Dexter and Philosophy

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

  We know that everything in Dexter’s life, from his graduating at the top of his class in medical school to his advanced training in martial arts to his complete lack of credit cards or rental of adult movies is all in place for a single purpose: to ensure that he’s as efficient a punisher as possible. His medical training ensures that he knows human anatomy so that his murders are clean and errorfree. His advanced martial arts training allows him to effectively attack and subdue his victims without their immediate knowledge as to what’s happening. Finally, his lack of credit cards and rental of porno movies allows him to remain free of the electronic leash around each of our necks in this modern, plugged-in, data-mining society. After all, how long can Dexter kill without suspicion once Visa takes notice of all of the surgical tools and black plastic trash bags that he purchases?

  Dexter is bound by Harry’s Code that dictates that he never get caught. Dexter’s method of dispatching his victims (a clean room draped in plastic, surgical implements, and the trademark stab wound to the midsection) are all in use as they are the most efficient and the safest in regards to Dexter’s possibility of getting caught. They don’t indicate that Dexter seeks to avoid inflicting gruesome, physical punishment. They just reflect his first objective: to never, ever get caught so that he may continue to dispense punishment for as long as possible.

  In fact, several of Dexter’s greatest foes, such as the Ice Truck Killer and Miguel Prado, were killed with methods inconsistent with Dexter’s usual style. But this was only to frame the deaths as something other than what they were. Dexter made the murder of the Ice Truck Killer look like a suicide, while he designed the murder of Miguel Prado by strangulation to look like the work of the Skinner. In both cases, this sleight of hand serves a greater purpose: to throw all possible scents away from Dexter. After all, the disappearance of The Ice Truck Killer wouldn’t have closed the case; in fact, it would have led to a nationwide (if not global) manhunt, which would only lead to greater scrutiny of the Ice Truck Killer case—scrutiny that might possibly reveal that he and Dexter are brothers. The only way to effectively end the case would be the appearance of a suicide. Any obvious murder of the Ice Truck Killer would only add to the attention that Dexter doesn’t want.

  As for Miguel Prado, Dexter had to eliminate him due to his newly discovered love of homicide. But the murder had to appear as something other than the standard disappearance that Dexter provides his victims. Prado’s power in the Miami area wouldn’t allow for him to simply vanish and be forgotten. Instead, he’s strangled to death ala The Skinner, which provides a tidy, unquestionable ending to Miguel Prado’s life without the scrutiny that his disappearance would cause.

  But, you may ask, why does Dexter choose to keep his craft a secret? After all, wouldn’t some potential killers hold off if they knew that they would be strung up (or sawed up, to be accurate) for committing their crimes? Wouldn’t public knowledge of Dexter’s talents (but not necessarily his identity) work in favor of deterring other murders?

  It might. But Dexter lives in a modern society that, according to Foucault, no longer accepts public punishments or executions. Except for handful of victims or relatives who are permitted to witness modern executions, for example, punishment is now “a spectacle that must actually be forbidden” (p. 15). Dexter’s happy to oblige. He punishes privately, away from the gaze of a judging society. This isn’t due to any sort of shame about what he does. Dexter makes no effort to hide his identity from his victims. He allows his victims to see his face upon waking and engages them in conversation prior to the kill (in many cases, the victim is shocked to discover that Dexter is who he is and not one of the many characters that he has played in order to get closer to his prey). Dexter only takes such effort to cover his tracks because failing to do so would violate the first rule of Harry’s Code, and would make him an ineffective agent of punishment. How much punishment could Dexter deliver behind bars? Not much.

  The Final Thrust to the Abdomen

  With his medical training, experience as a crime scene investigator, and relentless patience, Dexter has every opportunity to bring his victims to justice in the contemporary sense. They would be incarcerated and perhaps even executed by the state for their crimes, but that isn’t good enough for Dexter. A life spent on death row can’t inflict the type of pain that Dexter’s victims have inflicted on others, and it’s his duty to make sure that the wicked are punished appropriately. Harry taught him first-hand that the modern system of punishment doesn’t give society’s worst what they truly deserve, which is one reason why our adoration for Dexter and his Dark Passenger runs as deep as it does. We need to know that evil will be punished, and that’s exactly what Dexter provides: a one-way ticket on the Slice of Life.

