University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

OUR DARK DEFENDER: DEXTER IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-9/11 AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

EMILY GLOSSER

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2013

A special thank you to my grandmother— Rita Glosser— for her unconditional love, and for always encouraging me to follow my dreams.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my parents, Nancy and Richard Glosser, for their love and guidance throughout both my childhood and adulthood. I would also like to thank the many friends I have made in graduate school who shaped me as an academic, and have become a wonderful support network. I would like to thank my reader, Dr. Eric

Kligerman, who is such an inspiring, talented, and encouraging individual. Finally, a special thanks to my thesis chair, Dr. Anastasia Ulanowicz. Anja, as we call her, has been my mentor since I was an undergraduate and is one of the reasons why I am in graduate school today. She has helped me grow as a writer and thinker, and I am so appreciative to have her in my life, both as a teacher and as a friend.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 7

2 THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE ...... 16

The Hard-Boiled Detective and Moral Interventionism ...... 20 The Criminal Figure as the “Rogue” State ...... 25 The Forensic Investigator and the Murder Ritual ...... 28 Conclusion: Dexter as the Sovereign Figure ...... 35

3 THE CHILD ...... 38

The Virgin Land and Virgin Children: The Threatened Child in the War on Terror .. 41 “I am not like you…nobody hurts my children”: The Protective Father and Vulnerable Child Figure in Dexter ...... 45 Conclusion: Child as Narrative ...... 52

4 THE SERIAL KILLER...... 54

5 CONCLUSION ...... 67

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 70

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 73

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

OUR DARK DEFENDER: DEXTER IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-9/11 AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

EMILY GLOSSER

May 2013

Chair: Anastasia Ulanowicz Major: English

The Showtime series Dexter centers on a blood-spatter analyst named Dexter

Morgan (Michael C. Hall), who is also secretly a serial killer. Yet, unlike past fictional and real-life serial murderers, Dexter abides by a moral code, which restricts him to killing those that “deserve” to die, primarily other serial killers. As both an agent of the

Law that will exempt the Law when deemed necessary, Dexter acts in accord with

American exceptionalism, or the notion that the State can declare itself an exception to the order it regulates. Although exceptionalism was an organizing logic of The Cold

War, it has gained new footing following 9/11, exemplified by the Bush administration’s

Homeland Security Act and the Global War on Terror. Thus, I position Dexter in relation to its post-9/11 exceptionalist context, and argue that while the show is popular among young, liberal viewers, these viewers ultimately slip back into its neoconservative ideologies. My study of the series is split amongst three figures: the hard-boiled detective, the child, and the serial killer. While both the hard-boiled detective and the child figure affirm neoconservative exceptionalist beliefs and practices, the serial killer ultimately turns the viewers gaze inward, and exhibits the fissures within the exceptionalist framework.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The Showtime series Dexter premiered on October 1, 2006, and quickly became one of the most popular shows on television. Based on Jeff Lindsey’s novel series

Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), the show is about a blood spatter analyst named

Dexter (Michael C. Hall), who works for the Miami Metro police department, and simultaneously leads a secret life as a serial killer. Dexter, however, is not the usual persona of evil that we see in both real and fictional accounts of serial killers. Unlike

Buffalo Bill, Patrick Bateman, and John Kramer, or Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and

Charles Manson, Dexter will only kill those that “deserve” to be killed (primarily other serial killers) by following a moral Code of violence. In a flashback to Dexter’s childhood, viewers learn that Harry, Dexter’s adoptive father and a police officer, taught

Dexter the Code after he discovered a ditch full of animal remains, and realized his son had been killing neighborhood pets. Rather than punishing Dexter or responding with disgust, Harry feels empathy for his son’s murderous desires: he understands them as the result of a childhood trauma, when, as a two-year-old, Dexter witnessed his mother’s gruesome murder and sat for two days in a pool of her blood. Harry helps channel Dexter’s homicidal proclivities in a “constructive” direction, by killing those that slip through the cracks of a faulty legal system. Dexter transforms from a wounded and disturbed child into Harry’s vigilante creation, who will step outside of the Law for his own personal definition of justice. The show portrays him as “The Dark Defender” of a vulnerable, Miami population that is constantly subject to the evil whims of the monsters living amongst them.

Dexter has received some of the highest ratings in Showtime history. The season three finale garnered 1.51 million viewers, the season four finale 2.6 million, and the season seven finale 2.75 million, making it the highest rated episode in Showtime history. The show has also inspired an exorbitant amount of merchandise: through the

Showtime website, fans are able to buy Dexter’s kill costume, complete with a vinyl apron and the face shield, a woman’s thumb as a thumb drive, bobble heads of characters, and blood-spattered glass coasters and mugs. In the summer of 2008, a group of top designers transformed a New York apartment into a Dexter sanctuary: “The

Dexter dining room designed by Amy Lau and Johnny Grey’s Dexter-inspired kitchen produced such limited edition items for purchase as dining chairs apparently spattered with blood, dinner plates with bloodstains, and ‘dismembered flatware,’ where each knife, fork, or spoon consists of pieces of several styles of flatware - a real steal at only

$500 per place setting” (Schmid 132). Moreover, fans now are now able participate in

Dexter’s murders through a video game that helps Dexter pick, stalk, and kill his victims, all while concealing his identity. In the same manner that hunters collect their hunting trophies, viewers can enter Dexter’s “Kill Room” on the Showtime website, which displays pictures Dexter’s murder victims in their most vulnerable state, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap, with the fearful recognition that they are about to die. It should be evident by now that Dexter’s murders are glorified among American viewers.

Dexter primarily targets young viewers. The edginess and risky nature of the show appeals to “new-age, hip” fans, many of whom use social media to participate in forum, Twitter, and Facebook discussions related to the show. The most enthusiastic viewers fall within the 20-35 age bracket, with 55% of viewers being male and 45%

female (“Showtime’s Dexter Becomes Hot Trending Topic on Social Media”). Although I was unable to find demographics regarding the political affiliations of viewers, I surmise that the majority of viewers fall towards the Left, since that is the pattern among the 20-

35 age demographic. The show also invites a liberal audience through its progressive portrayals of race and gender roles; for example, Maria Laguerta, a Puerto Rican female character, is the lieutenant of Miami Metro, and therefore in a position superior to the White male officers working under her. The presence of characters like Laguerta, who defy traditional minority and gender roles, make a conservative surface reading of the show difficult. However, even though the show attracts liberal viewer and appears forward-thinking, the show often slips back into the neoconservative narratives that it likely attempts to avoid. This is best exemplified through Dexter’s character, a White

Anglo-Saxon male, who demonstrates that “taking the Law into his own hands…is the prerogative of White masculinity,” a narrative that resonates both with the traditional

Western, and Bush government’s exceptionalist policies (Byers, “Neoliberal Dexter?

146).

Dexter relies upon an exceptionalist framework that has been present in

American culture since the sixteenth century, when European White settlers saw

America as the fulfillment of the European dream. Exceptionalism, however, was not fully realized until the Cold War, when the United States positioned itself as the epitome of democracy that European nations should emulate. During this period in history, the

United States was considered “qualitatively better than the European nation-states whose social orders were described by exceptionalist historians as having been devastated by Marxist socialism” (Pease 10). Moreover, the United States responded to

the Cold War by creating a National Security State, which authorized the State’s use of

“emergency powers” in order to “defend the people against the threat” (Pease 10). And most importantly, this emergency state allowed the state to position itself

neither within the order or outside of the order. The state situated itself within the order that it protected but it occupied the internal externality of the exception. For in order to defend the order it also represented, the state was first required to declare itself an exception to the order it regulated. The State of Exception is marked by absolute independence from any juridical control and any reference to the normal political order. [emphasis added] (Pease 24)

The State of Exception’s potency dwindled at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet

Union came apart and the United States lost its enemy. As a result, many of the contradictions inherent to the State of Exception surfaced, and citizens began to recognize the disparities between the “nation’s exceptionalist ideals and the state’s discriminatory practices against domestic minorities and its acts of imperial aggression in the arena of international politics” (Pease 35). Yet, September 11th created the necessary conditions for a new State of Exception. Following this national trauma, the

Bush administration relied upon the rationale that since the enemy had violated the rules of war, the State needed to suspend its own rules “in the name of protecting [the

American people] against a force that operated according to different rules” (Pease

167). Under this justification, Bush created the Homeland Security Act (2002) that

“required the people to depart from the norms and values to which they had become habituated and that tore to the ground the democratic institutions – freedom of speech, religious tolerance, formal equality, uniform juridical procedures, universal suffrage – that had formerly nurtured and sustained the national people” (Pease 167). Congress also passed The USA PATRIOT Act (2001), an acronym that stands for Uniting (and)

Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and)

Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, resulting in the most dramatic abridgement of civil liberties in the nation’s history: “This emergency legislation subordinated all concerns of ethics, of human rights, of due process, of constitutional hierarchies, and of the division of power to the state’s monopoly over the exception” (Pease 168). Furthermore, Bush extended the domestic emergency state across the globe: he assigned Afghanistan and

Iraq as the enemies that have “wounded” the American people, and thus created the

Global War on Terror, which justified excessive violence directed towards these adversaries. Under the guise of “Operation Infinite Justice,” the United States depopulated much of the Afghani population. The euphemistic phrase “Operation Iraqi

Freedom” led to a violent regime change in Iraq under the rationale that the United

States needed to promote democracy in a land that, according to Bush, harbored terrorists and Weapons of Mass Destruction. American spectators took pleasure in the spectacles of violence that occurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq, because they were able to return to the American myth of the United States as a “redeemer nation rather than an aggressor state, whose manifest errand was civilizing rather than brutalizing”

(Pease 172).

My analysis of the show positions Dexter in relation to post-9/11 neoconservative exceptionalist ideologies. I have examined episodes from the first three seasons, since these seasons were filmed and premiered during the Bush administration, and therefore are likely the best reflection of the neoconservative beliefs of the time. As I noted above,

Darkly Dreaming Dexter was published in 2004. The first season aired from October

2006 to December 2006, the second season from September 2007 to December 2007, and the third season from September 2008 to December 2008. Less than two years

prior to the release of the novel, the Bush administration enacted the Homeland

Security Act (November 2002), which consolidated domestic anti-terrorism and protective services in order to better secure the nation’s borders and prevent terrorist attacks. In March 2003, Bush launched the invasion in Iraq, and in 2004, the war began to receive extensive domestic and international criticism: In March 2004, former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix declared the war in Iraq illegal, and in April 2004, images of torture from Abu Ghraib were revealed to a dismayed American public.

These revelations about prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib coincided with reports about mistreatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Only two months after the television premiere of Dexter, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and was executed a month later. 2007 saw a surge of U.S. military troops in Iraq. The Bush

Administration justified many of these events as necessary for the American people’s protection and for bringing freedom to the world. However, the revelations about the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay significantly undermined these exceptionalist practices and beliefs, and prompted much of the American public to no longer perceive their nation as the redeemer, but rather as the monster. In Dexter, we, too see how the show will, at times, compel viewers to no longer recognize Dexter’s serial murders as heroic, but as barbarous.

My study of the show is arranged around three figures - the hard-boiled detective, the child, and the serial killer - all of whom embody post-9/11 exceptionalism.

