True Detective (TV Series)

The Locked Room (2014)

Matthew McConaughey: Detective Rust Cohle

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Quotes 

• Detective Rust Cohle : This... This is what I'm talking about. This is what I mean when I'm talkin' about time, and death, and futility. All right, there are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions. Fourteen straight hours of staring at DB's, these are the things ya think of. You ever done that? You look in their eyes, even in a picture, doesn't matter if they're dead or alive, you can still read 'em. You know what you see? They welcomed it... Not at first, but... right there in the last instant. It's an unmistakable relief. See, cause they were afraid, and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just... let go. Yeah, they saw, in that last nanosecond, they saw... what they were. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go. To finally know that you didn't have to hold on so tight. To realize that all your life - you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain - it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it.

• Detective Rust Cohle : What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?

  Detective Marty Hart : Can you see Texas up there on your high horse? What do you know about these people?

  Detective Rust Cohle : Just observation and deduction. I see a propensity for obesity. Poverty. A yen for fairy tales. Folks puttin' what few bucks they do have into a little wicker basket being passed around. I think it's safe to say nobody here's gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.

  Detective Marty Hart : You see that. Your fucking attitude. Not everybody wants to sit alone in an empty room beating off to murder manuals. Some folks enjoy community. A common good.

  Detective Rust Cohle : Yeah, well if the common good's gotta make up fairy tales then it's not good for anybody.

• Detective Rust Cohle : Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective at proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking.

  Detective Marty Hart : Well, I don't use ten dollar words as much as you, but for a guy who sees no point in existence, you sure fret about it an awful lot; and you still sound panicked.

  Detective Rust Cohle : At least I'm not racing to a red light.

• Detective Marty Hart : Do you wonder ever if you're a bad man?

  Detective Rust Cohle : No. I don't wonder, Marty. The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.

• Detective Rust Cohle : You see, we all got what I call a life trap - a gene deep certainty that things will be different... that you'll move to another city and meet the people that'll be the friends for the rest of your life... that you'll fall in love and be fulfilled... fucking fulfillment... and closure, whatever the fuck those two fuckin' empty jars to hold this shit storm. Nothing's ever fulfilled, not until the very end. And closure - nothing is ever over.

• Detective Marty Hart : I mean, can you imagine if people didn't believe, what things they'd get up to?

  Detective Rust Cohle : Exact same thing they do now. Just out in the open.

  Detective Marty Hart : Bullshit. It'd be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery and you know it.

  Detective Rust Cohle : If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother that person is a piece of shit; and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.

  Detective Marty Hart : Well, I guess your judgment is infallible, piece of shit wise. You think that notebook is a stone tablet?

  Detective Rust Cohle : What's it say about life, hm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day. Nah. What's that say about your reality, Marty?

• Detective Rust Cohle : People... I have seen the finale of thousands of lives, man. Young, old, each one so sure of their realness. You know that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose and meaning. So certain that they were more than biological puppet. The truth wills out, and everybody sees. Once the strings are cut, all fall down.

• Detective Thomas Papania : You figure it's all a scam, huh? All them folks? They just wrong?

  Detective Rust Cohle : Oh yeah! Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, "He said for you to give me your fucking share." People... so god damn frail they'd rather put a coin in the wishing well than buy dinner.

• Maggie Hart : You drop Jen at home?

  Detective Rust Cohle : Yeah. I walked her to the door.

  Maggie Hart : You didn't go in? You don't have to fall in love at first sight, you know.

  Detective Rust Cohle : Yeah. I know. Look. She's nice, pretty.

  Maggie Hart : There's comfort there, Rust. I think you guys would be good together if you gave it a chance. You guys don't give things chances. I don't know why that is.

  Detective Rust Cohle : That's because we know what we want and we don't mind being alone.

• Detective Rust Cohle : The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that's what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it's a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it's such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn't it?

• Detective Rust Cohle : If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit - and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.

• Detective Marty Hart : Shit, man, look, I've noticed you have a tendency toward myopia, tunnel vision... blows investigations... vision skews, twists evidence. You're... you're obsessive.

  Detective Rust Cohle : You're obsessive, too. Just not about the job.

  Detective Marty Hart : Not me, brother. I keep things... even, separate. Like the way I can have just one beer without needing twenty.

  Detective Rust Cohle : People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.