Dexter and Philosophy

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

  Now some might say that we all feel unfulfilled, or empty, and one of the brilliant ironies of the show is that while Dexter wears a mask to hide the real killer inside, and to appear “normal,” there is also the suspicion that we all somehow pretend. Normalcy is masks. We pretend to be what we are not, whether that means conforming to our peers, lying so as not to appear weird or pervy, or keeping so many feelings inside.

  Dexter can pretend so that he is not revealed as a serial killer, but that wouldn’t explain his emotional void, his inner emptiness. People wear masks and keep secrets, but we also hide feelings from ourselves to protect our fragile egos and ward off the excruciating pain of vulnerability and rejection. We sometimes succumb to the drive to what psychologists Bollas and Hantman call “normopathy,” a pathological striving to submerge oneself in normality and acceptable virtues, a timorous obedience that squashes any inkling of independent thought, or deep emotions such as anger toward the friends who reject anything slightly different, or empathy toward those who languish.

  Michael Eigen writes of the “psychic deadness” we sometimes feel, the way we numb and excise our own feelings so we can avoid shame, anguish, vulnerability, neediness, desire, and rage. Existentialist philosophers even talk about the excruciating void that we mask every day, even from ourselves, so as to deny the intense pain and despair within. We flee from terror and despair into social conformity and emotional deadness, so Kierkegaard and Heidegger say. We live inauthentically in the face of death and flee from life, obliterating consciousness as we strive for oblivion. We commit what Firestone calls acts of “microsuicide” to kill off our feelings, stifle our yearnings, and close ourselves off from the pain of loss, love, betrayal, and death. So what of Dexter’s void? Consider the possibility that Dexter is vacant because he is frozen, deadened, and withdrawn from something cataclysmic inside.

  Some Buddhist philosophers also speak of the void, “sunyata,” emptiness. Actually this emptiness can be a good thing, when one comes to realize how false the masks are, how destructive desires can be, and is enlightened of the burden of feeling the need to be something, or someone. The Buddhists realize that all our desires and attachments cause us (and others) pain, and so being nothing, letting go, being empty, is seen as a positive state. But the feeling of that void in the self is what causes us to cling to the desires of the ego, to be ambitious, to feel like we want to be someone special and more important than others. We are so anxious and empty that we do outrageous things to be unique individuals, put our names in lights, buy the coolest toys and cars, and show it all off.

  While we can dissociate or close ourselves off from deep feelings, that inner void and deadness can drive us relentlessly, so that we take our pain and frustrations out on others, become callous and inhumane, greedy and acquisitive, desperately seeking social status, fame, or possessions to fill in that void that remains deadened to those vulnerable needs we just can’t let ourselves experience. That callousness can be emotional flatness, or mere insensitivity, or it can merge into degrees of intolerance, cruelty, spite, and contempt for anything needy, emotional, or weak. In The Insanity of Normality Arno Gruen writes of those who have numbed and deadened their feelings, but contain such utter abjection and rage within that they can inflict brutal suffering on others unfeelingly. This should seem eerily familiar to fans of Dexter. His void is an enigma, and a conspicuous mystery of the show is how a person who seems so numb and unemotional can crave acts of horrid gore.

  Some Buddhists believe that this emptiness and insecurity is so painful that it causes us to compete with others, desire to dominate and hurt others, even destroy them. One screams “I am not nothing! You are nothing! And I will destroy you to prove it!” A Zen master friend of mine named David Loy wrote a beautiful article about terrorist violence, saying that there is a “god-shaped hole” some people suffer because modernity challenges our beliefs and makes it difficult to have faith. This actually assumes that there is a void without God, and indeed the infamous philosopher Pascal wrote that the vastness and emptiness of infinity drove him desperately toward faith, and further, that we would all become as passionately religious if we ever allowed us to really feel that horror and infinity closing in around us, the emptiness of life, and the cold inevitability of death. If God fills that void, so Zen master Loy asserts, other faiths, ways of life, and defeats in life engender doubt, dissolve the blissful presence of God within, leave a painful void, and thus arouse rage. This void motivates terrorist vengeance against those with a different religion, a belief in God that makes them question their own. They fill their void with murder, just as Dexter fills his.