  17

  Dexter the Busy Bee

  DAVID RAMSAY STEELE

  Be brutal. Tell the truth. Would you rather live in Miami with Dexter than without him?

  I think we’d all have to agree. Miami with Dexter would be a safer and healthier place than Miami without Dexter. To know that someone is unobtrusively and efficiently disposing of really, really bad guys—especially really, really bad guys whom the official law enforcers can’t or won’t touch—can only be reassuring. The fact that this highly conscientious executioner is somewhat more painstaking than the police in refraining from hurting us good guys is an additional comfort.

  It’s part of Dexter’s M.O. that we wouldn’t know this was going on. Dexter’s discreet way of working loses the tremendous social advantage of deterrence: if everyone knew what Dexter was doing, that would cause some of the bad guys to become less bad, or at least to behave less badly. Murders would be prevented by discouraging the murderers, not just by eliminating them before they could murder again. Once you’re on Dexter’s table, you don’t get to call your lawyer, so deterrence wouldn’t be pissed away by the uncertainty of retribution. Unfortunately, that very salutary deterrence has to be given up, for the sake of Dexter’s secrecy (the first rule of Dexter’s Code: Don’t Get Caught).

  Killing Killers, Saving Lives

  Despite the absence of deterrence, the elimination of the really, really bad guys can only be judged really, really good. Just think about it. If each of the bad guys dismembered by Dexter would have killed one more person, then Dexter’s actions would save just as many lives as he deleted. And if each of the bad guys would have killed two more persons, then each of Dexter’s disposal operations would save one net life.

  Given the quality of Dexter’s targets, that we’ve been able to see, that would be a conservative estimate. Let’s suppose that the average Dexter target, but for Dexter’s timely intervention, would have gone on to kill six more people, which seems about right. Say Dexter kills twenty of these bad guys a year, which also appears to be in line with what we’ve been shown. That means Dexter saves one hundred net lives a year! Can any Miami fireman or heart surgeon say as much?

  And that’s counting the lives Dexter terminates as equal with the lives saved. But we all know perfectly well that the lives of Dexter’s targets are not worth the same as the lives of the people Dexter rescues from death. The targets deserve to die, whereas the targets’ prospective victims deserve to live. Can you deny that Dexter’s a public benefactor? If so, just what kind of a twisted monster are you?

  Back in the 1930s when Ronald ‘Dutch’ Reagan was a teenager in Dixon, Illinois, and everyone still pronounced his name ‘Reegan’, he worked as a lifeguard on the Rock River and was credited with saving seventy-seven lives in seven years—eleven lives per year. That’s a suspiciously high figure, and it’s been suggested that local damsels contrived to put themselves in a position to be saved by this dishy hunk, which may have somewhat inflated Dutch’s life-saving, umm, score. But making all due allowances, it was highly creditable. Obviously, that boy would go far. But it couldn’t begin to approach the magnitude of the public benefit conferred by Dexter Morgan. Maybe this boy will go farther.

  Without deceiv
ing himself about his motives, Dexter clearly understands his contribution to human welfare. After Special Agent Lundy has commented that there’s but one justification for killing, “to save an innocent life,” Dexter observes (not to Lundy, of course, but to us):

  How many bodies would there have been if I had not got to those killers? I didn’t want to save lives, but save lives I did. Motivation aside, I think Harry and Lundy would agree on this one. (“An Inconvenient Lie,” Season 2)

  Wait, wait. Is Dexter an unmitigated social benefit? He doesn’t respect habeus corpus or the Miranda rule. We need habeus corpus, the Miranda rule, trial by jury, and a slew of other checks on the powers of the official enforcers because we need to be protected against the official enforcers becoming bad guys themselves. We need the official enforcers to stop bad guys attacking us, and we need the Bill of Rights to stop the official enforcers attacking us. (That’s the theory. Some of us anarchists are not completely sold on the theory, but it does have its points. And, like it or not, it is the theory.)

