Dexter and Philosophy

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

  Although fierce in combat, Roman soldiers had a strong sense of civic duty and loyalty to the ancient laws of Rome. There was little guilt or remorse for the carnage they visited on their enemies. Roman soldiers did not fall prey to anxiety and doubt about their brutality toward others. If they wondered at all about the rightness of their actions, they were comforted by a religion that justified their conduct. Since Roman deities were gods of the city, the fate of the legionnaires’ souls was measured by the success of Rome.

  Poor Dexter was born in the wrong age. Had he been a Roman, he would not have been a social outcast; a monster, as he calls himself. No one would have noticed that he lacked an inner life or conscience, since hardly anyone else had one. Those few who understood the shortcomings of dedication to a civil religion pretended to be average citizens and “with a smile of pity and indulgence,” says Gibbon, “they diligently practiced the ceremonies of their fathers.”71

  Dexter too practices an ironic devotion to the lessons of his father. He too disguises his true intentions. As he puts it, “Harry taught me that. Secrecy. Self-reliance. And a well stocked cupboard of Hefty bags” (“Seeing Red,” Season 1).

  Instead of prowling around at night to fulfill his yearning, he would have joined the legions where the opportunity for slaying was ever-present. Dexter would not have to live by a secret Code. In the legions Dexter would have enjoyed the camaraderie of other born killers who, like Miguel Prado, would have seen him for what he “truly was” and instead of being “repulsed” would have been “proud” of his friendship (“Turning Biminese,” Season 3). Rome would have channeled Dexter’s passions and celebrated his dedication to the “fathers” of Rome—its ancient ethical code. Rather than the imaginary parade that Dexter fathoms up in “Born Free,” the final episode of Season 1, he would have been honored by thankful citizens for his skillful blood-letting—perhaps even with a real parade through the center of Rome. After all, he would have been completely justified in slaughtering the enemies of the Senate and People of Rome (SPQR—Senatus Populus Que Romanus).

  The Ethics of Dexter’s Appeal

  One of the greatest texts on moral philosophy written in the ancient world, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, really wasn’t about morals at all. The Ethics certainly teaches a code of conduct, but the rules laid out have to do with conduct not conscience; the principles have more to say about what people do than what they think; more about outward behavior than inner motivations. Perhaps Dexter is so entertaining because he is an ethical, if not a moral man. He follows rules, which, although far from humane, do aim at Aristotle’s highest ethical principle—justice.

  Or maybe there’s something darker in Dexter that appeals to us. We live in an age when the public philosophy promotes peace, humanity, co-operation, kindness and respect for all things, even objects without consciousness such as trees and glaciers. Contemporary morality demands that we treat everyone alike without consideration of outer qualities. But by concentrating on what is most common among us, we actually might promote what is lowest and least attractive in us. Nietzsche worries that “the leveling and diminution of . . . man is our greatest danger; because the sight of him makes us despondent.” It could be that in such an age we secretly crave what Nietzsche craved, that “if there are any such in the realm beyond good and evil grant me now . . . the sight of something perfect, wholly achieved, happy, magnificently triumphant, something still capable of inspiring fear!” (Genealogy of Morals, p. 177).

  Personally, I hate to think that Dexter merely represents destruction for its own sake. Perhaps instead, Dexter is so appealing because, even though he’s a serial killer, there is something decent, even noble about him. As Deb says, “You are the only one I can count on, jack ass!” (“There’s Something about Harry,” Season 2). Since I’m such a fan of the show, I like to think of Dexter in a place where he could thrive. He really would be better off in the legions: Dexter SPQR.

  24

  Dexter’s Look

  REBECCA STEINER GOLDNER

  The series premiere of Dexter opens with the title character cruising the city of Miami, looking . . . watching. Within two minutes, Dexter is demanding of his victim that he “look!”; “open your eyes and look at what you did!”; “look or I’ll cut your eyelids right off your face!” (“Dexter,” Season 1).

