Matthew McConaughey, Calvinism and Stepping Into Your Own Darkness

As a disclaimer, I love Nic Pizzalatto.  I’ve read everything he’s published.  I also love Matthew McConaughey.  He’s made some turds, but he’s given some stellar performances as well: Wooderson (Dazed and Confused), Jake Brigance (A Time to Kill), Rick Peck (Tropic Thunder), Danny Buck Davidson (Bernie), Mud (Mud), Ron Woodruff (Dallas Buyer’s Club) and perhaps his greatest performance, Rustin Cohle in True Detective.

We just watched a clip of McConaughey on Lex Friedman’s podcast talking about True Detective and something he talked about struck me.  What he said was that he reached inside himself to connect to Rust’s character.  Now, I’m not an actor, but this is a lot different than what I normally hear about someone preparing for a role. 

Typically, what you hear, if you hear anything at all, is that they did months of research.  In this case, you would hear, “I went to Louisiana and followed homicide detectives for two weeks and then I read a lot of books.”  A lot of times, watching a movie, I can tell the actor is working off of a caricature of someone.  A stereotype.  Because they don’t know anyone like the character they’re playing.  If a New York City raised, Los Angeles based actor plays a Kentucky coal miner, he simply buys a “Make America Great Again” hat, a can of Skoal and pretends to lower his IQ by 40 points.  The character never develops in the movie for you to connect with him because the actor takes an elitist approach. 

Sometimes, you’ll hear, given the same scenario, that they spent time with “those people” and they understand them a lot better, but there’s still an element of elitism there.  However, the performance is at least somewhat informed by reality and it’s a huge step in the right direction over the previous scenario.

This is what makes McConaughey’s performance so incredible.  He didn’t need to go outside of himself, other than to understand the character that Pizzalotto had written.  He compared his method to an equalizer on a stereo; you turn some frequencies in yourself up or down to be the character, but those elements are inside him already.  He also talks about his faith never being stronger than when he was playing that part and how that helped him lean into the darkness.

A non-denominational Christian, I don’t know where he falls theologically, but he seemed to be coming from a very Calvinistic, or reformed, viewpoint.  As Pizzalotto has stated before, Cohle would not ever say that any man is good.  This is a very Calvinistic approach.  McConaughey’s acceptance of his own nature allowed him to find those places inside himself where he could relate to Cohle’s darkness.  He could do so confidently because of his faith, which he described as jumping into a pool, going under water, but having faith that he would come up after he jumped in. 

I can relate to what McConaughey says here.  As a Calvinist myself, I have a clear understanding of human depravity, including my own.  I’m an awful person, I’m simply not as awful as I could be.  As the Apostle Paul wrote at the beginning of his ministry, “I am the least of the Apostles”.  Then as he matured, he wrote, “I am the least of all the saints.”  And, at the end of his life and ministry, with a mature vision of his own nature, “I am the chief of all sinners.”  Ideally, as you mature in your faith, you should become more Christ-like, however, you also become more aware of your sin.  No longer do you just feel guilty about lying to someone.  Now, you feel guilty about thinking about lying to someone because you sinned, not against the person you refrained from lying to, but against the omniscient and omnipresent God whose grace saved you from the eternal damnation you earn with every breath you take.  You live in grace, you don’t live in the darkness, but it should be easy to appreciate that grace because the darkness is always right there. 

It’s this faith, that I’ll pop back up out of the water, that allowed me to write myself out of this last episode of depression I lived through.  Instead of anti-depressants and trying to “fake it until I make it”, I simply stepped into the darkness and tried to creatively find the bottom of the pit.  Sort of like in Home Alone, when Kevin goes down into the basement and realizes, it’s just a basement.  There’s nothing to be afraid of. 

As I wrote recently, it’s not if storms come, it’s when storms come.  So, when those storms come, what are you going to do with it?  Are you going to ask “why me?”  Are you going to escape into vices or medication?  Or, are you going to say, how can I turn this pain into something beautiful?  How can I take this pain and do something with it, that other people who are feeling similar pain, can take comfort in?  Can you reach inside, through the pain, and give of yourself to others?  If not the pain you’re in now, the pain you’ve experienced in the past, can you use that to give comfort to others? 

I think what Pizzalotto and McConaughey did with Rustin Cohle is a beautiful example of what courageous art looks like.  What they did was so much more than good television or a great detective story.  What they did was lay themselves bare and share their humanity with us.  How does our code of ethics co-exist with our inevitable failures to live up to our own code?  Where will we compromise and where will we stand firm?  Are we drawing those lines in the right places? 

Great art should make you continue to think for years to come.  Whether it was first reading The Catcher in the Rye in the 7th grade or watching True Detective ten years ago, I still often think about these things and relate them to what’s going on now.  They captured a certain aspect of the human condition and being human never changes.