I use a cultural historical analysis by demonstrating how Dexter often parallels post-9/11 neoconservative narratives through the myth of regenerative violence. My interpretation of the show is inspired by Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1992), a study about the

influence of Wild West myths in American culture and politics. Slotkin defines myths as stories “drawn from a society’s history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness

- with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain” (5). Myth typically expresses ideology as narrative, and its “language is metaphorical and suggestive rather than logical and analytical,” often relying on “cause-and-effect

[relationships]” and therefore a theory of history as progress. My study assumes

Slotkin’s position that it is important to examine both popular literature, film, and television, for these forms of mass or commercial media “address most directly the concerns of Americans as citizens of a nation-state” (9). Moreover, my study is also corroborated by Slavoj Žižek’s position (through Althusser) that film and television function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’ (16). This idea was epitomized in November

2001, when White House advisors and senior Hollywood executives had a series of meetings “with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the ‘war against terrorism’ by getting the right ideological message across not only to Americans, but also to the Hollywood public around the globe” (Žižek 16). My second and third chapters especially take into account this idea of Hollywood as an

‘ideological state apparatus’: In these chapters, I demonstrate how Dexter parallels neoconservative exceptionalist narratives through the hard-boiled detective and vulnerable child figure. However, I make a shift in my fourth chapter, when I demonstrate the fissures in the exceptionalist framework by exhibiting how the show turns the gaze inward. As Slotkin explains, no myth system is proof against moments of

ideological crisis or cognitive dissonance, and consequently, mythologies are often disrupted and revised.

In my second chapter, I draw a comparison between Dexter and the hard-boiled detective character, who personifies the State of Exception, because he works both inside and outside the Law. Like Dexter, the hard-boiled detective will often justify exceptional violence through a moral Code, which becomes comparable to the Bush administration’s moral justification for intervention in Iraq. Additionally, the show creates a moral distinction between Dexter and his victims, which reinforces the Bush government’s rhetoric between the United States as the moral, redeemer nation, and the “rogue” nations that necessitate intervention. Moreover, within this chapter, I create a thread between the hard-boiled detective and the forensic investigator, who externalizes the moral Code into a scientific and clean murder ritual. I argue that the abstract and scientific treatment of the body on the show reflects the technological military strategy of the war on terror, which dehumanizes the enemy and allows for the disavowal of violence.

In the third chapter, I examine the figure of the wounded child in Dexter. The show explains Dexter’s adult violence through his childhood trauma of watching his mother’s brutal murder. This storyline, I argue, parallels George W. Bush’s rhetoric in the aftermath of 9/11, when he infantilized a wounded nation in order to warrant the abridgment of constitutional rights and extreme international violence. Moreover, the show harks backs to captivity narratives, with all of their racial reinforcements: in various episodes, Dexter acts as a protector and avenger of the White, vulnerable child, which creates a further correspondence between the show and the Bush administration’s

justifications for violence. President Bush similarly returned to the captivity myth in order to position himself as the father figure of a wounded nation, who must use whatever means necessary to rescue and defend his children from the savagery of the terrorist harboring nations.

My fourth chapter on the serial killer deviates from the second and third chapters, because it compels viewers to interrogate their own complicity and pleasure in Dexter’s violence. Fictional representations of serial killers grew in popularity following 9/11, which is likely because the figure is familiar, and therefore a source of refuge from the seemingly incomprehensible evil of the 9/11 terrorists. Yet, since this figure is a uniquely

American phenomenon, it functions as a reflection of the American viewers who are so enthralled by this character’s violence. Indeed, this figure’s presence in Dexter prompts us to wonder how Dexter’s character might be a monstrous manifestation of American exceptionalism. Additionally, Dexter’s repetition compulsion, which is characteristic of the serial killer, mimics the very seriality and cyclicality of the show itself. Thus, we begin to question how the show is an indication of our own trauma, and how we experience trauma as pleasure. Ultimately, I consider the show’s repetition compulsion in light of the Bush administration’s recourse to 19th century myths, and in doing so, draw into question the truism that everything changed after 9/11.

CHAPTER 2 THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE

As I explained above, Dexter is original in the sense that he is a serial killer that viewers affirm. The show persuades us to feel affection and support for Dexter because unlike the fictional and real serial murderers before him, he abides by a moral Code, which restricts his violence to those that “warrant” it, and he protects the lives of innocents. However, even though Dexter is distinct from his murderous predecessors, as a vigilante character, he acts in accord with other American heroes such as the lone gunfighter, the detective, and the gangster. These US mythological heroes, characters who Richard Slotkin has written extensively about, enact “regenerative violence,” or the idea that one must regress into acts of savagery in order to purify and purge lawlessness from civilization (Slotkin 12). Slotkin examines Theodore Roosevelt’s 19th century vision of the frontier past in order to explain the enormous effect it had on

American international and domestic policies throughout the 20th century. Influenced by

Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Roosevelt understood the frontier as the site of conflict over land and power between the superior Anglo-Saxons and an inferior aboriginal race.

In this confrontation, according to Roosevelt, Anglo Saxons bypassed democratic principles by resorting to violence in order to master the inferior race. Although these frontier heroes replicate their antagonists “dark” elements by turning to violence, their violence is vindicated because it destroys “dark elements and colonizes the border,” and consequently, “purges darkness from themselves and the world” (Slotkin 352).

Therefore, Roosevelt perceived Anglo-Saxon violence as a necessary ingredient for civilized progress.

Throughout this study, Slotkin demonstrates how Roosevelt’s conception of the frontier past continues to be reflected in the American popular culture heroes we see in

20th century literature and film. Moreover, he describes how the fictional conflicts in these heroic tales shaped real-life international and domestic policies, and how, in turn real events also defined the fictions. For example, he sees a relationship between “the

Golden Age of the Western” and the beginning of the Cold War, arguing that “the genre provided a frame in which alternative approaches to the political and ideological problems of the Cold War era could be imaginatively entertained” (349). To exemplify this point, Slotkin analyzes the John Wayne film Rio Grande (1950); He demonstrates how Wayne’s character, Lt. Col. Kirby, defiance of the Law and pre-emptive action to cross the Mexican border in pursuit of the Apache mirrors the Truman administration’s methods for dealing with the Korean crisis of June-July 1950. In this moment in history,

Truman and General MacArthur enacted the logic of exceptionalism by exceeding “the terms of the UN Mandate by attacking north of the 38th Parallel in an attempt to unite

Korea by force” (Slotkin 360).

Similarly, we can analyze the narratives employed in Dexter and consider how they mirror post-9/11 foreign policies, specifically the Bush Doctrine, which used the promotion of democratic regime change as justification for pre-emptive strikes against potential enemy nations that could be harboring terrorists. As noted above, Dexter acts in accord with past fictional American heroes who employ regenerative violence: he justifies his murdering other serial killers because it helps “purge” society of evil, and presumably, this justification is sanctioned by viewers who are called to sympathize with him. Moreover, like other heroes in American film and literature, Dexter is largely

concerned with issues of morality, since the show relies upon the Code to create an ethical distinction between Dexter’s regenerative violence, and his victims’ savagery.

The program’s emphasis on morality is especially significant because, unlike many of his fictional predecessors, Dexter constantly battles his hunger to kill, to ensure that his primal urges do not overcome his resolve to murder only those that deserve to die.

Furthermore, many of the show’s episodes include flashbacks to Dexter’s childhood, where viewers see Dexter’s father’s ethical justification for Dexter’s vigilantism. This extensive focus on morality is fitting when we consider the show’s historical context, particularly the Bush administration’s reliance on the notions of “good” and “evil” in order to justify military intervention in Afghanistan, and more problematically, in Iraq. While all presidents have used morals in order to warrant domestic and international policies,

Howard Fineman of Newsweek indicates that George W. Bush evokes morality and religion more than past presidents: “‘it has taken a war, and the prospect of more, to highlight a central fact - this president and this presidency is the most resolutely ‘faith- based’ in modern times, an enterprise founded, supported, and guided by trust in the temporal and spiritual power of God.’ Bush’s personal friend and Secretary of

Commerce Donald Evans contends that moral vision ‘gives him a desire to serve others and a very clear sense of what is good and what is evil’” (qtd. in Dolan).

Additionally, Dexter employs scientific and technological skills and tools from his forensics position to master his antagonists. His pragmaticism when murdering captures the Bush administration’s techno-dominance, or a “masculinized vision of technological supremacy” marked by “force, power, precision, and control” (Schueller 164). In her article “Techno-Dominance and Torturegate: The Making of US Imperialism,” Malini

Schueller turns to Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade’s Shock and Awe: Achieving

Rapid Dominance to explain the neoconservative technological military strategy and how it “identifies the psychosexual and social coordinates of US Imperialism” (167).

Schueller defines neoconservative militarianism as “high-tech weaponry, near-perfect knowledge enabled by information technology, and a colonizing of channels of information” (168). She demonstrates how techno-dominance has been associated with masculinity in Shock and Awe, and how this link makes the enemy into “an incoherent, demasculinized, and bestialized adversary” (163). Additionally, a high-tech military prevents scenes with “messy bodies,” and instead allows for “clean” warfare (167). The precision and “cleanliness” of this military strategy is important to keep in mind when viewing Dexter, specifically his day-time work as blood spatter analyst. As I will elaborate later, Dexter’s day-time forensic work transfers over to his night-time murders, as he treats each kill with the same control and precision as a science experiment. His technical treatment of murder results in the objectification of his victims, and allows viewers to effectively disavow his violence.

Dexter’s reliance on morality and science for stepping outside the Law makes him compatible with the neoconservative vision of intervention in rogue nations.

Although Dexter’s character is especially fitting within the post-9/11 historical moment, his character also harks back to the hard-boiled detective, a figure that had its heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s. Like Dexter, the hard-boiled detective exercises a moral

Code for violence, and works both inside and outside the Law to catch criminals. Both characters assume a utilitarian approach towards violence, or the belief that brute ends justify the means. The reemergence of this figure in Dexter is unsurprising, particularly

if we consider how the Bush administration also relied on a personal moral Code of justice, or the Bush doctrine, to justify preventive warfare with nations deemed threatening, unilateral militarism, and the spreading of democracy throughout the Middle

East.

The Hard-Boiled Detective and Moral Interventionism

Richard Slotkin explains how the developments in industry and urbanization during the 19th century shifted the focus from the frontier to the city. As a result, the outlaw hero of the frontier evolved into the hard-boiled detective figure, who embodies the outlaw’s criminality as well as the Law: the hard-boiled detective is “both an agent of the law and an outlaw who acts outside of the structures of legal authority for the sake of a personal definition of justice, which often takes the form of private question or revenge” (219). Dexter acts in accordance with the hard-boiled detective figure because he works both within the Law, as a blood spatter analyst for Miami Metro, and outside of the Law, when he takes justice into his own hands by murdering serial killers that the legal system has failed to catch, or is taking too long to catch. Additionally, Dexter relies on a moral Code as a method for determining who deserves to be killed. John Cawelti describes the purpose of the Code as preserving the “moral integrity” and “inner discipline” of the hero when engaging in acts of violence (536). In Dexter, the Code is never explicitly stated, although through flashbacks, viewers can infer that the Code involves Dexter having to extensively research his potential victims in order be sure they are guilty of murder and a continuous threat society. Additionally, according to the

Code, Dexter is to never kill innocents, especially children (a point I will discuss in further detail below). Finally, Dexter is to never get caught by following a specific ritual, which emphasizes sterile murder, and eradicating all traces of evidence. The ritual

according to Cawelti, is an externalization of the hero’s Code. He refers to the classic western shootout as a symbol of the hero’s inner-discipline and virtue during acts of violence:

The shootout usually occurs only after the extreme provocation by the antagonist, and it is a ritual ceremony in which the hero waits for his hero to draw first and then with the most extraordinary grace and discipline pulls his own gun and sends a bullet through another dastardly heart. The hero’s controlled and restrained demeanor under pressure and his adherence to the ritual structure of the shootout are external signs of the inner discipline and moral integrity he gains from his absolute obedience to the Code. (Cawelti 535-536)

Dexter’s moral Code becomes externalized through his murder ritual, which emphasizes the scientific treatment of the body and the elimination of all evidence of murder.

Therefore, Dexter’s ritual has less to do with morality, and more to do with conducting a

“clean” murder. However, as I will later describe, Dexter’s pragmatic treatment of the body does in fact help preserve his integrity, since the sterility of his kill rooms, which look more like laboratories, allow viewers to deny the monstrosity of his violence.