  Scenes like this are repeated throughout the series; Dexter looking, observing, and demanding that someone both recognize and become accountable for what he’s done. Dexter’s relationship to other humans is often defined by this looking, followed by his call for shame, recognition and responsibility. He reduces the other to an object before his eyes, to a body on a table, to a thing to satisfy Dexter’s own needs and purposes.

  In his foundational work Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre describes the relationship between human subjects as antagonistic, hostile, and limiting, and his exploration of this relationship begins in the moment when one subject sees another. The other, for Sartre, is always a limit to my freedom, to my possibilities; the look of the other crystallizes me into something fixed, nameable, and un-free. Though on some level I crave and seek out this identification, insofar as the other limits me to it, I resent and am ashamed of it. When Dexter reduces his victims to rapists, murderers, pedophiles and abusers, he likewise restricts their freedom, and he does so not only with duct tape and plastic wrap, but by robbing them of their possibilities, by stealing from them the openness of their existence, of their choices.

  Bad Faith

  The basic premise of existentialism, Sartre says in the essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” is that “existence precedes essence.”72 But what does this confounding claim actually mean? It means that we are, that we exist, before we are any given thing. It means that we do not have “a nature” or any “essential identity” or “destiny.” It means that from the moment we exist, we are radically, painfully, free, and that, as such, we are responsible for each and every choice we make and activity in which we engage. It means that I can’t excuse my behavior by saying, as Dexter might, that I was “born that way” or that my childhood or past “made me that way.” However, Sartre tells us, this freedom is not liberating, it is frightening and overwhelming. “We are condemned,” Sartre writes, “to be free.” Human existence is a constant tension of the desire to simply be something, as a table is simply a table, and our ability to go beyond that, to escape what we are, and to choose our world and ourselves. Bad faith is the primary way in which we try to be some one thing.

  Sartre uses a number of examples to illustrate his concept of bad faith. The common theme to all of these examples is the central claim of bad faith, that “we have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”73 Understanding this claim, which looks self-contradictory but is actually quite meaningful, is essential to understanding bad faith and Sartrean freedom. It is also a perfect description of Dexter himself.

  Sartre describes a waiter in a café like this:

  His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick . . . all his behavior seems to us a game . . . he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation . . . the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it. (Being and Nothingness, pp. 101–02)

  The waiter in the café, in one sense, is a waiter in a café. It is his job, he does his job sufficiently well, and he is recognized by those around him as being a waiter. However, the waiter in the café is, in another sense, not a waiter in a café. There is some part of the waiter that is able to step back, outside, or beyond his role as waiter and be aware of himself as a waiter. And, insofar as a part of the waiter is engaged in thinking about himself as waiter, that very part escapes being a waiter. Unlike a table, or a water bottle, which can be nothing beyond a table or a water bottle, simply because the waiter is able to
reflect, question, affirm, doubt or deny that he is a waiter, he is not (merely, or only) a waiter. In this way, the waiter is not what he is (a waiter).

  For the most part, however, the waiter ardently desires to be a waiter; he yearns for an identity. The identification “waiter” provides for his life a meaning, a paycheck, a structure, and a situation that determines most or many of his choices. Should he get up at 6:00 A.M. when his alarm goes off? Yes, because he is a waiter, and being a waiter means arriving at work in time to set the tables. For Sartre, without the structure provided by an essential identity (waiter, teacher, even serial killer), our lives threaten to overwhelm us with the openness of the possibilities, with the anguish of our own radical freedom. If the waiter is not a waiter, he is free to sleep through his alarm, to deny that the alarm has any meaning for him at all, to leave Paris altogether, to abandon all responsibility.

