It’s interesting that Nic Pizzalatto, the creator and writer of True Detective’s iconic first season, likens the show’s protagonist Rust Cohle, to the Biblical Figure, Job.

Job & Rust can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Job is a righteous man who finds himself being tested by unimaginable suffering, left with nothing but questions. He loses his wealth, his family, his health—all in a divine wager between God and satan.

Rust in many ways, is like Job without the faith..Like Job, Rust has witnessed the depths of human depravity, and it’s shaped his understanding of the world. But where Job challenges God, Rust challenges existence itself. His worldview is steeped in nihilism, a belief that life is a flat circle, a never-ending cycle of suffering and death.

But eventually, both men experience something that completely transforms their attitude toward their suffering.

For Job, this process comes in the form of God describing to him in great detail, the vastness and complexity of the things like the foundations of the earth, the boundaries of the sea, the constellations, and the behaviour of wild animals, highlighting the limitations of Job’s understanding of things.

For Rust, it’s an experience he has moments away from death, he sees his loved ones that he’s lost. His brooding, nihilistic core is exposed to the presence of such profound love he feels as he’s on the verge of death. He undergoes an experience that doesn’t directly address his suffering but directly transforms the part of himself that renders his suffering meaningless.

In fact, neither of these experiences directly address their specific suffering, but instead it allows them to widen their gaze, not to solely see beyond their suffering, but to see it through a new perspective of meaning and transformation.

What’s interesting about these 2 stories is that, these are 2 characters who deal with significant suffering but yet, find it in themselves to search for meaning within it, and therefore allow themselves to transcend it.

It isn’t about trivialising their genuine pain, it’s about validating it and imbuing it with purpose, it shows us that suffering may not always have an answer that fixes it, but that there could be a power that can validate it, and it’s through that validation and acceptance that they find a glimmer, and perhaps even a promise, of meaning.