  But what does that teach us about Dexter? If we all feel an inner void, as some Buddhists say, do we conclude with Pascal and Zen master Loy that we must fill this void with God or murder, or else dissolve into a quivering puddle of existential misery and terror? Let us grant that if we do experience an existential vacuum, or Buddhistic void, maybe we aren’t all equally vacuous or empty inside. Dexter shows us that however empty and unfulfilled some people feel, obviously not all are so profoundly empty that they crave terrorist pyrotechnics or ritual death. As empty and frustrated as we may be, and as much as we may want to strangle someone sometimes, most of us don’t feel antsy if we don’t get our weekly fix of bloodshed (real bloodshed that we personally inflict, as opposed to our favorite shows or the nightly news).

  Thus Dexter shows us something fascinating: His void reminds us of ours; the masks and conformity of daily life enable us to empathize with a serial killer, to experience his needs and desperation, as well as his struggle to feel. And yet as much as we empathize, we are not Dexter. So we identify with him, and like him personally, want him to kill his evil and deserving victims, and are further drawn into his story. We’re exposed to our own void, our masks, our desperation, and our own desire to kill, and we feel a similarity even when we are so vastly different. Withal, we still want to know what makes Dexter need to kill.

  Dexter’s Ritual Transcendence of Death

  And so the show shows us. Dexter is not empty and unempathic because of a genetic condition, or even some God-craving terrorist void. It’s something far less abstract, and more vicious. We find out that his mother was murdered before his very eyes. Dexter saw her slaughtered before him, and lay crying in a pool of her blood. This was the psychological devastation that (virtually) obliterated the capacity to feel. Dexter needed to forget, and blot out vulnerability, and pain, and rage, to survive. That void is a gap in memory, and an emptiness of being eviscerated emotionally. Where the mother, and love, and joy once were, now there is blood, rage, and emptiness. But the excruciating pain of that loss and the feelings of anguish, helplessness, vulnerability, and rage were too overwhelming to endure, and Dexter must feel (almost) nothing.

  Like so many dark emotions we cannot consciously endure, however, the abject helplessness and seething rage take on a life of their own. That dark void of infinite rage and vengeance grips Dexter and possesses him to murder, even as he is consciously emotionless. Like so many murderers, and others who have suffered catastrophic, traumatic losses, Dexter is compelled to revisit symbolically the scenario that destroyed him.

  Each murder is a compulsive attempt to restage death as its master, to recreate helplessness and terror as the angel of death instead of his victim, to inflict overwhelming terror and helplessness on the victimizer and then murder him. Every murder is an act of recreation and magical undoing, and every slain murderer is a symbolic substitute for the one who slaughtered Dexter’s mother and left the child bereft of love, in a pool of blood. Where he was drowned in a sea of blood and terror before, now he inflicts terror and diminishes the oceanic blood to a drop on a slide he can imprison, own, control, and possess. Each uncontrolled and remorseless murderer is demeaned, reduced to an inhuman globule helplessly splayed and squashed by transparent glass. The ritual recreates and avenges death, masters it, and punishes the doppelgangers symbolizing the murderer wh
o ravaged him. Each slaughter ritualizes the transformation from wretched helplessness to utter control over blood and death.

  Here we enter into the psychology of ritualized and compulsive behaviors, where the compulsion to repeat, master, avenge, and transmogrify trauma can be seen in rituals as ordinary as obsessive compulsive tendencies, in violence, even in sexual scenarios that restage painful and humiliating experiences. In many spheres of life we unconsciously revisit and recreate the circumstances that once terrorized us. Dexter’s ritualization is a parable for the mastery of tragic violence, but many of us are also compelled to repeat the same banal mistakes, find the same kind of dysfunctional lovers, and master archaic experiences that wounded us. Most of the time we have no idea that we have recreated the situation and wonder how the same absurd things have befallen us again and again.

