Dexter and Philosophy

291 Pages·2012·1.35 MB·English

Table of Contents

Popular Culture and Philosophy
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Know Thyself?

BODY PART I - Maiming and Necessity

Chapter 1 - The Killing Joke

What Is a Superhero?
Deeds Not Words
Origin Stories: The Orphan Makes Good
The Superhero Syndrome
The Only Truly Decent Man Left on the Planet

Chapter 2 - Dexter’s Pointy Ears

Dexter’s Loss Is Our Gain
The Spock Problem
The Dexter Problem
As Goes Dexter, So Go We?
The Good Life and The Dexter-like Life

Chapter 3 - Dearly Damaged Dexter

You’re a Killer, I Catch Killers
I’ve Always Sensed There Was Something Off about Him
A Little Bird with a Broken Wing
You Can’t Help What Happened to You. But You Can Make the Best of It

Chapter 4 - Can We Blame a Man with No Choice?

How Much Control Does Dexter Have Over the Butcher’s Knife?
Does Inevitability Absolve Us?
Judge Frankfurt Rules Dexter Guilty
Any Way You Slice It
Almost Caught!

Chapter 5 - What Dexter Doesn’t Know Can Hurt You

Reasonable Doubts
Bodies of Evidence
Hey Dex, Is Your Spidey-Sense Tingling Yet?
More than a Feeling?

Chapter 6 - Dexter the Self-Interpreting Animal

Dexter’s Inescapable Framework
Has Dexter Overcome Humanity?
The Need for Recognition
A Story in Search of a Narrator

Chapter 7 - Is Dexter Morgan Practically Perfect in Every Way?

Groomin’ Lumen

Corrupting the Youth of Miami
The Homicidal Imperative?
Kickin’ It New School
I’ve Got No Strings . . .

BODY PART II - The Cut of Dexter’s Jib

Chapter 8 - Dexter’s Mirror

The Seduction of Blood
The Void, Dread, and Murder
Dexter’s Ritual Transcendence of Death
All for Love

Chapter 9 - A Very Special Kind of Monster

Corpses and Nothingness
Violence and the Return of the Abject
Taking Out the (Six) Garbage (Bags)
Kicking the Dark Passenger
Rule Number One

Chapter 10 - The Sublime Dexter

The Power of the Sublime
The Passions Aroused by the Sublime
Look for Something Bludgeony
Dexter’s Aesthetics

Chapter 11 - Dexter’s Specimens

Try Our New Dahmerland Section at Specimens ‘R’ Us
Counting Specimen Slides
Dexter, Specimen Maker
Buddy’s Bones
Born Free of All That’s Human
Pulled Pork Sandwiches and the Sexual Politics of Meat
You Kidnapped a Cop This Time, You Know? Not Some Invisible Hooker
Designing Women in Dexter
Homosocially Yours, Dexter
Specimen Watching

BODY PART III - What Would Dexter Do?

Chapter 12 - Pathetic Rule Follower or Vigilante Hero?

What Is a Moral Code?
Weird but Likeable Psychopath?
Emotions, and Rules, and Morality (Oh My!)
Good? Evil? Icky? Sticky?
Vigilante Hero?

Chapter 13 - Deontology in Dahmerland

Why Might Dexter Be Amoral?
The Three Moral Theories

Dexter’s Deadly Virtues
The Dark Defender and the Needs of the Many
Dexter’s Dark Deontology
You Control Your Urges—They Do Not Control You

Chapter 14 - Best of Luck, Dexter!

