The Sexual Politics of Dexter

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Film Friday

Last Friday I wrote about my deep distress over the season 4 finale of Dexter. (Read no further if you want don’t want the suspense ruined for you.) My friend Rachel Kranz, who introduced me to the show, wrote me the following response examining why people, men especially, find the show so captivating. Don’t worry if you’ve never watched Dexter and never plan to.  Rachel’s astute analysis provides deep insight into how a society’s power structure distorts our most intimate relationships.

In her response, Rachel touches on two other shows and one film: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which she finds brilliant), the Buffy spin-off Angel (which she believes suffers from the same limitations as Dexter), and a 1976 film by Swiss director Alain Tanner, Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 (a masterful film about which, with her help, I wrote my first major academic article).

Dexter features a serial killer who we root for because he only kills serial killers. In the process, he marries a wonderful woman with two children (Rita), and they have a child together. I was upset because the scriptwriters determined (for reasons Rachel explains) that the marriage cannot continue, so they have Rita killed by another monster. Rachel takes seriously my desperate desire for a happy family resolution and, after noting that many male viewers are more interested in male performance than family harmony, points out that (1) my happy resolution would necessarily mean the death of the show and (2) the greater impasse that the show points to—a brutal and competitive world that disrupts male-female relationships—can’t be solved at the level of the individual or the family. Rather, we must leave such private solutions and engage in collective social action if we are to achieve the harmony I want.

Buffy concludes with such a vision, which is why Rachel finds it so extraordinary.  At the end, the heroine stops the apocalypse by sharing her powers with the women of the world and then, now a normal human being, goes off with her friends to fight the next battle (in, as I recall, Cleveland). Jonah also ends with a vision of future action: 1960’s activists in retreat create a protest community and name the next generation–so that even though they then splinter, a collective vision has been passed on to Jonah, the future. Dexter and Angel, by contrast, are men who are doomed to perpetual inner torment.

Rachel’s brilliant grasp of the intersection of the public and private spheres can be seen on full display in her novel Leaps of Faith (Farrar Straus, 2000).

By Rachel Kranz

Dear Robin,

Sorry Dexter was such an agonizing experience…but I agree, it’s fascinating how deeply it spoke to you. I haven’t seen Season 4 yet (though I knew Rita was killed and saw the actress on another show, which I wish I hadn’t, but you weren’t the spoiler!).

What’s also interesting to me, since I’ve always liked the show but not loved it on the level of its biggest fans, is how deeply it speaks to male fans, at least some of whom I assume are drawn to the image of a man who is leading a sham marriage with a woman who could never really understand him–as well as to the image of a man whom the world could never understand. And then when people do understand it–as with Lila in Season 2 or the Jimmy Smits character in Season 3–that’s worse because they just encourage his destructive impulses instead of putting the brake on them.

To me what’s always been fascinating about Dexter is how everybody has that sham side in the series; everybody is violent and broken and confused and out of touch with who they really are. He’s just the extreme. As you know, I don’t at all see the world that way fundamentally, but there is certainly a piece of that which I do see. I don’t know what I’ll think of Season 4, but to me it’s like those gothic novels, “Someone is trying to kill me and I think it’s my husband.” In the end of those, there’s always the, “Oh, I misunderstood, he’s really a good guy who loves me,” but as Tania Modleski says in Loving with a Vengeance, that’s really a cover for, “I’m living with this man I don’t understand who seems bent on destroying me, or who is cold and withdrawn and won’t share his emotional secrets with me,” etc. etc.

Dexter isn’t from the woman’s point of view, so it’s not asking that. It’s asking, for men, “What if we really can’t protect women and fulfill our manly duties; what if we can’t protect our children from the horrors of the world; what if our violent, angry natures that women are always asking us to tame are both unchangeable and necessary?” All the men in the show wrestle with that, and all the women do too. They want the men to protect them from horror, and they want the men to be sensitive and loving. And (since it’s a male show), they fundamentally don’t understand how horrible the world is or what the man has to go through to survive in it, let alone to protect them.


I don’t think this was ever your story (or the story of most of the men in my family), and, like the gothics (or Jane Austen), I don’t particularly like works that validate people’s anxieties and fantasies rather than challenge them. Although Dexter violated your fantasies, it certainly validates those of men who see their job as protecting their women from a hostile world that requires them to be monsters…and even then it’s not enough. And the woman both relies on that and sort of asks for it and would hate them if she really faced it or knew what it cost.