Additionally, the hard-boiled detective has been compared with a political leader who uses narrative in order to derive significance from a chaotic world. According to

William Aydelotte, the “detective…has many characteristics in common with the modern political leader or agitator. He simplifies life, makes sense out of it and gives it meaning.

His strength is real, like the criminal’s pseudo strength, for it is based not just on externals but on intuition and a sense of community with the right things in the universe”

(80). Like the politician, the detective uses his devotion to analysis and reason in order to make sense out of disorganized world: “[the detective] soon places the facts of the case in their proper relationship to one another, and from this ordering of the facts he goes onto the reordering of society. The murderer is identified and is isolated,

uncertainly yields to certainty, safety and trust are restored; for the unsettling puzzle there is substituted the reassuring solution” (Gilbert 32). Similarly, in Dexter, viewers watch Dexter piece together clues in order to discover a killer, stalk him/her, and kill him/her. The city of Miami remains vulnerable up until the moment whn Dexter executes the criminal and returns the world to safety.

Furthermore, the hard-boiled detective and political leader create the fantasy of order and control, usually by relying on the fictional world of good versus evil in a real life context. Donald Pease explains that political leaders will turn to state fantasies, or a

“dominant structure of desire out of which U.S. citizens imagined their national identity,” after experiencing a national trauma or an event that “cannot be incorporated within the normal order of things” (5). As a way to make sense of the trauma, leaders will use fictions in order to create a teleological order. Eventually, the fantasies become linked to the actual Law and become “unacknowledged legislators,” in which they form a

“contractual agreement” between the State and its people. These “unacknowledged legislators,” allow the fantasy to appear normal and rational, and therefore deny “explicit recognition” (Pease 6). Similar to the hard-boiled detective genre then, these fantasies provide its citizens with “veils of illusions” of order and reassurance. Moreover, Donald

Pease explains that these fantasies are often exceptionalist, in which the State declares itself an exception to its own rules (16).

After the trauma of 9/11, Bush created the fantasy of narrative order through his use of “good” and “evil” binaries, which allowed the State to justify the exceptionalist act of declaring a war with Iraq. In a speech on September 12, 2001, George W. Bush employed “us” versus “them” rhetoric, when he stated, “every nation, in every region,

now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime…” (qtd. In Dolan). States that were suspected of harboring terrorists and Weapons of Mass Destruction were described as

“an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” Bush deemed Iraq one of the evil states that

continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. (qtd. In Dolan)

By describing the Iraqi regime’s crimes evildoings, Bush produced a clear distinction between the idealistic and morally righteous image of America as the “city on the hill” and the evil forces it needed to eradicate. The contrast he created between “good” and

“evil,” hero nation and villain nation, created justification for preventive strike against nations he declared “rogue” that could potentially threaten the security of the American people. In this veritable proclamation of war, Bush depended on the idea that the rules of war have changed, now that the fight is against terrorists, which conceal their movements and intentions and have a disregard for international law. According to the

Bush administration, America’s vulnerability to terrorism and the potential for Weapons of Mass Destruction legitimized an aggressive and self-defensive military strategy.

Dexter, too, relies on the similar binaries of good and evil in order to justify acting outside of the Law for the sake of a vulnerable population, insofar as it uncannily echoes the Bush administration’s narrative of using extralegal measures for the sake of protection and self-defense. Dexter’s character resonates with the exceptionalist

framework because while he works for the Law, he also will also go beyond the Law for his own definition of morality and justice. As a hard-boiled detective, he does not

“belong to the police, the official guardians of the law, nor is he a member of the closed circle or group within which the plot develops” (Aydelote 80). This character does not follow the orders of the “police or regular authorities, but an order that is discovered and imposed by him” (Aydelotte 80). Moreover, because the detective is the only one who can solve the puzzle of a crime, the genre frequently shows the policeman surrendering their authority over to him. “One could argue that all these qualities add up to a dictator, that the detective is the extra-legal superman who is called in to accomplish by extraordinary measures what is impossible within the traditional organization of society”

(Aydelotte 81). The detective’s extralegal measures do not break the viewers identification with him, because “he exists in that part of the imagination reflecting the real world where personal or interpersonal morality supersedes formal legal procedures”

(Landrum, Browne, Browne 4). Additionally, these “stories which highlight criminal activity by detective figures are usually ‘justified’ by the terms of the story,” showing that readers do not expect the detective to be “legally pure, though the formula demands a moral understanding between the author and the reader” (Landrum, Browne, Browne 4-

5).

In turn, both the show and Bush administration’s moral framework for violence also help maintain a separation between the hero and the villain. Dexter’s villains are always depicted as out of control and unpredictable, which corresponds with the Bush administration’s description of Iraq as a nation that has gone “rogue.” The fear

Americans had towards terrorists and the “evil” regimes that “harbored” them rested on

this idea of unpredictability: Bush described these groups as having “weapons of mass destruction-weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning” (qtd in Chomsky). The similarities between the serial killers Dexter goes after and the terrorists is unsurprising, since according to Aydelotte, the criminal in the hard- boiled detective genre is often a “personalization of our grievances, as we like to personalize them in the atmosphere of political or social crisis in real life. We have toward the criminal the same or comparable feelings we have toward any one of the commonly accepted scapegoats of our day, the jew, the labor agitator, Wall street, the

‘radical,’ the capitalist, or whatever other image we have formed the habit of using” (80).

Unlike the detective, these “bogeyman” are depicted as having “sham strength, not real strength,” and although they are a “major threat,” they are one the detective is “always able to counter” (Aydelotte 80). By examining the criminal figures on the show, we might understand how they mirror the real fears Americans have towards the terrorist or the

“terrorist harboring” regimes.

The Criminal Figure as the “Rogue” State

Scholars like Noam Chomsky have noted that the definition of a “rogue state” has become increasingly muddled. The Bush administration never provided clear criteria of what constitutes “rogue,” therefore leaving critics to infer his definition. Chomsky provides two definitions of a rogue state. The first definition is literal: “states which partially reject international law and convention insofar as they can get away with it.”

The second definition, Chomsky claims, is the propaganda version, presented “by those who have the power to control discourse, propaganda, framework of discussion, and so on. And in that case, that means primarily the United States” (Chomsky). American political leaders use the term “rogue” to refer to “anyone who’s out of control.” According

to Chomsky, this propaganda version will classify a nation as rogue by focusing on its morally criminal acts. For example, former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and

William Cohen defended the military intervention in Iraq by emphasizing Hussein’s criminal acts of ‘using weapons of mass destruction again his neighbors as well as his own people’ (qtd in Chomsky). It is significant to note, however, that the United States is the leading rogue state if we use Chomsky’s literal definition of “rogue,’ because it often declares itself an exception to World Court decisions.

Even though Bush never provided Americans with a clear definition of “rogue,” an evaluation of the villainous figures in recent popular culture could shed light on the traits that American political leaders deem criminal. Specifically, by studying work of

American literature, film, and media that have a hero protagonist, we can infer the propaganda version of rogue, since the hero itself generally fits the literal definition. For example, Dexter goes rogue because he works outside of the Law to find and execute the villains. Yet, because the show creates a moral distinction between Dexter and those he murders, viewers are really seeing the propaganda version of “rogue” at work: within this framework, Dexter’s violence is not rogue, because he relies on a moral

Code, unlike his victims, who have no such guidelines. Rather, his victims are depicted as being “out of control” and sociopathic, because like Hussein, they kill innocent people with no remorse. For example, in Season 1, the Ice Truck Killer is represented as sick and perverse, with no regard for human life: he kills and dismembers female prostitutes in order to receive Dexter’s attention. Additionally, the Ice Truck Killer seduces and eventually proposes to Dexter’s sister, Debra, and then tries to kill her as a way to manipulate Dexter into coming after him. Therefore, unlike Dexter, this character is

rogue because he has no regard for innocents or for human emotion, as seen by the way he tricks Debra into falling in love with him, only as an attempt to make her his next victim.

In season three, we are introduced to Lila West’s character, who also contrasts with Dexter because she is a compulsive arsonist who will kill innocents. Beginning in this season, the show creates a further distinction between Dexter and his victims through the binary of rationality versus irrationality and masculine versus feminine. Lila, unlike Dexter, is illustrated as giving into her emotional whims. For example, she kills

Sergeant Doakes by lighting propane canisters as a way to become closer to Dexter, whom she believes is her soul mate. The show writes her as an artist, which contrasts with Dexter’s scientific demeanor: she, unlike Dexter, is obsessive and emotional, whereas Dexter is controlled and logical. In season three, moreover, the show introduces Miguel Prado, an easily angered Latino character, who further reinforces this rational versus irrational binary between Dexter and his victims. Miguel is an Assistant

District Attorney who becomes, for a short period, Dexter’s partner in murder. Although

Dexter initially trusts Miguel, the show foreshadows Miguel as a villain by rendering him mercurial. Miguel is often boisterous, easily excitable, and most dangerously, easily angered. Like Lila, he contrasts with Dexter’s cool and pragmatic personality. Although

Dexter tries to teach Miguel the Code, Miguel ultimately goes against these moral guidelines and kills his rival, defense attorney Ellen Wolf, an innocent woman. Dexter soon realizes that Miguel is a monster who cannot be controlled, and chooses to kill him as a way to prevent more innocent lives from being taken.

If we look closely at the traits of the Ice Truck Killer, Lila, and Miguel, and see how they contrast with Dexter, we get a clearer definition of what constitutes “rogue” and what meets the criteria for “heroic.” The Ice Truck Killer, for example, is rogue because he has no regard for human connection, evidenced by his manipulation and attempted murder of his fiancée, Debra. Significantly, the program’s depiction of the Ice

Truck Killer corresponds with media descriptions of Saddam Hussein. For example, a

Denver post columnist described Saddam as having an ‘utter lack of empathy and concern for people’s humanity that is so characteristic of the sociopath’ (Schmid 250).

Therefore, we can infer that to be “rogue,” a leader or State lacks regard toward the wellbeing of its own people. This contrasts with the hero, who is emotionally bonded to his own people, and is compelled to secure the safety and welfare of his community, an idea that I will elaborate on in chapter two when I discuss the use of sentimentalism in

Dexter. Even so, however, Lila and Miguel’s characters indicate that too much emotion is also dangerous. As explained above, Lila becomes so obsessed with Dexter to the point that she hurts innocents (as seen by her murder of Sergeant Doakes). Miguel, too, exhibits rage and hatred, evidenced when he illegitimately kills Ellen Wolf purely out of rivalry. Both of these characters exemplify the fear many Americans had towards terrorists and terrorists harboring regimes, which, as explained earlier, are described as erratic villains who will use weapons of mass destruction with no warning. Through these villains, then, the show demonstrates that a hero or moral character strikes a healthy balance between affect and control and predictability.

The Forensic Investigator and the Murder Ritual

Since I will be discussing the significance of a hero’s sentimentalism in chapter two, I will bracket that off for now, and turn my attention to the forensic investigator, a

figure, who, I argue, is a later manifestation of the hard-boiled detective, and mirrors the

United State’s techno-dominance in the war on terror. The hard-boiled hero’s Code, as explained earlier, typically has both an inner and outer form. Internally, the Code functions to maintain the hero’s moral integrity. Externally, the Code becomes a type of a ritual that reinforces the hero’s self-discipline, exemplified by Cawelti’s description of the classic western shootout, where the heroic character waits for the antagonist to pull out his gun first. In Dexter, the external form of the Code has evolved into a precise, controlled, and clean murder ritual, in which the body is treated as an object of science.

