Using Los Angeles as a synecdoche for the nation, these stories ambitiously try to chart the scale of America’s degradation, only to find that it’s easy to become artistically inchoate in the process.
After the shock of the 2016 United States presidential election, many writers and critics assured the world that no matter how bleak the prospects for America looked, at least we’d get some good art out of it. Some even predicted a resurgence in punk rock—in the mainstream, still an unfulfilled aspiration. Whatever one’s opinion about how the arts writ large responded to that election, in the waning weeks of 2016 we simply needed to look backward at the signals being sent to us by the art we already had. Two such works in particular—Richard Kelly’s film Southland Tales (2006) and the second season of the Nic Pizzolato-created anthology prestige series True Detective (2015)—anticipated features of the post-Trump landscape in America. At the time of their release, these projects’ aesthetic failings seemed to consign them to the dustbin of U.S. media culture, the cultural equivalent of the discount DVD bin at Walmart. (In fact, my first exposure to Southland Tales was seeing a profusion of copies in the Blockbuster sale section.) But it’s these very aesthetic failings, these “bad” qualities, that now imbue these projects with a ring of the prescient, allowing them to be reread as augurs of incipient sociopolitical tumult.
At first pass, these two artworks do not appear kindred spirits apart from their negative-to-mid reception. They were released nearly a decade apart and share no core cast. Tonally they sit at two opposite ends of a continuum, one a zany dystopian comedy and the other a dour prestige series riding the early 2010s wave of antihero TV dramas. However, Kelly and Pizzolato’s ambitious sophomore projects are much more alike than their surfaces suggest. Both aspire to the heights of auteurism, and take the City of Angels as their subject. Kelly envisioned a grand Los Angeles panorama in the vein of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (and by extension the cinema of Robert Altman) with a bizarro sci-fi approach that cribs unashamedly from Philip K. Dick. Pizzolatto’s influences are similarly foregrounded throughout True Detective’s second season, even as the show remains soaked in the moral nihilism of the Louisiana-set season one, with the LA of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive intermingling with the morose atmosphere of classic LA noirs from the genre’s 1940s and 50s heyday. Instead of Los Angeles proper, Pizzolatto imagines an offshoot city called Vinci (population 95), a kind of industrial tumor on the greater metro area that never evolved beyond its origins as a pollution factory in municipal clothing.
The position Kelly and Pizzolato found themselves in creating these artworks also unites them. Following Kelly’s now cult classic debut Donnie Darko (2001) and Pizzolato’s instantly beloved first iteration of True Detective with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as leads, both men were perceived by the public as groundbreaking storytellers, seemingly poised to do something that would innovate their respective media. What actually followed for both, however, gave the moniker “sophomore slump” a new life.
A hurried cut of Southland Tales premiered at Cannes in 2006 to critical lambasting. Roger Ebert described his experience at that screening as leaving him “dazed, confused, bewildered, bored, affronted and deafened by the boos all around.” Things did not fare better for Kelly after a trimmed cut and a wider theatrical release, during which his film netted less than half a million dollars worldwide against a 17 million dollar budget. The sprawl of Kelly’s script befuddled audiences, who struggled to understand how a story about an amnesiac movie star (Dwayne Johnson) trying to create an “epic Los Angeles crime saga” hangs together with plotlines involving a cartoonish zeppelin-riding billionaire (Wallace Shawn), “neo-Marxist” splinter cells fighting against the PATRIOT Act, and an adult film-turned-reality TV star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) promoting a single called “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime.” (“I never said it was,” mumbles one Republican politician in reply.) The confused can to an extent be forgiven for their frustrations; Kelly admits in the bonus features to the recent Arrow Video Blu-ray reissue of Southland Tales that he succumbed to what he calls “scope creep” in composing the story, letting it balloon to a point that strains comprehension. Yet it does not take long for it to become apparent that the plot’s bricolage is meant to push back against such comprehension. After all, the film’s most iconic sequence involves Justin Timberlake as Pilot Abeliene, a PTSD-afflicted Iraq war veteran who also serves as narrator, lip-syncing to The Killers’s “All These Things That I’ve Done” in the style of a Busby Berkeley musical number, apropos of nothing. One gets the sense that nonlinearity might have been the point.
