When Dexter, the tale of a sensitive serial killer, first premiered, five seasons ago, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum counted herself a fan:
Each week, Dexter, played with icy charisma by Michael C. Hall, stalked his victims. He strapped them to a table, sliced their cheeks to collect a drop of blood, then cut them up with a chainsaw. During the day, he worked as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police, side by side with his clueless sister Deb. Once we learned his history, it all made sense. Dexter witnessed his mother’s murder when he was three. His adoptive father, a cop named Harry, trained the budding sociopath to channel his compulsions—he could kill only other murderers, and only the ones that the law couldn’t convict. He couldn’t get caught. He couldn’t have relationships. Dexter called this Harry’s Code.
Well, I have a very weak stomach, and I go very much out of my way to avoid shows about high-strung dudes cutting up folks with chain saws,* even if they “deserve” it and even if, you know, the poor kid saw Santa Claus hacking up his mom with a dull machete. Even skipping the obvious, not to say bourgeois, consideration of how Dexter can “know”† that these people are guilty of capital crimes, there’s the whole death penalty thing, not to mention the whole torture thing, the cruel and unusual punishments thing, which I thought we had gotten past a couple of hundred years ago, fool that I was.
Emily, obviously, is made of younger and sterner stuff than I am, and clearly relished the fourth season wrap-up, in which a seriously undisciplined Dexter bonded with a fellow serial killer who, naturally, murdered Dexter’s wife (you knew that “no relationships” thing would go by the boards pretty quickly, didn’t you?), “leaving Dexter’s infant son spattered in his mother’s blood.” Hey, cowboy! It’s karma time!
But the fifth season has been too much even for Emily: “Now, for the first time, Dexter’s mirror [person he identifies with] was a victim: Lumen, a young woman who had been gang-raped and tortured. It was a provocative dynamic, but by midseason all nuance dropped out. The villains were chuckling sadists with an incoherent backstory.”
Gang rape/torture? Sure! With an incoherent backstory? Sorry, dudes, that is so not art.
Afterwords
I thought this piece was going to be funnier (that is to say, even funnier) because I confused Emily Nussbaum with Martha Nussbaum. Martha’s a philosopher (at the University of Chicago), while Emily’s a Manhattan gadabout, writing about TV and la Vie Pop for New York, New Yorker, et al. If Martha writes a fan letter to Dexter, I’ll definitely be on it, but I rather hope she doesn’t.
*It isn’t clear from Emily’s précis if the “bad guys” are alive or dead when Dexter cranks up the Poulan. At first blush, one would think the latter, but since “transgression” is Dexter’s middle name, maybe not.
†Since I’ve never seen the show, I can only guess, but my guess is that Dex “knows,” or at least the audience is assured that he does know, by the time-honored TV/Hollywood device of showing us the villain both committing the crime and giggling evilly as he does so. The law is so lame! Why can’t they catch these guys, when it’s so obvious that they’re guilty?