I think a lot of men feel like there are two choices: show the woman a strong, smiling face or show her your true rage and fear and frustration and anxiety (as standup comics do). I think men believe—with some justification—that if women saw that darker side, they wouldn’t stick around; that, like Rita, they don’t know what the hell they’re really asking for when they say, “You can tell me your dark side and I’ll still love you.” Really? So most guys would say, “You want to hear about my porn collection and you won’t be mad?” or “You want to hear how much rage and despair and frustration I feel that I try not to show you,” or “You want to hear how terrified I am that I can’t satisfy you and how resentful I feel that I’ve been stuck with that responsibility, which I never wanted and never asked for, but if I want any sex or companionship, I’ve got to take it on?” Try this for a dark side—I kill people every week, including your children’s father, and then I use my job with the police department to cover it up. That’s the Dexter problem: this is who I am, and all I am, and it doesn’t get any nicer, so I can either show you or cover it up. If I cover it up, you’ll want to get at it and be mad at me for withholding; but if I show you, you’ll hate me for feeling this way and being this way.

On a practical level, I don’t see how they could have let Rita live and had another season Once Dexter is happily married, he has to become human, and then his hiding his serial killer side really becomes an unforgivable violation of the relationship. So he either gives it up (and the show ends with him healed) or we have an even worse ending–her finding it out and leaving him and taking the kids so he’ll never see them again (and having him arrested and put in prison for life, if she has any sense of social responsibility).

It was a similar problem for Angel, which is why that show fell apart so badly–the character could never progress without ending the premise of the show. (For those of you who don’t know Angel: the main character is a vampire with a soul and a curse: if he becomes truly happy, by achieving romantic union with a woman he loves, he’ll lose his soul and become a monster. So the character is always falling in love and then not being able to do anything about it…and you watch the relationship develop knowing that it can’t ever go anywhere.) The weird contortions that the show had to go through ultimately were awful, so I had to stop watching, even though I still love the early episodes in retrospect. But knowing where they probably lead (I think the whole vampire-fighting world falls apart in a horrible, creepy set of betrayals), I can’t re-watch the early episodes, either.

It’s fascinating to think about that, too. Dexter and Angel speak to the ultimate insolubility of male-female relationships, and to a man’s relationship to the world, under our current system. I kind of agree that they are insoluble, as I think race is, unless the whole system changes. So meanwhile, you do the best you can and accept the big shortcomings. But that’s a comedy, which I have written [Rachel’s novel Leaps of Faith].

The darker forms tell the bigger systemic truths, which is that it doesn’t matter what individuals do: the kitsch [of a happy family resolution] is a false consolation, in the same way that me surviving and being happy is a false consolation when you think about all the people in the world that have to suffer for me to have the comfortable life that I do. (My current novel is about that; hence, it’s a mystery!) On an individual level, of course, go on and be happy. But as an artist, do you celebrate the corrupt, partial, meaningless happiness or point out the systemic insolubility?

One last thought: Robin, you and I share a deep love for the Alain Tanner film Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000. And that film also has to end with the possible happiness for eight individuals falling completely apart, because the world can’t sustain it. Even at the happiest moment, one of the eight—Marie—is in jail for slipping her elderly impoverished customers some free products from the big capitalist chain store where she’s a cashier. Later, the utopia falls apart because the organic farmers are being squeezed out by agribusiness and they can’t afford to pay school taxes and maintain the experimental school. The whole utopia always rested on the shoulders of the “two zeros”—immigrant laborers who don’t even get names. Doesn’t the political teacher, Marco, get fired for bringing politics into the classroom? Trotskyist Max and Hindu Madeleine can’t integrate their material/spiritual versions of the dialectic. And of course, Mathieu, the industrial worker, has already been laid off.

So Jonah is a sunnier and more politically aware version of the same problem: how do you tell people that nothing can fix the systemic problems except changing the entire system, without making them want to throw the book across the room? Or maybe, you let them throw the book and hope that they’ll stick with it and figure out how to change the world, if being confronted with its truths makes them so mad.

Of course, you could argue that Dexter isn’t true; that men really aren’t monsters with horrible secrets locked away that their women will never really understand; that the forces of evil aren’t so out of control that, ultimately, the men can’t protect their families much as they would like to. And there is no political vision in Dexter, which is why I personally find it less compelling—and less great—than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I think, like Jonah, does it all. Still, there’s no happy ending there either, really. In the end, Buffy, like Mathieu and then Jonah, just have to leave their utopias and/or individual specialness behind and go out with a bunch of other people and actually find a way to save the world.

But how many works of art ever give you that?

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