While Dexter’s day time forensics work might initially appear as a cover up for his night- time murders, in the same manner that Clark Kent’s journalism job masks his super hero alter ego, the show illustrates continuity between Dexter’s forensic work and his murders: Dexter relies on the research methods that he uses to solve crimes to commit murders, and his kill room resembles a laboratory more than a torture chamber. Indeed,

Dexter kills his victims with many of the same tools that he uses in the laboratory, such as blood slides, syringes, and a face shield visor. The continuity of these images, I argue, provokes the viewer to maintain a dispassionate stance towards Dexter’s victims, in which we are no longer to regard them as humans, but rather as mere bodies.

Dexter’s scientific murder ritual, then, allows him to maintain his moral integrity, and enables viewers to disavow his violence.

The crime scenes in Dexter establish the modus operandi for how viewers are to regard the body. Similar to the characters in other forensic dramas like CSI and Bones, the characters in Dexter are unaffected by the corpses that they examine at crime scenes, treating the body as a puzzle to be solved through science rather than as a

once living human. In episode 1:2 titled “Crocodile,” viewers watch Dexter investigate the murder of police officer Ricky Simmons. As he enters the crime scene, the camera remains only on Dexter’s unexpressive face as he looks down at the corpse. Dexter then looks up, and the camera switches to a birds eye view, where we get a distant shot of Dexter as he examines the two overpasses above him, as well as a view of the bloodied corpse beside him. The camera then switches to a low camera angle as

Dexter explains to Lieutenant LaGuerda his interpretation of the murder, which he describes impersonally and scientifically: “Given the skin rupture and secondary spatter the distance had to be 50 or 60 feet.” Viewers are then granted a close up shot of the grotesque body, yet because the shot is from Dexter’s perspective, we are prompted to perceive the body with the same emotionless stance as him. Furthermore, within this scene, the corpse is depicted as abject: immediately after Dexter removes a piece of loose flesh from the mouth of the corpse, blood that had accumulated in the open mouth of the corpse projects onto Dexter’s face, which prompts viewers to regard the corpse with disgust. The impartial treatment of the body and its portrayal as abject carries over into Dexter’s kill rooms, where Dexter regards living bodies in the same manner.

In her article “Corpses, Spectacle, Allusion: The Body as Abject and Object in

CSI,” Michele Byers uses Julia Kristeva’s notion of the body as ‘abject’ or ‘fundamental pollution’ in order to explain CSI’s regular portrayal of dispassionate scientists dismembering bodies and images of the corpse, which are flaunted “in various stages of decomposition or mutilation in virtually every episode” (95). In Dexter, the show compels us to perceive both the dismembered corpse at the crime scene and the living body in

Dexter’s kill rooms as pollution, driven home in the show’s very first episode, when

Dexter describes his murders as “taking out the trash”: he literally puts his victims’ dismembered body parts in trash bags and tosses them into the sea. As Byers argues,

“the dead body is the moment when the body ceases to be human” (“Corpses,

Spectacle, Allusion” 94). In Dexter, however, the body ceases to be human soon after

Dexter determines it does not deserve to live. After Dexter makes this decision, he treats the living body like an object in a lab experiment, epitomized through his murder ritual. In this ritual Dexter first uses a syringe to inject his victim with tranquilizer. He then transports his victim’s body to a sterile kill room: a room lined with plastic see- through sheets, which makes for an easily clean up and no traces of evidence. The victim wakes up to find him/herself stripped of clothing, held to a long table by thick layers of see-through plastic wrap or duct tape, and often surrounded by photographs of the innocent people he or she has killed. Dexter, wearing an apron and latex gloves, cuts a slit into the victim’s cheek and then transports a drop of the blood to a blood slide, which he keeps as a trophy. He then often kills the victim using a sharp knife, with a single puncture to the heart. The camera never captures the knife stabbing into the flesh. Rather, the show often softens his murders by having Dexter’s body block the violent image, or by switching to a shot of Dexter’s face right as he kills. For example, when Dexter kills Matt Chambers, a murderous drunk driver, in the episode “Crocodile,” viewers only see Dexter pull out a knife and move the knife downward in a stabbing motion. We do not, however, see the knife actually enter Chambers body, nor do we see any blood that flows as a consequence of this action. Instead, the camera remains on Dexter’s emotionless face while he stabs, and then switches to a shot of Chambers face, whose expression appears understated.

The systematic nature of Dexter’s murder ritual, as well as the way the camera avoids graphic images of violence, allows viewers to disavow the pain and torture

Dexter inflicts on his victims. Dexter’s sterile-looking kill room and his use of lab instruments make his murders appear clean and eradicate the possibility of remaining evidence. The physicality of a messy looking corpse disturbs Dexter, a fact we quickly learn in the pilot episode, when he admires the pristine appearance of the bloodless remains of one of the Ice Truck Killer’s victims. He remarks to himself, “No blood, no sticky, hot, messy, awful blood, no blood at all…what a beautiful idea…Ive never seen such clean, dry, neat looking dead flesh.” Moreover, seeing the bloodied remains of

Dexter’s victims would likely disrupt the viewer’s sympathy with his character. In the article “The Art of Sp(l)atter: Body Horror in Dexter,” Simon Brown and Stacey Abbott elucidate this point by citing a key scene in season two, when Dexter remembers his father’s response when he witnesses one of his murders: “Confronted by the sight of

Dexter covered in blood and in the process of dismembering a body, Harry’s response is visceral: he freezes, vomits, and begs Dexter to ‘stay away’” (213). Brown and Abbott explain how in this scene the murderous act is split; the show indicates that Harry saw an explicit image of violence, even though viewers only see “a glimpse of a body in

‘profuse disarray’”(213). While Harry is no longer able to maintain identification with

Dexter, signified by his command for Dexter to “stay away,” viewers’ are able to preserve their allegiance with Dexter because we are absolved from graphic images of murder.

Dexter’s methodological and sanitary approach to murder resonates with the scientific treatment of the Other and the military’s use of high-tech warfare in the war on

terror. Christian Parenti remarks that in this war, we see an increase in technology or

“dead labor” replacing military soldiers, citing as examples “smart bombs” that have portable Global Positioning Systems (GPS) units “that transmit their geographic coordinates to twenty-four Pentagon maintained satellites” and the “Global Hawk drone which can operate virtually undetected and accurately from altitudes of sixty-five thousand feet and can travel many thousands of miles in a single mission” (94).

Schueller explains how the US’s technological supremacy makes for a definition of the national body politic as force, power, precision, and control - a hypermodern, punitive empire – both causing and dependent on the paralysis and destruction of the Other”

(164). She refers to both the high technological machines that Parenti mentions, as well as objects as small as “surgical gloves,” reminding us that in a photograph from Abu

Ghraib, Charles Graner and Sabrina Harmon, two of the specialists that took part in the torture and prisoner abuse, are wearing “gloves while giving triumphant thumbs-up signs as they pose behind the carefully ice-packed and cellophane wrapped body of a battered prisoner” (174). These objects come to symbolize the US military’s masculinized dominance over the vulnerable and demasculinized body of the Iraqi prisoner, which is similar to the contrast created between Dexter and his victims. With his lab tools, apron, and gloves, Dexter embodies masculinized supremacy over an abject and deviant life. His victims’ physical vulnerability is reinforced by their nakedness under the see-through plastic wrap that secures them to the kill table. Their bare bodies resonate with the humiliated naked bodies of the Abu Ghraib prisoners.

Additionally, as I explained earlier, Dexter’s scientific murder ritual coupled with the censored images of graphic violence, enables viewers to disavow Dexter’s brutality

and maintain sympathy with his character. The abstract depictions of violence on the show allow for the body of the victim to disappear, or be not fully recognized by the viewer. Similarly, modern warfare also absolves acknowledgment of the body. Drones, or Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) are aircraft often armed with missiles and bombs that are either controlled by pilots from the ground or autonomously through a pre- programmed mission. While drones are controversial for a number of reasons, one main question is whether operators will become

trigger happy with remote controlled armaments, situated as they are in complete safety, distant from the conflict zone. Keith Shutleff, an army chaplain and ethics instructor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina worries ‘that as war becomes safer and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is a very real danger of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.’ (Cole and Wright)

Elaine Scarry makes a similar argument about modern warfare in her book The Body in

Pain (1985), when she explains the dangers of violence becoming an abstraction: she observes the evolved language of modern warfare where parts are substituted for the whole. For example, “one’s own army may become a single gigantic weapon, a

‘spearhead’ or a ‘hammer;’ a certain territory or part of the army may become an

‘appendix’ or an ‘underbelly’; each arm has an ‘achilles heel,’ or a vulnerable ‘hinge’ or

‘joint’ or a ‘rear’ that may be ‘penetrated’” (70). Scarry explains that the danger in this convention is that it

assists [on] the disappearance of the human body from accounts of the very event that is the most radically embodying event in which human beings will ever participate. It is not that ‘injury’ is wholly omitted, or event that it is redescribed, but rather that it is relocated to a place…where it is no longer recognizable or interpretable. We will respond to the injury (a severed artery in one giant, a massive series of leechbites in another) as an imaginary wound in an imaginary body, despite the fact that the imaginary body is itself made up of thousands of real human bodies, and thus composed of actual (hence woundable) human tissue . (71)

Here, she explains how the synecdochal language of modern warfare creates a space where the pain of others is able to be disavowed. Although Dexter is not directly about modern warfare, his methodical, clean approach to murder as well as the camera’s avoidance of graphic displays of violence, creates a similar effect, and thus absolves viewers from feeling any sense of responsibility or sympathy towards his victims.

Conclusion: Dexter as the Sovereign Figure

Judith Butler in her book Precarious Life (2006) turns to the Sovereign figure to explain the phenomena of the Guantanamo Bay detainee who is able to be “detained indefinitely” without entitlement to due process. Since the Guantanamo Detainee is a product of “democracy,” Butler works to explain the legal possibility of indefinite detention through the concept of “governmentality,” or a “mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as the maintain and restrict the life of a populations” (52). Govermentality works systematically “operating through policies and department, through managerial and bureaucratic institutions,” yet it also has unrestrictive power because “sovereignty emerges within the field of governmentality,” when law is used as “tactic,” or when the state “suspends law or contorts law to its own uses. In this way the State extends its own domain, its own necessity, and the means by which its self-justification occurs” (Butler 55). The sovereign or discretionary power that emerges within governmentality is able to decide whether a “person” or “people” are “dangerous.” If deemed threatening, “… the state constitutes the detained population unilaterally, taking them out of the jurisdiction of the law, depriving them of legal protections to which subjects under national and

international law are entitled” (Butler 59). These populations, according to Butler, are surely “not regarded as subjects, humans who are not conceptualized within the frame of a political culture in which human lives are underwritten by legal entitlements, law, and so humans who are not human” (Butler 77). The Guantanamo Bay detainees are indeed a perfect example of subjects regarded as not human, and function similarly to

Georgio Agamben’s figure of Homo Sacer, a figure of Roman law who is banned, can by killed by anyone, but cannot be sacrificed in religious ritual. This figure occurs when natural life (zoe), which traditionally existed outside of the polis, becomes part of the polis. Agamben argues that zoe’s inclusion in the political sphere is dangerous because it grants the sovereign power the ability to exclude life, particularly if this figure declares a “state of exception.” According to Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher and political theorist, the state of exception typically occurs during an “emergency” period, such as after 9/11. However, Agamben alters Schmitt’s concept of the exception by arguing that the state of exception has become the norm rather than the emergency, meaning the sovereign figure always has the power to declare an exception, and therefore always has the power to exclude life from the polis.

