Dexter and Philosophy

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

  Brian’s carnivore references suggest the natural order of things between predators and prey against the “civilizing” influences of Harry’s Code directing Dexter’s compulsion to kill. Even Dexter refers to Brian as a predatory animal when he tells him “You need to be put down,” a euphemism for putting to death aggressive, injured or diseased nonhuman animals. This likeness to nonhuman animals as a way of justifying violence in Dexter echoes Adorno’s arguments about the role of making human others into animals as a form identity thinking.37 Human-on-human violence involves projecting the nonhuman onto the human, a perception that separates a human self off from a nonhuman other. What’s been done to nonhuman animals can, for that very reason, be justifiably done to humans.

  It’s this criminological linking of animal abuse and killing to human violent behaviour that is behind current developments in US law enforcement and prosecution measures involving animal cruelty taskforces and Humane Society investigators targeting human abuse and cruelty of nonhuman animals. As Alisa Mullins points out in her PETA report quoting L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the need for such laws, “When we protect animals, we are protecting ourselves, we are protecting our communities.”38

  The recognition of the rights of nonhuman animals now plays a role in the future prevention of human violence against humans, even for identifying violent tendencies that are still to “evolve.” This is one way in which forms of identity thinking involving human relationships with nonhuman animals have been changing. But this raises another question: is the legal recognition of nonhuman animals and their suffering in relation to the human world of criminal violence another historical episode of speciesism? Does this rethinking of nonhuman animal suffering in relation to human violence privilege some animals over others?

  Asking this question isn’t to deny the moral good involved in greater protection of nonhuman animals for the wider social benefit of humans. Rather, it’s to think more about the relationship of the violent treatment of nonhuman animals and the relationship of that violence to human identity thinking. The nonhuman animals we encounter in Dexter are not on any Miami menu. So what about the non-criminal putting to death of nonhuman animals? What connection could there be between the identity thinking shaping the violence committed by humans against humans and the noncriminal killing of animals that is part of our everyday consumption of them?

  Pulled Pork Sandwiches and the Sexual Politics of Meat

  Something of how the threading of human identity, violence, and the consumption of nonhuman animals begins to appear in Dexter when we look at Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat.39 Even the cover of the book prompts visual associations of how meat eating and identity thinking are at work in the first season of Dexter. The image of the woman’s naked sectioned body corresponding in location and name to the meat cuts of butchery is eerily like the Ice Truck Killer’s victims, especially the scenes where Brian adds the cutting lines to the naked body of Monique, the amputee escort worker. Adams’s book looks at the historical and cultural justification of a society based on the eating of meat and how this connects to the oppression and domination of women. Looking at the cover image—an ad urging us to “Break the Dull Beef Habit” with the choicest cuts of the Cattle Queen—it’s almost as if it were a howto guide for the Ice Truck Killer. And that’s the point of Adams’s feminist study.

  Dexter draws on wider cultural associations about how the bodies of women and nonhuman animals are interchangeable as objects for a meat-eating, male dominated society. After all, the image above is what brings out a connection between the blooddrained parts of women’s bodies, paper wrapped and string-tied like parcels from the local butcher, to the porterhouse steaks Brian/Rudy shares with Dexter as part of their brotherly bonding. And you need only think of what the second corpse of the Ice Truck killer awakens in Dexter on his date with Rita. Dexter’s admiration for the artistic “cuts” of meat performed by his brother is re-enacted on her as an unconscious sexual pass (“Dexter,” Season 1). So how does Dexter consume this other species shared between men?

  You Kidnapped a Cop This Time, You Know? Not Some Invisible Hooker

  Deb’s defiant reminder of who she is to Rudy/Brian speaks clearly of the differences between herself and the women sex workers who were his victims (“Born Free,” Season 1). It tells us what cops and society won’t tolerate in terms of which women suffer at the hands of men. Deb’s defiance also reminds us of the working-class differences between them. Deb has worked her way up to detective, while Rudy/Brian’s victims have been street working prostitutes, or in the case of Monique, the amputee sex-worker, working for a “legitimate escort service.” Although unspoken by Deb, the racial differences between herself and these women as well as Monique’s disability are also telling reminders of what women experience in the world of Dexter. Deb’s calling out who she is and who she isn’t is one of the few scenes in Dexter where differences between women are acknowledged. And it’s one place to begin looking at identity thinking and how women characters are made to exist differently from men.

  As much as Deb is the Ice Truck Killer’s last female kidnap victim, she isn’t the “Final Girl” in the way women are in slasher horror films of the 1980s and their twenty-first century remakes.40 Tough Deb survives her lover and would-be killer, but she isn’t “transformed from terrified screamer to active heroine.”41 And it isn’t just the case that Dexter saves her. Deb is after all given a sacrificial role in the bonding between Dex and Biney. Deb is the final girl in piecing together the reunion of blood brothers, but this should make us think more about what the “gifts” of bloodless pieces of girls left by Brian for Dexter to puzzle over tell us about women in Dexter. As recreations of Brian and Dexter’s murdered mother, they’re offerings to Dexter to take up innocent women as the proper objects he has been substituting with his more deserving, and mostly male, victims.

