The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [40]
The man himself would deem the question irrelevant, since the job is a part of the mask he wears to keep himself hidden in broader society. It’s clear at several points, though, that positive spillover from murder to forensic analysis does exist. The pathological need to kill would, if left unfulfilled, drive him to distraction. When he is unable to kill, his focus drifts. If he weren’t able to isolate targets, learn their patterns, hunt them down, and make an end of them, would he be able to function at all?
The strong suggestion, based on what Dexter himself says and what Harry told him, is that he wouldn’t. He would end up in jail, or dead. The act of killing creates positive spillover to his work, because it allows him to do his job, help solve crimes, and save lives. Dexter may or may not care about the outcomes associated with his success at his job, but that doesn’t change the reality of those outcomes. His ability to continue to do the right thing for such very wrong reasons is one of the things that makes him a compelling character.
In rewatching episodes before writing this essay, it often seemed to me that the way the lives of all the characters in the show—not just Dexter—developed was based on the idea that the isolation of one life domain from another is simply impossible. Things will always spill over. That idea created much of the dramatic tension around Dexter himself, but also provided us with memorable incidents in the lives of other characters. Batista’s divorce led to a number of work-related problems, including his job-threatening fling with Lila and near arrest by undercover vice officer Barbara Gianna. Debra’s romantic history is rife with work spilling into her personal life, as she has moved from the Ice Truck Killer, to an FBI Special Agent, to a confidential informant—to say nothing of poor Gabriel, the children’s book writer whom she almost chased out of her life because she looked at their relationship with a homicide detective’s eyes. Even patriarch Harry Morgan seems to have had trouble keeping work and non-work separate—and good for Harry. If he hadn’t carried that frightened, bloody child out of the cargo crate and adopted him, we wouldn’t have ever met Dexter.
Season Four
For all Dexter’s trouble with maintaining normality and keeping his work and non-work activities separate, things didn’t become really complicated until he married Rita at the end of season three. With the arrival of Harrison, everything in Dexter’s life changed. Late-night excursions to hunt and kill bad guys became endurance tests. He fell asleep while staking out a target, then again at the wheel of his SUV. He was so sleep-deprived from getting up with Harrison that he took the wrong files to a trial and allowed a killer to go free, and when he brought his own personal justice to the killer, he forgot what he did with the body!
Prior to season four, Dexter mainly had to deal with work versus non-work. In season four it became a matter of work-nonwork- family balance, and things grew exponentially more complicated. Issues from his past continued to re-surface, his need to protect children revealed a chink in his psychological armor, and this man who denied being able to feel emotions seemed to feel something very close to love.
The examples of conflict between work and non-work in season four alone would have been enough to fill a chapter. Take Quinn, whose involvement with reporter Christine compromised his judgment and allowed her to protect her serial-killer father by killing Lundy and shooting Debra. The stories Christine ran relating to the investigation, based in part on information she gleaned through her relationship with Quinn, let her father know exactly how far ahead of Miami Metro he was.
Debra’s trouble with men continued. With Lundy’s reappearance in Miami to search for the Trinity killer, she found herself torn between him and Anton. She slept with Lundy, only to have him gunned down in front of her, then told Anton the truth and found herself alone yet again.