Dexter and Philosophy
Page 34
The storyline of Dexter is popular because it’s safe—ideologically safe. A story about someone who bumps off people for carefully calculated reasons, in pursuit of a strict code of justice, would make too many people too uncomfortable. Today’s ruling ideology (at least among the intellectual class from whom scriptwriters are chiefly recruited) holds that motiveless, irrational killing is tasty, especially if it can be linked with childhood trauma, while calculated killing in a worthy cause, by a hero without hangups, is almost unthinkable, and if thinkable at all, painfully embarrassing. Every age is as straitlaced as every other, but the specific taboos change.
Dexter adroitly accommodates itself to the reigning ideology. It gives us the glamour of the Secret Life and of the anti-social ‘bad boy’, the narrative appeal of the supernormal hero who fights his way out of adversity and triumphs, the satisfaction of seeing the most cunning and elusive evil-doers getting their just desserts. Instead of inviting criticism or derision by having the hero take a strong moral line against the villains he executes, any questions about the rightness of the hero’s cause are defined away: the hero is not responsible for his actions. To make the hero a puppet of his bloodlust seems, on the surface, outrageous, provocative, audacious. But really it’s the very safest way to go.
This is not to denigrate the artistic quality of Dexter, which is superb. Nor is it to criticize Dexter on ideological grounds. We should be no more troubled by the childhood-trauma ideology of Dexter than by the anti-Semitism of A.J. Raffles and Bulldog Drummond, the ultra-politically-correct feminism of Stieg Larsson, or Jack London’s amalgam of Marxism and Social Darwinism. Outside the context of the story, these belief systems may be criticized and rejected, while within a work of fiction or drama, they can be accepted as features of the landscape.
It was inevitable that the indestructible popular hunger for stories of unofficial justice would meet the rampant ideology of mychildhood-makes-me-do-it. It was not inevitable that the artistic result would be as intelligent, as witty, as well-plotted, and as brilliantly produced and acted as Dexter.
The Perps
SULTAN AHMED is a graduate student in the Bioethics Department at Case Western Reserve University. He does research in Islamic medical ethics and the psychology of terrorists, as he is sometimes mistaken for one when going through airport security. He is at times suspected of being a psychopath and finds himself drawn to blonde women with lots of emotional baggage.
AARON C. ANDERSON is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently parlaying his experience as a blood spatter intern with Miami Metro Homicide into his dissertation on aggression and graphic violence in the slasher film.
PATRICIA BRACE is a Professor of Art History at Southwest Minnesota State University, in Marshall, Minnesota. With co-author Robert Arp, she contributed chapters to Lost and Philosophy (2008); The Ultimate Lost and Philosophy (2010); True Blood and Philosophy (2010); and The Philosophy of David Lynch (2011). The character in Dexter she most resembles is Lila; not in the burn down your own studio, kidnap Rita’s kids, blow up Doakes psycho way, but because of the sexy artist thing. . . .
JASON DAVIS has only had intimate contact with serial killers involved with academic library budget cuts to journal subscriptions. Still, working in research evaluation at Macquarie University does have its days when he feels the “Dark Passenger” within wanting to begin a very different body count. In between preparing specimens of audit numbers with a knifepoint glint of light in his eyes, he thinks crazy thoughts like what would happen if you sped up the scenes in Dexter involving Daniel Licht’s “Wink” music to the same tempo as “The Spear Waltz” from Donnie Darko? And what if a serial killer did have time-traveling powers? And why shouldn’t there be a scene in a future Dexter episode where all the major female characters—from Jennifer Carpenter to Julia Stiles—appear together and break into a synchronized dance routine to Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion”?
PHILLIP DEEN is a lecturer in Wellesley College’s department of philosophy. He has published articles on the history of American philosophy, the aesthetics of videogames, and contemporary democratic theory and has edited John Dewey’s lost work Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Befitting his submission in this volume, he is a rigorously self-disciplined individual who always helps neighbors with their packages, except for that time he beat a redneck to death in a everglade shack with an anchor. You know, to relax. (It’s possible he has unresolved hallucinogenic daddy issues.)
M. CARMELA EPRIGHT is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. Her research is in medical ethics and psychiatry. As a rule she steers away from writing about psychopathy because sociopaths have consistently shown disinterest in her brilliant insights about morality. She lives with her husband, son, and two cats, one of which is named Dexter. Like his namesake, he is a serial killer; unlike his namesake he eats his prey.
