[For this year’s
installment in my
annual Halloween series,
I’ll be AmericanStudying serial killers in American culture and history. Add
your boos and other thoughts in comments, please!]
On antiheroes,
vigilante justice, and serial killers.
Although the
character began in 2004 in the first of a
series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, when Dexter Morgan was brought to TV life
by Michael C. Hall across eight seasons on
Showtime he fit very nicely into the dominant 21st century trend
of television
antiheroes. While Dexter might seem to be the worst of the bunch, given
that his defining characteristic was killing people week in and week out, I
would argue that he’s more representative of the type than unique; after all, Frank
Underwood and Tony Soprano both kill their fair share of innocent people,
while Walter
White kills numerous fellow criminals in order to further his own criminal
enterprise. Indeed, since Dexter only kills the guilty (something that the show
makes sure its audience knows with certainty in a way that would be impossible
in real life), he’s not unlike another heroic antihero: Jack Bauer, who only
tortures and/or kills those whom viewers know are necessary to thwart terrorist
plots. Dexter is unquestionably haunted by his actions (given tangible form
through his “dark
passenger,” the ghost of his adopted father Harry Morgan), but so in one
way or another are these other TV antiheroes as well.
Yet at the same
time, Dexter’s explicit and primary motivation is to find ways to kill his
deserving (as he sees it, and again as the show portrays it) victims without
being caught or stopped; if and when those other antiheroes kill, they do so as
a means toward other ends (some more noble than others, to be sure), rather
than the end in and of itself. That doesn’t necessarily make Dexter worse than
them, but it does link him to a different cultural and American type: the
vigilante, one pursuing a self-defined vision of justice outside of and
opposed to the law (a narrative driven home with particular clarity and irony
due to Dexter’s day job as a policeman). As is so often the case with such
vigilante characters in popular culture, while the audience is given various
forms of distance through which they can critique Dexter’s actions (such as the
stories of his fellow police officers investigating his killings), the ultimate
success of the show depends on the audience sympathizing enough with him to
remain invested in his story—or, to put it another way, if the audience became
more sympathetic to his victims than to him the show would quickly cease to
work.
So Dexter Morgan
is an antihero and a vigilante, two types we’ve seen quite a bit on television
and in popular culture more broadly over the last couple decades. But he’s also
a serial killer, and to my mind the only serial killer protagonist of a TV
show. Contemporary TV is full of serial killers—they’re pursued just about
every night of the week by the detectives on numerous procedural and cop
shows—which certainly reflects our collective fascination with such characters
and narratives. Yet even when those killers are charismatic or compelling (as
were Mads
Mikkelsen’s Hannibal Lecter on Hannibal
and James Purefoy’s Joe Carroll
on The Following, for example), the
logic of the shows requires them to be the hunted, locating the audience as one
of those hunting them. Whereas, as I’ve argued in each paragraph here, the
logic of Dexter locates us in an uneasy
but clear parallel to Dexter himself, concerned about what might happen to him
(legally but also psychologically) but taking part in his ongoing killing
spree. Perhaps the show was simply an anomaly—but perhaps it represents a next
step from some of the cultural texts and narratives I’ve highlighted throughout
this week’s posts.
October recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other American killers or scares you’d highlight?
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