Dexter and Philosophy

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

  In the end, Dexter chooses to save Debra (“Born Free,” Season 1) to cement his traditional deployment of alliance and identity as a Morgan. She hugs him and thanks him, not for saving her, but for finally being emotionally available when she needs him. With his choice made, he couldn’t just leave Brian alive, and so “for the safety of his sister” murdered his brother, severing the only remaining blood tie to the Moser family and affirming the Morgan alliance.

  “She’s not your real sister. She’s a stranger to you and she always will be. I tried to help you by killing her,” Brian tells Dexter, who responds, “I know that!” before slitting Brian’s throat and whispering “I’m sorry. I can’t hear anymore. But you’re right.”

  Dexter Moser, brother of Brian, was born to Laura. He died one day in a cargo container on the Miami docks. But at that same moment, Dexter Morgan was born and his family, his “alliance” came into being. Like most families they have their problems and like many adopted children Dexter did go looking for his birth family, but returned to those who loved him enough to hide the truth. The murder clearly happens for dramatic reasons, but in Foucault’s world this act is an example of the “right of death” and is a symbol, and affirmation, of Dexter’s power over his life.

  For Foucault, the modern world places such an emphasis on sexual expression (and the power that goes with self-discovery) as the key to healthy mental development in a society that seems to have forgotten its own history and that consequently remains subject to the power of our sexual history. Just as Dexter’s power to choose who he is could only be acquired by plunging deep into his past, knowing himself as both a Morgan and Moser, Foucault teaches that we each must embrace the search for knowledge in order to know who we are, behind our own masks.

  19

  Dexter’s Whiteness

  EWAN KIRKLAND

  Dexter is a very white television character.

  By this I mean that so much of what defines him is bound up in qualities, historical activities, and philosophical perspectives traditionally associated with white masculinity. As an emotionally empty, anally retentive, Harvard graduate, forensic scientist and serial killer, there seems to be a clear fit, intentional or not, between Dexter’s characterization and his ethnicity. Emotional repression, in contrast to the passion, excitement, and exuberance attributed to other races, is a particularly white thing. A fussy attention to detail also seems a personality trait of predominantly white film and television characters. Notwithstanding recent efforts within academic institutions to broaden their intake, higher education remains associated with white privilege. Science, forensic or otherwise, is historically a white man’s field. And serial killing, as represented in fiction, is practiced primarily by white men.

  Think of Hannibal Lecter, listening to classical music in his cell, extolling the virtues of fine wine and fine eating. Think of the yuppie monster in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Think of the white-faced masks of Jason, Leatherface, or the killers in the Scream series. Now try to think of a fictional black serial killer. If any exist, they are absent from the canon.

  This is not to say that the role of Dexter could not be played by a black man, a Hispanic, or a Native American. But if this happened, he would be cast against type. Dexter, ethnically speaking, plays to type—so much so that exploring Dexter from this perspective provides an insight into the nature of whiteness itself.

  Of course, the characteristics that define Dexter’s ethnicity are stereotypes, not a reflection of what white people actually are. Race is understood to be a social, historical, political, and representational construction, and references to race throughout this chapter should be read as something defined by culture and not by genetic heritage. In addition, whiteness connects with other kinds of categorisation, such as class, gender and nationality. Nor is whiteness a single cluster of traits: there are different kinds of whiteness. The particular whiteness exemplified by Dexter is different to that of, say Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down, Mr. Burns in The Simpsons, or Edward the romantic vampire of the Twilight series. Dexter expresses a specific form of whiteness, overlapping with other popular images, but distinct unto itself.

  To say that Dexter engages with white identity is not intended as a criticism. The series contains an admirably multiracial cast. While occasionally touching on the subject of illegal immigration, or racial tensions within Miami, it does so with sensitivity and respect. In Dexter we see no celebration of white identity. Dexter himself is no racist. As he clearly states, his murderous impulses do not discriminate (“Its Alive,” Season 2). Dexter’s whiteness is not extreme. He’s no white supremacist, racist redneck, or collector of Nazi memorabilia. Instead his is a whiteness in part rooted in banality, ordinariness, transparency. For this reason, it is a whiteness that is extremely hard to see.

