Dexter and Philosophy

by Greene, Richard; Reisch, George A. ; Robison, Rachel

  Prado is already a powerful man in the Miami Cuban community when Dexter meets him, the kind of man others call “patrón” and “jefe.” The words translate as “boss” and “chief” and imply deference and respect for a powerful man. Prado has what Burke calls “natural power,” the power “which arises from institution in kings and commanders” and “has the same connection with terror. Sovereigns are frequently addressed with the title of dread majesty” (p. 57). Prado clearly likes to be the one in control (defense attorney Ellen Wolfe provides evidence that he has used his office to bend the law to his liking on many occasions and his behavior has prompted an ethics investigation) and to provoke fear. In “Our Father” when their lives become entangled by the death of Miguel’s brother, Oscar (unknown to Miguel, Dexter accidently did the deed) the two men bond. When Miguel witnesses the aftermath of a kill in “Finding Freebo,” instead of turning Dex in, he praises him. Astonished at the possibility of a someone who knows the real monster inside of him and still wants to be his friend, Dexter warms to the role: “It destroyed my brother, consumed Lila, but not Miguel Prado—somehow he looks at me and he’s proud” (“Turning Biminese,” Season 3).

  Using his justice system connections, Prado points Dexter towards people he says deserve death, but unbeknownst to Dex, he is actually using our hero as his own personal vendetta machine, removing anyone who is a threat to his power. In “The Damage a Man Can Do,” a flattered Dexter acquiesces to Miguel’s desire to learn the Dark Defender business first hand and they perform a joint kill on a bookie’s enforcer who bludgeons people to death.33 When later that night, Prado, drunk with the power of holding life and death in his hands, breaks Harry’s Code by killing an innocent, his enemy Ellen Wolf, Miguel’s ecstatic response to his action, “I feel real for the first time in my life,” shows an understanding of the effect of the sublime (“About Last Night”). But since he has used his strength for selfish ends, he doesn’t truly reach it. There can be no sublime in this, as Burke states, “Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime” (p. 56).

  When he discovers that Miguel has brutally murdered Wolf, Dexter has to figure out a way to deal with him. It speaks to Miguel’s power that Dexter’s first inclination, to send him in pieces on a one-way trip down the Gulf Stream, is initially vetoed because of Prado’s standing in the legal and Cuban immigrant communities. Harry taught Dexter self-preservation and disappearing someone so high-profile is dangerous, even if Prado did flout the Code. Miguel abused Dexter’s trust, friendship, and mission by employing Dexter’s strength and abilities for his own selfish ends.

  With Harry’s help, Dexter channeled his desire to kill to more socially (if not legally) acceptable targets, but as he says in the first Dexter novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, he is still not really in control of “the growing Need, rising in me like a great wave that roars up and over the beach and does not recede, only swells more with every tick of the bright night’s clock.” 34 That fits Burke’s definition of the sublime. Dexter has an overwhelming internal compulsion to kill—whereas Miguel kills to gain more personal power. Dexter realizes this truth in “Go Your Own Way,” when they have a confrontation on the roof of the police station over Miguel’s series of betrayals. Prado’s statement, “I’ll do what I want, when I want to whomever I want—count on it,” shows his selfish disregard for anyone who gets in his way. He plots to kill LaGuerta, a trusted friend, when she suspects him in the Wolf murder, and sets Dexter up to be killed by the latest Miami serial killer, “the Skinner” (they do seem to attract a lot of them in the series, despite Florida’s death penalty). In a bit of poetic justice, Prado’s murderous plans actually help Dexter do away with him. He traps Miguel in LaGuerta’s house when the A.D.A. comes to kill her, and then uses the Skinner’s M.O. to hide his kill in plain sight as just another serial killer victim. Yes, Miguel’s death kept Dexter safe, but Dexter’s assertion of power over his former friend was not merely for selfish need. Prado was killing innocent people, and just as he did with his brother, Brian, Dexter had to follow the Code and take him out.

