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I AM IN LOVE WITH A SOCIOPATH

During these cold months, Molly Young is keen to cosy up at home with her new friend Dexter, a humble, introspective serial killer. Really, he's a mensch with just a bit of blood on his hands ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Just as it takes a certain inner push to learn a new board game or jump into a cold swimming pool, so it is with starting a new television series. After exhausting "30 Rock" and "The Office", and in need of a break from old pirated "Simpsons" episodes, I found myself casting a line for a new series to savour during this indoor season. After an arduous search, I finally turned to "Dexter", a show about a serial killer.
   
I was swayed over dinner with my former English professor and his wife, a TV critic for the New York Times. Together they made a persuasive case: it was skilfully plotted television, said the critic over salad. It grappled with all sorts of wacky literary conceits, said the English professor over flank steak (the show is based on a book series by Jeff Lindsay). Their recommendations seemed to place "Dexter" at the centre of a curious Venn diagram composed of “literary experimentation” and “entertaining TV” circles. By dessert, I knew I would soon be investigating the "Dexter" DVD situation.
   
But I worried. Would the series threaten to become dull after the novelty of its production design wore off (a la "Mad Men")?  Would it ensnare me and then impose unreasonably long intervals between seasons (like "Lost")?  As with Dickens novels and generous burritos, I tend to stay committed once a choice is made, no matter how arduous the slog. It is crucial, then, to choose wisely.

"Dexter" had all my requirements: it came vigorously praised, there was a backlog of three seasons to keep me entertained on penurious winter nights, and it runs on the Showtime network, a reliable source of cleverly quirky TV. "Dexter" it would be.

For those who are not yet familiar with the show, "Dexter" is a crime series about a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. The titular lead, played by Michael C. Hall, is a likable guy. His day job is in forensic blood-spatter analysis with the Miami Police Department, and he is great at solving crimes. On the surface, "Dexter" is your typical crime thriller, featuring all the delights of the genre: freakishly creative criminals, slow pans over important evidence, characters visibly experiencing clue-related epiphanies. The phrase “statewide manhunt” is uttered more than once, and the police lieutenants favour putty-coloured suits with sharp lapels.

Dexter makes for a fine host and protagonist: he’s charming and intelligent, with the striking good looks of a handsomely-built monkey. In voiceover narration, he attempts to explain his murderous actions to the viewer, insisting that he is an empty shell of a person. "I love Halloween,” he indulges. “The one time of year when everyone wears a mask, not just me.” The voiceover device allows Dexter to explain his bloody motivations with illuminating introspection. The sociopath, it turns out, is humble and has regrets. He is self-searching and self-questioning. He is, in other words, a really unconvincing sociopath.

Here’s the thing: as viewers, we have to believe that Dexter is an aberration––a man totally unlike us––in order to accept his dubious activities. And yet the very qualities that would designate him a sociopath would surely alienate him as a protagonist. The solution? A character who acts in thoroughly lovable ways while telling us that it’s all pretence. If Humbert Humbert's narration was all about providing a beguiling justification of his misdeeds, Dexter's is about convincing us that he’s bad and empty inside, despite evidence that he's really a mensch.

How did this happen? Blame it on the books. A guy like Dexter is possible in a book because a literary character, however vivid he may be in the imagination, is never tested by flesh. Yet the show is so good we’re happy to swallow this shaky conceit whole. Kudos go to Hall, who plays Dexter with such affable charm that he can deliver the corniest lines without inducing emesis: "My neat little world of lies is crumbling all around me. And I can't tell a soul,” he says. Or, “You're gonna be the one to apprehend that heinous murderer. Not her."
   
Charismatic Dexter also plays deliveryman for the show’s most important theme. The idea of visual deception––of things not being what they first appear–– ripples into all aspects of the show. Like David Lynch exploiting the latent creepiness of suburbia, "Dexter" sets its action in breezy, sleazy Miami, making excellent use of the city’s waving palms, sherbet-coloured motels and sunbaked highway overpasses, suggesting a humid rot beneath the surface. It’s a pleasurable place to visit.
   
Plus, we want to like Dexter. He’s a caricature of how most of us feel ourselves to be: outsiders some of the time, morally correct most of the time, doing the best we can with the cards we were dealt. Dexter explains that he fakes his likeability in the voiceovers, but the explanations themselves––with their introspection and self-deprecating tone––don't jibe with the hollow killer he claims to be. There's something cutely postmodern in this representation of an actor playing a character explaining that he has to act in order to, well, enact himself.
   
"Dexter" is problematic but impossible to dismiss. It is, in other words, a show worth tussling with. Its success is only underlined by the fact that its central premise is totally nonsensical. Indeed, its entertainment value lies in direct proportion to our eagerness to suspend disbelief. Despite the snags and irreconcilable contradictions of its main character, I won’t stop watching Dexter. More precisely, I can’t.

Picture credit: Showtime

(Molly Young is a writer living in New York.)