The Tightening Noose

I've just finished the first season of Showtime's Dexter, which I started watching shortly after I discovered how much was available to watch on Netflix Instant Watch, and holy shit there's so much to watch on Netflix Instant Watch. I was completely unprepared for it. When the option was first presented to me, I quickly looked through the available films, saw a handful of good titles and even watched the first few seasons of The Office on a bender with a friend's Xbox.

So Dexter became the ultimate test of this Instant Watch service. And what can I say? It's streaming content, so it's certainly not HD quality or anything, but that's a worthy sacrifice if, like me, you tend to want to ingest TV shows all at once instead of waiting for individual discs to arrive in the mail, and especially if you're sharing an account with a family of seven and you have the two-at-a-time service and every time you get something you're renting a Michael Bay film.

I'm sure you all know that Dexter is about a blood spatter analyst cum serial killer played by Michael C. Hall, but he's a serial killer with a catch: he only kills bad guys. How does he determine who's good and who's bad? Cold logic. He's a sociopath, after all. And why is this film so different from all those shows and movies about subverting the law and murdering to satisfy your personal code of morality that I hate so very much? Not enough, honestly, but Dexter is a sociopath who kills first and foremost to satisfy his desire to murder; I just wish the show would keep that in mind when they deviate from the main story line to have Dexter pornishly execute a drunk driver. Dexter is a sociopath who has the same relationship with a code of morality that I do with the process of making a tequila sunrise. If I mix all these things together I can have a tequila sunrise, which has tequila in it, so hooray. I could drink the tequila straight, but that's not how it's done, I'm supposed to have something larger and I'm supposed to take it slower. The writers take a more commercial approach to the murders, trying to appeal to the audience's love of violence and disgust with criminals. The more interesting approach would be Dexter's hatred of the code, but continued obedience to it out of respect for the man who taught it to him.

Aside from the show's antiquated hatred and misunderstanding of marijuana, there's one scene that's very tellingly constructed from a morally conservative standpoint. Spoilers for the rest of this paragraph. One episode follows Dexter's disposal of a couple who bring Cubans into America and kill the ones whose families can't pay the activation fees. A child hiding in a car trunk gets a front-row viewing of Dexter sedating and dragging the wife off. Dexter has to investigate his own crime scene (rote and you knew this would happen from the moment you heard the premise, but come on, it's still pretty cool) when the police discover the child. They get him to talk to a sketch artist and together they produce an immaculate drawing of JESUS CHRIST. It's like having sugar poured directly into your tear ducts by Glenn Beck. I almost stopped watching the show right then and there. If Dexter was going to become the symbol of the heroic that catch the wicked on behalf of those damned liberal courts that never seem to catch them themselves, I wasn't going to be a part of it. I pressed on, mostly out of curiosity for Dexter's character. Despite what happened in that episode, I was getting invested in the character, despite how hard large portions of the show were working against it.

And in spite of all that they did, the character, remains intact and interesting. The most interesting portions of the show are his interactions with the police officers he works with as a blood-spatter analyst and his personal interactions. Now, those personal interactions are best when he's with his girlfriend Rita, but I'm not convinced they couldn't be better with his sister, a detective who he also works with. In fact, Rita and Dexter's relationship is a sub-plot I'm not entirely sure I like. Rita's a well-written character, but her relationship with Dexter is played out, especially since we get the same pieces of character from his relationship with his sister, and his relationship with his sister tends to be pertinent to the plot.

But what would they do with forty hours of freed-up time getting rid of Rita would give them? More introspection and more fantasy sequences. Being a sociopath, it's difficult to get to know Dexter through his interactions with others, and the writers, for whatever reason, only use his narration and fantasy sequences in conjunction with his interactions with others, rarely to reflect on the world around him. He even says he lives his life in his head, and being in there with him would be a billion times more revealing than trying to figure out what he's thinking while he interacts with people and pretends to be normal.

The biggest offense I think the show commits is to take us out of Dexter's head and give us entire subplots about the world around him, especially the fucking cops he works with. Every time we have a subplot about them, it drags us away from the best part of the show and into the land of boring, Law & Order police procedural bullshit. I don't see why the show needs to create all these salt-of-the-earth characters and put us in their presence for so long. I assume it's because they think we won't be able to relate to Dexter and need to fall back on boring stock characters. And they're right. Most of their audience aren't sociopaths and can't relate to what Dexter is going through, but that's only one way to connect to a character. Just because he's not relateable doesn't mean he's not sympathetic or interesting. And if we can relate our everyday struggles to a character, chances are he's not terribly interesting. Dexter's head is an interesting place and nothing else the writers come up with really compares.

Excel though it may when we're inside his head, the show's approach to the mind of a serial killer isn't exactly original or unique. It's seriously indebted to the writings of Bret Easton Ellis, and even manages the most excruciating homage to his work in one scene that's like being hit over the head with a pole made partially hydrogenated stupid. After all, Ellis' stuff has been brought to life on film really well only once and I think it has a lot of life left in it.

In any case, I just watched the first season. Perhaps all the problems I have with the show are solved further down the line, but based on what I've heard, they aren't.

6/10