  Dexter’s Aesthetics

  Season 2 villainess, modern artist Lila Tournay, asks Dexter for one of the blood spatter test analyses she watches him create and later we see it hung on the wall of her studio. At a dinner party she declares him to be an artist (“Dex, Lies, and Videotape,” Season 2) and even directs their lovemaking as if it was a painting (“That Night a Forest Grew,” Season 2).

  The similarity of Dexter’s spatters to the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock’s paintings has been noted by many critics. Pollock’s technique of seemingly randomly flung gouts of paint was actually carefully controlled for color choice, application tools and methods. Dexter’s own “paintings” are a reverse engineering of a crime scene, attempting to map out the criminal’s actions and as such are also created under carefully controlled circumstances. He displays them like art on the walls of his office and they are also used in many of the promotional materials for the show and on the cover design for the hardback edition of Dexter by Design which shows Dexter standing in front of a red splattered white canvas with an artist’s palette all in red and a bloody butcher knife. In this book, Dexter recognizes the parallel between his hidden calling and the works he sees in the Paris museums: “Art is, after all, all about making patterns in order to create a meaningful impact on the senses. And isn’t this just exactly what Dexter does? Of course in my case ‘impact’ is a little more literal, but still—I can appreciate other media” (p. 5). Dexter’s true art, however, cannot be so publically displayed.

  Dexter takes the same care and precision in the preparation and clean-up for his art—his killings—as he does in his crime scene analysis. The extensive research to determine guilt, the creation of a kill room, the stalking and capture of the subject and the dismemberment and disposal of the body are all vital parts of his ritual process (paralleled in the show’s Emmy winning opening credits and cleverly spoofed in the first episode of Season 4 when sleepdeprived new father Dexter finds baby puke on his white t-shirt and breaks his shoelace). For Dexter there is beauty and symmetry in the fulfillment of both Harry’s Code and the bloodthirsty needs of his Dark Passenger. Within the context of the narrative, the only audience for almost all of his true art process is the victim.

  As Burke explained, art works that induce a violently emotional state, such as terror, can be sublime. For the person strapped nude to Dexter’s table with saran wrap, the aesthetic experience is short-lived, but undeniably intense. The reader or viewer of the Dexter series can experience the sublime anew with every novel and episode. Just like Rita in Paris viewing “Jennifer’s Leg,” that is why we keep coming back—we find pleasure in the fear, terror, and astonishment we feel following Dexter’s adventures, with “not an unmixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness” (pp. 40–41).

  11

  Dexter’s Specimens

  JASON DAVIS

  Specimen / ’spεsemen / noun1. a part or an individual taken as exemplifying a whole mass or number; a typical animal, plant, mineral, part, etc. 2. Medicine a sample of a substance to be examined or tested for a specific purpose. 3. Colloquial a person as a specified kind, or in some respect a peculiar kind, of human being; he’s a poor specimen.35

  In Dexter specimens come in threes. The most recognizable are the measured amounts of crime matter taken from the murder scenes that are bagged, tagged, and tested as lab samples.

  Then there are Dexter’s after-work re-enactments of specimen taking. These specimens are one part in Dexter’s quarantine ritual of latex gloves, laboratory aprons, pipettes, and face shields, all clinical barriers and surfaces needed for traceless murders.

  The third type of specimen inhabiting the world of Dexter is the walking, talking, life-taking kind—the varieties of serial killers we encounter in each episode, Dexter included. As much as Dexter, or rather Michael C. Hall, is a fine mal
e specimen for some of us Dexter watchers, Dexter’s also typical of what we know about serial killers. The traits and behaviors Dexter typifies and shares with other killers in the series are also what define his questionable moral difference from them—Dexter’s victim types are killers. But as much as Dexter presents us with examples of what we recognize and know about serial killing, there are unfamiliar “specimens” too.