  But don’t we need protection against Dexter? No, no, no! Dexter is driven by an irresistible force, a passion as remorseless and unreasoning as a tornado, to kill the guilty and save (or at least, avoid killing) the innocent. Oh sure, Dexter makes mistakes. Who doesn’t? But he tries as hard as he can, and a lot harder than any government employee on a pension plan ever would, not to screw up. As Dexter tells Doakes:

  My Code requires a higher standard of proof than your city’s laws, at zero cost to the taxpayer. If you ask me, I’m a bargain. (“There’s Something about Harry,” Season 2)

  But wouldn’t we need protection against a real-life Dexter? Yes, of course. But Dexter isn’t real-life, silly. He’s all made up. That’s why he’s so marvelous. A real-life Dexter might become a bad guy. A real-life Dexter might start slicing and dicing folks according to their race, their religion, their sexual preferences, their astrological signs, or their musical tastes. (Musical tastes? Hey, wait a minute . . .) A real-life Dexter might go after children or cats, or, like the Unabomber, after exceptionally talented and productive people.

  Even more ominously and more probably, a real-life Dexter might become a Miguel Prado, classifying as guilty people like defense attorneys who sometimes help to get the guilty off. But we and Dexter understand what the late Miguel didn’t: that occasionally getting the guilty off is the price we pay for not convicting the innocent. And we all know what happened to Miguel. Dexter got to him and administered the coup de grâce. “This isn’t over,” says Miguel. “It is for you,” says Dexter, swiftly garroting him. Did I mention that our Dex is witty?

  So, to those people who’re puzzled or distressed by the fact that we want Dexter to keep getting away with it: There’s no contradiction between passionately wanting a fictional character not to get caught and quite decidedly wanting his real-life counterparts to get caught.

  If you don’t want Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, to impose the most humiliating misery and death upon those douchebags who conspired to have him falsely imprisoned, then don’t bother to check your pulse. I can tell you there’s nothing there. At the same time, and without contradiction, we don’t want a legal system that would permit rich men with fancy titles to get away with some of the really cool things the fictional Count does. A work of art is not a manual of ethics or self-help. If you find this too tricky to wrap your head around, maybe it’ll be safer for all of us if you stay away from fiction. Oh, and stay away from the Bible and the Quran too.

  The Thrill of the Kill

  But one thing might still worry us about Dexter Morgan. And this is the element that makes Dexter such an astounding innovation in the history of fiction and drama. Dexter’s fundamental motivation, so we’re repeatedly told, is arbitrary, amoral, inhuman, inherently malign, fearsome, and revolting. It’s an addictive imperative. Dexter has an urge to ritualistically kill warm-blooded creatures. As a child, he begins with non-human animals, but he soon graduates to those opposable-thumbed naked apes who flow so expendably through the streets of Miami.

  This urge, this drive, this hunger owes nothing to a sense of justice or any other kind of disinterested intention. Dexter does not kill to fulfill a mission. He kills because of his addiction to the thrill of killing. Usually it has to be killing by sharp steel implements. Shooting, poisoning, strangling, rigged auto accidents, we feel, just don’t (pardon me!) cut it. Miguel Prado is dispatched by garroting—but that’s only because it has to look as if the Skinner (a serial killer without a Code) has done it.

  But then there’s something else: Harry’s Code, which becomes Dexter’s Code. The Code controls and restricts Dexter’s howling appetite for blood. Dexter’s Code doesn’t modify the primal urge to butcher people for the sheer joyous gratification of butchering them. It doesn’t change that motivation to one of justice or benevolence or concern for public safety. Fundamentally and intrinsically, Dexter doesn’t give a rap about these notions, one way or the other, though as an intelligent observer keeping tabs on that wondrous beast, Homo sapiens non-serial-killerensis, they do mildly interest him as worthy of his urbane and amused comments.

