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" In his classic 1996 essay, &amp;quot;Equine Gothic,&amp;quot; the literary scholar Jerry Leath Mills, after an entire career teaching English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, established what he called &amp;quot;the generic signifier in Southern literature of the twentieth century.&amp;quot; Southern novels, he claimed, had dead mules in them. My survey of around 30 prominent 20th-century southern authors has led me to conclude... that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it? The Southern Gothic genre has transferred from the novel to film and television, but its popularity remains enormous. The latest iteration is True Detective, a Nietzschean piece of pulp fiction, which is currently rolling toward its finale as HBO&amp;#039;s latest huge success and possibly the best new show on television. Last night&amp;#039;s episode showed what may be emerging as the equivalent to the dead mule for the new Southern Gothic: pink underwear.   There were two examples last night alone: the beautiful ex-prostitute Beth examining herself in the mirror in electric pink underwear. Then there was Maggie, out on a mission to seduce Rust, who turned out to be wearing a more matte pink bra. Electric pink is for other women, matte pink is for wives, I guess. If you are watching a Southern Gothic, and there is an attractive woman, the chances are preposterously high that she will show up in pink underwear. Sookie in True Blood varies from outright red to flesh-colored. In The Paperboy, a seriously underrated bit of trashy fun from 2012, the key scene involves Nicole Kidman channeling Sharon Stone, but with pink underwear on, under pantyhose. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, from Arizona, dressed up his inmates in pink underwear. He apparently understood that pink underwear means attractive woman. Not that it never appears in shows set elsewhere. But women in shows set in New York \u2014 Gossip Girls, for example \u2014 wear black or white underwear for the most part.  The South, as it is found on television and film, is overwhelmed with other &amp;quot;generic signifiers&amp;quot; of course, by which I mean it&amp;#039;s a mass of cliches. The opening credits to True Blood are basically a list of them. Alligators in swamps. Churches. Snake-handlers. Old mansions. Rusting cars. The Klan. People without teeth. Roadkill. Girls in dive bars dancing in Daisy Dukes. River baptisms. You will find some or all of these in any show purporting to be from the Southern United States. And griminess. Everything in True Detective or True Blood or any of the various movies set in the South seems to be covered in a dusty film. It&amp;#039;s like even the buildings and the cars are sweating. But all of these other cliches make sense. They are tied to actual history or possess some basis in reality. (A snake-handling preacher did die from a snakebite a week ago. There is a real Ku Klux Klan. The South has had a brutal transition to post-industrial life. And so on.) It&amp;#039;s the pink underwear, like the dead mules, that doesn&amp;#039;t seem to make any sense.  I have no idea whether this preponderance of pink underwear on Southern female television characters reflects reality. I&amp;#039;m Canadian and married. Not that it particularly matters whether the signifier is real or not. The author of the dead mule theory of Southern literature acknowledged that, having lived his entire life in the South, &amp;quot;I have never laid eyes on any actual dead mules.&amp;quot; How these tropes enter our collective imaginations is always mysterious. I would assume that there are more dead mule carcasses around the Erie Canal than there ever were anywhere in the South. Mills offered no explanation for why there should be so many dead mules in Southern fiction, and I can think of no reason why there should be so much pink underwear on Southern-themed television. True Detective, however, is such a great show in large part because it understands the emptiness of all those signifiers while reveling in them better than anybody else. It is a show about navigating symbols, first and foremost \u2014 through the murder but also in the private lives of its characters. Marty is a mass of contradictions exactly because he wants women to inhabit these symbolic roles he has imagined for them \u2014 whore, wife, mother \u2014 while he is free to move between the various codes at liberty. Even the slightest violation of the symbolic order by somebody else and he responds with brutal violence, as in the last night&amp;#039;s episode when he beat up the teenage boys who slept with his daughter. He feels the symbols intensely while escaping their content almost completely. How many men do you know who live that way? True Detective feels so natural because it is aware of its own hollowness. That&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s so great about it. It is a show that understands sometimes the things that most clearly define a place are the things that make the least sense. Like dead mules and pink underwear. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27480/true-detective-southern-gothic-pink-underwear/>