Darkly Dreaming

A couple of years ago, when CBS was negotiating with Showtime to broadast an edited version of the series Dexter, the Parents Television Council
objected because, in the words of its president, Timothy Winter: “The biggest problem with the series is something that no amount of editing can get  around: the series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered.”

I had not seen Dexter until recently, as I don’t subscribe to Showtime. But now I’ve seen the first two seasons and Winter’s comment provokes two
responses:

1. Dexter is a brilliant show, skillfully written, smartly plotted and realized by a top-notch cast.

2. Winter is partly right.

However, while Winter is right that the series “compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get
discovered,” he’s wrong that that somehow invalidates its value. As is typical for professional busybodies, Winter is only looking at the superficial
aspects of the show. The reason Dexter works is not because the title character is a serial killer; that’s only the manifestation of a much deeper
substance. The show is not about rooting for a serial killer, it’s about the history of an individual and the slowly revealed backstory of how and
why he is a serial killer.

To summarize for the uninitiated: Dexter Morgan (played by Michael C. Hall) is a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police, who sometimes kills
people who have themselves committed murder and think they’ve gotten away with it. He does not victimize the innocent; Dexter’s victims are those who are violent, dangerous and not likely to stop being so. From Dexter’s point of view, he is “taking out the trash,” not simply murdering for fun.

The why of all this, which I will not spoil here, is revealed piece by piece in flashbacks to his childhood and adolescence. It is both the discovery
of his past and the moral ambiguity of his present that provides the interwoven fabric of the story.

The anti-hero is not a new concept, of course. Take a traditional dramatis personae and make the antagonist the focal point rather than a supporting character, and you have an anti-hero. The moral crusaders on the right can decry this because, seen simplistically, such stories do appear to evoke sympathy for the evil.

But there’s another way to look at it, a way that evokes multiple layers of significance. The value of the anti-hero, particularly the kind of anti-
hero who — like Dexter or The Shield’s Vic Mackie — can easily pass for normal among people who don’t know them well, is that he is us. They are
ordinary people, who through a series of external circumstances and their own deliberate choices, have slidden deeply into darkness from which they can’t cllimb out.

Seeing them as such, as three-dimensional human beings instead of carboard monsters, does evoke some degree of empathy. They illuminate the darkness in our own psyches, and while most of us are not hiding secret lives as serial killers, we’re all subject to less noble motives sometimes than we might care to admit. Dexter is an exaggerated version of anyone who has wished to take revenge on behalf of society against a miscreant who has gotten away with it. Vic Mackie is an extreme example of what happens when you take too many shortcuts against the rules.

I think it may be this that worries the Timothy Winters of the world. It’s easier to stand in judgment of people when we can tell ourselves they
are simply evil and vile. If we are encouraged to see them as human beings with loves and fears, with good intentions leading to bad actions, we’re more likely to reserve our condemnation, or at least to temper it with compassion.