  In Dexter, women are important for male bonding as well as boundary making between men. Think of Detective McNamara’s use of James Doakes as “bait” as payback for Doakes’s secret affair with McNamara’s murdered sister (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1). And Dexter’s initial interactions with Paul, Rita’s violent ex-husband, are dominated by Paul’s sexual jealousy towards Dexter, tensions hinting at Paul’s still-lingering sexual ownership of Rita. But Deb provides us with another clue as to what women share in Dexter that makes them even more secondary to men. Deb is after all the girlfriendless “final girl.”

  Designing Women in Dexter

  Until Season 3, when Rita is befriended by Sylvia Prado and Maria LaGuerta develops her friendship with Ellen Wolf, the women of Dexter exist very much without female support or companionship. Deb, Rita, and Maria don’t have any female friends. By the second season, women experience each other as competitive, even threatening presences. Think of Lila Tournay’s attempt to come between Dexter and Rita. Driven to possess Dexter, Lila is likewise without connections to other women. Christine Hill is devoted to her father the Trinity Killer, but she’s like Deb, without attachment to other women. What makes this strange absence in each of their lives so much stranger is how this shared trait contrasts with what the men of Dexter experience.

  In Dexter father-to-son (Harry and Dexter), brother-to-brother (Dexter and Brian), friendship or brotherly surrogate (Dexter and Miguel) bondings are the strongest, most meaningful emotional relationships the adult male characters experience. That’s not to say that these relationships aren’t what men should be experiencing in Dexter. But compared to the strong ties, sexual and non-sexual, that men experience with both sexes, the women of Dexter, cut off from other women, seem like they’re living half-lives. It’s as if the secret men’s business of killing is more defining of the types of relationships men can have while women seem secondary in their relationship to men. It isn’t just that women are kept out of this male bonding. It’s as if they’re designed not to have the types of relationships the adult male characters have. Dexter is a
very masculine world and we can say that homosocially it’s a very male dominated one. This means that nonsexual ties and attachments such as friendships are more available to, and become more meaningful for, the adult male characters than the female characters.

  Homosocially Yours, Dexter

  Individually, all of the women of Dexter are strikingly different in their personalities, but their absence of meaningful involvement with other women brings out their sameness as something like a specimen class. What they share makes them belong to a kind or type of “woman”. Saying the women of Dexter are specimen-like sounds absurd—they’re human characters, not objects like glass slides or concepts we use to make sense of serial killing. But the point is to look harder at what is missing from the identity thinking at work here, even in the creation of fictional characters.

  What if there is something about the differences between women’s lives in Dexter that we’re not seeing because of their sameness? And what if those differences lead us to think differently about how we understand serial killing? The sameness of the female characters has to do with how the world of Dexter not only makes women secondary to men. It also makes the women of Dexter separate from, even indifferent to, other women. And the type or kind of woman that the women of Dexter represent is also an example of the concept of “woman” that feminist philosophers have been challenging.

  Seeing how women are depicted in Dexter in this way provides a way of understanding how identity thinking has contributed to feminist questioning of women’s experiences. For feminist philosophers of sexual and racial identity such as Drucilla Cornell, Judith Butler, and Reneé Heberle, philosophical thinking about women’s differences from each other has provided possibilities for giving voice to women’s experience of suffering outside of the concept of “woman.” This concept has been defined by forms of feminism that haven’t included experiences of sexual and racial differences, disability, and economic class other than those shaping the identities of able-bodied, straight, white, middle-class women. Added to this is the need to question how women’s differences, especially class and racial differences, have been publicly recognized when women have been victims of multiple murderers.

  Deb’s defiance about being an invisible or forgotten victim like the sex workers of the show is a comment on Dexter itself. Dexter is premised on the forgetting of the history of feminist-led women’s rights campaigns aimed at raising public consciousness about women as victims of violence. Take Back the Night demonstrations have been a political tool for organizing and mobilizing women’s efforts to reclaim public spaces after sunset as part of women’s social and legal right to safety and protection outside of the home.42 These political movements have also challenged and escalated attention about the racial and class-bias against institutional failures of the police, the courts, and the media to respond to the plight of sex workers and non-white women targeted by serial murders. Deb as the “final girl” was destined to survive as “dearly damaged Debra,” dutiful daughter of Harry Morgan. Deb survives not because she isn’t an “invisible hooker.” It was her sisterhood to Dexter that both endangered and saved her. What is celebrated in the ending of Season 1 isn’t the lone survivor of a serial killer who targeted women. In the daylight celebration of Dexter, sex workers become more invisible. After all, it was Dexter who took back the night.