Picking Up the Dark Passenger
Better You than Me, Dex!
Teaching the Code of Harry
. . . And No More Fucking Remorse
Where the Bodies Lie

Chapter 15 - Why Kill or Not Kill? That Is the Question

The Mind Thinking about Its Sense of Duty
Dexter Doing His Duty Dutifully?
The Mind Serves the Heart
Harry’s House
Dexter Is a Needy Ned
De-Deontologizing Dexter

BODY PART IV - Bad Blood and Bad Behavior

Chapter 16 - The Discipline of Dexter’s Punishment

The Wimpiness of Modern Punishment
Following Harry’s Code
You Can’t Always Kill Whom You Want
One Minute, You’re on Top of the World, the Next, Dexter’s Table
Dexter Is the Sovereign We’ve Been Waiting For
The Final Thrust to the Abdomen

Chapter 17 - Dexter the Busy Bee

Killing Killers, Saving Lives
The Thrill of the Kill
Bad Motives, Good Actions
Enter the Man-Devil
A Poem that Will Live in Infamy
A Second Look at Dexter’s Motives

Chapter 18 - You Hurt Her, You Hurt Me

Why Does Dexter Need a Family if Blood Is His Life?
Dexter’s Awkward Sexual Advances
Sex, Power, and Knowing Thyself
Morgan or Moser?

Chapter 19 - Dexter’s Whiteness

The Problem of Whiteness
The Invisible Killer
Murder and the Mise-en-Scène of Whiteness
Death, Sex, and Dexter

Chapter 20 - Happiness, Dexter Style

One Code to Kill Them All

Dexter: The Family Man?
Beyond the Code, Beyond the Lies
Can a Serial Killer Be Happy?

BODY PART V - Dexter’s Bloodline

Chapter 21 - Dexter Unmasked

Everyday Masks
Nietzsche’s Masks
Dark Passengers
True Blood
Deeply Dissecting Dexter

Chapter 22 - Neither Man nor Beast

Being Bad Feels So Good
The Self-Controlled Person
The Morally Strong Person
The Morally Weak Person
The Self-Indulgent Person
The Beast and the Saint
Locating Dexter on the Scale
Fine, I’m a Sociopath, but Do I Have to Feel Bad About it?
But Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
Becoming a Real Boy

Chapter 23 - Dexter SPQR

Nietzsche’s Bay Harbor Beast
Conscience and Guilt
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
The Ethics of Dexter’s Appeal

Chapter 24 - Dexter’s Look

Bad Faith
Dexter as Master
Caught in the Act
Look at What You’ve Done!
Bad or Bad Faith?

Chapter 25 - Safe Dex

Dexter the Just Man
Rooting for a Killer
Our Killers, Right or Wrong
The Retribution of Raffles
Enter the Bulldog
Enter the Saint
Decline of the Vigilante Novel
Dexter, Hero of Our Time

The Perps
Index

Copyright Page

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For Brandy Burfield

Acknowledgments

Working on this project has been a pleasure, in no small part because of the many fine folks who have
assisted us along the way. In particular a debt of gratitude is owed to David Ramsay Steele at Open
Court, the contributors to this volume, and our respective academic departments at UMass Amherst,
Northwestern University, and Weber State University. Finally, we’d like to thank those family members,
students, friends, and colleagues with whom we’ve had fruitful and rewarding conversations on various
aspects of all things Dexter as they relate to philosophical themes.

Know Thyself?

GEORGE A. REISCH

The statistics are one in twenty-five. That means there’s a good chance that there was one among my
elementary school classmates, two in my high-school student council (which explains a lot!) and about
eighty at the last meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Yikes.

Sociopaths are everywhere—at least according to psychologist Martha Stout who, in her book The

Sociopath Next Door, formulates the one-in-twenty-five (four percent) statistic. The sociopaths Stout has
dedicated her life to studying have three defining traits: they are incapable of feeling ordinary human
emotions, like compassion, empathy, and love; they have no moral conscience and simply don’t feel
shame or guilt like the rest of us; and they easily hide this from those of us around them.

How do they do it? In large part, they don’t. We do it. We are so confident that we know what other

people are about, we do the work for them. As Stout puts it, “since everyone simply assumes that
conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly
effortless.” When you’re one of the one-in-twenty-five, living, working, and bowling with your friends,
“the icewater in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they
seldom even guess at your condition.” (p. 1). The only good news is that most of these sociopaths are not
vicious serial killers.