Dreaming the Future Closer

(and now for something completely different)

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already caught this, but it’s novel to me right now.  I was watching the season finale of Dexter on CBS and it dawned on me all of a sudden why, for all of the gore and sociopathy, Dexter seemed so familiar.  The plot, the character, are modeled on superhero comics.  In fact, not just any superhero, but an iconic and powerful one–Spiderman.  There are significant variations, of course, but the structural parallels are strong.

Let’s tally the list real quick like:

Dexter is raised by foster parents.  For Spiderman, it was his uncle and aunt, but the important thing here is that he was an orphan.

Dexter has a secret identity.  Moreover, he has all the problems that come with a secret identity.  He has to have cover stories for his nightly forays to brign justice to the world.  If people were to find out, it would have disastrous consequences for them and him.  And, of course, he has people who suspect he is something more, even if they don’t realize what he really is. 

Dexter has a code of honor.  Better yet, that code, like Spiderman’s, is rooted in his adopted father figure’s morality.  He acts to maintain that code to the best of his ability, even when it makes things harder on him.  Through flashbacks, we see very clearly that he dealt with many of the classic superhero dilemmas–does he use his powers for good or for evil (i.e. selfish) ends?

Dexter is a science geek.  What’s his job?  He’s a labworker, a specialist in blood, admittedly, but it’s a rational, science-y kind of affair, just like Peter Parker’s chemical giftedness.

Dexter has an origin story.  This one is important because it’s actually quite hard to determine what, if anything, ever happened to a serial killer to make them a serial killer.  Not so with Dexter.  Just like a superhero, we can establish a dramatic moment at which he became what he was.

Dexter’s life is episodic, villain of the week, with a recurring arch nemesis.  This is important, too.  Each episode features his conflict with a single and colorful villain.  While none have superpowers per se, just like Dexter they have the power of killing easily, and misuse it for their own pleasure.  Against that backdrop, there is an escalating tension with a supervillain, an arch-nemesis, who has special insight into our hero.  Like many good superhero stories, that villain is part of the hero’s ‘normal’ life, embodying not just the threat to his heroic person, but to his life and loved ones.

Here I have emphasized the proximity of Dexter the character to Spiderman, but, you know, the reverse holds in an eerie way, too.  What is with the superhero trope of being above the law, of working outside it even as they supposedly carry it out more effectively? 

One of the things Dexter and superheros embody is the urge to reach justice more quickly, more truly, without the intervening system of justice.  They emerge, in part, in response to a system of justice that is growing ever more distant, less immediate, more complicated. 

Reading this way also illuminates a certain moral blindspot in the show.  While much effort is put into humanizing many of the victims of the serial killers Dexter kills, the hookers his nemesis kills are not so well portrayed.  Those women are in so many ways ‘beneath’ the law. 

The show doesn’t touch upon those women as people except in the briefest of moments (i.e. when his sister, no longer undercover, goes back to the hookers she worked with, when Angel discovers the hooker with the prosthetic hand painted just like one of the nemesis’s victim’s hand) and doesn’t really treat their deaths as a moral problem.  Quite the opposite, it spends more time dwelling upon the spectacle of their murder, their body as meat, not the life it ended.

However, as soon as his sister’s death is immanent, the whole situation changes.  It’s telling that, before she can be threatened and rescued, she has to undergo a transformation.  She can’t be the potentially promiscuous woman that the series began with.  No, she has to be monogamous, virtuous, in love. 

That the route of her purification is also the killer arch-nemesis is a clever twist, but it doesn’t change the underlying message: only as sister and good, as marriage-material, is she the woman worth saving.

Which suggests that, for all its adult content, the show hasn’t really moved beyond a basically comic book notion of morality and justice.  It still presumes that we need a virtuous damsel for us to care.  I keep thinking of Plato’s Republic, about his concern over the difficulty of representing virtue in theater.  Thinking about Dexter makes me much more sympathetic to his concerns. 

Theater often works best when it plays to our sympathies, our prejudices.  We ’swallow’ the story more easily, throw our hopes upon it.  Though, perhaps unlike Plato, I’m not sure that is such a bad thing so long as we differentiat keenly theater of justice from true justice.  Per Aristotle, catharsis, release, is perfectly acceptable as a goal of theater.

Of course, keeping theater and life separate is awfully difficult, especially when, like Dexter, they mimic life so well in places.  The better the illusion, the less like illusion it seems.

It starts to seem like an endless dialogue between the Platonic and Aristotlean positions on theater, no?  Perhaps it is by sustaining the dialogue, the tension, that we manage to sustain the difference between the realm of theater and life, to the benefit of both.