Heart of the Splatter

			Send to a Friend
			Printer Friendly Format
			Leave Feedback
			Read Feedback
			Hooksexup RSS

he new Showtime series Dexter wastes no time in establishing itself as the crown prince of TV’s perpetual psycho sweepstakes. We open with a red-filtered shot of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) cruising Miami Beach. "It’s going to happen again tonight," he says, ominously. Within a minute or so, he has abducted the director of a boy’s choir and forced him to drive to a remote location in the Everglades. As it emerges, his captive is a serial killer who specializes in little boys. Dexter slaps him around a little, then forces him to look at his decaying victims, whom he has helpfully exhumed.
    "I couldn’t help myself," the choir director whimpers. "I couldn’t. Please! You have to understand!"
    "Trust me," Dexter shoots back, "I definitely understand. See, I can’t help myself either." He pauses dramatically. "But children? I could never do that, not like you. Never. Ever. Kids? I . . . I have standards."
    Welcome, brave viewers, to the quintessential American construct of our age: the serial killer with a heart of gold.
    Fortunately for all of us, Dexter does what any upstanding homicidal maniac would do in such circumstances: he tapes his victim to a table and tortures him to death, using a drill and assorted other tools of the trade. The whole thing is just delightfully Dick Cheneyish.

    Dexter is supposedly based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, though it comes off more like the byproduct of a cynical pitch session: Hannibal Lector meets CSI. Our hero (predictably) is a forensics investigator who specializes in bloodstain-pattern analysis. This allows him to spend his days examining dead bodies and photos of dead bodies, and his nights creating yet more dead bodies. Hall plays Dexter as a charming monster, a sociopath who just can’t resist his own innate bloodlust. Luckily, he had a dad who understood the unique of burdens of wanting to maim people to death. Rather than seeking therapy for his boy, dad trained his son to channel his savagery by killing only those who have it coming.
    And they say family values are dead.
    Naturally, the producers give Dexter a hot girlfriend, one of those saintly single moms grown in a lab for use on select television dramas. Rita (Julie Benz) works long hours to support her adorable children and happens to look like a runway model — you know the type. She’s also a victim of domestic abuse, which has rendered her unable to have sex, a convenient arrangement given that Dexter has a pickaxe where his libido should be.
    Dexter has a sister, too, Deb (Jennifer Carpenter), a plucky vice cop hoping to rise through the ranks, despite possessing the IQ of a frozen pastry. Their central form of sibling bonding consists of banter at crime scenes. The rest of the cast is the expected rainbow coalition of cops, all of whom adhere, with grinding predictability, to their given stereotypes. The Cuban, por ejemplo, communicates in Spanglish and dresses in guayaberas. A minor effort is made to get us to care about their individual ambitions and love interests. For the most part, viewers will be happy to watch Dexter as he plans and carries out his vigilante executions and, less frequently, helps his co-workers track their latest quarry.
    It may very well be that South Florida boasts an unprecedented concentration of mass murderers. I must be honest, though, in confessing that this was not my experience during the four years I spent in Miami as a newspaper reporter. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I did not encounter a single serial killer lurking among the neon and palm, unless you count being in South Miami Beach at the same time as Andrew Cunanan, the nutbag who murdered Gianni Versace. Nonetheless, Dexter serves up a hot, spicy tropical paradise — cue the salsa music, please! — with no fewer than three serial killers at large per episode!
    The marquee suspect for this first season is the so-called Ice Truck Killer, who drains all the blood from his (or her) victims, before slicing them into assorted cuts and chops. Dexter, upon viewing the first of many porcelain corpses, cannot help but gush at the handiwork: "No blood at all — why hadn’t I thought of that? What a beautiful idea . . . I’d never seen such clean, dry, neat-looking flesh. Wonderful." As it turns out, the admiration is mutual. Yes, the Ice Truck killer has a raging crush on Dexter. We can expect the pair to spend the first season playing a grisly game of cadaver-and-mouse.

    The viewer is given to understand that Dexter does not find all these dead bodies upsetting, because he’s a natural-born killer. The problem is that Dexter is hardly the only one on the program who drools over the remains. "Body’s in good shape," one of his colleagues observes, adding, wistfully, "She had a nice ass, too." For her part, Deb looks ready to do cartwheels over each new corpse.
    We’ve seen this all before, of course. Prime time is now wall-to-wall with shows in which hottie crime investigators treat dead bodies not as the proper objects of mourning, or ethical reflection, but as forensic puzzles to be solved. Dexter, though, is the first show to take such naked pleasure in human butchery. It seems never to have occurred to anyone in his world that a dead person is anything more than a complex meat product.
    Critics and fans alike will want to cry foul at this point. The show, they will insist, is merely black comedy. So what if its central allure is sociopathic violence? The cinematography is so stylish! The dialogue is so clever! But stripped of its slick veneer, Dexter is something far more insidious — the apotheosis of our descent into theatrical barbarism. It is worse than a snuff film, because a snuff film at least carries the power to shock and disturb us. Dexter, on the other hand, gets hailed as a satiric masterpiece, one that allows us to chuckle at our own closeted sadism.
    A culture with even a shred of decency would regard this program not as a masterpiece but a terrifying symptom. As Americans we are loosening our grip on the sanctity of human life. How else can one explain why we choose to indulge in contrived, pornographic violence rather than confronting the death of real children in Darfur, or — oh, what the heck! — our own teenage soldiers in Iraq? If Islamic terrorists want evidence of how morally enfeebled our imperial culture has become, they need look no further than this sickening series — and the acclaim it has won among our fine, Christian citizens.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Steve Almond‘s new essay collection is (Not that You Asked). It is, like much of his work, filthy.