The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [31]
The extraordinary Dexter Morgan works at trying to appear utterly ordinary. He doesn’t say much and, as a guy, can get away with seeming like the stereotypical unemotional and unexpressive type. His clothes are uninteresting and so is his hair style (if you can call it that).
Appearing low-key and staying in the background is useful to Dexter because he has so little intuitive sense of what to say or how to act. There’s a risk to doing too much of that, though—he could start seeming like a “loner” who “keeps to himself.” That would be trouble! So Dexter does what he can to seem like one of the gang. He’s the donut guy. That’s easy enough—bring donuts and make people think you’re a nice, thoughtful person. He goes out with the guys, knowing that he’s not going to have a good time. He let his friends throw him a bachelor party and pretended to enjoy it, all the while wishing he could just go out and kill someone.
Perhaps the best props in Dexter’s show have been Rita and the kids. How ordinary does that seem? The irony is that having a spouse or kids is actually not a great indicator of whether you might be a serial killer. In their book Homicide: A Sourcebook of Social Research, criminologists John Fox and Jack Levin note that many serial murderers “hold full-time jobs, are married or involved in some other stable relationship, and are members of various local community groups.” What Dexter realizes, though, is that it is the conventional wisdom that counts. If other people generally believe that serial killers are loners and that men with families rarely do any harm, then the family man is the role to play.
What Makes Dexter Such an Extraordinarily Successful Liar?
To find out what makes Dexter such a great liar, we can start by looking inside him. To get away with a life of lies, Dexter benefits from what he does have—his smarts—and perhaps even more interestingly, from what he doesn’t have—deep emotions and a conscience. Let’s start with the have-nots.
NO EMOTIONS? NO PROBLEM
When ordinary people lie to someone face-to-face about where they were the night before or how their car got smashed, they risk being betrayed by their own feelings. If they are worried about getting caught in their lie, or if they feel guilty about what they did wrong or about the fact that they are telling a lie, they might come across differently than they would if they were telling the truth and not experiencing any of those emotions. Liars sometimes seem more tense than truth-tellers, and they can sound as if they don’t really want to commit to what they are saying. Those kinds of differences in demeanor can tip off a listener that something is amiss.
Dexter, though, is emotionally stunted. He just doesn’t understand human feelings. He doesn’t often have them, and he usually doesn’t know how to deal with other people’s emotions.
When it comes to getting away with lies, emotional emptiness is not such a bad thing. That guilt that other people feel about their lies that can show in their behavior and give them away? Dexter doesn’t have that. The apprehension about getting caught that can reveal itself in a nervous demeanor? Sure, Dexter is bound and determined to get away with his lies, but most of the time he doesn’t experience much anxiety about the matter.
Dexter typically thinks of Harry’s Code as a way to avoid getting caught. By season four, though, he has realized that the code also helps shield him from experiencing emotions.
Where Dexter runs into trouble as a plausible liar is when he has to fake emotions. The appropriate feelings don’t come naturally to Dex, and sometimes he simply forgets that he’s supposed to be feeling something and needs to pretend. That’s one of the mistakes Dexter made that set off Sergeant Doakes’s suspicions. After Angel was stabbed, his concerned friends and colleagues were at his side at the hospital. When word came that Angel would survive, everyone was visibly relieved. Well, everyone but Dexter. Doakes noticed.
Like an anthropologist trying