  Try Our New Dahmerland Section at Specimens ‘R’ Us

  We’re consumers of serial killers, both in popular culture and popular science. Dexter is also a consumer of serial killers. From syringe to specimen slide to Hefty bag; each capture and murder satisfies Dexter’s urge to kill, until the next time. He doesn’t “feed” on them literally, but he is like a consumer satisfying his unquestioned needs with things whose origins aren’t reflected on. Dexter isn’t concerned about what makes killers the way they are, only that they’re available and free range. That’s the point of looking at Dexter in terms of specimens. What’s presented to us about serial killers and serial killing—their behavior, their victim types, their psychological profiles—are consistent with what we know. Dexter draws on our shared ideas and understandings of serial killing. If we recognize these specimens, then what’s taking place is a form of identity thinking.

  ‘Identity thinking’ is Theodor Adorno’s name for how knowledge about a particular thing, say a novel about a serial killer who works as a blood-spatter analyst, involves making that individual thing into a case or example or specimen of something already known, such as an established genre. Likewise, an act of murder as a particular event can be identified as a specimen of individual psychology or as an example of how social beliefs sanction hate crimes. In each case, identification of a particular thing as belonging to a larger group or category involves fitting it within a concept.

  Regardless of whether I understand the thing as an instantiation of a Platonic form or an example of a scientific class, what matters is that the object is no longer a unique and strange thing but is rather a member of a category that makes sense to me. This process . . . causes a belief that concepts fully capture the objects to which they refer.36

  This isn’t to argue against concepts because of the way they reduce things to likeness as a member of a category. Placing things within concepts is necessary for developing our understanding of the world. What Adorno reminds us is that over-reliance on concepts and categories involved in identity thinking runs the risk of making the material world fit an accepted abstract idea of it. When something particular is overlooked what could be seen or known differently is lost.

  Attention to the difference between concept and thing is one way of getting further into the world of Dexter. For one thing, focusing on the particular means thinking with what resists, or is considered insignificant, or what remains invisible to understanding. In a way, Adorno’s philosophical approach sounds like forensic detection and homicide police work. After all, how does something become evidence against the background of the everyday? Or what patterns can be found within the chaotic “noise” of the spatter, pools, and trails of human blood at a crime scene? But Adorno would want us to think beyond the concepts that keep explanations and popular cultural portrayals of serial killing focused on the individuality and individualizing acts of the killer. What can something seemingly marginal in connection to the world of Dexter—specimen slides, nonhuman animals, and friendless women—tell us about the world of serial killing?

  Counting Specimen Slides

  The owner of the specimen collection of “trophies” we see in nearly every episode of Dexter is more than a “very neat monster.” It belongs to a minimalist serial killer. A minimalist serial murderer is what you get when a killer son follows his police father’s survival code to remain traceless. Focused and controlled satisfaction of his urges keeps the murderous double-life of Dexter and his criminal, yet acceptable killing for viewers, appealingly Dahmer-Lite. And yet, might there be more to the prized specimen slide collection of the blood-obsessed Dexter than the risky breaking of Harry’s Code and the product placement of an LG Air Conditioner?

  As a discrete catalogue of nameless “trophies,” Dexter’s specimen collection is an eerie window into serial killing in Dexter. The glass-on-glass sound of the warm blood being tapped out and the dull arrhythmic tinkle they produce when Dexter runs his finger across them in their wooden case make them delicate keepsakes of anonymous deaths. They’re also clinical and impersonal mementos, but each addition “speaks” of a haunting repetition. Each slide Dexter adds isn’t just the recording of another death. Each one of those numberless thumb-print-sized mementos is also a token for those that were killed by the killers added to Dexter’s collection. And these slides also remind us that this specimen-making is underway with no date for completeness or closure. It’s an open set. The slides are a reminder that the world of Dexter is made up only of individuals: those who are innocent, and those who do the evil others only dream of.