ABROL FAIRWEATHER teaches Philosophy at San Francisco State, University of San Francisco and Las Positas College, all in the Bay Area. His philosophical interests include virtue epistemology, philosophy of mind and emotions, and existentialism. He has recently contributed to a volume on Facebook and Philosophy and co-edited a volume on Blues and Philosophy. His life interests include loving and listening to dusty, whiskey-bottle blues music, connecting with his dog and keeping more in touch with his emotions than Dexter.
EVERITT FOSTER is an independent scholar and film historian living in Austin, Texas. He holds an MA in military history from Texas Tech University where his thesis attempted to use films to tell a nearly complete history of the Vietnam War and the effects it has on veterans. He is currently working on a manuscript of on Eastern European cinema during the Cold War. He agrees with Dexter that pulled pork sandwiches are the perfect driving food.
REBECCA STEINER GOLDNER is a PhD student in Philosophy at Villanova University, where she works on Aristotle, Merleau-Ponty, perception and the body. Her work on the body is significantly different from Dexter’s.
RICHARD GREENE is a fucking Professor of Philosophy at Weber State University. He’s co-edited a shitload of books on pop fucking culture and philosophy with various assholes, fucktards, and douchebags. His favorite fucking character on Dexter is Deb. Motherfuck!
BRIAN GREGOR holds a PhD in philosophy from Boston College. He has published several essays in the areas of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism—particularly with regard to philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. Like Dexter, he is still trying to figure out what it means to be human.
DANIEL HAAS swears he didn’t do it. He’s a graduate student in philosophy at Florida State University and is much too busy teaching undergraduates and working on his dissertation to have made the drive all the way from Tallahassee to Miami. Oh? You say it’s less than an eight hour drive which would have been ample time? And that you found a box of blood samples stored in his office? Surely, none of them match the samples taken from the murder scene. Oh, they do? Dan would like to speak to his lawyer.
ERIC HOLMES is a freelance writer and instructor of writing and public speaking. He has published articles on EC Comics and agitative rhetoric. Like Dexter, he buys a suspicious amount of black plastic trash bags, but only because he has four dachshunds to pick up after.
EWAN KIRKLAND lectures in Film and Screen Studies at Brighton University, UK. Instead of murdering criminals who have evaded justice, Ewan is compelled by his Dark Passenger to deconstruct representations of gender, race, and sexuality in popular culture.
DANIEL P. MALLOY is lecturer of philosophy at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. His research is focused on political and Continental philosophy. He has published on the intersection of popular culture and philosophy, particularly dealing with ethical issues, as well as on Leibniz, Spinoza, Foucault, Hegel, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Daniel was Dexter’s neighbor for a while. When asked about it, Daniel described his one time neighbor as quiet and polite.
SEAN MCALEER is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. He likes all things Dexter: Pete Dexter’s novels, Dexter Gordon’s saxophone, C.K. Dexter Haven’s yachts; but he likes Dexter Morgan most of all. He is currently at work on a children’s book on Dexter’s exploits, which has yet to find a publisher. He keeps the manuscript in a fake air-conditioner, next to the blood samples.
DEBORAH MELLAMPHY is a part-time Assistant Lecturer and Tutor in Film Studies in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. Her research focuses on gender transgression, star theory and collective authorship in the collaborations of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Her teaching interests include the horror genre, gender studies and film theory. Deborah’s love of Dexter stems from the conversations she has about blood slides and plastic wrapping with her Dark Passenger.
NICOLAS MICHAUD teaches Philosophy at the University of North Florida. He has begun to think that Dexter’s way of dealing with serial killers might be an excellent way of dealing with annoying philosophical opponents. Sadly, he has not found a way to sneak a syringe into the American Philosophical Association’s conference, yet. . . . Should he ever succeed in this endeavor, however, the name if his boat will be Cutting Remark.
JOHN KENNETH MUIR is the award-winning author of reference books such as Horror Films of the 1970s and The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television by day, and a dark, avenging genre blogger by night at Reflections on Film/TV (http:// reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot .com), recently named of the best 100 film study sites on the Net. John’s split personality is also the driving creative force behind the independent web series The House Between (www.thehousebetween.com), which in 2008 and 2009 was nominated by Sy Fy Portal and Airlock Alpha as “Best Web Production.”
MIKE PIERO is a graduate assistant in the English department at John Carroll University. His research interests include post/modernism studies, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and blood spatter reports. During the week, he orders the chaos of his world by alphabetizing books.
JERRY S. PIVEN is sometimes mistaken for a celebrity, though he is neither an actor nor a sociopath. However, with so many actors in the family, he has had extensive fieldwork studying sociopaths in their own habitats (which naturally inspired him to compose an essay on Dexter). When not teaching philosophy at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Piven is writing on the psychology of religion, culture, and violence, watching episodes of Dexter and Futurama, hangin’ at the jazz club, and cycling insanely to flee from evil. He is the author of Death and Delusion: A Freudian Analysis of Mortal Terror (2004), The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (2004), and sundry other works on equally festive subjects. His latest work is Slaughtering Death: On the Psychoanalysis of Terror, Religion, and Violence.