  What the Code does is to impose a rigid pattern, like a superstition or an obsessive compulsion, on top of the naked urge. The Code takes a terrifying, mindless, brutal force and channels it into a solid benefit for humankind.

  The exact relation between Dexter’s hunger to kill and the Code bequeathed by Harry has yet to be (if you’ll excuse the expression) fully fleshed out. Maria Montessori was an educational theorist who believed that there’s a point in time when a child is just ready to learn some particular type of thing. Maybe Harry Morgan, Dexter’s step-father, caught Dexter at just the right Montessori moment where the Code would ‘take’ with Dexter. Maybe Dexter would go to pieces without the Code. As Dexter says, “I know I’m a monster.”

  His wistful, secret, impossible dream is to be normal, fully cured, with normal headaches and normal heartaches, just like all those millions of non-serial-killers out there. Although this doesn’t bother him enough to put him off his knife stroke, it does seem possible that complying with the Code makes it easier for Dexter to live with himself. And so the two parts of Dexter’s make-up, the basic instinct to chop up humans and the Code, may support and sustain each other. But maybe not; we don’t really know.

  In the novels, Dexter is a sadist who has fun torturing his subjects before he recycles them. In the TV show, Dexter only tortures them mentally, for a minute or two, by reminding them of their horrendous crimes. The physical process is not protracted. Though both Dexters have their engaging side, the TV Dexter is more thoroughly likeable, more charming, and more of a wag than the Dexter of the books. We feel that any gratuitous inflicting of pain would be entirely foreign to the TV Dexter.

  Not that he’s a softy. He’s capable of acting with impressive ruthlessness, as when he frames Rita’s husband for breach of parole to get him sent back to jail. Come to think of it though, this may be more a matter of opportunity than motivation: as a highly trained ambusher, abductor, and eraser of forensic clues, at the top of his game, Dexter can easily get away with exploits that just wouldn’t be practicable for those of us who maintain our upper-body strength mainly by pushing the buttons on the remote.

  But Dexter lacks even normal spitefulness, just as, we’re repeatedly informed, he lacks much of normal sentimentality and human warmth (though he sincerely if half-heartedly regrets his lack of these). This can lead him to send the wrong signals, as when he responds to Quinn’s overtures with profound indifference, after Quinn knows that Dexter has seen him steal money from a crime scene. Quinn just doesn’t get it: Dexter simply doesn’t care the teeniest bit about Quinn, except that Quinn should leave him alone. (Oh dear, Quinn, me boyo, do I see Hefty bags and duct tape in your future? Just try not to murder anyone, there’s a good police officer, or you’ll become a legitimate target under the provisions of Dexter’s Code.) The vengeful payback motive, among ma
ny conventional emotional responses, seems pointless and barely intelligible to Dexter.

  The uniqueness of Dexter as a character in drama is that he totally does the right thing for totally the wrong reason. (Shut up, all you ADHD cases. We’ve established it’s the right thing, okay? Just get used to it.) He’s a good guy, a hero, whose primal driving force is dangerous, ugly, monstrous, terrifying—everything that we’ve learned to call evil. So maybe (as Milton Friedman said of Henry Ford) he’s a bad man who does a lot of good. But if he does a lot of good, can he really be so bad?

  Bad Motives, Good Actions

  Dexter’s unique. He’s a sympathetic character whose fundamental motivation is totally creepy, while the consequences of his actions are predominantly benign and protective.

  For thousands of years, the ruling assumption has been that if you want to encourage good actions, you’d better encourage good motives. At first blush, this makes sense. If people feel it’s wrong to kill other people, for instance, they’re less likely to kill other people. But there’s always the possibility of motivation and behavior working in opposite directions. People may do the right thing for wrong reasons, or they may do something appalling for decent and good-hearted reasons.

  Christianity gave a new importance to motives as opposed to actions. Jesus angrily denounces the Pharisees, the inventors of what we now call orthodox Judaism, those Jews who were especially concerned to follow every detail of the Jewish law, but no more than that. Jesus came out with such remarks as: