The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [105]
When viewers root for Dexter, it may seem reprehensible because he is a murderer. However, the mental processes involved in rooting for Dexter are the same as those involved in processing most any story. Television series frequently cause dissonance by challenging viewers’ perspectives on morally suspect behaviors such as adultery—and prompting viewers to identify with the characters committing these behaviors. However, the type of boundaries that Dexter crosses, and the high degree to which the show prompts viewers to identify with Dexter, makes Dexter a particularly compelling experience for viewers. Few shows have successfully gotten viewers to identify with a murderer! In that sense Dexter provides information to psychologists about how far viewers’ sympathies can be stretched. Still, so long as viewers do not consider picking up Dexter’s hobbies, they should feel free to indulge their own temporary “Dark Passenger” and root for Dexter to successfully collect his next trophy.
Matthew E. Jacovina, Matthew A. Bezdek, Jeffrey E. Foy, and William G. Wenzel are all graduate students at Stony Brook University where they conduct research under the direction of Richard J. Gerrig. Gerrig is a professor of psychology in the Experimental/Cognitive program. The laboratory’s primary research focuses on readers’ experiences of narrative worlds. The group considers both the basic cognitive psychological processes that enable readers to understand discourse and the broader consequences of readers’ experiences of being transported to narrative worlds.
Even if you were faced with the most horrendous killers, you probably could not saw them apart in the dispassionate way that Dexter does. That’s one of the characteristics that separates Dex from us ordinary folks, right? But what if you were a surgeon—wouldn’t you have to learn to cut calmly into human flesh, day after day? What if, as part of your job, you had to remotely pilot unmanned predator drones into areas that could include civilians? Can we place some of these situations into morally or legally justified piles, or are there no neat piles? Are we all capable of wounding others without feeling pain ourselves? These are troubling thoughts to ponder, but hey, you’re a Dexter fan—you can take it!
BEING DEXTER MORGAN
CHRISTOPHER RYAN
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
—William Butler Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War”
I’ve watched every episode of all four seasons of Dexter, but I’ve yet to tire of the opening title sequence, which won an Emmy in 2007.47 Like the excellent title sequence of HBO’s Deadwood, it’s all about the beauty lurking within the disgusting, the horror coiled among the commonplace. (You can refresh yourself on it online; just search “Dexter: Morning Routine” on YouTube. Check out Deadwood’s opening sequence while you’re at it.)
The camera opens with a macro close-up of a mosquito, preparing to stab its proboscis into human skin. Dexter comes into focus—we see the mosquito is on his arm—and preemptively swats the bug. Self-defense. Thus, the very first thing viewers see is a “just murder.” Already, in the first instants of the opening credits, we are behind Dexter’s eyes, absorbed in his perspective.
What a perfect victim for drawing us to Dexter’s side. Show me a person who doesn’t take some pleasure in killing mosquitoes and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t spent much time in the tropics. I’m not much of an avenger myself, but I’ve passed many steamy nights in cheap guesthouse rooms from Bangkok to Belize stalking the little bastards, finding a kind of grim joy in every fresh bloodstain I left on those damp walls. Unlike most insects, whose offense is just a by-product of them going about their business, mosquitoes are coming after us, coming for our blood, while we sleep in the malarial