An ostensibly muddled plot also proved to be a sticking point for True Detective’s second season, which collapsed under the heightened expectations ginned up by its predecessor due to what many saw as a needlessly complex core mystery. A postmortem in Esquire begins with the emphatically simple declaration: “It made very little sense. No one can explain it.” Episode recaps and online forum posts glutted up with expository questions. Slate went so far as to publish a nearly 4000-word catechism outlining the forking paths of the season’s storyline quagmire. Certain plotlines do flounder in the morass of season two’s mysteries, but as with Southland Tales, critical audiences could not or would not entertain the idea that ambiguity might have been Pizzolato’s agenda. After all, noir infamously eschews the clean cause-and-effect of an Agatha Christie-style mystery; think of Raymond Chandler’s curt reply to the filmmakers behind The Big Sleep when they asked him about an unclear story detail: “NO IDEA.” Where season two’s critics found stronger footing was in targeting Pizzolato’s dialogue, particularly when delivered by Vince Vaughn’s failing gangster character Frank Semyon, who proved an unpersuasive lead for critics with his penchant for clunky hard boiled wisdom: “Never do anything out of hunger. Not even eating.” Semyon ends up being a repository for some unsalvageable dialogue, as when he says of his native Vinci, “This place is built on a codependency of interest”—-a phrasing that brings to mind TikTok finance bros more than it does mob bosses.
I count myself as a fan of Southland Tales and True Detective season two for all their warts, if nothing else because both pass what I call the “MZS Test,” inspired by a tweet by the critic Matt Zoller Seitz: “[I]f I think I’m ambivalent about a work of art yet I think about it constantly, I like it.” Over time, as I came to view this film and series in conversation, I’ve developed a theory of my own to better understand why I think about them constantly, one I’ve come to call “the Southland-Vinci Theorem.” In this theorem, I divide the days of our contemporary moment into those where America feels like Southland Tales and those where it feels like True Detective season two. By turns, our present resembles either the universe of Southland Tales, which depicts imperial decline as a messy dumb comedy, or the universe of True Detective season two, which depicts imperial decline as a messy drama of indecipherable shell corporations committing slow violence in plain sight. In one instance, history as farce; in the other, as something aspiring to tragedy but lacking the gravitas to achieve it.
Consider: if the academic job market existed in Kelly’s Southland, one would certainly expect to see an advertisement for the Rupert Murdoch Distinguished Professor at the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs. The logo for the ostensibly forthcoming Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looks like something lost in Kelly’s early script drafts. Same for a guy named Joe Exotic waiting for a presidential pardon from Trump in a stretch truck limo, or Olive Garden releasing a statement about January 6th, or mommy bloggers reviewing literal military craft on their TikTok channels for parents looking for their next mode of transport to the grocery store. Wallace Shawn may ham it up as the maniacal Baron von Westphalen, but, sadly, Kelly’s creation of a goofy billionaire character that leverages Republican politicians to advance his self-aggrandizing and environmentally destructive agenda continues to be prescient. One could plop in the now-memed shot of Musk leaping onstage at a Trump rally into Southland Tales without causing any continuity error or anachronism.
Similarly, the bleak milieu of True Detective’s Vinci looks increasingly less fictive in a post-Trump world, especially in the plotline involving mysterious sex parties in which a well-connected man gathers compromising footage of government officials. The list compounds: the fall of Roe v. Wade ushered in by behind-the-scenes gladhanding between the Trump administration and Anthony Kennedy, random acts of catastrophic violence in the US being handled suspiciously by law enforcement agencies, and sclerotic corruption on the part of major US officials. Joe Manchin may be from West Virginia, but he might as well have walked off the streets of Vinci. Joining him is the parade of cabinet nominees Trump named following his 2024 re-election, which reads like a direct strike against the #MeToo movement, who all have the bad vibes of the corrupt city officials and law enforcement officers that prop up Vinci.