  Dexter, Specimen Maker

  Identity thinking is very much at work in Dexter’s killing. Dexter acknowledges his victims’ self-defining compulsion to kill as something he unmistakably shares with them as a fate “gifted” beyond their control. But he also defines himself as completely other to them in terms of who they kill. Dexter, the “lab rat,” is a specimen maker in the sense that what he kills are but examples of serial killers. They are specimens in the sense that Dexter has no interest in what distinctly makes them kill. Dexter isn’t interested in how his victims reflect their difference from the others. And he isn’t remotely concerned with how his victims reflect or are shaped by a society that may give their murderous actions justified possibilities, even sanctions.

  The therapist Emmett Meridian (“Shrink Wrap,” Season 1) is compelled to make his professionally successful women patients dependent on him to the point that he can rationalize for them their suicides as meaningful acts of escape from the suffering he sustains in them. It’s only enough for Dexter, and presumably the creators of the series, that Meridian has induced women to kill themselves before and will do it again. But there is no exploration or even teasing out further why a man wants control over the life and death of publicly powerful women. It’s only enough for Dexter to determine that Meridian can be killed, rather than glimpse how the self-defining need to make women suffer connects to more wider social truths about the lives of women in a male dominated society.

  To ask just who or what Dexter is killing is to think about more than just who and what Dexter is dissociating himself from when he kills serial killers. That Dexter is working with a “concept” of the “serial killer” when he knows their “types,” their “thinking” is to suggest Dexter is living the life of the unexamined serial killer. Or more slyly, we could say Dexter is a consumer who understands not what he consumes. He is the subject distinctly different from his object. He is a subject who doesn’t want to know what makes his object the object that it is. The “social stuff” that maketh the serial killer outside of gothic family origins and forensic facts has no place in Dexter’s individual-based concepts of the serial killer.

  Buddy’s Bones

  Remember the very first flashback of Harry’s intimate father-son talk with Dexter about Buddy, their neighbor’s missing dog? (“Dexter,” Season 1) For anyone familiar with the biographic popularization of “real world” serial killers, it’s a scene that plays out an understanding of what the abuse, torture, and killing of defenceless animals is a “rehearsal” of. Young Dex’s rationale for the oneoff killing of the barking Buddy—concern for his mother’s sleepless recovery from illness—is challenged by Harry’s discovery of Buddy’s bones in a hidden growing grave of animal remains. And the flashback connects a cop father’s strong instincts about his son with what Dexter sees in the violent pornographic appetites of the rapist killer, Jamie Jaworski; that their “needs are evolving.” With a remembered story about an unseen dog, the beginnings of Dexter are established. And Buddy’s
bones sink back into the hidden graves of personal history.

  But the short back-story that’s Buddy can tell us something more than passing behavioral information about young Dexter. I say “behavioral information” because as clinical as that sounds, it does bring out that what we learn is specimen-like. What we get is an example or token of what’s already known about serial killers. It’s an added dimension of authenticity. And if you already knew this connection, it fits with the idea or concept—the behavioral history—we have of serial killers. Saying this detail is a specimen isn’t to dispute the “real world” connection of the criminological linking of animal killing with violence towards humans. It’s to have both the accepted and minor status of this detail open up other ways of understanding the relationship of nonhuman animals to identity thinking, especially identity thinking about serial killers. And that involves looking more at how nonhuman animals become part of the meaning making of human actions and human identity.

  Born Free of All That’s Human

  Nonhuman animals appear throughout Dexter, mostly as a way of expressing human likeness to predatory animals. Think of Brian leading Dexter (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1) to the amputated body of Tony Tucci like the offering up of injured prey to a feline cub by a lion parent keen to awaken a suppressed taste for innocent humans. Or the opening scenes of “Crocodile” where Dexter is immersed in water with unblinking eyes above the waterline like the reptile of the episode title. Then there’s Brian’s calling to Dexter’s real nature—images of lions taking down their hunt and feeding on a bloodied carcass—to be “Born free of all that’s human” (“Born Free,” Season 1).