The Guantanamo Bay detainees are the product of the exception. They have lost all rights not just as citizens, but also as men, because they have been excluded from the polis. One could also argue that all Iraqis are homo sacer because they have been subject to the Bush administration, and later the Obama administration’s state of emergency. Removed from the conventions of international law, Iraqi lives are now exposed to the discretionary power of the sovereign. Dexter, too, demonstrates the operation of the sovereign power and the figure of homo sacer. As a hard-boiled

detective who both works within and outside the Law, Dexter decides when the rule of

Law does not suffice for catching and prosecuting the criminal. If Dexter deems another being a danger to society, he will use moral justification to step outside of the Law and execute the criminal. Those that are subject to Dexter’s extralegal measures are homo sacer, because their lives have been excluded from the polis, and therefore, they no longer retain rights as men. Moreover, Dexter’s role as a forensic investigator and his scientific murder ritual further reinforces his victims’ loss of humanity. The way the show creates continuity between forensic crime scenes and Dexter’s kill room allows his viewers to regard his victims as abject objects rather than men. Moreover, by having the camera avoid graphic depictions of Dexter’s violence, the show creates a perspective that preserves Dexter’s integrity, and absolves viewers from having to acknowledge the humanity of Dexter’s victims.

CHAPTER 3 THE CHILD

The morally heroic character, as I explained in the previous chapter, exhibits both self-control and sentimentalism. The forensic investigator, a figure that has evolved from the hard-boiled detective genre, has the controlled and scientific demeanor, which resonates with high-tech militarianism during the war on terror. In this chapter, I shift to the sentimental component of the morally righteous character, by analyzing the centrality of the child figure in post-9/11 American exceptionalism, specifically how the

Bush administration used this figure to catalyze emotion and justify extreme domestic and international policies. In his article “Rooting for Serial Killers: The Strange Case of

Dexter,” Leonard Cassuto examines the figure of the child to explain why Dexter is a likeable serial killer. He writes, “Dexter’s secret source of sympathy is children. He has a special affection for kids.” Cassuto draws our attention to a line in Jeff’s Lindsey’s novel

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, when Dexter remarks that “one of [his own] character traits that genuinely mystifies [him],” is “[his] attitude towards children” (Lindsey 70). Children,

Dexter declares, “are important to me. They matter” (Lindsey 70). Although Cassuto makes an astute observation, his brief article leaves more to be desired, because he does not explore the full effect of the child figure in Dexter, particularly how this character helps affirm Dexter’s violence. The show, I argue, uses childhood innocence, trauma, and vulnerability to justify Dexter’s exceptionalist practice of stepping outside the Law for a personal definition of justice. These narratives that rely on the wounded child reflect the post-9/11 political rhetoric, which similarly depended on the figure of the traumatized child to warrant the dramatic abridgment of constitutional rights, as well as to situate the United States as a redeemer nation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Through flashback sequences, viewers learn that Dexter became a serial killer because as a child, he witnessed his mother’s brutal murder. In this flashback, viewers watch an angelic looking two-year-old Dexter cry as he watches his mother die, which prompts viewers to perceive Dexter as a victim, and have empathy for his later homicidal tendencies. Additionally, while Dexter explains in an inner monologue that he does not sincerely care about others, including his own family, scenes from the show dispute this claim, depicted through the genuine affection Dexter has towards Rita’s children, Cody and Astor, and the way the show portrays him as a protector of children.

Indeed, many of Dexter’s murder victims have harmed or have attempted to harm children, and Dexter does not take lightly to these crimes: in comparison to his other murder victims, those who murder/attempt to hurt children experience the brunt of

Dexter’s wrath : for example, he goes to greater lengths to make the murderers and rapists of children suffer. Moreover, the show uses children to create a binary between

Dexter and his victims; because Dexter does not murder children, viewers are inclined to perceive him as good, moral, and heroic, whereas those that do harm children are considered bad, immoral, and villainous.

But how do these fictional binaries, created through the trope of childhood suffering, become problematic, even dangerous, when we move them out of a fictional context and into real political laws and policies? As I explained in the previous chapter,

American literature, film, and television, specifically those centered are an antihero character, tend to mirror the international and domestic policies of their historical moment. Therefore, an examination of the child figure in Dexter, specifically how the child functions within the show’s narrative to vindicate Dexter’s violence and maintain a

hero-monster binary between Dexter and his victims, could shed light on the way

American political leaders employed the notion of the innocent and wounded child to justify extreme international and domestic measures. Lauren Berlant posits that since the Reagan era, citizenship has moved into the private, domestic realm, resulting in what she coins an “intimate public sphere” (10). Consequently, according to Berlant, the unborn fetus and child have become chief political figures in American culture.

These “infantilize citizens” are ideal citizens, because they are both “dependent on the state and maintain faith in the “state’s commitment to representing the best interests of ordinary people” (63). Berlant’s definition of infantile citizenship does not necessarily refer to only children, but to adults who, like the child citizen, are passive, and do not fully exercise their citizenship through civic acts. These passive and dependent citizens are encouraged to remain devoted to the State, which acts as the protective and authoritative father figure. The infantilization of the citizen is dangerous for a number of reasons: First, it creates a citizen that chooses not to exercise his rights, and also it could potentially incite reactionary legislation and juridical practices, since the child is such an emotive figure (21). Significantly, the Bush’s administration’s creation of

Homeland Security State, a name that already conflates the State with the private sphere, justified international violence and the abridgement of constitutional rights through the narrative of having to protect a vulnerable and dependent child-nation.

Dexter parallels this neoconservative narrative: In a number of episodes Dexter steps outside the sphere of the Law in order to secure children from harm.

In order to fully understand the emotional weight of the child figure in Dexter and in post-9/11 neoconservative policies, it is important to examine the common perception

of the child as inherently “innocent,” and how this conception creates reactionary legislation. Anne Higgonet argues that even in the 21st century, we remain invested in the 19th century child Romantic child, who embodies innocence, purity, and virginity.

Yet, every “sweetly sunny, innocently cute Romantic child image stows away a dark side: a threat of loss, of change, and, ultimately, of death” (28-29). In her study

Higgonet examines photography and purports that the graphic nature of these images automatically places the ideal child into crisis, where the child could potentially be eroticized, and where the intentions of the photograph are unknown. This crisis has led to draconian pornography laws, where a photographer could be arrested if any viewer finds the photograph sexual, irregardless of the photographer’s intentions or if sexual material is explicit. Although Higgonet’s study is centered on visual representations of children, we can actually apply some of her conclusions to the Bush administration’s justification for constitutional restrictions and violence abroad. In his address to the nation in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, Bush not only infantilized the nation, but also described the attacks as one that stole this child-nation’s virginity. His rhetoric had a similar effect to the one described in Higgonet’s study, as it created the basis for reactionary legislation, such as the Patriot Act, and the intervention of the U.S. military in nations deemed a threat.

The Virgin Land and Virgin Children: The Threatened Child in the War on Terror

In an address to the nation on September 20, 2001, George W. Bush declared war in Afghanistan and Iraq by emphasizing the breached innocence of the American people and land in order to justify violence abroad. Donald Pease argues that in this speech, Bush harked back to the myth of the “Virgin Land” in order to portray the

American people as vulnerable and in need of the protection of the State (157). Bush

first described a violated (perhaps even sexually violated) American nation when he stated, “Americans have known casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning.” He also used the discourse of trauma by depicting September 11th as a “wound to our country.” However, Bush prompted Americans to not dwell in grief, but to feel wrath and the desire for retribution: “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution…Whether we bring our enemies to justice or justice to our enemies, justice will be done” (qtd in Pease 157). After describing a violated American nation, Bush was able to position himself as the father figure who must take extreme measures in order to secure the safety and wellbeing of his children.

The conflation between the nation and the wounded child and the president with the father figure is further seen in the story of Ashley Faulkner, a teenage girl who lost her mother in the 9/11 attacks. At a campaign stop in Lebanon Ohio, Bush heard a woman yell, ‘Mr. President! This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9/11!’

(Faludi 191). Bush then pushed his way into a crowd and ‘locked’ eyes with Ashley, and said ‘I know that’s hard, are you all right?” and then proceeded to give her a hug. This moment between the President and a grieving teenaged girl gained national news coverage, and was described with emotionally charged language: “[The president] instinctively reached for the teenager, clutched her head, placed it on his chest - and just held her” (qtd in Faludi 191). This news reporter’s use of the word “instinctual” makes Bush’s gesture seem like the natural response of a protective father, who will take whatever measures necessary to make sure his child does not suffer from further loss. “Ashley’s Story” was later used in Bush’s campaign for re-election, demonstrating that a good president acts as a “guardian of the homestead…one particularly suited to

protecting and providing for the isolated American family in perilous situations,” which further indicates how the nation was infantilized (Faludi 191-192). Yet, as a guardian of the American people, the president was expected to not only offer sentimental gestures such as a hug to a child in mourning, but also to act aggressively towards the enemies that caused that child to suffer in the first place. Bush fulfilled this role: he was tender and paternal to the American people, and simultaneously, acted as a “Daniel Boone, a frontiersman whose proofs of eligibility were the hatchet and the gun - and a bloody willingness to wield them” (Faludi 191).

Many Americans, then, perceived Bush as the ideal man to have in the White

House following 9/11, because he was the perfect fusion of sentimentalism and aggression. He often used domestic, private rhetoric in order to warrant violence, which made him popular among “security moms,” or women whose desire “for protection of the home and family, took top priority over other concerns” (Faludi 207). After 9/11, many of these mothers switched from being “liberal-minded, anti-military spending, pro- gun control,” to being the “biggest proponents of putting guns in the cockpit – favoring the idea by a whopping 78 percent, five points higher than men” (Faludi 203-204).

Moreover, some security moms, such as Michelle Malkin, a USA Today conservative columnist, believed children were the main targets of the 9/11 attacks. In a column

Malkin wrote, ‘toddlers and schoolchildren were incinerated in the hijacked planes on

Sept. 11…Murderous Islamic fanatics will stop at nothing to do the same to our kids’

(Faludi 207). Malkin and other like-minded mothers supported Bush and his declaration of war, because they wanted a president who had ‘the same qualities we look for in a husband: Someone who is strong and who will do his utmost to protect us’ (Faludi 207).

The utilization of domestic language to define the president consequently reaffirmed violence to the enemy nations of Iraq and Afghanistan, since, as Carla L. Peterson explains, “Family…often functions as a Code word intended to stigmatize the deviant, those placed beyond the norm by virtue of their race, sexuality, class or other social identities (123). After 9/11, children were used to represent the family and nation, which created good-evil binaries between the Americans and Iraqis/Afghanis. This is exemplified by Malkin’s description of ‘Islamic murderous fanatics,’ who are particularly barbarous because children were on the 9/11 planes (there were only 8 children out of

2,793 9/11 victims, showing how children became emblematic of the innocent American lives that were lost). Moreover, while the American military killed a number of innocent civilians and children in Iraq and Afghanistan, this information was often censored and softened by the media, which tended to focus on sentimental stories, like Bush hugging a grieving child.

Other emotionally stirring stories following 9/11 include Jessica Lynch, a young soldier who was captured and taken to a hospital in Nasiriya, Iraq. The media emphasized Lynch’s youth and vulnerability, and consequently downplayed her role in the US military. She was reported as being tortured by Iraqi military officials, even though Lynch has no memory of this, and later medical examination reports indicated little evidence of physical maltreatment. Nevertheless, what “Lynch didn’t remember would ultimately be redefined—as a memory repressed and willfully so. If she wouldn’t cooperate, others would recover the buried trauma for her” (Faludi 248). The media made Lynch’s story into a captivity narrative, a staple of American mythology, where a white woman, often young, is captured by Indians during a savage war and later

rescued by hunter or warrior. This rescue comes to symbolize “the triumph of civilization over savagery” (Slotkin 15). Even though Lynch herself was not a child but a soldier, and likely was not harmed in the hospital, her story had to be adapted according to the captivity narrative, because without “the girl, the cowboy president had no one to hug, the buckskin pol no one to protect, the urban outride no one to rescue. In the resurrection drama of American might, this supporting actress was the essential dramatis persona, without whom the play could not go on” (Faludi 259-260). As the damsel in distress, Jessica Lynch’s story further reinforced the hero-villain division between the noble United States military, whose violence was ethical because it safeguarded children, and the wicked and depraved Islamic fundamentalists, who killed children with no remorse.

