ADVERTISEMENT

'True Detective' and Remix Culture

August 6, 2014

There's a scene in Heat in which a criminal (Kelso, played by the great Tom Noonan) who sets up scores explains how he obtained the data—cash flow, alarm info, etc.—he's selling to Robert De Niro's Neal McCauley. "How'd you get this information?" asks McCauley, ever suspicious. "Just comes to you. This stuff just flies through the air. They send this information out--it's beamed out all over the fucking place," Kelso replies. "All you have to do is know how to grab it. See, I know how to grab it."

I couldn't help but think of Kelso's spiel while working through my own feelings on the revelation that True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has ... well, at the very least, he has borrowed quite liberally from the work of horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Pizzolatto had briefly given Ligotti a shout out in interviews but has, it seems, failed to give him the proper amount of credit. Here's The Lovecraft E-Zine's Mike Davis:

As I reviewed Jon’s research, and did more of my own, any doubts I had about plagiarism disappeared.  It became obvious to me that Pizzolatto had plagiarized Thomas Ligotti and others — in some places using exact quotes, and in others changing a word here and there, paraphrasing in much the same way that a high school student will cheat on an essay by copying someone else’s work and substituting a few words of their own. ...

Writers work hard to produce original ideas, stories, and dialogue, and it is unfair for another writer to pawn off those ideas as their own.  Mr. Pizzolatto has been nominated for an Emmy for writing True Detective, while Thomas Ligotti labors in near obscurity.

If you look at Davis' examples, you can see they're pretty damning. Most troubling, as Ace pointed out on Twitter, is the fact that the scene that clued audiences in to the fact that this show was something different—Rust Cohle's (Matthew McConaughey) rants about the nature of humanity and his generally misanthropic outlook on life—was lifted almost word-for-word from Ligotti. These revelations follow previous reports that Pizzolatto "borrowed" from Alan Moore for the series' closing lines. Pizzolatto, it seems, thinks that these ideas are just flying around through the air. Like Kelso in Heat, he knows how to grab them—and obviously feels justified in doing so.

"Plagiarism" in art is a trickier concept than it is in, say, journalism. Homage, inspiration, and genuine originality all kind of swirl together in a creative stew and it's sometimes difficult to sort out what's "original" and what's "borrowed." I'd be kind of curious to know what proponents of "remix culture" think of Pizzolatto's actions. Do they see any difference between Pizzolatto's lifting of words and George Lucas' lifting of images and plot points? If everything is a remix, then why bother getting upset about yet another mashup?

People are upset, of course, and it's hard to blame them. It's not just a function of feeling bad for Ligotti (though I think it's pretty crappy if Pizzolatto has earned fame and fortune by lifting Ligotti's work without compensation). In journalism, plagiarism involves a fundamental misleading of the audience, a very serious breach of trust. The stakes are lower in art—we're not discussing reports on ebola but entertainment by HBO—but that breach is no less real. We, the audience, give ourselves over to you, the creator. Jerking us around by promising us something new and original and instead delivering a warmed-over bit of thievery isn't cool.