The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [106]
Then the music starts. One critic described it perfectly as “spicy Latin in flavor and creepy Gothic in sensibility . . . like the Addams Family theme played by a Mexican Day of the Dead band . . .”48 The melody transmits an uneasy blend of warning and welcome.
The rest of the sequence takes us through Dexter’s morning routine—though in his case, we might call it his morning “ritual,” in that his obsessive compulsion for control allows for very little variation. He shaves (against the grain, of course); he cooks and chews his meaty, bleeding breakfast—complete with runny yolks and bright red ketchup splats on the plate (or is that Tabasco?); his juice is blood orange (the close focus makes the pulp look like particularly nasty roadkill); the dental floss drawn taught around his finger visibly cuts off blood flow, while the lacing of his boots echoes the strangulation.
The sequence ends with Dexter staring straight into our eyes for an overlong moment, as if a confidence has been shared—a gift that might just seal our fate. Then, the locking of a door and a neighborly nod to us as he heads off for work.49
Beginning with these powerful images, both Dexter the program and Dexter the character challenge us to join in, if we dare, for a journey along the razor’s edge separating the cleansing execution of moral justice from the sticky evil that oozes from unfeeling killing—and, frankly, from the unfeeling depiction of killing.50
Dexter is all about cold blood, inside and out. His day job is to decipher the messages violence leaves behind—gory hieroglyphs splattered on walls or pooling significantly on the carpet. His painstakingly catalogued trophies from his own kills, clinical blood samples on glass microscope slides, are secreted away in an air conditioner. What could be more cold-blooded than that?
Since we are privy to Dexter’s darkest secrets, we know what nobody else does: this killer’s ruthlessness is leavened by a limited range of feelings, unlike the stereotypical sociopath, who fakes everything. He feels real affection (for his sister, for Rita and her kids, for Angel) and respect (for FBI Special Agent Lundy, for Arthur), if not love. He yearns for male connection (with his brother, with Miguel, with Arthur). He wants so desperately to share his experience that one suspects much of the pleasure he takes in his pre-murder conversations with his victims is just this: he can confide in them in their last moments—they’ll take his secret to their watery grave, and soon. He can finally, briefly share the truth about who he really is. But of course, these feelings that bring him closest to his humanity represent the greatest threat to his performance and continued success in fulfilling his “heroic” destiny: ridding the world of those who brutalize the innocent.
And we do want him to fulfill this destiny, don’t we? Part of the genius of the program is that by sharing Dexter’s secret life with us in all its surface normalcy and profound justifications, we are emotionally—and even intellectually—aligned with this cold-blooded killer’s view of the world. Miami is a safer place because of what he’s doing—even if an innocent person occasionally gets offed in the process. Knowing what we do, both about the criminal underworld and about Dexter’s traumatic past, we accept his perverse hungers as the price of justice, cheering him on as he battles “real” evil.
Tragically orphaned as a young boy, he was raised by kind-hearted adults who tried, often unsuccessfully, to understand the strange child he was. Gradually, it dawned on him, too, that he was different from everyone else and somehow disconnected from the source of his deepest, essential identity. But with his pain and isolation came unique abilities. His life would be all about learning to use these abilities to defend common, decent folk against those who would do them harm or, failing that, to seek revenge against those who already had harmed the innocent.
This is Dexter’s story, of course, but it’s a biography shared by Superman,