“I am not like you…nobody hurts my children”: The Protective Father and Vulnerable Child Figure in Dexter

In Dexter, the narrative of vulnerable child figure corresponds with the depictions of a lost virgin nation and threatened children that Bush relied on to justify exceptionalist policies. Scenes from episodes 1.1 (“Dexter”), 1.10 (“Seeing Red”), 3.3 (“The Lion

Sleeps Tonight”), and 3.12 (“Do You Take Dexter Morgan?”), demonstrate parallels between Dexter and the U.S. following 9/11, specifically the manner in which the threatened child warrants extreme acts of violence. In these episodes, Dexter’s violence is justified through his own childhood trauma, the murder of children by villainous characters, as well as the paternal role he performs through his relationship with a single mother. Furthermore, the vulnerable child reinforces a separation between

Dexter’s moral violence and the wickedness of his victims. Significantly, this division between Dexter and his victims is even further bolstered through racial features, harking

back to the captivity narrative of the white hero rescuing a child from the dark-skinned savages.

In episode 1.10 (“Seeing Red”), viewers learn through a flashback sequence how

Dexter became a serial killer. After walking into a particularly bloody forensic crime scene, Dexter immediately becomes haunted by a repressed memory of his childhood self, covered in blood, shouting “Mommy!” Startled by this horrifying memory, Dexter physically reacts by momentarily blacking out. He quickly regains consciousness and runs out of the crime scene in a panic, but later returns to the bloody room in order to fully understand the meaning behind this memory. As Dexter walks back into the crime scene, viewers see an extended flashback of him as a two-year-old crying in a large pool of blood, with blood spattered across his porcelain face. Moreover, we see an image of his hysterical mom, also covered in blood, soon-to-be brutally murdered by a chainsaw. She begs Dexter to “close your eyes,” and yells at the shadowy-looking killer

“Not in front of my son!” Viewers do not actually see his mother’s murder; rather, we watch young Dexter’s reaction, whose eyes remain open during the entire scene.

Dexter’s mother’s final plea suggests that because Dexter did not look away from the violence, he became violent.

This narrative of childhood trauma leading to adult violence is common in both real and fictional serial killer stories. In Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s

Wound Culture (1998), Mark Seltzer explains how the serial killer exemplifies a popularized understanding of childhood trauma, derived from the “modern belief that childhood experience forms the adults, the founding premise, for example, of psychoanalysis” (4). Although Seltzer acknowledges that many serial killers have

experienced childhood trauma, he argues that the theme of “wounded as a child, wounding as an adult” has such an “a priori status, even when evidence for it is absent”

(5). Here, Seltzer critiques psychoanalysis, which often employs Freud’s notion of the

“primal scene,” or the child’s initial witnessing of his parents engaged in sex, which, as

Freud contends, traumatize the child’s later psychosexual development because the child interprets the sexual act as a scene of violence. Seltzer argues that for serial killers, the governing belief in childhood trauma allows for mimesis, where the trauma

“loop[s] back on these cases: framing not merely the public intelligibility of the serial killer but also his self-intelligibility” (5). According to Seltzer, the problem with this looping effect is that the public will often jump to a Freudian explanation for serial violence, even when evidence for it is absent. Moreover, the serial killer will often rely on these pop-psychology clichés, since according to Seltzer, this figure is constantly mimicking all that is perceived as “normal.” In Dexter, this flashback of child trauma similarly prompts viewers to have sympathy for his character’s adult violence, knowing that his innocence was breached at too young of an age. The show compels viewers to excuse his murders through the narrative of “loss of innocence,” a justification which fits well with the show’s historical context. Indeed, this particular narrative strategy in the show resonates with Bush’s declaration of war following September 11th, when he relied on the notion of a destroyed “virgin land” in order to justify violence in Iraq and

Afghanistan.

Moreover, the show utilizes the trope of the harmed child to reinforce the demarcation between Dexter and his victims, and to morally excuse Dexter’s violence.

This binary between Dexter and other serial killers is highlighted from the very first

episode (“Dexter”), when Dexter kills Mike Donavan, a boys’ choir leader responsible for murdering multiple children. Dexter kidnaps Mike after a choir performance, and uses a rope to drag him by the neck into a shed containing the dug-out bodies of the boys

Donavan raped and murdered. Donavan closes his eyes, not wanting to recognize his own monstrosity, but Dexter shouts at him, “open your eyes or else I’ll cut your lids right off of your face,” which becomes a reference in the later episode described above, when in a flashback, Dexter’s mother begs him to close his eyes. Dexter wants

Donavan to open his eyes to the violence they have in common, yet the show also creates a division between Dexter and Donavan when Dexter tells him “…children – I could never do that. Not like you. Never, ever kids” (“Dexter”). Dexter is particularly disgusted by Donovan’s murdering and sexual abuse of children, and goes to great lengths to dig out the decomposing bodies in order for Donovan to recognize the wickedness of his crimes (in later kills Dexter only uses photographs of victims in order for the murderers to face their guilt). Dexter also appears particularly enraged by

Donovan’s offenses, seen when he drags his victim by the neck with a rope, shouts at him, and forces him to look at the rotting bodies of his victims (all actions that viewers never see with Dexter’s later victims), which suggests that the murder and rape of innocent children justifies the most drastic retaliatory measures.

In the case of Mike Donovan, one has to wonder whether Dexter’s rage is directed more towards Donovan’s murdering of children, or his rape of children. That question is answered in later episodes, when Dexter adjusts his Code to kill people who are not necessarily child murderers, but who Dexter perceives as a sexual threat to children. For example, in episode 3.3 (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), Dexter kills Nathan

Marten, a pedophile whom Dexter believes has made his step-daughter, Astor, his next victim. Dexter spots Nathan talking to Astor in the grocery store, and immediately becomes suspicious. As he closely watches them chat, Dexter compares his own instincts to that of a lion, and says in an inner monologue, “my highly tuned senses detect another predator sniffing around one of my cubs.” Dexter moves closer to Astor as a protective gesture, and stares coldly into Nathan’s eyes, allowing viewers a few moments to notice the polarity between Dexter and Nathan’s appearances. Dexter has dirty blonde hair and light skin, whereas Nathan has dark hair, dark eyes, and tan skin.

Although Marten’s racial background is never mentioned, the show appears to be falling back on light and dark archetypes, where whiteness automatically signifies civilization, and darkness savagery. This racial contrast is reinforced by Dexter’s inner remark,

“we’re not so different, Nathan and I,” referring to their compulsion to harm; significantly, however, Dexter adds, “but I would never harm a child.” Dexter’s mistrust of Nathan grows when he crosses paths with the suspected predator again at the beach, and sees that he is taking pictures of Astor from afar as she plays in the ocean. Dexter confirms through a sexual predator registry that Nathan is a pedophile, but knows that he cannot kill him because Nathan is not a murderer, and therefore does not fit the Code.

However, believing that Nathan is a threat to his own child, he decides to adjust the

Code. He reflects, “maybe there’s another Code, a Code that says you’ve stepped uninvited into my world, and that’s a place where I get to decide who gets to live or die.”

When Dexter finally murders Nathan, the show drives home the difference between the two of them. While strangling Nathan with a rope, Dexter angrily declares through gritted teeth, “I am not like you…nobody hurts my children.”

We can arguably compare Dexter’s Code to the Law, since the Code is ultimately the regulations that Dexter must abide by. This scene demonstrates, however, that

Dexter acts with the omniscience of the Sovereign figure, who declares himself exempt from his own laws. He justifies this state of exception through the need to protect his child’s innocence from a sexually threatening miscreant. The show, then, resorts to the

19th century depiction sentimental child figure who, as noted above, adults will exploit to warrant reactionary legislation. As I argued earlier, Bush, too, personified the nation through the sentimental child figure, in order to justify an intervention in Iraq when the

“virginity” of the nation was lost to foreign intruders. Furthermore, both Dexter and Bush evoke the captivity narrative through the innocent white child figure, as well through their own racial features. Dexter’s lion/cub metaphor particularly recalls the captivity myth, in which he becomes the Daniel Boone or Hawkeye, white characters, who must cross into savage lands to rescue the white child from “jungle” beasts. Bush and more generally, the US Military, also depended on this narrative, by situating themselves as the white, masculine heroes out to save the innocent Jessica Lynch and Ashley

Faulkner from uncivilized Iraqis and Afghanis.

It is also important to note how in this episode, fatherhood plays a significant role in Dexter’s choice to adjust the Code to kill Nathan. Earlier in the episode, Dexter learns that Rita is pregnant with his child, and he expresses hesitation about being a father, at one point telling his sister, Debra, that he is not sure if he is going to be in the baby’s life. However, killing Nathan solidifies Dexter’s decision to be a father to the baby. After strangling him to death, Dexter steals milk from Nathan’s refrigerator for the kids, and comes home to find Rita drying and putting away the dishes. He walks over to her and

for the first time, puts his hand on her pregnant belly, looks into her eyes, and says in an inner monologue, “so there it is, I’m going to be a father and raise my child. That’s what any good man would do, after all, it is a jungle out there.” This scene marks a change in

Dexter, who in the first season claimed that he is unable to truly care about anyone. Yet, this sentimental paternal gesture of laying his hand on Rita’s belly contradicts his earlier claim. Through this scene, the show begins to establish Dexter as the paternal figure who must kill in order to protect his vulnerable children from the cold-blooded jungle creatures.

Dexter’s fatherly sentimentalism grows as the third season continues. In episode

3.12 (“Do you take Dexter Morgan?”), the show takes a melodramatic turn when Dexter finds himself tied down on the kill table of George King, a serial killer who skins his victims. The show makes an allusion to Hamlet in this scene, when the ghost of Harry,

Dexter’s adoptive father, appears in glowing light. Dexter communicates with Harry about his desire to live because he wants to be a father, while Harry sheds tears as he listens. Violins softly play in the background as he says to Harry, “I’ve never felt this.”

Harry responds, “You’ve never had a son before, you want to see him come into the world,” to which Dexter replies, “Yes…to raise him with Rita…to watch him grow up…to protect him…I didn’t until now, until it’s all going to be taken away. I want to be there for him. I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.” Dexter’s compassionate lines bolster the moral contrast between him and George Skinner, who the show depicts as a sociopath that murders and skins purely for perverse pleasure. Here, we see how the show, once again, returns to the propaganda version of “rogue” that separates the hero from the villain: The scene contrasts Dexter’s newfound compassion for his unborn son

with George King’s wickedness and utter disregard for human life. This contrast resembles the moral distinction the media created between George W. Bush and

Saddam Hussein: While Bush was the Daniel Boone who bypassed the Law to protect his child-nation, Hussein was the sociopath, lacking empathy for his own people. This ethical separation between Dexter and his nemesis is once again reinforced through racial features. The show assigns torture to the racialized Other, evidenced by the fact that King is a Nicaraguan immigrant with a long and thick wiry beard and dark brown skin and eyes. Moreover, viewers learn that prior to moving to the United States, King headed an interrogation unit for the Nicaraguan Army, and was known for skinning his victims as a form of torture. The show’s choice to include these sadistic interrogative tactics as part of King’s back story is interesting when we consider how the Abu Ghraib photographs were released to the American public less than four years prior to this episode. Therefore, the show unconsciously helps elide the torture practices of US military officials in Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray, by assigning interrogation torture to the racialized enemy. Significantly, while Dexter does torture his victims, the show downplays this violence, and instead emphasizes his compassion for children, and his desire to protect them using whatever means necessary.

