Your Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer

Film Friday

Today, in a slight departure, I am writing on a television series rather than a film, one that has gripped me for months. My love affair came to a crashing end last week, however, and I have resolved never to watch another episode. Since I tell my students that negative viewing experiences are as revealing as positive ones, today I analyze what my angry rejection means.

The television series is Dexter and I will be revealing what occurs in the final episode of Season 4, the one with the bathtub killer.

Dexter has a bizarre premise: its protagonist is a serial killer who only kills serial killers.His dark penchant comes from having seen his mother butchered when he was a child.His father, a cop , figures that Dexter’s desire to kill can be channeled against killers who have managed to escape the law.In other words, he trains Dexter to become a vigilante avenging angel.

But to make sure that Dexter only kills murderers, his father instills in him a code. Dexter can only kill when he has absolute proof. His father also adds other rules that are designed to insure that Dexter escapes detection.

Dexter breaks one of these latter rules, however: he becomes too close to another human being. In fact, he falls in love with and marries Rita. In the process, he becomes stepfather to her children and they have a baby together. As the seasons progress, we see Dexter’s life become increasingly complicated: he must balance marriage, fatherhood, his day job (as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami homicide department), and his night job.

The series is not for everyone. For one thing, you have to have a strong stomach since people are always getting cut up. It’s not normally the kind of thing I watch.

But my novelist friend Rachel Kranz told me it was interesting, and I became fascinated with its psychological complexity.I think it also appealed to a split that I feel in myself between a nerdy and somewhat repressed exterior and an interior filled with dark desires.

Okay, so they’re not that dark. But I find them embarrassing enough that I don’t share them with others.

Anyway, seasons three and four show Dexter trying to open up to Rita, even as he knows that he will never be able to completely share vulnerabilities. In fact, following his father’s rules, he initially chooses her because she is a traumatized rape victim who doesn’t want intimacy, just company. Therefore he is able to use her as cover of normalcy. The problem with this plan is that she recovers, in part because of her relationship with him.

At times, the series takes on a comic streak: she insists on couples counseling because she catches him in some of his lies and senses that he is holding something back. He tells her that he’s afraid she will no longer love him if she finds out who he really is. It’s a counseling cliché but in this case it’s really true. She has already been traumatized by her first husband, who “merely” beat her up and then tried to take her kids (Dexter disposes of him), and we figure that she will be shattered if she learns she is married to a mass murderer.

What has kept me coming back to the series is not all the killing but the psychological drama of Dexter coming out of his shell.I have enjoyed watching him learn what it’s like to feel like a normal human being, learn how to become a loving father, learn that others can see him as somebody worthwhile and not as the monster that he knows he is.He becomes less socially awkward.He discovers that he can feel remorse.Although the voice of his father is always with him, telling him that he cannot let his guard down for a moment, he allows himself to begin believing that he can live a normal life.

In one scene, normality comes to him in the form of what Milan Kundera would call kitsch: we have a slightly tinted frame of him envisioning celebrating his baby’s first birthday.

As I approached the finale of Season 4, I eagerly awaited a comforting message. Dexter would do the impossible, somehow manage to momentarily resolve all his selves—father, husband, crime lab technician, serial killer, and an invented self he has created to pull in the bathtub killer—and take the next step towards full personhood. While I knew that he could never be normal, I reminded myself that none of us are ever entirely normal. I was willing to embrace a qualified resolution.

And for most of the finale I thought I was going to get it. First of all, Dexter sends Rita and kids out of reach of the serial killer, who knows who he is. Then he makes a miraculous escape: although he is at the killer’s house when the police invade, he comes up with a believable excuse for being there. Then his sister, a cop who has cracked the case, tells him how important he is in her life. Then he captures the killer and dispenses with him. All seems well.

Only then he comes home and finds his baby crying on the kitchen floor while lovely and kind Rita lies dead in the bathtub. The killer got to them after all. End of season.

If this had been a book, I would have thrown it across the room, as I did with the 19^th century novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith, which has a comparable twist. (An idyllic union between a loving couple is sabotaged by a vindictive father.) There are reports of Victorians reading the ending of Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop on trains and throwing the book out the window when the angelic little Nell dies. That’s how I felt.

The reviews of the finale didn’t help. Dexter has attracted a fairly discriminating following, and viewers were laudatory. Some had felt that Rita had been holding the show back and were pleased that she was now out of the way. Others looked forward to the fact that Dexter would be wrestling with the complications of single parenthood. Some pointed out that, if Dexter becomes too domesticated, he is no longer a monster and the edgy quality of the show is lost.

Many appreciated the fact that we should have seen this coming but that none of us did. Everyone agreed it was a brilliant coup.

Except me. I wanted Rita back. I wanted to watch this marriage continue growing. Even though I recognized, intellectually, that the reviewers might be right, I didn’t care. I wanted my kitsch.

It made me realize how deeply I am invested in the ideal of the nuclear family.Dickens’ vision of the family hearth has been the Bible of generations of Bateses and Fulchers and it has come to me unadulterated.As a family we celebrate this vision every Christmas, where we follow Victorian rituals that date back at least as far as my great grandparents.For God’s sake, I once played Tiny Tim in a community pageant.“God bless us every one,” I remember saying as I leaned on my crutch in the play’s closing lines.The Season 4 finale, therefore, was like watching someone, deliberately and wittily, spit on the cross.

I have to make some use of this heartbreak. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

All around our increasingly globalized world, people are being told that old patterns are breaking up and the knowledge strikes them as a violation. For instance, we live in an America where large swathes of the population speak Spanish, where the president is black and son of a mixed marriage (with a Kenyan father and a Muslim middle name), where men want to marry other men and women other women, where suicidal Muslims attacked America and took down an iconic building. All of this has happened suddenly. No wonder people are lashing out in reactionary anger and listening to radio and television demagogues who articulate their panic.

Versions of this drama are occurring around the world and help explain the rise of various fundamentalisms. I suspect every society has its versions.

I’m not saying to let these people have their way. In any event, history is generally not on their side (although a lot of destruction can happen before a new order emerges). I am saying that we who disagree with them need to listen to them with sympathy. A hysterical response to a hysterical response just feeds the flames.

That’s one thing my hysterical response to Dexter taught me. Having one’s idealized vision ripped from one cuts deep.  So I’m grateful to the show for teaching me that. But I’m still not going to watch any more episodes.