A serial killer is at his most honest when he’s doing his killing: when the knife blade glides through the flesh, when the hands work soft skin raw, and the flash and burn of a muzzle foretells destructive bloodletting.
Certainly Dexter Morgan, the eponymous main character of Showtime’s best show, believes this is true. Over the program’s run (it just started its fourth season two weeks ago), the main tension between audience and character has always been our uneasy total access to Dexter’s inner mind. His running monologue of personal assessment—”I am a monster”—and unbridled bloodlust face plant into this brutal truth: We want him to succeed.
See, Dexter portrays a certain kind of American revenge fantasy, but complicates it, which is the reason the show is so damn good.
By day, Dexter is a forensic technician for the Miami Police Department. There, he learns all about how to commit murder and, more importantly, how to get away with it. He also grows his stable of victims, which he culls from the ranks of non-convicted murderers. Dexter murders people, yes, but only those who deserve it.
He’s a revenge archetype: a man with rigid moral weight who will stop at nothing to see justice served. The only problem with this picture is that Dexter has a pathological need to kill.
In the show’s first season, we found out that our hero witnessed the horrific murder of his mother as a young child. This apparently instilled a permanent psychological compulsion to murder. As a teenager, when he confesses this salient desire to his adoptive father, a homicide detective, the dad decides he can’t change his son’s behavior, only direct it toward a greater good. He gives Dexter “the code.”
The code is the binding principle of Dexter’s life, a series of rules that set out who should be killed, and how he should live his life. The code saves Dexter from a life without meaning, but establishes that he is a monster.
Dexter is best looked at as series of dualities. The hidden life versus the projected life. The good serial killer versus the bad. The criminal justice system versus Dexter’s justice system. Which side is better is hard to see.
In the fourth season, Dexter has a changed life. He’s a new dad and husband, living in the suburbs, which cuts into his stabbing time. He’s also about to meet the Trinity Killer, the newest in a series of truly awful serial killers who Dexter has danced with in the past.
Set with a dark and moody neo-noir style, Dexter, as ever, entertains with a certain humor, panache and delicious style that sets the show apart. It’s part police procedural and part existential crisis. It’s also just bizarre. Matter of factly, it aims to humanize a serial killer in a way no other piece of cinema has done before.
The moral questions at play are vast, and the production and writing substantial. It’s just one more show in a long line of premium cable productions—The Sopranos, The Wire—that prove television is one of the best places for filmic art.