Look at What You’ve Done!
This tension, between our freedom and what Sartre calls our facticity (the ways in which we are actually fixed and limited, which include the past), are identified by Sartre in an example quite relevant to Dexter. “We are readily astonished and upset when the penalties of the court affect a man who in his new freedom is no longer the guilty person he was” Sartre tells us (p. 107). A criminal who has recognized his radical freedom to not be what he was is a reformed, changed criminal. “But at the same time” Sartre goes on, “we require of this man that he recognize himself as being this guilty one” (p. 107).
Dexter’s victims often plead with Dexter that they can change, that they won’t do it again, and, on occasion, we might want to believe them. We might want to see Dexter let someone go. Dexter’s call for shame and recognition, initiated when he begins to look, is in some ways a lack of regard for the future while a permanent bond to the past. Dexter’s kills suggest that to him, the past, our actions as well as that which was done to us, shape us, take hold of us, and form us in ways that are almost impossible to break.
In Season 1, Dexter confronts the role of the past and the structures of childhood when he watches Jeremy, the young killer. Dexter sees himself in Jeremy, but he wants to believe in Jeremy’s freedom to change. Thus, in Episode 3, even after watching Jeremy plot a kill (thwarted by Dexter rustling through the woods to look out on the scene), Dexter lets Jeremy go after discovering that he was raped by the man he killed at age fifteen. Dexter wants to believe in Jeremy’s ability to change, to escape the path he is on. But Jeremy kills again, and then takes his own life. The past had a strong hold on Jeremy, but we cannot allow the past to excuse what he does. Every new act, every new crime, is a free choice in its own right, and it is for this reason that we must be responsible for both who we are in the present as well as who we were. To rely on a claim that this was Jeremy’s nature, or his destiny, is to rob Jeremy of the very freedom that defines him as human.
Dexter’s elaborately staged kills call upon the victim to feel shame, to see herself as having been fixed and limited to the designation ‘evil’—not by Dexter, but by the activities and projects the victim has chosen. The demanded recognition requires each victim to accept responsibility, to recognize each decision to kill, rape, drive drunk, deal drugs, for what it was: the free choice of a free subject. In the Season 1 episode “Shrink Wrap,” when Dexter kills the psychiatrist Emmett Meridian, he tells him, “I’m sorry doc, actions have consequences, and this is yours.” Meridian has genuinely helped Dexter to confront the past through psychoanalysis, but whatever good Meridian could accomplish in the future, he needs to be held accountable for his past. The only way to end this bond to the past is to kill the subject who carries that past forward.
Thus, in spite of our freedom to change, the present subject is responsible for its past. Sartre explains, using the example of a grudge, that so long as the person against whom we hold the grudge is alive, we can continue to hold the grudge, even if the person is no longer the offender in the same sense in which the thief is no longer a thief. Sartre claims that “I am my past and if I were not, my past would not exist any longer either for me or for anybody, it would no longer have any relation with the present” (p. 169). In this respect, the thief, even if truly reformed, is still responsible for the thief that he was; it is only because of him that the past thief has any being at all in the present.
As Dexter suggests a connection between past actions and current consequences, Sartre too sees a shared bond of responsibility between the past, the present, and the future. I am not only responsible for my past, but the past weighs on my present and future, and is, for example, “responsible for the fact that at each instant I am not a diplomat or a sailor” (p. 173). Dexter watches and shames others into recognizing who they are and acknowledging responsibility for what they have done. But he kills them because, in spite of a seemingly limitless freedom to make other choices, what they’ve done is in some ways responsible for what they continue to do.
Bad or Bad Faith?
Dexter looks at criminals, identifies them as being criminals, and then shames then into recognizing what they are as he holds them responsible. He robs his victims of their freedom, of their freedom to change, to always be something else, to create the world around them based on the choices they make, and this freedom is a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human. While in bad faith we actively flee from this freedom, by seeking essential identities that limit our possibilities and help us to avoid the anguish of endless openness, we resent the one who robs us of this freedom by objectifying us. The encounter with the other brings to the fore a tension at the core of consciousness; the desire to be free and escape what I am, and the anguish I have in this freedom. Nobody better encapsulates the Sartrean tension between freedom and identity than Dexter himself.
Dexter is well aware of the various roles he takes on. “None of us,” he says, “are who we appear to be on the outside, but we must maintain appearances to survive . . . all you can do is play along at life and hope that sometimes you get it right” (“Shrink Wrap,” Season 1). But Dexter believes that there’s one thing which he truly, fundamentally, and inescapably is: a killer. The entire show is premised on Dexter’s bad faith choice, his project of vigilante serial murders. Dexter thinks he cannot escape this identity—that it is a combination of his nature and what happened to him as a little boy. Sartre would deny that there is such a powerful bond of determination, that Dexter’s Dark Passenger has such control over him.