  Is Dexter in bad faith? Like the waiter in the café, Dexter is playing a role: caring, kind, polite brother/boyfriend/police analyst. Dexter, however, as we learn through the voice over narratives, is well aware of his role-playing. “People fake a lot of human interactions,” he tells us, “But I feel like I fake them all. And I fake them very well. And that’s my burden, I guess” (“Dexter,” Season 1). These moments of self-awareness, of reflection on his own activities, are what Sartre refers to as pre-reflective consciousness. In our everyday interactions with the world “consciousness is consciousness of something” (p. 23). Our basic, usual, conscious activity is located in the way in which we are directed towards objects, it is always a relational activity directed at some thing in the world. When I think, I think about some object. If I doubt, I doubt the existence of some object or idea. Pre-reflective consciousness, on the other hand, takes up the activity of being conscious in the place of the object; it takes the thinking, doubting self as object. When Dexter reflects, through the voice-over narratives, on his inclinations, his past, or his activities, he takes himself as object.

  Unlike most people, however, Dexter is fully aware of his role-playing, and that the identities into which he forces himself—Deb’s supportive brother; Rita’s caring boyfriend; Miami Metro’s diligent blood spatter analyst—are choices that he must work to sustain at every moment. Dexter is constantly aware of the possibility that he could (and often does) behave completely differently—even in contradictory ways—from that other Dexter. Does his awareness that he is merely “playing at” being Dexter allow us to claim that Dex is not in bad faith? We’ll get there.

  Dexter as Master

  Faced with endless, open possibilities and choices, we flee into essential identities that define and limit us. This wish, however, that a series or pattern of activities could crystallize us into a “thing”, something which simply is, can ultimately backfire on us when we encounter the other. While my freedom might be apprehended in anguish, Sartre says, “by the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.” (p. 302). Dexter’s victims see themselves in many ways; some are hardened criminals, others are upstanding citizens who believe they possess a fatal flaw that drives them to molest, rape, or kill. Rarely, however, do they confront themselves with the kind of reckoning they undergo on Dexter’s table. Each of these criminals has, until Dexter enters their lives, enjoyed a kind of freedom—the freedom to get away with bad acts, to behave one way but often be seen as something else by society. When Dexter turns his gaze upon them, however, they are robbed of this freedom, the freedom to change, reform, start anew—all of this is taken from them from the moment we see Dexter begin to watch. As Harry tells the young Dexter “When you take a man’s life you’re not just killing him, you’re snuffing out all the things he’ll ever become” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1).

  Dexter is rarely mistaken in his choice of victims. Most famously, perhaps, the events of Season 3 are inaugurated by a mistaken, hasty kill, but, in general, as his audience, we can be fairly certain that when Dexter begins investigating a victim, we will see it end in blood. Whatever else these people might be—teachers, nurses, car salesmen, valets, district attorneys—when Dexter begins to watch them, to him and to us they take on one essential identity: criminal. All other possibilities narrow to the point of invisibility, so that in spite of their promises to change, to reform, or claims that they can’t help themselves, that they’re sick, Dexter forces them to reckon with what they are. He has documented their acts, and the acts can’t be denied or taken back. Thus, instead of a human being with open, endless possibilities, the acts that confirm their guilt become their definition.

  A paradigmatic example, Matt Chambers, the drunk driver from the episode “Crocodile,” has changed names and cities after every incident where he killed someone. There’s a Sartrean freedom in this; he re-creates himself anew in every place he goes and does not allow the obligations and exigencies of a life to trap him into some chosen identity. When Dexter begins to observe him, however, Matt’s freedom is taken from him—he will never go to a new city, assume a new name, kill another person. He is a drunk driver. That’s all. He’s trapped in the identity he did not and would not have chosen. Thus, it is Dexter who becomes the source of his identification. Typically, in bad faith, I choose the identity into which I flee and I require that the other confirm or validate me in this identity. Dexter, however, as often happens in the encounter with others, limits his victims to precisely the very identity they deny as being essential to them. To the other, I am just a thing—a particular kind of thing, yes, but a thing in the sense of an object, one among many. The look of the other robs me not only of my possibilities to be something else, but it also takes from me the belief that I am the foundation of my own world, that I am the one in control.