I’ll admit: as easy as it became for me to over time filter daily news items through the Southland-Vinci Theorem, I can’t say it spurs good feelings in me. The worlds envisioned by Kelly and Pizzolato could never be considered inviting even when they’re working aesthetically. At its best, Southland would be like finding oneself at a technicolor theme park where a level from Call of Duty was happening for real, live bullets and all, and to get out of Vinci alive would be about as pleasant as sitting in 405 traffic during a wildfire.
And yet I continue to find myself drawn into the theorem’s logic. The synchronicity between daily life in post-Trump America and the worlds of Southland Tales and True Detective season becomes more fluid every time I return to them. What has struck me most on recent re-watches is that these points of connection feel most evident in the features with which critics and audiences took issue—indeed, with aspects of the craft that are genuinely deficient. To be clear, these are not completely misunderstood masterpieces; they are flawed, particularly with regard to the space given to women in both, outside of the excellent performance by Rachel McAdams in True Detective. (As Emily Nussbaum well argues, this was a pre-existing issue from the first season.) But other supposed blunders in Kelly and Pizzolato’s storytelling—their ramshackle narrative structures, characters who try and fail to embody certain archetypes—increasingly became, for me, means of understanding America rather than defects to overlook. Contrary to the classic cinematic category of “so bad it’s good,” the Southland-Vinci Theorem got me to see these artworks as something else: perceptive because they’re bad (at times).
Southland Tales and True Detective season two are indexes of a corrupt empire in decline, artistic manifestations of a global superpower now fraying apart at the seams at the behest of late-stage capitalism’s regulation capture of the US government. Using Los Angeles as a synecdoche for the nation, these stories ambitiously try to chart the scale of America’s degradation, only to find that it’s easy to become artistically inchoate in the process. By the end of their runtimes, neither can achieve actual resolution, as it is the case with the still-Trumpian present. True Detective wraps up its own “epic Los Angeles crime saga” with a semi-hopeful gesture that a lone reporter might expose the corruption of Vinci, but by that point the majority of the top-billed cast have been killed in various isolated California environs. Southland Tales opts for a loonier finale involving a dimensional time rift activated by a floating ice cream truck that seems to instigate the apocalypse. Yet despite the invocation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” by Timberlake’s narrator—“This is how the world ends”—Kelly’s narrative wraps with more uncertainty than finality. Here, as in True Detective season two’s closing scene, the historical framing aligns with the famous Gramscian prognostication: the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born. What few rays of optimism one might glean from either hardly amount to a genuine alternative.
By presenting such a vision of America prior to Trump’s election, Kelly and Pizzolato give credence to Oscar Wilde’s claim that life reflects art far more than art reflects life. What the aesthete Wilde no doubt also knew, though, as someone who recycled tired tropes from the English stage in his society comedies, is that “art” need not always mean “high” art. As Semyon himself puts it in another of his signature attempts at profundity: “Sometimes your worst self is your best self.” Of course, I would never call Southland Tales or True Detective the “best” of anything, but few artworks have helped me mediate the roils of post-Trump America more than they have, who in their shaggy execution foresaw the shifting tides that followed the 2016 election. Contrasted with other ambitious but more formally polished examinations of America’s moral failings, Southland Tales and True Detective season two feel more authentic to the present because they stumble, at times spectacularly so.
Whether or not the 2016 election inspired good art is an open question. But what has taken place since gives us all the more reason to look back on the “bad” art that came before it. Krysta Now’s proclamation in Southland Tales that “scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted” may be a tautology, but it’s also right. There will be a future still ahead of us. But in trying to map it out, through art or elsewhere, we’re bound to mess up, or maybe make no sense at all. And those mistakes might, in their own strange way, be on to something.
Brice Ezell is a cultural critic and independent scholar. His writing on music, film, and television has appeared in venues such as PopMatters, Consequence, and Glide Magazine. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Texas, and is at work on a book about the playwright Tom Stoppard, an excerpt of which appears in Modern Drama.