Yes, the past influences who we are and what we do, but we are always free to make other choices, to behave otherwise—first, we are, and only later do we make ourselves be something. Thus, our existence primarily and in every instance precedes our essence, which is, for as long as we are alive, open and free to change. Dexter does not yet see, though it is increasingly suggested through the series, the ways in which Harry created Dexter’s murderous identity out of his past. Dexter thinks he does not have, and never had, a choice about what he does. In other words, Dexter believes his past has ultimately determined his essential identity. To deny himself the choice is, like so many of his victims, to deny that he is responsible for his actions.
We, as viewers, watch Dexter, as Dexter watches his own victims. And while Dexter looks in order to see guilt, we look at Dexter to see his innocence, to see the ways in which he might escape his chosen identity. It is our acknowledgment of Dexter’s freedom, of his ability not to be forever determined by and limited to this role, that intrigues us as viewers, that allows us to sympathize—even root for—this serial killer. We believe that Dexter “is not what he is” because we begin to suspect that he is not a monster, that he might be able to escape his past, and we wonder if (or worry that) he will make an authentic choice, recognize his freedom, and abandon his murderous project. Mostly, however, we love him because he doesn’t.
25
Safe Dex
DAVID RAMSAY STEELE
Arthur Mitchell, the misnamed Trinity Killer, surmises for one fleeting moment that Dexter aspires to be a vigilante (“The Getaway,” Season 4). Our Dex, however doesn’t want to be a vigilante, though the net result is that he acts just like one.
Well, maybe not just like a vigilante: occasionally saving killers from being picked up by the police so that he can have the satisfaction of slaughtering them himself isn’t VSOP (vigilante standard operating procedure). But even this Dexter quirk has its helpful side: it does save the taxpayer all that expensive crap about appeals, psychiatric evaluations, and maybe in some cases, life sentences for the killers (which come with a life sentence for the taxpayers who have to feed, clothe, accommodate, and entertain them).
Dexter the Just Man
One hundred and four years before Season 1 of Dexter, when the word “vigilante” was still confined to westerns and was fairly obscure even there, and the term “serial killer” had not even been coined, Edgar Wallace
published The Four Just Men. It instantly became, and remained for the next fifty years, a super-hyper-megabestseller, and was followed up by several sequels, both novels and collections of stories, including The Three Just Men (there had really only been three all along).
The Just Men are rich, well-connected (one is a European prince), ruthless, cosmopolitan individuals with secret lives and a secret plan. They ingeniously conspire to assassinate evil-doers who have somehow escaped the law. In the main story of the first book, however, their target is not an especially wicked person, merely somewhat misguided, in their opinion, about current politics. The Just Men publicly announce that they will kill the British Foreign Secretary (equivalent to Secretary of State) if a certain piece of legislation goes through the British Parliament. It does and they do. Good job, killers! Sometimes even non-evil persons may have to be eliminated, in the interest of the greater struggle against evil.
The Four Just Men is not a whodunnit but a howwilltheydoit: how can the Just Men manage to kill the illustrious cabinet minister at a precise pre-announced time, under the eyes of the entire Metropolitan Police Force and the secret service? The Just Men always keep their word to the very letter, so it’s understood that if they don’t succeed in killing the minister at exactly that time, they will have to abandon the attempt to kill him altogether.
If we want to understand why our cuddly monster Dex is a true hero of our time, we can begin by asking why nothing like The Four Just Men could possibly be a major hit in the early twenty-first century.
Both the Just Men and Dexter kill bad guys. Both the Just Men and Dexter have secret lives, respectable public faces contrasting with their clandestine callings. Both the Just Men and Dexter are dedicated, disciplined, charming, muy sympatico. Both the Just Men and Dexter are, if you want to get technical about it, murderers, serial killers, dangerous criminals who, if caught, would be executed. Both the Just Men and Dexter are strongly identified with by readers or viewers, who want them to keep on getting away with their killing.
As far as I know, there were no protests or complaints about the morality of the Just Men. I’ve come across several disdainful references to Wallace in writings of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Snobbish literary people dismissed Wallace, along with Agatha Christie, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and sometimes even the Sherlock Holmes canon, as vulgar and escapist. They considered this stuff to be trash, though many of the literary intellectuals who took this line still thoroughly enjoyed reading that kind of slickly-executed trash.
But I have not encountered anyone from that period saying that there is something unhealthy about encouraging millions of readers to identify sympathetically with people who cold-bloodedly break the law in myriad ways, and commit numerous murders for which, if caught, they would be executed. And this was at a time when hardly anyone doubted that such people should be executed.
