GleamVibe

Contains spoilers for 'True Detective' till episode 4. Tread carefully. 

In the quiet little town in Arkansas, the power equation is clear. There are the good old white boys with families and kids, there are educated upper-middle-class colored folks and then there are creatures like Brett Woodard who live on the fringes of the town collecting everyone's trash and just barely keeping their head over the water.

This season of 'True Detective' is mysterious, beautifully written and all the good things that come with it but it also paints a gut-wrenchingly painful picture of racism imbibed in the social fabric. And Brett Woodard, the Trashman as they call him grudgingly, is at the center of it all. 

Michael Greyeyes plays the raw, unstable and absolutely badass character of Woodard this season and he makes for an extremely uncomfortable and heartbreaking watch.  There aren't many things we know about the character other than the fact that he is a Native American Vietnam War veteran who had all the baggage you'd expect from a man who came home from war. Unable to integrate back into civilian life, Brett loses his family. His wife leaves him and takes his children with her and he is left all by himself. Holding down a job was tough and he ended up picking up whatever trash he could find to resell it.

At first, you find the character of Woodard a bit stereotypical. He's the mysterious guy and silent and looks like he knows a lot but then as his character evolves you see, crystal clear, the prejudice, racism and how the spoils of war hurt a veteran. Greyeyes' performance just makes it even more heartbreaking yet beautiful to watch. 

While the show explores racism with Hays' character as well, with Brett it isn't just more pronounced, it is also much more painful. This isn't just your superiors stubbing you because they think it would sound better when it came from a white colleague - this a matter of life and death. When the rednecks meet Brett during his daily trash run and beat him black and blue and then collectively hunt him down to end him because they think he stole the kids, evidence be damned, you know it would have been different if he was white. We've got alcoholic parents, a very pushy priest and a plethora of suspects to choose from but this town just slams down on Brett. He's different, he's "weird" and he's an easy target.

Who's to say they've always just tolerated him this whole time and the kidnapping and murder just broke the dam? It isn't hard to guess that he may have had violent tendencies. Wars have murders too. However, he is innocent in this case. His only fault could be that he refused to take it sitting down. He planned his defense and he stood his ground just in case those rednecks showed up again. 

At the end of episode 4, it does seem like he may have hurt quite a few people since the screen goes dark after Brett peeps out from behind his American flag turned curtain (oh the metaphors). However, to me, he will be a victim and a survivor - a man who gave everything he had for his country and was scarred so hard in the process that civilian life just didn't want him anymore. 

Watch what happens to Brett after the last episode on 'True Detective' episode 5 airing this Sunday, February 3 on HBO at 9 pm.

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