  Some scholars believe that certain religious rituals are also ways of transforming the dread of helplessness and death into magical control, order, and life. There are so many kinds of religious ritual, but let us pause for a moment and consider some of the myriad human and animal sacrifices, rituals of appeasing nature, warding off death and disaster, even communing with God, and at least inquire to what degree human beings have been so terrified of devastation that magical, ritual means of control have become sacred acts. The sheer proliferation of religious rituals throughout history that have tried to ward off cataclysmic disaster, evil, contagion, plague, and death through sacrifice and ritual murder (even of humans) suggests that Pascal may have been on to something, that we live in such dread of death that we turn desperately to religion. Like so many other behaviors, and like Dexter’s own benighted rituals, there may be more purpose to such acts than we know, or would be willing to believe unless we had the courage to look deeply into the eyes of our own dark passengers.

  Dexter’s transcendence of death is emblematic of a far darker mode of ritualization, however: the way some people can transform misery, abjection, and humiliation into triumphant conquest through ceremonial violence. As Walter Davis explains in his provocative book Death’s Dream Kingdom, acts of torture and terrorism are not only ideological, political, or strategic events. They are also ritualized forms of death transcendence. The torturer derives sadistic pleasure from humiliating and rendering victims helpless, forcing them to suffer, and inflicting terror. The recent scandal over the torture camp in Abu Ghraib in Iraq revealed photos of torturers smiling happily while holding their unclothed prostrate victims on dog leashes and piled naked in pyramids. That’s a far cry from retrieving actionable information.

  And again, as much as we may interpret terrorism and martyrdom operations as political and strategic acts, there is also a psychological dimension that transmogrifies the wounded victim of injustice to a heroic angel of death who wreaks vengeance on his (perceived) victimizer. I would argue, along with Dexter, that in their own ways these acts recapitulate our own unknown, dark pasts and emotional wounds, inflicting our own miseries and nightmares on others, even if we would rather protest that wicked desires and fears do not exist within us.

  Thus Dexter has provided us with fascinating clues to our protagonist’s need to murder, and when we’re closed into that dark, suffocating, claustrophobic container where his mother was slaughtered, we are forced to empathize with his tragic loss, and become conscious not only of what drives him, but makes us desire vengeance. If he describes the shadowed impulse to murder as his Dark Passenger, we too become empathic travelers who begin to feel those desires with him. And so, perhaps we have a radical insight into both the way we deaden or excise feelings to survive, and the shadowy remembrance of loss, horror, vulnerability, and violation, that motivate some of us to seek out vengeance and death.

  Perhaps the supreme insight and sinister lesson, however, is that just as Dexter feels that void and isn’t aware of what drives him, we too may not realize just how much our own fear, dread, and vulnerability may render us susceptible to both psychic deadness, and then, the capacity for murder. Perhaps Heidegger and Kierkegaard were right when they asserted that we are so afraid of nonexistence and death that we immerse ourselves in oblivion, close ourselves off to the void of horror and despair within. Ernest Becker even writes that the mainspring of human activity is an attempt to deny and overcome our grotesque fate, that the fear of death haunts us like nothing else. We don’t need to watch our loved ones slaughtered before our eyes to feel such terror and rage that we are driven to emotional deadness and ritual slaughter, and yet, even we are so utterly horrified by death that we can become numb, closed off, and easily seduced into murder.