Conclusion: Child as Narrative

Part of the reason why this chapter so strongly focuses on the narrative of the traumatized child who is in dire need of rescue and protection is because narrative itself is often linked with childhood. In her book Strange Dislocations (1995), Carolyn

Steedman explains how over the past 200 years, Westerners, through discourses like psychoanalysis, physiology, and evolutionary theory, have searched for interiority, or a lost past. She demonstrates how childhood has become associated with this lost past,

evidenced by Freud, who turns to the child as the origin story that is missing and yet still a transcendental part of the adult. Most significantly, Steedman explains how this conception of the child as lost emerged simultaneously with the modern idea of history, which is teleological because it uses narrative to situate the past in relation to the present. The historiographer, who employs narrative, takes a past that is ‘dead and gone’ and renders it lifelike, or ‘as they really were’, or ‘as they really happened’

(Steedman 80). Psychoanalysis captures the modern historiographers method, because according to Freud, the adult undergoing therapy can reawaken a lost memory and have it ‘operate as though it were a contemporary event’ (qtd in Steedman 87).

However, what Freud found was that many of the childhood memories his adult patients were describing, particularly of sexual abuse, “was not actual sexual abuse in childhood, but a fantasized seduction” and that the events had never really happened”

(87). This point is especially significant when we consider how Dexter and the Bush administration employ the fictional narrative of the traumatized child in order to account for later violent events. Yet, as Freud and Steedman explain, we should understand the show and President Bush’s narration of events as an indication of the adult fantasy of childhood trauma. This brings me to my next chapter on the serial killer, a figure who begins to unravel neoconservative narratives, and compels Dexter viewers to look inward at American culture and policies. In doing so, Americans viewer confront the disturbing fact that the trauma of 9/11 might not be an event that just happened to them, but an event that they might have been invested in.

CHAPTER 4 THE SERIAL KILLER

In the previous chapters, I explained how the hard-boiled detective and the child figure in Dexter parallel the neoconservative, exceptionalist framework used to justify international violence and restrict constitutional rights. In this section, I turn to the most complex figure in Dexter – the serial killer - to understand how this figure turns the gaze inward, and is indicative traumatic nature of the series itself. In my discussion of both the hard-boiled detective and the child figure within Dexter, I explained violence as occurring from an outside force. Dexter, as hard-boiled detective, fights criminals that have gone “rogue,” which reinforces the moral separation between Dexter and his victims. Similarly, with the child figure, the show explains trauma from a Freudian lens, in which an external event taints a child’s innocent psyche. In this model, adult violence is almost always accounted for by the wounding event that occurred in childhood. The serial killer figure in Dexter, however, draws viewers’ attention to the traumatic nature of the series, demonstrated through the cyclical and repetitive violence on the show.

Moreover, this figure often functions as a mirror, reflecting our own pleasure and complicity in viewing and enacting violence. This idea is important in light of 9/11, which is often described as an unexpected shock. Rather, by turning to the serial killer figure, this chapter will elucidate our own traumatic involvement and attachment to representations of violence: Dexter’s repetitive ritual comes to mimic the show’s cyclical form, and the viewers attachment to these recurring violent images are indicative of our own traumatic neuroses.

It is important to note how the serial killer genre grew after 9/11. For example,

David Schmid cites only a few of the serial-killer-related movies that were released

within the two years following 9/11: Dahmer (2002), Bundy (2002), Speck (2002),

Murder by Numbers (2002), Red Dragon (2002) and Monster (2003) (Schmid 246). He argues that these films provide Americans with “perverse comfort”: since serial killer films have been a staple of American culture since before 9/11, the films become a place of “refuge,” since they are “familiar and therefore in many ways less threatening than the terrorist” (248). Moreover, the serial killer genre helps reinforce the binaries between “us” as “civilized and nonviolent” and “them” as “violent” (Schmid 248). The figure’s familiarity and its ability to maintain us/them binaries resulted in the conflation between the serial killer and the terrorists. Indeed, it is not insignificant that the

American media at times employed the terminology used to characterize the serial killer to describe the terrorist. For example: in a Denver Post column, psychologist Curtis

Schmidt described Hussein as a ‘serial murderer’ because ‘he has demonstrated, for any nation willing to look, the utter lack of empathy and concern for people’s humanity that is so characteristic of the sociopath’ (qtd in Schmid 250). Curiously, Islamists also relied on the serial killer figure in order to account for the evil of American culture, which in turn caused the disintegration of binaries between the morally righteous United States and the depraved terrorists. For example, in an audiotape addressed to the allies of the

United States, Bin Laden asked, ‘What business do your governments have to ally themselves with the gang of criminality in the White House against Muslims? Don’t your governments know that the White House gang is the biggest serial killers in this age?’

(qtd in Schmid 250). Bin Laden likely understood that describing the United States as a serial killer was rhetorically effective, since the serial killer is, after all, a uniquely

American phenomenon, and therefore could stem from an evil inherent in American

culture. The 1991 novel American Psycho (later made into a film in 2000) drives home this idea of the serial killer as the diseased product of American culture, as the novel and film create a comparison between rape and serial murder, and the misogynist, consumerist, and shallow culture of the Reaganite era.

Although the American media’s description of the terrorist as serial killer was intended to maintain a separation between the civilized United States and the barbarity of the foreign terrorists, the comparison nevertheless implied that the serial killer is intrinsic to American culture. Consequently, the serial killer figure allows Americans to look inward at their own society, and to see the 9/11 attacks as potentially symptomatic of American culture and policies. Indeed, in his post-9/11 essay “Welcome to the

Desert of the Real” (2002), Slavoj Žižek argues this point when he writes that the “safe sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing and cowards, cunningly intelligent and primitive barbarians. Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence” (387). Žižek’s quote applies to the media’s description of the terrorist as serial killer, because it allows Americans to confront their own barbarity, by drawing our attention to the fact the serial killer is intrinsic to American culture. In turn, the media’s comparison between the serial killer and terrorist invites the recognition that terrorism might also be inherent in American culture, which begins to dismantle the simplistic perception of 9/11 as an attack by evil outsiders. However, American’s recognition of their culture’s inherent evil will sit uncomfortably and therefore call for disavowal, because they do not fit within the

American exceptionalist framework of America as the morally righteous, redeemer nation. Žižek argues that Westerners are constantly avoiding this distilled essence, or the “hard resistant kernel of the Real” (11). Rather, westerners demand products deprived of their “malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol…virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties, warfare without warfare…” (9-10). In Dexter, viewers are similarly able to derive a virtual pleasure from watching Dexter’s murders, without having to experience the “malignant property,” since the show absolves viewers of graphic displays of violence, and relies upon a moral framework (the Code) to justify Dexter’s murders.

In Dexter, viewers encounter the reactionary “passion of the Real,” without the

“excessive antagonism” of the actual Real, or that which we are unable to integrate into our reality, and therefore experience as a “nightmarish apparition” (Žižek 19). Žižek argues that the very core of the passion for the Real is the identification with

the dirty obscene underside of Power: the heroic attitude of ‘Somebody has to do the dirty work, so let’s do it!’…We find this stance…in the properly rightest admiration for the celebration of heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty work: it is easy to do the noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it - it is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country…(30)

Dexter embodies this hero that Žižek describes, as he is willing to step outside of the

Law and perform the “necessary dirty work” by killing those that “deserve” to be killed. In the final episode of season one, the show itself recognizes how American viewers celebrate the dirty underside of the Law, when Dexter fantasizes about the community’s response if they were to learn about his murders. Dexter does not envision handcuffs and jail bars, but instead imagines a parade thrown in his honor, complete with a banner with the words “I love Dexter” and red, white, and blue streamers. As Dexter walks

through the crowd, a police office smiles at him and cheerily says, “Way to take out the trash,” and a blonde middle-aged woman merrily shouts “All right Dexter! Protecting our children!” In this scene, the cheering crowd is us – viewers who identify with his character, morally justify his violence, and commemorate him as an American hero (as seen by the red, white, and blue streamers). Dexter remarks in an inner monologue,

“Yeah they see me. I’m one of them, in their darkest dreams.” Ironically, this scene occurs in Dexter’s fantasy, even though in reality, many Americans at the time (2006) supported the exceptionalist justifications of the Bush administration, which acted similarly to Dexter by stepping outside of the Law to protect American families from the

Afghani and Iraqi villains. Therefore, Dexter’s remark that this would only happen in viewers’ “darkest dreams” is not necessarily true, because morally sanctioned exceptional violence was already part of the viewer’s reality. Additionally, Dexter is not part of our “darkest dreams,” since the show withholds viewers from the “malignant property” of murder. Rather, on the whole, viewers feel affection and affirmation for

Dexter, because we are relieved from the brunt of his violence, and because the show creates a moral distinction between Dexter and his victims. Therefore, Žižek’s notion of our “distilled essence” often remains repressed in Dexter, since the show still relies upon the binaries of good and evil, hero and villain.

However, in the flashback scene when Harry walks in on Dexter dismembering a body, the show demonstrates how viewers’ sentiments towards Dexter would change if they were to encounter what Žižek calls “the Real” or the “traumatic excess” of his murders, and how the serial killer figure could be an allusion to the Real (since Žižek claims the Real cannot be exactly pinpointed) (18). As I described in the first chapter,

the show splits the scene in which Harry walks in on Dexter dismembering a corpse, and indicates that Harry sees the full horror of his son butchering a body, while viewers see very little of the corpse. Douglas Howard compares Harry in this scene to Victor,

Frankenstein’s creator, who feels ‘breathless horror and disgust’ at his creation (67).

Harry throws up, tells Dexter to “stay away,” and three days later, commits suicide, unable to endure the monstrosity of his evil creation. After recalling this memory,

Dexter remarks that ‘The idea of the Code is one thing – a grand idea, a noble cause, but the reality of it is [something else]’ (Howard 67). I would argue that the true horror of this scene is Dexter’s overidentification with the Law to the point of excess. As the judge, jury, and executioner, Dexter embodies the Law to the extreme. And perhaps surprisingly, the serial killer figure fits quite well as a manifestation of the extreme Law.

Richard Tithecott writes in On Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (1998) that “the FBI is not shy in telling us that serial killers often identify with instead of against the law enforcement community” (109). More importantly, the serial killer relates to the police officer hero or the super cop, who will sometimes act with omniscience, and “who defeats not only the criminal but the legal system, who fights for a higher justice that is founded on the principle of an individual’s right to assert power in the face of a tainted society” (Tithecott 112). The serial killer embodies exceptionalism, because like lawmakers and those in power, he transcends the Law:

“Those who so obviously disregard the law, those who are figured as existing in a world beyond the reach of the law, exist on the same plain as the lawmakers, those who disregard previous laws and establish new ones, those in authority” (Tithecott 111).

Therefore, the horror that Harry encounters when he sees Dexter butcher a corpse is

really the structural excess of State power. This scene in many ways relates to

Willard’s terrifying encounter with Kurtz in Francis Coppolla’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a

Vietnam war film based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Willard has been sent on a mission to find and kill Colonel Walter Kurtz who reportedly had gone rogue. After a month long trip down the Nung River, Willard reaches Kurtz’s camp, where he sees severed heads and bodies hanging from various objects. Here, at this camp, Willard encounters the “horror,” not of the “savage” Vietnamese, but of Kurtz, who reveals the true barbarity of US militarianism:

Is it not significant that in the figure of Kurtz, the Freudian ‘primordial father’ - the obscene father-enjoyment subordinated to no symbolic Law, the total Master who dares to confront the Real of terrifying enjoyment face-to-face - is presented not as a remainder of some barbaric past, but as the necessary outcome of modern Western power itself? Kurtz was a perfect solder – as such, through his overidentification with the military power system, he turned into excess which the system has to eliminate. (Žižek 27)

Similar to Kurtz, Dexter’s experiences an overidentification with the Law through the horrifying enjoyment of murder. Harry and Willard, however, perceive Dexter and

Kurtz’s excessive connection with the Law as the “nightmarish apparition” of the Real.

