Dexter and Philosophy

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

  There is one final need that appears at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy: Self-actualization. People have interpreted this need as many different things, such as morality, creativity, spontaneity, or acceptance of facts.62 In the end, these experiences are merely cultural interpretations of what Maslow, quoting Kurt Goldstein, describes as the rule that “What a man can be, he must be.” This refers to the need for self-fulfillment, that is, to fulfill one’s potential. A self-actualizing moment could be, for example, when you’ve gotten Cs on most of your papers in high school, and then one day you get an A; and a light clicks on, “Oh, wow, I can get As on my future papers if I put enough time and work into them.” Before you got that A, you may have thought your best was a C, but that A showed you your potential, which caused you to desire to do your very best next time as well. Perhaps this is why Dexter helps Cody do his best on his class presentation on Saudi Arabia.

  Dexter’s beginning to realize that he has more inherent potential than he saw before; indeed, more than Harry saw as well. At the end of Season 3, in “Do You Take Dexter Morgan?,” when the Skinner, George King, has Dexter on his table, Dex actually cries inside (we see it as Harry in the vision crying), and forgives his father and wants with all of his heart to stay alive to see his son come into the world: “I’ve never wanted anything before so much in my life.” It’s not just a sense of belonging to a family (although that is part of it), but the realization that he can have a normal life, with genuine roles like that of a husband and father. This is something that he wants for himself—not as a smokescreen or a mask, but to be the best person he can be, despite his dark urges.

  Can a Serial Killer Be Happy?

  Achieving perfection is not what Maslow’s theory is about though; instead, it reveals what makes us tick, what motivates us, and how we can live more fulfilling lives. It also proves that Dexter, despite the dozens of people that he’s killed, is a person capable of human emotions after all. Damaged? Hell, yeah. But he has normal human motivations that are being revealed to us, season by season, as we watch. Dexter is, as we all are hopefully, achieving what Maslow called “degrees of relative satisfaction.”

  To this point, we’ve dealt with these five needs as all-or-nothing categories in which you complete one fully and then move on the next, which is not entirely accurate. Maslow explains that one need can be satisfied, for example, only partially and that is sufficient for an individual to place importance on the next set of needs. To say that Dex is involved in some self-actualizing acts is not to say that he has totally, one hundred percent, met all of the four lower needs. He has met each of them to some extent, but only partially. And they fluctuate from time to time.

  Season 4 presents new issues for Dexter; namely, how to juggle his many roles as husband, father, brother, friend, co-worker, and protégé (for a while to Trinity). He has doubts as to whether or not he can do it, unconscious doubts that manifest themselves in his visions of Harry. He remains steadfast that he can manage all these moving parts of his life. Maintaining his Code, even when he makes mistakes, is paramount. But let’s face it, he’s in dangerous territory now. In Dexter, the killers don’t seem to treat their families that well. Brian (Rudy) ties his fiancé up to a table and tries to kill her. Miguel treats his wife coldly and then cheats on her. Trinity emotionally and physically abuses his wife and kids, despite his image as the perfect family man. Comparatively, Dexter looks pretty good, but the prospect of having a family is still fraught with many hazards.

  Dexter’s thoughts of suicide at the beginning of Season 5 indicate his mourning, guilt, and depression over Rita’s death at the hands of Trinity. After that, Dex resumes feeding the Dark Passenger and realizes that he must stay strong for his kids’ sake, and they also give him a reason to live. While I don’t think we can say that Dexter is happy in any absolute way, he has his moments of happiness, such as when he holds Harrison and plays with him. The joy of parenthood, of being a father, still infuses happiness into Dexter’s life despite all of the chaos that surrounds him. To tell whether or not Dexter is happy is a difficult task because he expresses his emotions differently from most of us. From what we have seen in Seasons 1 through 5, it seems that Dexter has a relatively happy, albeit complicated, life. As we’ve seen, Dex has moved up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and while with the death of Rita he risks retreating into his former ways of complete isolation, his children, Harrison first and foremost, will be his salvation. Self-actualization is not about perfection and leading a totally happy life; it’s about realizing one’s potential in this brief time we have alive and achieving, experience by experience, moments of satisfaction, worth, and contentment.

  Perhaps his biggest new challenge will be how to raise Astor and Cody, should they return from living with their grandparents, along with Harrison on his own. How will he deal with his son who may very well have the same urges that Dexter has, each having been baptized so young in his mother’s blood? He will, no doubt, rely on his Code to see him through, but there must be more than that. The situation will require him to reach out to those he’s close to—his friends and family—for help and support. Hopefully, he will move deeper into self-actualization in order to realize his full potential as a father and as a human being.

  BODY PART V

  Dexter’s Bloodline

  21

  Dexter Unmasked

  DEBORAH MELLAMPHY

  My name is Dexter. Dexter Morgan. I don’t know what it was that made me the way I am, but whatever it was left a hollow place inside. People often fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all.

  —DEXTER (“Dexter,” Season 1)

  There are no secrets in life, just hidden truths that lie beneath the surface.