  Worse, over the past few decades experimental work in Terror Management has shown that if we are stimulated by the fear of death and given messages of dire threat, that we will become more militant in defense of our world views and even support policies that we would otherwise find reprehensible. In other words, beyond the operation of rationality and our conscious values, we will become more aggressive and supportive of violent acts that we would usually find disgusting. Terror Management psychologists continue to find that our dread of death motivates our attachment to worldviews that salve that dread, and that we will respond like monsters when that fear is reawoken by reminders of death. Zen master Loy was right: there may be a void within that is filled with religion (or other death-denying) unguent, and so many of us will respond to threats to that death-containing belief system with violence. Yes we are not terrorists, or Dexter, but we too are vulnerable and terrified within. Yet another irony: we don’t have to be as wounded as Dexter to murder. That dread of death, that human void filled in with death-denying belief, can make slaughter so utterly banal if we are scared enough, and we will kill with impunity if guided into it with the right rhetoric, the right justifications or excuses that make carnage seem right. That brings us back to Dexter’s father, Harry . . .

  All for Love

  It is Harry who channels Dexter’s violent impulses toward remorseless predators who victimize the innocent but manage to escape the punishment they deserve. This actually has sinister implications that relate to both Dexter’s moral code and the way our own “rational” moral and ideological tenets are so tethered to our own dimlyconceived needs for love and acceptance. For Dexter begins murdering people not only to channel that helplessness and rage, but to satisfy Harry. The boy who looks timidly and longingly into his father’s eyes does his bidding to make father happy. Dexter is inflicting his own rage on victims, but when he murders criminals, envisions his father, has imaginary conversations, and follows the Code, he is fulfilling his father’s wishes as well.

  Harry looks like a father deeply concerned with the safety of his son (and perhaps he is) but he is also expressing his own desire to kill murderers who escaped the system. As viewers we may interpret that intense gaze as paternal concern, but that look is also a manipulative, imprisoning stare that encumbers Dexter with the burden of doing his father’s bidding. It is the look directed deeply into the eyes of someone who will be bent to one’s will. And indeed, that will so manipulates and coerces Dexter that even as an adult, he is ghosted and plagued by Harry, who condemns him beyond death when he deviates from the Code. Were this merely parental concern Dexter wouldn’t be stalked and harassed like a visitation from the ghost of Hamlet’s father or a Dickensian character pleading with a spirit to haunt him no longer. There would be no guilt, no conflict, no painful struggle that strangles and condemns Dexter every time he desires autonomy, sees a glimmer of happiness, and departs from his dead father’s commandments.

  The sinister political implication is that while we may suffer a cavernous void within, plagued by the fear of death and nothingness, wounded from our own personal failings and losses, leaders can manipulate these fears, inform us of dire threats, and goad us into murdering to satisfy their wishes and purposes. The power of charismatic leaders resides not in their magical abilities, but in our disposition to depend on them, trust them, yearn for their protection. We look to them for
safety and salvation, and this is why psychologists studying groups continually emphasize how susceptible we are to manipulation by leaders. We become dependent children psychologically regressed so that we no longer see leaders for whom they are, and we are easily seduced by their deceptions and fearmongering.

  Dexter is an intriguing parable about the way we may murder from our own inner voids, our own wounds, and Dark Passengers. Dexter further illumines how we can be goaded to murder out of a desire to please someone else, how our own pain and terror can be manipulated so that we fulfill their wishes, and feel as if we’re being good sons and daughters when we murder evil. I encourage readers to read transcripts of political speeches telling citizens that their loyal patriotic duty is to kill the evildoers, or for that matter, to read the speeches of Osama bin Laden to see just how much his followers are guilted into slaughter, for it is the duty of every Muslim (he says) to obey and kill infidels. Anything else, any independent thought or refusal, is betrayal, selfishness, cowardice, and commiseration with evil. We too have been manipulated into slaughter, and seduced by messages that make carnage a sacred and patriotic imperative in the war against terror and evil.

  Dexter’s genius is in depicting the story of us, the inner void and dread that make us lash out and want to kill, and the vulnerability that makes us yearn so deeply for love, that we will kill to attain it. This is why Ruth Stein could call her recent book (in my opinion the most insightful on the psychology of terrorism) For Love of the Father. But it isn’t only those fanatics over there. We too suffer our own inner dread. We don’t just kill out of hatred, but for love. Now that is sinister.