  The ways in which Dexter, both serial and serial killer, throws this ordinary everyday whiteness into relief—contrasting it with other ethnicities, sardonically reflecting on its invisibility and emptiness, revealing its visual constructedness, playing with the association between whiteness, death, and sexual dysfunction—is part of what makes the show such an intelligent and fascinating example of popular television.

  The Problem of Whiteness

  Whiteness in culture is a tricky business. Critics of film and television so often explore images of marginalized groups—black people, lesbians and gay men, women—while those at the center—Caucasians, heterosexuals, men—often go unconsidered. It’s easy to identify the racial stereotypes that circulate ‘minorities’ and the ideas behind those representations. These characters stand out. They’re different. Historically, on the screen they are defined by their race in ways that reflect limiting assumptions about the nature of such groups.

  In contrast, identifying the stereotypes that surround white people in popular culture is much harder. Richard Dyer, one of the first critics to start interrogating whiteness, argues that “white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular”59 and not anything in particular is particularly hard to define. White people are just that—people, unencumbered by the burden of representation. Whiteness, as an ethnicity, defines so much of what it is to be normal in Western culture, and normality is bland, characterless, without form. Seeing whiteness, identifying what whiteness is, and how it is represented in film and television, requires looking very hard indeed.

  One way Dyer suggests whiteness becomes visible is in moments when white people are depicted alongside non-white characters.60 Dexter certainly presents plenty of instances where its protagonist’s white masculinity is thrown into relief by characters who seem more defined by their gender, race, or sexuality. Debra Morgan, Dexter’s sister, is introduced working on the vice squad, and initially struggles to gain respect and acceptance in a man’s world. Maria LaGuerta is a Hispanic woman whose success is constantly jeopardized by the machinations of her white male superior. She even states on a number of occasions that her struggle is gendered and raced. Angel Batista, with his distinct, slightly lisping accent, and occasional exchanges of unsubtitled Spanish, is colored by his ethnicity with every word he utters. James Doakes’s abrasive manner is consistent with notions of black men as aggressive and confrontational, even if he turns out to be more insightful than any of his colleagues. And Vince Masuka’s Asian ethnicity is partnered with a perverse non-normative sexuality, albeit one that is played for laughs.

  Of course, Dexter’s colleagues are more than stereotypes. But there’s no value in a racially diverse cast who are not allowed to reflect that diversity in their performance, and it is to the writers’ and performers’ credit that these characters never seem tokenistic. The point is that against this background of multiculturalism, Dexter, the white heterosexual male, seems at first to be devoid of character. He has no political ax to grind. He has no distinct accent. He is polite, unobtrusive, and quietly professional. He has no sexual peccadilloes, as far as anyone knows. And at the same time, jus
t as white paint is only noticeable when placed on a non-white surface, this ‘colourful’ environment allows Dexter’s ethnicity to become visible.

  A broad-strokes comparison of Dexter with his Season 3 partner in crime Miguel Prado illustrates how such racial juxtapositions make Dexter’s whiteness apparent. Dexter is cool and calm, but his Hispanic colleague is emotional and hot blooded. While the practiced killer remains detached and aloof, unclouded by emotion, the DA pursues a personal vendetta against Ellen Wolf whom he messily murders then dumps into an open grave. Dexter sleeps soundly in his bed untroubled by the atrocities he has committed, but Miguel has restless nights. While Dexter has a granite set of ethics, Miguel has no dead white man’s Code to live by and, as a consequence, spirals out of control. Again, Miguel is more than his ethnicity, but exploring the character in such terms throws light on the contrasting nature of Dexter, the white serial killer. Dexter is defined by cold, calculating, dispassionate logic, exemplified in his meticulously sterile method of murder. In this respect, Dexter confirms Richard Dyer’s speculation that whiteness is about “tightness . . . self-control, self-consciousness, mind over body” (p. 6). Miguel lacks this control, which Dexter has practiced all his life.

