My fairly brief thoughts on Mike Davis's (and Jon Padgett's) question: Did True Detective Plagiarize Thomas Ligotti?

BLOT: (04 Aug 2014 - 03:00:51 PM)

My fairly brief thoughts on Mike Davis's (and Jon Padgett's) question: Did True Detective Plagiarize Thomas Ligotti?

I'm a fan of HBO's True Detective and have recommended it to dozens, and when Mike Davis [and Jon Padgett] ask the question, "Does True Detective plagiarize Thomas Ligotti?", my first instinctive response is, "Isn't that the point?" There have been several articles—see this and this—that have pointed out the relationship without blinking an eye, though maybe slightly dancing away from an outright claim that Rustin "Rust" Cohle is directly spouting Ligotti, but as I read down the Lovecraft eZine article, I realized that while I hang around the sorts who immediately see a connection between Conspiracy Against the Human Race and Cohle, that simply assuming attribution is problematic.

As an academic librarian, had someone turned in the oft-quoted "car scene" to me to talk about intellectual property issues—and I often field similar questions—then I would told them that they need to acknowledge Ligotti in some way or form [Doug's note: I'm a fan of the "be respectful" school even if all the letter-of-the-law switches are flipped]. Sure, the ideas are not copyrightable, and are definitely not unique to Ligotti, but many of the phrases and ideas feel "very Ligotti", not just "kind of Ligotti"—something admitted in an interview as Pizzolatto says, "there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers." I'd rather you read Davis and Padgett's take than my own, though, so off you pop for those in a bit.

In my eyes, there are two interesting nubbins to chew upon outside of the Davis/Padgett reasoning. First, this feels heightened by the fact that it deals with such a tight-knit community. The same things that make Ligotti fans see a cousin to his worldview are the same things that make the claim seem worthwhile. People who got the Yellow King and Carcosa references right off the bat at least know of Ligotti. Hell, had people not been into it for the weird fiction in-jokes, most of my discussions about the show would probably not have happened.

Secondly, though there are ways to go, "Hey, speaking of antinatalism...," it would have been impossible in True Detective in that the text that people are claiming is being plagiarized was not written until after the time in which parts of the show take place.

Then you get into the whole thing of homage and whatnot and you can debate this for days, I guess. As I said, my take was that it was meant to sound like Ligotti and it never occurred to me that it wasn't obvious. I'm curious to see how Pizzolatto and Ligotti respond to this.

UPDATE (5 Aug 2014, 12:03PM): A fair number of people are wrongly arguing against the claim of plagiarism by saying that Ligotti stole the ideas first. This is a misunderstanding of plagiarism in general and of Ligotti's work in specific. I made this post on reddit in response to someone who said, "Pizzolatto is no more plagiarizing Ligotti than Ligotti plagiarized those who have expressed these feelings throughout centuries prior," which I will copy here as it feel fitting to my post:

It illuminates the situation of why proper citation can be important is such argument, as is reading the source material you are attacking online.

Weird Fiction

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2014