True Detective (TV Series)

The Locked Room (2014)

Woody Harrelson: Detective Marty Hart

Photos 

Quotes 

• 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 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 Marty Hart : I get the feeling like, I can see forty and it's like I'm the coyote in the cartoons, like I'm running off a cliff, and if I don't look down and keep running, I might be fine. But I think I'm all fucked up.

• 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.