  The Invisible Killer

  There is an invisibility to whiteness. This is not the invisibility suffered by minority groups within the media, who are routinely ignored or marginalized. Rather it’s an invisibility that comes from saturation, normalization, non-particularity. Dyer says that this invisibility derives from “the sense that whiteness is nothing in particular, that white culture and identity have, as it were, no content” (p. 9). White people appear to own no distinct heritage or history to characterize who they are. Consequently, and because they are so pervasively present within popular representations, white people do not stand out.

  There is a similar invisibility to Dexter. Even in multiracial Miami, the white man whose ethnicity has been largely overlooked within discussion of racial identity, cannot be seen. When stalking his victims, Dexter has the uncanny ability to move unnoticed by his quarry. He can break into cars, homes, offices, apartment buildings, stalk tattoo parlours and used car lots seemingly undetected by surveillance systems, human or electronic. When Dexter is spying on his mother’s killer in “Morning Comes” (Season 2), the retired thug emerges looking decidedly agitated, glancing furtively up and down the street. Yet he entirely fails to spot the man he attacked only two nights earlier, sitting in broad daylight, in his huge car, ominously putting on a pair of brown leather gloves. As a white man, someone who has been historically regarded as above suspicion, Dexter projects a prima facie blamelessness. More than being simply beyond scrutiny, Dexter seems at times to be literally invisible.

  Leaving no trace is his area of expertise. There is something ghostly to Dexter’s activities, something that invokes a non-corporeal quality of white identity. This is an extension of the requirement that white people master, control and in a way transcend their bodies. Dyer sees the idea of corporeal transcendence in the Christian symbol of Mary and Christ (“a thumbnail sketch of the white ideal”), in the Kantian notion of the “subject without properties” who remains always the subject, rather than the object, of scientific racial investigation, and in the myth that white people are distinguished by some intangible invisible ‘spirit’ which sets them apart from other, more bodily races (p. 23). This spirit, Dyer argues, often translates into a form of imperialistic ‘enterprise’ or ‘will’ that entails “the control of self and the control of others” (p. 31).

  Dexter is without doubt an extremely enterprising individual, mobilizing all the resources that his privileged position lays at his disposal in his search for victims. His killings represent the channelling of his own murderous desires for the greater good, the end result being a control not only of his own body but also the bodies of rapists, murderers, and pedophiles whom he transforms into clean little packages, wrapped neatly in garbage bags, and deposited where they will never be found.

  Clearly, Dexter gets away with his crimes not simply because he’s a white man. He is also very clever. He is very clean. He is meticulous in his methods. But these characteristics—cleverness, cleanliness, care and attention to detail—are themselves connected to white people and white identity, evident in the stereotyping of many non-white races as stupid, dirty, and sloppy.

  Dexter also illustrates one of many paradoxes of white identity. Whiteness is ordinary, banal, unremarkable—the very qualities from which Dexter’s invisibility derives. At the same time whiteness is supposed to be special, superior, admirable. This contradiction can be understood as resolved in the superhero archetype, where the Clark Kent/Superman dyad allows both incompatible meanings to reside in the same white body, and Dexter flirts with the image of himself as a caped crusader figure.

  Dexter might be ordinary on the outside, but he is extraordinary on the inside. He is extremely intelligent, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, admired amongst his colleagues for his professionalism, prized as a brother and as a boyfriend. Dexter is also remarkable because he kills people, he kills only those who deserve it, and he is able to do this so well that for four seasons he has avoided detection by the authorities. The extraordinariness of whiteness also incorporates extraordinary atrocities, the spirit and enterprise of white people allowing them the potential to achieve remarkable things, both wonderful and terrifying.