Only two and a half years prior to this episode, many American viewers had a similar reaction to Dexter’s father, as they watched Sixty Minutes broadcast a series of photographs from Abu Ghraib. These photographs displayed prisoners in various humiliating, often sexual, poses, and many of the photographs included a White

American guard grinning and giving a thumbs up near the degraded subjects. Although the photographs were initially intended for American viewers to enjoy the torture and revenge against the enemy, most Americans were repulsed by the images, which created national shame, as well as turned the gaze inward. Although President George

W. Bush deemed the guards’ actions “un-American,” Susan Sontag’s article in the New

York Times argued against Bush’s claim, stating that the guard’s acts are, in many ways, what it means to be an American, citing, for example, video games centered around killing as evidence of the “increasing acceptance of brutality in American life.”

Additionally, like Dexter, the guards overidentified with Bush’s biopolitical settlement.

Donald Pease writes, “the Bush administration defined the Homeland Security State as populated by a vulnerable people whose biopolitical security depended on the state’s defending them against a people that was negatively represented as posing a biopolitical threat” (185). These photographs of people “not worth living” set against those “whose lives must be defended” reproduced “Bush’s biopolitical settlement reduced to its simplest, visual terms” (Pease 184-185). I would argue, then, that the true horror of Dexter, Kurtz, and the Abu Ghraib guards is that their acts are no longer in the realm of the symbolic Law. Rather, all three confront the Real through their “terrifying enjoyment” of violence and their overidentification with militarianism and the Law.

Moreover, the three figures reveal the “distilled essence” of Western power, which caused Harry, Willard, and American viewers respectively to lose identification with these subjects, instead seeing them as the frightening excess, or a “nightmarish apparition.”

Additionally, the cyclical nature of the series, the repetition of Dexter’s ritual, and

Dexter’s troubled relationship with his father invite a traumatic reader of the show. Of course, as I discussed earlier, the show itself encourages viewers to view Dexter through a traumatic lens, when we see, in a flashback, Dexter’s childhood trauma of watching his mother’s gruesome murder. In this scene, viewers are prompted to have empathy for Dexter’s adult crimes, because we are to understand them as a

consequence of him losing his innocence as too young of an age. Yet, as I explained above, this reading is problematic, because it allows violence to become justified through the child figure. To accept this reading, we fall right back into the conservative framework that George W. Bush used following 9/11, which warranted extreme acts of violence to protect the vulnerable, infantile nation.

Turning our attention to the serial killer figure helps avoid this reading, which relies too heavily on interiority, and not enough on how the interior meets the exterior, or how the psychological meets the social. In discussing the serial killer figure, Mark

Seltzer avoids the psychoanalytic model, arguing that the serial killer “internalizes the public (popular and journalistic) and expert (criminological and psychological) definitions of this kind of person: ‘serial killers are influenced by the media as well academic psychology, and many make a specific study of early offenders’”(Seltzer 107). Here,

Seltzer argues that the serial killer, who he describes as “chameleon-like” and

“mimetic,” will use popular psychological, clichéd explanations, such as the primal scene, as a way to simulate and conform to the dominant understanding of this figure.

The serial killer, then, embodies a looping effect; he lifts himself up by his “own bootstraps: feeding off of the representations and identifications that thus become inseparable from that concept” (Seltzer 107). Although Seltzer does not completely bypass traditional psychoanalytic theory, he argues that it is important to give further attention to how the serial killer is the “mass in person,” or the epitome of the intersection between private and public. It is in this space where the private meets the public where we find trauma, or what Seltzer calls “wound culture.”

I am primarily concerned with Seltzer’s notion of the looping effect in Dexter and post-9/11 culture, which the show and the terrorist attacks exhibit through the theme of creation leading to destruction. We see this theme in Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the 9/11 attacks in terms of an “autoimmune crisis,” or the “strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (94). Derrida’s metaphor of 9/11 as an autoimmune crisis explicates how terror is “always, at least in part, ‘interior’” and “lives with or within ‘me’” (188). To exemplify this idea, he explains the 9/11 hijackers as a product of the Cold War, when the United States contributed to the Islamic Afghan fighters by providing them with weapons and intelligence. Moreover, to further his comparison between 9/11 and an autoimmune crisis, he refers to how the terrorists lived in and trained in the United States. Derrida reflects on the hijackers’ reliance on

American weaponry and intelligence as “doubly suicidal,” both to themselves, and to the

United States, which armed and trained them.

Similarly, in Dexter we see this looping effect and Derrida’s notion of the autoimmune crisis, when Harry’s creation ultimately becomes his demise. As a police office frustrated by the failures and slow legal system, Harry teaches Dexter to function as the Law without all the bureaucratic red tape. He trains Dexter, providing him with a

Code and weapons, which allows for a comparison to be made between Harry and the

United States, as both enabled the subjects that would inevitably become their downfall.

Harry’s creation of Dexter is analogous to Derrida’s autoimmune crisis, because it eventually leads to his own suicide, literal in this case. The paralleling narratives between Harry and Dexter and the United States and the 9/11 hijackers demonstrates,

once again, how the show turns the gaze inward. Dexter’s monstrosity is not just the consequence of a childhood trauma. Rather, it is, what Seltzer calls, “a malady of social construction experience at the level of the subject” (107). Dexter is a byproduct of the legal system since Harry is a police officer that created him. Moreover, since American exceptionalism stems from the Cold War, when the United States helped militarize

Islamic Afghan Fighters, we can see Dexter as the diseased product of exceptionalism, similar to the terrorist attacks.

Furthermore, Dexter’s murder ritual is an indication of wound culture, or the

“public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and open persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 1). His ritual, I argue, demonstrates how the show’s content meets its form, as the ritual mimics the very seriality of the show itself. In Dexter viewers are constantly observing a looping effect, or repetition compulsion, through Dexter’s murders, which almost always follow the same trajectory: in every episode, Dexter will have an urge to kill, research a potential victim to confirm that he/she is deserving of murder, stalk the victim, and then murder the victim in a kill room that always looks the same (plastic lined walls, and a long kill table in the center of the room). Moreover, Dexter consistently uses the same tools, and typically murders his victims using the same method, a single puncture to the heart. He calls the ritual “intoxicating,” and I would argue that this description captures the way viewers feel about the series in general. There is something “intoxicating” about watching Dexter, as the series itself is similar to the unvaried ritual: in every episode, viewers encounter a “monster of the week,” or a minor character that Dexter tracks and kills. Simultaneously, every season includes a major killer that Dexter clashes with the

entire season, and inevitably ends up murdering, usually in the season finale: the Ice

Truck Killer in Season 1, Lila/Doakes in Season 2, Miguel in Season 3, etc. The series, then, functions as the viewers’ ritual through its repetition, and thus prompts us to reflect on our own investment in Dexter’s violence. How does our involvement with Dexter’s repetitive violence indicate our own traumatic neuroses? The repetition we enjoy in the series is comparable to the “jouissance” viewers experience watching the same televised footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Žižek observes how after 9/11 “the same shots were repeated ad nauseum, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest” (12, original italics). He argues that viewers’ desire to watch the same images from 9/11 indicates how we were

“libidinally invested” in the attacks, exemplified by the proliferation of action films prior to

9/11, such as Independence Day, with images eerily similar to the terrorist attacks.

Significantly, viewers demonstrate their investment in both Dexter and the 9/11 attacks through their attachment to televised images. I would argue, then, that television as a medium in both the show and in the aftermath of 9/11 helps domesticate a trauma by allowing viewers to repeatedly watch wounding images within the comfort of their homes. Of course, the television set itself is a chief object of the Western domestic space, and for many Americans, holds as much importance as a refrigerator or a bed. Television becomes part of a daily routine: we turn it on during certain times of the day, either as background noise as we engage in another activity like cooking or cleaning, or at night when we decide we are finished with our daily work and its time to relax. Additionally, when we turn on our favorite television show, we expect to see what we are used to watching. For example, I would feel uneasy if I was watching Al Roker

on the Today show, and he did not end his weather segment with the line “That’s what’s going on around the country, here’s what’s happening in your neck of the woods” or if my favorite television series began with a different set of opening credits, after having been accustomed to certain images and sounds that signal that my show is about to begin. It is safe to argue, then, that American viewers take pleasure in repetition, and yet, our enjoyment of repeated images might be indicative of trauma. Dexter makes viewers aware of our traumatic attachment to the show: In the same manner that Dexter relies on his ritual, as a way to master his own traumatic childhood memory of witnessing his mother’s death, viewers are also dependent on his ritual, which mirrors the seriality of the show itself. The televised images of the World Trade Center attacks have a similar effect: the cyclical images of planes crashing into the towers are an attempt to master the shock. Watching these repeated images of the attacks through the television set in our living rooms helps to provide makes us feel in control of an event that is outside of our normal order.

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

The ultimate truism following the terrorist attacks was that everything changed after 9/11. However, it is inaccurate to perceive this attack as an epistemic break, especially since the Bush administration harked back to 19th century narratives as a way to make sense of the national trauma and justify retributive violence. Moreover, the increased popularity in vigilante characters in film, television, and literature following

9/11 further shows how Americans are resorting to 19th century frontier myths as a way to comprehend this shocking event. Like Dexter and his ritual, Americans have once again recourse to their old routine of exceptionalism, or the belief in America as a redeemer nation that must errand into the wilderness in order to purge civilization of evil.

I wish to conclude with this idea of “cycling back” into older narratives. It was not until I was writing my third chapter that I began to notice cycles throughout this entire project. For example, even though the show intends to be “hip” and attract a liberal audience, it ultimately falls back into the neoconservative narratives that it attempts to avoid. Moreover, the show perfunctorily uses the psychological cliché that the child experience forms the adult, by constantly including flashback sequences to Dexter’s childhood. As Seltzer argues, this “dime store” psychoanalytic account of serial murder is problematic, firstly because evidence for childhood trauma is often absent, but more importantly because the explanation is circular: the serial killer reenacts the ‘recurrent killing of the self throughout childhood,’ or the “serial killer – a killed self – seems to go on living by transforming others into similarly killed selves” (6). Furthermore, the repetition compulsion in Dexter’s ritual is a never-ending cycle of murder. Indeed,

Dexter’s ritual makes him into a killing machine, and the mechanical and perfunctory nature of his murders parallels the predictability of the show itself. The way the content mimics the form draws our attention to television as part of our daily routine. The pleasure we take in the repetition of televised images, such as the planes crashing into the World Trade towers, indicates how the television set fulfills the role of domesticating a trauma.

Although Dexter often parallels post-9/11 neoconservative exceptionalist narratives, particularly through its respective repurposing of traditional hard-boiled detective and child figures, the show also indicates how our recourse to these narratives are a form of suicide. While the show likely chose the serial killer as a vigilante figure because this character is a “hip” idea, the choice of this character enables viewers to look inward, and see how American’s glorification of the vigilante character, who embodies exceptionalism, is suicidal. Indeed, the show illustrates Derrida’s notion of the autoimmunization, when Harry’s vigilante creation ultimately becomes the source of his demise. Similarly, we can understand 9/11 as the self-destructive fulfillment of the Cold

War, when the United States helped militarize Islamic Afghan Fighters. In this case,

American exceptionalist beliefs and practices, which arguably gained footing during the

Cold War, is the source of America’s downfall. Even so, the Bush administration returned to these narratives, indicating how we are still part of this cycle of destruction and violence.

The Bush administration relied upon the progressive narratives of democracy, freedom, and science to justify the war on terror. Dexter, too, employs both science and moral reasoning in order to warrant Dexter’s violence. Yet, as Theodore Adorno and

Max Horkeimer demonstrate, these enlightened narratives always cycle into barbarism, and Dexter embodies this critique. Indeed, while Dexter’s violence seems regenerative, since it purges civilization of evil, the fact that he is a serial killer, the epitome of violent repetition compulsion, indicates that his violence is ultimately degenerative.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Emily Glosser received her MA student in English at University of Florida. She also received her BA from the University of Florida, where she majored in English.