Rooting for a Killer
When we turn to Dexter and our own time, things are different. Dexter is continually being denounced by people whose denunciations are well publicized. The Parents Television Council (PTC), which claims membership of over a million, has called for action against advertisers who support Dexter, and has repeatedly agitated for confining Dexter to cable and keeping it off the broadcast channels. Although explicitly concerned about sex, violence, and profanity in TV shows which might be watched by children, the PTC is well aware that Dexter does not have a higher level of sex, violence, and profanity than some other shows, but still singles Dexter out as the worst offender because (as their President, Timothy F. Winter, puts it) “the series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered.”
There must be more to it than that, though. To pick just one obvious example, since 1844, readers of The Count of Monte Cristo have been “compelled” by Dumas’s story-telling magic to empathize with Edmond Dantes, root for him to prevail, hope he doesn’t get discovered. And Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, like the Just Men, is literally a serial killer. What’s going on here? No doubt part of the answer lies in the fact that TV is easily accessible in a way that books aren’t. But there seems to be something else.
As a first stab at the answer, Edmond Dantes has a personal motive: revenge for a terrible wrong. And the Just Men had a moral purpose—though we don’t know that the PTC wouldn’t object to the Just Men if they were popular today. But Dexter is addicted to the thrill of slaughtering humans for its own sweet sake. He’s not just a serial killer, he’s a psychotic serial killer, addicted to ritual killing—or so we’re told.
What’s the attitude of Wallace (and presumably many of his readers) to the operations of the Just Men? It’s an attitude which no thriller writer or TV scriptwriter could get away with today. The killings of the Just Men are depicted as a rational plan, and are tacitly commended, at least to the extent that the reader is expected to identify with the Just Men and hope that they keep getting away with it. Each killing is one more happy ending. The Just Men are smooth operators, fully in control. Most of their victims (with the notable exception of the Foreign Secretary in the first story) are evil characters who thoroughly deserve their fate.
In conversation, the Just Men good-humoredly compare their own notoriety with that of Jack the Ripper, then as now the most famous of all serial killers. (The Ripper is more legend than fact. The press, with the connivance of the police, conspired to pad his resume by crediting him with murders committed by several different unconnected people.)
Our Killers, Right or Wrong
What about the rightness or wrongness of what the Just Men are doing? Wallace’s attitude, as storyteller, seems to be: ‘There are big ethical issues here, and they add to the excitement, but we don’t want to get sidetracked into debating them.’ The authorial voice betrays no defensiveness, even though we’re continually reminded that the Just Men have to outwit official law enforcement as well as the bad guys. The Just Men never falter in their belief that what they’re doing is absolutely right. The writer seems to be saying to his readers: ‘I have a story to tell, and part of the charm of my story is that you and I can imagine what it’s like for scoundrels to be brought to justice. There are powerful, influential, or very slippery people who commit a lot of evil acts but are outside the reach of the law, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if ruthless, glamorous persons, with efficiency and panache, could give these disgusting villains their come-uppance?’
Could something like The Four Just Men be made today, say as a TV series, and be successful? Can you imagine a show something like Criminal Minds, in which the heroic team is a self-appointed group of private crime-fighters, who illegally execute bad guys? To make the parallel close, suppose that the pilot episode shows our heroes assassinating the Secretary of State because she supports a piece of over-intrusive homeland security legislation—and imagine that this episode is wildly popular, with no one voicing a qualm about its propriety.
This is extremely unlikely, for two related reasons. First, any such series would provoke a storm of controversy about the choice of targets for assassination, as well as the general immorality of endorsing murder. Second, and more importantly, today’s writers would be quite incapable of presenting the Just Men as entirely rational. They would be unable to stop themselves from finding the origin of the Just Men’s plans in their troubled childhoods. The ideology of childhood trauma is now so very powerful. But if the writers took care to present the team of killers as victims of their demons or their ‘issues’, this would tend to defuse the former kind of objection. We see here how currently dominant ideology automatically pushes any acceptable vigilantism in the direction of Dexter.
What became of Edgar Wallace? He persuaded his employers at the Daily Mail (a major UK national newspaper) to serialize The Four Just Men, with a generous prize to readers who could guess the ending (just how the Foreign Secretary was killed). Although the book sold millions, boosted the circulation of the Mail, and made Wallace famous, Wallace was c
areless with the wording of the prize offer, so that everyone, without limit, who guessed the ending was entitled to the prize. Wallace’s book sold millions but the prize competition drove Wallace himself into bankruptcy.
After that, he wrote many successful stories, including a series about “the Ringer,” a glamorous revenge killer. He earned a lot of money, but always spent far more than he earned, gripped by the superstition that if he failed to spend lavishly, his run of success as a writer would come to an end. His final project was the script for King Kong. In 1932 he went to Hollywood to work on that movie, but quickly fell ill and died.
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