JAMES F. PONTUSO is Charles Patterson Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at Hampden-Sydney College (Founded 1775) in Virginia. He has lectured or taught in a dozen countries, including his latest position as visiting professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. He has published six books and more than seventy scholarly articles, reviews and essays. Although he has written extensively on popular culture, composing a chapter on Dexter is the only project that gave him nightmares.
GEORGE A. REISCH keeps tiny clippings of every article and book he has published sandwiched between glass slides and hidden in long wooden box. As Series Editor for Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series, the number of samples is growing rapidly. He has also published articles about twentieth-century philosophy of science and wrote the book How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (2005).
RACHEL ROBISON-GREENE is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at UMass Amherst. She is co-editor of The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God Bites the Dust (2009), and contributed chapters to Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (2007), The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy (2008), and Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy (2010). Rachel’s Dark Passenger rides in a booster seat.
DAVID RAMSAY STEELE always pays cash for plastic sheeting and frequently “works late because something’s come up.” He likes Cuban sandwiches but some nights feels a different kind of hunger. Dr. Steele is the perpetrator of From Marx to Mises (1992) and Atheism Explained (2008), and coperpetrator of Three Minute Therapy (1997). He has been implicated in The Atkins Diet and Philosophy (2005), The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (2007), and The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (2008). Thinking. Sometimes it sets his teeth on edge, sometimes it helps him control the chaos.
SARA WALLER is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Montana State University. She edited Serial Killers—Philosophy for Everyone (2010) because she really wanted to write a chapter about Dexter. In this volume, she finally got her wish. She spends her time studying and writing about other serial killers, including cats, coyotes, and dolphins, though she suspects that these killers are utilitarian rather than deontic.
SARAH E. WORTH is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. She publishes mostly in the field of aesthetics and sometimes in the intersection of pop culture and philosophy. She contributed chapters to Seinfeld and Philosophy (2000) and The Matrix and Philosophy (2002). Because of her obsession with Dexter, she is going to school part time to become a blood spatter expert, so she can be as like Dexter as possible, but in a moral kind of way.
Index
“About Last Night” (episode)
Abu Ghraib
abjection
act-utilitarianism
Adams, Carol J.: The Sexual Politics of Meat
addiction
Adorno, Theodor
Ahmed, Sultan
akrasia
“All in the Family” (episode)
American Psycho (1991 book and 2000 movie)
Amper, Susan
Anderson, Aaron C.
animals, killing of
antisocial personality disorder. See also psychopaths; sociopaths
Arendt, Hannah
aretï
Aristotle
Astor. See Bennett, Astor
Austin, Steve
Bateman, Patrick
Batgirl
Batista, Angel
Batman
Batman Begins (2005 movie)
Batman Forever (1995 movie)
Batman: The Killing Joke (1988 graphic novel)
Bay Harbor Butcher
Becker, Ernest
Bell, Lisa
Bennett, Astor
Bennett, Cody
Bennett, Paul
Bennett, Rita ; murder of
Bentham, Jeremy
Berkeley, George
Birth of a Nation (1915 movie)
Blofeld, Ernst Stavro
blood spatter
Bollas, Christopher
Bond, James
“Born Free” (episode)
Brace, Patricia
Briggs, Anton
Bronson, Charles
“The British Invasion” (episode)
Browne, Ray
Buddhist philosophers
Buddy
Burke, Edmund: Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Burns, Charles Montgomery (Simpsons character)
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Burton, Tim
Butler, Judith
Byron, Lord; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; Don Juan
Callahan, Harry
Campbell, Teegan
Campbell, William
Camus, Albert: The Stranger
Captain America
Captain America and the Crusade against Evil
Castillo, Jorge
Castillo, Valerie
categorical imperative
Cash, Johnny: “Folsom Prison Blues
Chambers, Matt
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964 novel, 2005 Movie)
Charteris, Leslie (Leslie Bowyer–Yin); Angels of Doom; “The Death Penalty,” 285; Enter the Saint; The Saint Closes the Case/The Last Hero; The Sain
t in Miami; The Saint Steps In
childhood trauma; ideology of
Christie, Agatha
“Circle of Friends” (episode)
Code, Dexter’s. See also Code, Harry’s
Code, Harry’s ; Don’t get caught; Kill only killers. See also Code, Dexter’s
Cody. See Bennett, Cody
coffee houses, eighteenth-century