  In Dexter we see a common theme in tales about white people: secrets lying beneath the surface. Bodies buried in basements, abuse hidden behind respectable front doors, psychotic impulses disguised by tight white smiles and implacable white faces, like Dexter’s fellow white suburbanite who smashes up his own neighbourhood under cover of darkness. These stories suggest something sinister about what white people keep hidden, as if the invisible something that makes white people so special might not be very nice at all.

  The theme of the mask recurs throughout Dexter, in every soliloquy about the mantle of normality, ordinariness, conformity that Dexter wears to conceal his true nature. As the only main character on the show who might be considered ‘black’, Doakes seems to be the one most able to penetrate the layers of Dexter’s whiteness, suspecting that there’s something sinister at the center of his supposedly vice-free alter ego. Observing one of the many ways in which their difference is ethnically coded, Doakes tells Dexter, “Unlike you I do everything out in the open” (“That Night a Forest Grew,” Season 2).

  There is another, arguably ‘black’, character in Dexter, one suggested by Toni Morrison’s analysis of how darkness is often used in American literature to represent the chaotic, uncivilized, savage aspects which white culture finds within itself, but cannot deal with (Dyer, p. 80). Behind the mask of his white ordinariness lurks Dexter’s “shadow self,” his “Dark Passenger,” the Dark Defender. But despite such black metaphors, Dexter’s other self is white at heart.

  Murder and the Mise-en-Scène of Whiteness

  If whiteness and the qualities which distinguish white people from other races are invisible, there’s also the problem that, as Dyer points out, white people are not actually white. Caucasian skin is rather a yellow-pink tone. It makes no more sense for white people to be labelled ‘white’ than for other races to be termed ’black’. For this reason, the drawing, painting, photographing, lighting, and application of cosmetics and digital manipulation to white skin and white bodies historically works to reinforce the tenuous connection between pale skinned people and whiteness.

  White pervades Dexter. Across the range of DVD box covers, promotional stills and publicity material defining the show, actor Michael C. Hall is consistently presented dressed in white against a white background, smiling conspiratorially from a toneless canvas which is as much—maybe more—a component of his ethnicity as his own blood flecked skin.

  There are undoubtedly aesthetic reasons for this visual design. Red against white provides dramatic contrast of colour, and a recognizable visual motif that ru
ns throughout the series. Dexter is repeatedly associated with white spaces. The “intoxicating ritual” which accompanies every execution involves surrounding himself and his victims in an unreal cocoon of transparent plastic that has the effect of bleaching colour from any environment. The plasticbag interior of Dexter’s kill room ironically echoes the white space where he practices blood spatter patterns. Amid white-skinned manikins, walls hung with white paper, stands Dexter dressed entirely in white. Season 3 opens in a dentist’s surgery. A succession of images includes a blinding white electric light, a row of silver instruments on a reflective surface so clean they are barely visible, and white hands made unnaturally so by talcum powdered latex gloves. The location is entirely devoid of colour: white walls, white floor, white panel ceiling, white chair, on which lies white Dexter.

  One of the problems with interpreting this imagery in racial terms—a practice commonplace in analysis of dark visual imagery and non-white characters—is that there is slippage between whiteness as hue, whiteness as skin, and whiteness as symbol (pp. 45–46). In other words, there are different spheres of whiteness at play, some only tangentially related to race. For example, there is an exaggerated, expressionistic quality to many of Dexter’s visually white scenes that draws upon the symbolic dimensions of whiteness to characterize the protagonist’s mental state. The icy bleached blank design of these settings underlines Dexter’s cold, emotionless, hollow, deadly nature. But these qualities, the symbols of whiteness, are not divorced from the construction of whiteness as a race which is aloof, emotionally controlled, culturally empty, and which enjoys a symbolic relationship with death. Dyer speculates that this slippage underlines all images of white people in Western culture, and is the potential source of white power and authority.