If Looks Could Thrill

The opening sequence for True Detective the Second is as magnificent as the First.

Produced by the same company, the video naturally has the same double-exposure tenor of terror, sense of slowness, and combination of fleshy humans and stark material objects, all of which hint at what’s to come.

Lavish opening sequences are a luxury. While Netflix takes their time, and does have some very good ones in Daredevil, House of Cards, and their masterpiece, Marco Polo, it’s really only HBO that does them supremely well and with the sort of pre-thought worthy of a PhD dissertation.

TD2, like its predecessor, uses the music and imagery of less-popular, but highly-acclaimed artists. For example, it uses pictures from David Maisel’s book, Black Maps, which shows the vagaries of human antipathy as expressed in the form of man-made structures over the natural environment.

As for music, this iteration uses one of the newest, most phantasmal songs by the legendary Montreal poet Leonard Cohen. The song, ‘Nevermind’ was originally a poem about war, but it drapes over the credits and the series like a dark fog through which only Cohen’s deep, laconic, mesmerising, and iconic voice can penetrate.

It is a masterful choice for a masterpiece of metaphoric storytelling.