  —DEXTER (“Crocodile,” Season 1)

  Dexter Morgan is a serial killer. You don’t even have to watch the television show to know that.

  Showtime’s entire marketing campaign relies on advertising the show as one that centers on a serial killer. Posters and images invariably depict Dexter sprayed with blood, brandishing knives, coming into contact with dead bodies and limbs or “shushing” the audience, letting us know that we’re in on the secret of his true identity. Taglines for the show—“America’s Favorite Serial Killer,” “Takes life. Seriously,” and “A serial killer with a heart. . . . Just pray it’s not yours”—all flaunt the image of Dexter as serial killer.

  People who haven’t seen the show would expect that such a character would not be able to keep his secret safe for long because, as everyone knows, serial killers are “different”; they’re outsiders, unlike the rest of us. Yet, those who know Dexter know how “normal” he appears to the other characters. He looks, acts, and sounds like an extremely hard-working, incredibly charming and likeable character. He has several friends amongst his co-workers at Miami Metro, including Angel and Masuka, who even throw him a bachelor party in Season 3. He also has a good relationship with his adopted sister Deb and is in a relationship with Rita and is close to her two children, Cody and Astor in the first four seasons. At work he is the “doughnut guy” who also joins a bowling team with his colleagues. In “All in the Family” (Season 3), he says that “pizza night” is the highlight of his week. He also gives a talk at “Dad’s Day” in Cody’s school in Season 2. Even Dexter’s morning routine, shown in the show’s opening sequence, is ordinary. He flosses, shaves, eats breakfast, and dresses just like everyone else.

  But of course all this normality is simply a facade, constructed in an attempt to fit in with everyday society. Dexter has carefully designed and adopted the mask of normalcy to fool others, including the authorities and those closest to him, Deb and Rita. Following the revelation in Season 1 that Brian Moser/Rudy Cooper is his brother and Dexter’s subsequent killing of Brian in compliance with Harry’s Code, Dexter says:

  I drove away a brother who accepts me, sees me, for an adopted sister who’d reject me if she knew. . . . Sometimes I wonder what it would be
like for everything inside me that’s denied and unknown to be revealed. But I’ll never know. I live my life in hiding. (“Born Free,” Season 1)

  This masquerade leads him to regularly ponder his sense of self and identity through voice-over and in his conversations, remembered or imagined, with Harry. Dexter persistently asks who he is. What is his true identity? Is it his hidden self, his everyday appearance or a combination of the two? Is it neither?

  This links Dexter to philosophical questions that the brilliant minds have been trying to answer for millennia—what is a person’s true identity, how is it formed, and how can we identify it? Since Dexter is a show about identity, truth, and masks, investigating the identities of the show’s characters can help us to understand our own. Do we know who we really are?

  Everyday Masks

  Human bonds always lead to messy complications . . . if I let some- one get close, they’d see who I really am, and I can’t let that happen. So, time to put on my mask.

  —DEXTER, (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1)

  We all have various “masks” that we wear in different social situations in the course of our day-to-day lives. For example, we act differently with our closest friends than with new acquaintances. Different situations and groups of people call for different “masks” or parts of our personality. We don’t have split personalities, that’s just how society works. Most of the time we’re not even aware that we’re doing it. That’s also how killers are able to elude the police for years; they look and act like everyone else to the world at large.

  Dexter embodies these conflicts but he is highly conscious of them and his are more pronounced. Dexter reveals to us that he believes the killer within him to be his “real” self and the everyday social personality to be the facade. We discover early in Season 1 that he crafted his everyday “persona” in childhood with the aid of his adopted father Harry Morgan. After rescuing Dexter as a child, Harry felt it necessary for Dexter to consciously construct the facade of an everyday person, with a normal life in order to fit in and to escape persecution. Instead of sending Dexter to therapy and attempting to control his behavior at an early age (as anybody else would naturally do), Harry guided the young Dexter to use his murderous instinct for good.

  In a flashback, we see a teenage Dexter taking a girl to the prom, a rite of passage for young men in American society. In “Love American Style” (Season 1), Harry has a conversation with him about girls and dating, yet this is not the typical “father-son” talk, it’s more of an instruction of how to appear normal.

  “Shrink Wrap” (Season 1) reveals that perhaps Dexter might have benefitted from therapy. The burden of keeping his identity a secret is clear when he reveals himself to Dr. Meridian, a therapist whom Dexter is investigating due to the mysterious deaths of Meridian’s patients. To Dexter’s surprise, these sessions provide him with an opportunity to reflect on his life. In his last session he finally admits to Dr. Meridian, “I’m a serial killer. That feels so amazing to say out loud”. When Meridian laughs the claim off as a joke Dexter continues, “I’m not joking. I kill people”. Later in the kill room he tells Meridian “You helped me to accept what I really am. I’m grateful for that, but I was raised with a certain set of principles.” This illustrates the separation between his two identities. He acknowledges that the personality that he projects isn’t who he really is. This is also clear when he addresses himself in the third person, when he asks himself, “Where is the orderly, controlled, effective Dexter? How did I lose him? How do I find him again?” (“Waiting to Exhale,” Season 2).

