The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [3]
A lethal predator has the callous remove of a psychopath and is meticulously efficient in committing multiple acts of sexual or sexually symbolic violence. But is that really our Dexter? We’ll look at each of these qualities and see how Dexter fits the mold of a psychopathic, organized, and sexually sadistic serial killer.
Psychopathy: Dexter’s Disconnect
The term “psychopath” is used rather frequently. On the one hand, we jump to using it for just about anyone who has committed some heinously violent crime; on the other, we might use it to describe some jerk who cuts us off in traffic, a boss who has slighted us, or an ex-lover who has jilted us. The term conjures images of some deranged nutcase busted out of his loony-bin straitjacket and on the run from the law.
Psychopathy, however, is not just about the bad things people do (which is an aspect of psychopathy known as antisocial behavior ), but is also about a particular set of personality traits that includes emotional shallowness, superficial charm, impulsivity with poor judgment, deceitfulness, unreliability, manipulation, and disregard for the feelings of others. Psychopathy is frequently, but not always, associated with criminal behavior. Not all criminals, not even all murderers, are psychopaths. The man who murders his wife in a crime of jealous passion is generally without the remorselessness and emotional emptiness seen in psychopaths. Furthermore, these same psychopathic traits can sometimes even be used in healthy and adaptive ways. A car salesman, for example, offers a valuable product, but he might need to rely on natural charm and manipulation skills to be successful on the job and wouldn’t get by very well if he lost sleep every time he bilked an unassertive customer out of a few extra bucks.
Dexter’s most prominent psychopathic features are his impoverished emotional life, his lack of remorse or guilt, and the way he masks that through deception and superficial charm. From the very beginning of the series, Dexter has told us that he doesn’t have feelings about anything at all and is a well-studied faker of human interactions. He doesn’t understand or experience conventional expressions of love, sexuality, comfort, grief, humor, or remorse.
At the same time, Dexter is exceptionally charming. He brings donuts, is quick with a compliment, and lends a (seemingly) sympathetic ear to others. He’s a model coworker. Dexter has pulled a fast one on the Miami homicide department, but he isn’t the only psychopath to get one over on coworkers involved with law enforcement. In the 1970s, crime writer Ann Rule began work with the police department on a series of then-unsolved murders of young women in Washington state. Rule was later shocked to learn that the man arrested in 1975 and convicted of those crimes was Ted Bundy, someone she had befriended while working alongside him for years on the same crisis counseling hotline.2 More recently, Eric Harris happily charmed workers in his juvenile justice rehabilitation program into believing he was repentant for a minor theft and a “very bright young man . . . likely to succeed in life,” while at the same time compiling bombs and guns for a planned murder spree at Columbine High School.3
Like many psychopaths, Dexter not only justifies his crimes as necessary but can also play upon them in such a way as to elicit sympathy for his own victimization. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy described himself as a victim, cheated out of a childhood and left to wonder if “there would be someone, somewhere who would understand how badly it hurt to be John Wayne Gacy.”4 When Dexter confessed to the group at Narcotics Anonymous about the pain and confusion from his Dark Passenger, was it genuine revelation, or a great performance? When dealing with the lies and mask of a psychopath, Dexter told us, “otherwise right-thinking people don’t stand a chance” (“Popping Cherry,” 1-3). Dexter’s charms