala Ali in the Season 3 premiere of “True Detective.”Warrick Page/HBO |
Quoted from nytimes.com
Season 3, Episode 1: ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’
The great 1996 documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” about a triple-murder in Arkansas charged to teenagers later known as the West Memphis Three, opens with helicopter shots of the wooded area where the bodies of three prepubescent boys were discovered. Across 150 minutes, the film bears witness to a shocking miscarriage of justice, triggered by coercive police tactics, an incompetent defense and the presumptions of a community that wanted to lay this horrific case to rest.
The documentary and its two sequels helped raise public awareness of the case, and after a successful (if unusual) plea deal, the West Memphis Three were finally released from prison in 2011, 18 years after the murders.
The new season of “True Detective” also opens with overhead shots of a wooded area outside a small town in Arkansas — referred to, ominously, as Devil’s Den — and closes with Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), a state detective, discovering the body of a missing boy tucked away in a cave. There are other specific connections between “True Detective” and “Paradise Lost,” particularly in its three teenage outcasts. One of them is questioned over his Black Sabbath T-shirt, a reference to the “satanic panic” that colored the case against the West Memphis Three.
But mostly, it is bound to “Paradise” by the milieu itself — a mostly white, poverty-stricken community that is reckoning with a terrible secret in the forest outside town....
Published 2019