  Dexter considers himself both a monster and a superhero. In the closing scene of Season 1, he fantasizes that his secret has been revealed and that he is considered a hero for his actions. In perhaps the most humorous scene of any season so far, he imagines himself walking through a ticker-tape parade, where admirers shout “You sliced him up good” and “Way to take out the trash, thanks buddy.”

  Dexter is highly duplicitous, as indicated by the secrecy surrounding many objects including his box of slides, his chest of weapons, and his apartment. He feels as if he can “take off” his mask in his apartment and (late in Season 4) in his garden shed. His panic when Doakes discovers his blood slides (his secret trophies) in Season 2 is clear. The discovery of the bodies of his victims and the subsequent investigation into the identity of the “Bay Harbor Butcher” brings Dexter closer than ever to being unmasked by the authorities. His panic throughout Season 2 is palpable as he frantically attempts to follow the latest findings in the case from Deb, who is part of the investigation.

  Nietzsche’s Masks

  The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche can help us to better understand Dexter’s dilemma. His theories can help us to comprehend Dexter’s identity more fully and to relate it to ourselves in our own lives. Like Harry, Nietzsche was a firm believer in masks and considered them a necessary, justifiable, and unavoidable part of social life. For Nietzsche, “Mediocrity is the most successful mask the superior spirit can wear because to the great majority, that is to say the mediocre, it will not seem a mask.”63 Nietzsche’s masks are the various aspects of our personality that we present to the world. He believes that all individuals express their “will to power” or reason for living, which will involve deception and the wearing of masks to avoid danger. The will to power constitutes life; “Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of one who serves I found the will to be master”64

  In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes masks as useful for the lower classes who need to represent themselves according to the conditions set in place by the ruling classes, in order to “blend in” with the middle classes and to stay alive. Dexter needs to do the same thing (on ethical and moral grounds) for he too would be sentenced to death if his secret was found out by the “ruling” class or authorities. Dexter’s mask is both necessary and inevitable and must be carefully crafted and performed.

  Nietzsche discusses masks not only in relation to the lower classes but to society in general; the everyday world is full of appearances. He proclaims that, “Every profound spirit needs a mask: what’s more, a mask is constantly growing around every profound spirit, thanks to the consistently false (which is to say shallow) interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he displays.”65 Nietzsche praises the mask as a form of defense and self-preservation; everyone hides behind the mask of convention (everyone, that is, who wants to blend in with the rest of society). He praises such masks for their ability “to deceive other spirits and to dissimulate in front of them . . . the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and craftiness of its masks, it also enjoys the feeling of its security behind them” (p. 220). Nietzsche maintains that humans model themselves on others. They feel validated by believing what others believe. This allows them to belong and makes them feel less insecure.

  Nietzsche also believes that man, as a social being, relies on social dress and deceptive masks to disguise immorality; individuals masquerade as moral and thus “normal” persons. He believes that these masks have become ingrained in society; “every surface is a cloak” (p. 122). Other philosophers have recognized this as well; individuals “simply cannot dispense with that masquerade which one calls clothes”66 Dexter seems to have thought closely about how clothing is used as a metaphor for masquerade with the naked body representing truth. His victims are naked in each of their kill rooms, representing the “shedding” of their masks and the revelation that somebody knows their secrets.

  Dexter’s decoration of the kill rooms with photographs of each killer’s victims points to each victim’s knowledge of who they really are. These photographs serve as “audience” to the killing. The use of clear plastic and cellophane is also significant—they are transparent, allowing each victim to see clearly their true identity as a killer. Dexter’s killing of these individuals represents his own search for identity and his own desire to shed his mask and to appear “unclothed.”


  Dark Passengers

  Nietzsche believed that the individual who loves masks “alone has the strength to look behind a mask to discover a man, the courage to mask himself in his individuality, and the playful innocence to choose a mask which not only hides, but represents him to the world.”67 This individual sees the masks that others wear and is able to look beyond these disguises. This seems true of the characters, throughout all four seasons, who see beyond Dexter’s facade. These include Brian/Rudy and Doakes in Season 1, Doakes and Lila in Season 2, Miguel in Season 3, and Arthur in Season 4.

  Each of these is also extremely conscious of how they themselves appear to others and are aware that they possess many different guises and personas. The most important of these is Doakes who suspects Dexter (as opposed to Brian) from the start. As an ex-Special Forces operative, Doakes is a trained killer who may be as bloodthirsty as Dexter and has inevitably murdered in the past. Doakes is also hiding the fact that he’s having an affair with Kara Simmons, the soon-to-be ex-wife of a fellow officer. Since Doakes seems to be the only member of the police force who recognizes that Dexter consciously embodies various personas and he is extremely suspicious of him, even going so far as to spy on him in Season 2, he illustrates Nietzsche’s point: those who are aware of their own masks are better able to recognize those of others. This is also true of Lila, in whom Dexter recognizes the lack of emotion he knows so well. “You’re emotionally color-blind,” he tells her.