What Does ‘Time Is A Flat Circle’ Mean?

Few shows, if any, ever reach the level of “True Detective” season 1. As trite as it’s become to cite this season of television as one of the finest ever made, it doesn’t change the fact that writer Nic Pizzolatto, director Cary Joji Fukunaga, and stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson created something truly special with those eight episodes of television. Leaving aside the incredible depth contained in the show’s writing, its historical and literary influences, and the standout performances, one of season 1’s most enduring contributions to pop culture remains the phrase “time is a flat circle.” But what does this actually mean?

At this point, the phrase has been memed to the point it has lost most of its meaning. You’ll likely see some version of the words used any time some cultural event occurs that’s vaguely reminiscent of a past event. But there was much more meaning behind it in “True Detective” season 1, which contained a notable physical representation of the phrase in the pervasive spiral symbol. The cryptic motif is first seen tattooed on the back of murder victim Dora Lange all the way back in the pilot episode of season 1. But it cropped up throughout that initial season, too, before making a return in “True Detective: Night Country,” wherein the spiral was seemingly given an origin when Jodie Foster’s Chief Liz Danvers and Kali Reis’ Trooper Evangeline Navarro witness an ancient beast suspended in the Alaskan tundra. More importantly for our purposes, Rust witnessed the spiral motif in numerous post-drug addiction visions throughout season 1, experiencing a hallucinatory manifestation of his now-famous quote.

With all this talk of death cults and foreboding visions of eternity, you might thing that this “time is a flat circle” business isn’t all that optimistic, but it really depends on how you perceive the underlying ideas. Here’s everything you need to know about what the phrase “time is a flat circle” actually means.

Nic Pizzolatto drew from an exhaustive list of sources when creating “True Detective,” from the writings of horror author Thomas Ligotti to Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 short story collection “The King in Yellow.” He also drew from philosophy, especially when it came to Matthew McConaughey’s Detective Rustin Cohle. Throughout season 1, the character delivered several philosophical monologues that revealed an ostensible nihilism — one which is undercut in the show’s closing moments when Cohle utters an optimistic final line, which was later put to the test in “True Detective: Night Country.”

It’s during one of these monologues that we get the “time is a flat circle” line. At least, that’s where most viewers will remember the phrase as coming from. In fact, it’s first spoken by Reggie Ledoux (Charles Halford), the meth dealer and child abuser who’s killed by Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart during a flashback in episode 5, “The Secret Fate of All Life.” After being caught, Reggie — who is killed in one of TV’s most brutal gunshot scenes — says, “I know what happens next. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle,” to which Rust replies “​​What is that, Nietzsche?” This is, in fact, a reference to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, which appears throughout his work but was perhaps most straightforwardly explained in 1882’s “The Joyous/Gay Science” in a section entitled “Aphorism 341, ‘The Greatest Weight'”:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'”

In this passage, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence is presented as a kind of thought experiment, and your interpretation of it dictates whether it’s a reassuring or upsetting one.

If you knew you were bound to repeat your life exactly as you’d experienced it, with all the pain that came with it, would you “curse the demon who spoke thus” or claim to have “never heard anything more divine?” Does such an idea excite or disturb you? The question is designed to prompt reflection on life and its meaning. In “True Detective,” we see two different views emerge.

Reggie Ledoux is delighted by the prospect of eternal recurrence because it means his evil deeds will literally be repeated regardless of whether Rust and Marty catch him or not. Rust, meanwhile, is disturbed by the idea that within this concept of eternal recurrence, he can never save the kids being held captive by Ledoux. As the detective says later in the season, “This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me ‘time is a flat circle.’ Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again and again and again. Forever.” It’s not exactly the most uplifting take on Nietzsche’s idea. Here, there’s no real upside. The antagonist is delighted because he will forever carry out his horrific acts, and the protagonist is disturbed by that same fact. Nobody is uplifted by the idea that their life will be infinitely repeated. But as the season goes on, a more optimistic view emerges.

At the very end of “True Detective” season 1 (which started life as a novel and a stage play), Rust looks at a star-filled sky and says, “Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.” In this moment, McConaughey’s jaded detective appears to embrace a more positive view of existence. Eternal recurrence doesn’t just mean the pain repeats. It means the things you love will also always be there forever, like a bright star in the night sky.

In “True Detective,” “time is a flat circle” isn’t just a reference to a philosophical thought experiment. Rust Cohle gives us the most straightforward explanation of his view late in the season, during a famous scene where he flattens a beer can in order to make his point (though he actually doesn’t say the phrase “time is a flat circle” during this scene). “In this universe we process time linearly, forward,” he says, continuing:

“But outside of our spacetime, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn’t exist, and from that vantage — could we attain it — we’d see our spacetime look flattened, like a single sculpture, with matter in a superposition. Every place it ever occupied. Our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension, that’s eternity; eternity looking down on us. Now, to us it’s a sphere. But to them, it’s a circle.”

Here, Rust is literally talking about time being a flat circle when viewed from an eternal perspective. This is where quantum mechanics comes in. Without getting too far into the theory of atomic and subatomic particles, this idea of a “superposition” is important, as it explains Rust’s thinking. In quantum theory, a superposition refers to a state wherein a given particle is theoretically in multiple different states at once. You may have heard of the same concept as it relates to quantum computing, wherein a bit can be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. In Rust’s conception, time as viewed from a 4-dimensional perspective is effectively in one of these superpositions, because it’s all laid out before you in a literal, non-linear circle of time. In this non-linear view, there is no beginning or end; time is just there to be viewed in a superposition. Why is such a concept included in the show? Well, Nic Pizolatto spoke about this during a discussion for Forum des images. After explaining the quantum aspect of “time is a flat circle,” the show creator said, “Why it came into this show, was the same way really almost anything is in this show: Because it was right for the character to think that.”

Aside from featuring several “flat circle” easter eggs and generally working the theme of eternal recurrence into its iconography, “True Detective” season 1 is, itself, a demonstration of the flat circle concept. It is time viewed from the four-dimensional perspective Rust spoke about. It’s not a coincidence that season 1 jumps between three separate times in the characters’ lives: 1995, 2002, and 2012. These characters experienced those times linearly, one after the other. But we as the viewers not only witness them non-linearly in the sense the show cuts back and forth between them, but we can go back and replay the season whenever we want, however many times we want.

In that sense, Pizolatto flattened time itself into a season of television, and when Rust says, “Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over again,” he’s not just paraphrasing a philosophical theory, he’s actually right in a meta sense. We will rewatch “True Detective” season 1 multiple times, and everything he and his fellow characters do, they will do it again. As Pizzolatto himself put it during his Forum des images talk:

“Isn’t he also a character complaining about being a character on a TV show? He lives when someone watches his story, and there’s nothing he can do to change it. And we do stand outside of his dimension, and it does look flattened to us.”

In this way, “True Detective” season 1 is itself the best explanation of the concept of time being a flat circle. It’s always there, waiting for our next rewatch. There’s no beginning or end, it just exists in its entirety. As such, do we “curse the demon who spoke thus?” Well, if you’ve spent too much time online listening to season 1 fanboys complain about “Night Country,” then yes, you probably do. For most of us, though, being able to revisit this modern classic is a blessing, and in that sense, the mere fact that “True Detective” exists answers the question posed by Nietzsche’s Aphorism 341 demon with a resoundingly positive outlook.