The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [93]
Aggression is often suppressed in women. We women are not supposed to be aggressive and when we are it raises concerns, in ourselves and sometimes in others. Men are allowed to express these forceful instincts more freely. They can “kill,” either literally (in war) or symbolically (in sports or in the boardroom), and as a culture, this is defined as more acceptable. I do not mean to relegate the difficulties in accepting aggression in women as issues that are present only in men, however. We women are often just as susceptible to feeling more at ease watching men engage in aggressive acts while expecting women to stand back and ignore their own impulses. By supporting Dexter, Rita was able to give expression to her own aggression through him.
Rita was not alone in this; most of us, male and female, are taught to avoid aggressive feelings and behavior. Aggression is ugly, and most of us want to avoid these messy, scary, and complicated feelings. We all split off our own truly aggressive impulses, so that we too can function. Dexter gets away with murder, and we need him to, so we can rest assured that someone is doing the dirty work for us. Dexter has to keep doing what he does, so we don’t have to.
Final Analysis: Crime and Punishment
The issue of “getting caught” is central to Dexter. We viewers buy into Dexter’s story and his rationale for his need for murder, and we want to see him get away with it. Why shouldn’t we? After all, he is “taking out the trash,” as it were, and Harry’s Code does make sense to many of us, even if we couldn’t truly imagine the pleasure that Dexter gets from torturing and killing his victims. The idea of getting caught or not getting caught, however, is complicated psychologically. Not getting caught for “crimes” has a deep resonance for many of us. In a paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2009, Adam Phillips describes quite vividly the psychological consequences of not getting punished for wrongdoing. When we are not punished, when we get away with it, no matter how minor the infraction, our perceived sins haunt us. (That is, at least, most of us. Dexter is unique and rare in that he does not seem to suffer psychologically [through guilt] from his crimes.) Perhaps Dexter’s lack of punishment created a tension in the ongoing nature of the television series and some resolution was needed. But since Dexter is our hero, he can’t get punished or caught, at least not yet. We need Dexter to live freely. But if punishment serves to restore some kind of homeostatic psychic function, as Adam Phillips suggests, then someone has to pay for Dexter’s crimes. At the end of season four, that person was Rita.
Rita’s murder raised all kinds of questions and observations. On some level it appeared that just as Rita became a more fully functioning and complex woman, she died. As one fan said to me, “Just when we were starting to like her, she gets killed.” And while feminist ideas regarding killing off strong women are seductive, I am not sure that fills out the whole story here. It is true, Rita got stronger and then she died, but maybe this was a necessary sacrifice for the story. Personally, I am sad at the elimination of a great actress in this series, but if I am right about the psychological nature of Dexter—that someone needs to get caught and pay for Dexter’s actions—I am glad that it was Rita and not Dexter.
Rita’s death also serves another purpose: it reinforces our need for Dexter to be someone who not only can get away with it, but who seeks justice, even if it is in a perverse way. And narratively, having Harrison, Dexter’s infant son, relive Dexter’s own experience of being “born in blood” is compelling. It may also be that Dexter’s character needs