  Specimen Watching

  Dexter is a world of everyday surfaces with shadowed depths beneath. The closeness of the ordinarily domestic to the dangerous is after all what makes the double-lives its characters lead, especially Dexter and his prey, doubly intriguing. And within this serial world we consume we do encounter some connections to the real world of serial killers. What we get are examples that add touches of authenticity, but which we don’t think long enough about, much less think they can tell us anything more about the reality they’re from. But specimens, as well as those things we don’t think of as specimens, can tell us different stories about the “real world” of serial killing than what Dexter thinks we know. The “supporting” roles specimen slides, animals, and women play in Dexter as part of the everyday world of the Dark Passenger also have double-lives. They can make us think a bit differently about serial murder than what surfaces through the secret men’s business of killing.

  Watch Dexter for more specimens. They’re there, between the obvious crime-scenes of a killer on repeat.

  BODY PART III

  What Would Dexter Do?

  12

  Pathetic Rule Follower or Vigilante Hero?

  M. CARMELA EPRIGHT and SARAH E. WORTH

  “Kids. I could never do that. . . . I have standards” (“Dexter,” Season 1). Dexter Morgan, blood-spatter expert, psychopath, and vigilante serial killer does have some standards. He is an avowed killer who thoroughly enjoys his work—but he follows a seemingly strict moral Code. One of the many things that makes Dexter so interesting is his adherence to these rules, which gives him the appearance of being moral, even though most people would never consider a murderer a pillar of moral virtue.

  At the beginning of the series his rules are known as the “Code of Harry,” and they were taught to young Dexter by his adopted father as a way of controlling his murderous impulses and channeling his blood lust into killing the “really bad people out there” (“Crocodile,” Season 1). At first Dexter follows the Code almost mechanically (maniacally?); he never kills anyone who doesn’t fit Harry’s Code. Later in the series Dexter adapts the Code for his own purposes but never rejects the notion that one must be governed by a set of rules.

  But Dexter’s Code and his struggle to adhere to it demonstrates many of the problems that come with a rule-based approach to ethics. The moral Code he chooses, like other rule-based theories, seems moral on its face, but this doesn’t make the actions that follow from it—in Dexter’s case, cold-blooded murder—justifiable. We think that genuine morality requires more than just adherence to rules—it depends on things like empathy, concern for others, and doing, well, moral acts. Dexter may be a good rule follower, but he should not be considered moral in any sense of the word.

  What Is a Moral Code?

  There are several ethical theories based on following rules. Many would cite the Ten Commandments as their first guide to ethical behavior as it is a convenient and succinct set of rules about what to do and what not to do. The Golden Rule works too as a relatively straightforward rule that can be applied widely (although it has some serious limits when it is applied by serial killers or masochists—using your own self as a standard can be tricky!).

  In philosophy, rule-based moral theories include Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative”: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (or, in normal language, act according to rules that can and should be adopted by everyone); and various forms of the “principle of utility” as offered by such thinkers as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These are rules like “Maximize pleasure and minimize the pain for everyone involved” and “Do that which results in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”43

  Although it’s more complicated than this, the assumption is that if you properly interpret and act upon any given moral rule then it follows that your actions will be moral—even if the outcome might seem morally questionable. Some of these rules are based on the likely consequences of either acting or not acting in a particular way; others are based upon intentions. All of them assume that moral people are reasonable and rational and that they can calmly look at extremely difficult questions abstractly and act not on their desires and emotions but according to a careful application of rules. Yeah, right . . . I can make life’s most difficult decisions by making a list of pros and cons, weighing and measuring each with absolute precision, and naturally, the most rational outcome for as many people as possible will result. Or, I can in all cases stick to a list of predetermined rules—regardless of the context or consequences.

  As you c
an imagine, there are many problems with these sorts of “rule-based” theories—first it’s often difficult to establish whether the rules in question are “right” or “moral.” How do we know that the source of the rules (the Bible, one’s father, Kant’s or Mill’s interminable texts) provides the right principles? Furthermore, following the rules may lead you to do things that seem wrong or even ridiculously wrong. For example, a consistent Kantian would never lie—not even to the Nazis who are questioning him or her about the Jews who are currently hiding in his or her basement. A consistent utilitarian might, if the stakes were high enough and there were no other options, agree that some people not only should be tortured but that they must be tortured if lots of other people would benefit significantly. In Dexter’s world, the rules allow him to kill those who deserve to be killed but this doesn’t make doing so right or moral.

  The original set of rules that Dexter follows, the “Code of Harry,” includes “don’t get caught,” “always be sure that your victims are guilty” (Dexter takes this to mean guilty of murder, but Harry never actually says this), and “control your urges, do not let them control you.” The strictness of the code forces him to struggle with the thought of killing Sergeant Doakes since, while he doesn’t fit the code, he knows so much about Dexter’s second profession that Doakes is capable of destroying him. Dexter lucks into an answer to this dilemma that doesn’t violate Harry’s Code when Lila kills Doakes to protect Dexter. Sadly this doesn’t solve all of his problems; he still needs to kill Lila (who clearly needs to be killed, if anyone does, as she is just so evil!); eventually he succumbs to this temptation, but only because she comes to meet the criteria (minimally)—precisely because she did his dirty work by killing Doakes.