  This loss of control starts with being watched. Being looked at presents me with the suggestion that the world is not entirely my own or of my own making. Dexter, from the moment he chooses a victim, controls the world of that person. When the victim realizes he has been under observation—should this moment occur on the kill table or even before it—he realizes, as Sartre says, that “I am no longer master of the situation” (p. 355). To be looked at, then, is far more than merely to be seen, it is to be reduced, objectified, and threatened. Even if the one watching you is not a serial killer, the fact that the other robs you of your possibilities and steals the world from you is sufficient to signify that the encounter with the other is a danger to you. As Sartre writes and Dexter well knows, the look can be given not just by someone turning their eyes on me, but by “a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain” (p. 346), and the result is the sudden awareness that I am being looked at. What occurs to me, upon this awareness, is “that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt” (p. 347). Indeed when that noise behind you, that rustling in the bushes, or that man staring at you from the family minivan is Dexter, you will surely end up hurting.

  Caught in the Act

  Dexter’s goal, however, is not merely to hurt. Dexter’s ends in his vigilantism are complex, and involve his own need for blood, a perverted sense of justice, and penchant for control and authority, but also a need for the victim to see herself for just what she is. Dexter accomplishes this by plastering the walls of his kill room with pictures, pieces, or other reminders of those his victim has hurt and harmed. He enhances their vulnerability by binding the victim on the table naked, a symbolic act, which further reduces the victim to her object-self, to her body, and physically limits all possibilities. According to Sartre, however, such acts on Dexter’s part are ornamental, because Dexter’s look alone would be sufficient to cause some degree of shame in the victim.

  Sartre describes a scene in which one has been caught listening at a door and looking through a peephole. When he assumed the hallway was empty, the peeper was completely caught up in the act of peeping, unawar
e of himself and completely directed towards the scene on the other side of the door. “But all of a sudden” Sartre writes, “I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean?” (p. 349). It means that he has been seen, caught in the act and identified as a peeper. Dexter’s victim’s likewise assume a veil of privacy in their crimes, and if caught in the act by Dexter, they, too, react with horror, shock, and shame.

  To Sartre, shame is the almost inevitable result of being seen. While in bad faith I might flee from my freedom and try to limit myself, when the other successfully identifies me as being something—a peeper, a rapist, a murderer (or even something positive, like a police officer or a loving mother)—I react with shame—shame that I am not that free and open possibility which is the mark of the human subject. In Season 5, when Lumen inadvertently watches Dexter kill Boyd Fowler, she catches him in the act and he reacts with horror, not simply because Lumen represents the threat of being caught, but also the shame of being identified as something at all. To the other, I am a mere thing in the world, I am a peeper as the table is merely a table, with no chance of escape. “Shame reveals to me that I am this being” Sartre tells us (p. 351). Shame makes me be “somebody” as opposed to an endless stream of possible otherwises, and, as such, it tries to locate my essence on par with my very existence.

  “My shame,” Sartre writes, “is a confession” (p. 350), and it is this confession that Dexter hopes to elicit from his victims, explicitly or tacitly. Dexter sees who the victim is, when often they have tried to hide this from the world, and he demands of his victim, through various methods, that the victim, likewise, recognize who he himself is. “Shame” Sartre tells us further, “is shame of self; it is the recognition that I am indeed that object which the other is looking at and judging” (p. 351) and that my freedom, that which demarcates me as a human subject, has its limits in a world that contains other people. The look of the other forces me to see myself from outside, from beyond myself, and to see myself as fixed, or as having a “nature”(p. 352). Dexter’s victims often try to deny that they are what Dexter has identified them to be. In one sense, they are correct in that the freedom that is the heart and structure of the human subject is open to them—they could change their ways, reform. But by identifying them as a criminal, and as one unlikely to change, Dexter not only utilizes shame to objectify them based on their pasts, but to demand that they hold themselves responsible for those pasts. The fixed past and the open future create an almost insurmountable tension when brought to a head on Dexter’s table.