DEXTER: VENGEANCE, THE DEATH PENALTY AND DETERMINISM

WARNING:  Written on the cusp of the series' final season, this piece contains spoilers from Seasons 4 and 5.





The inherent restrictions and freedoms of working in a fictional form are often those of creating unique worlds that must be taken on their own terms—things sublimely made in their own strange human image.  Like dreams that vanish or lose their power when you try to retell them, stories (the best ones) often defy attempts to explain them concretely, or posit a certain message from them.  The freedom at work in creating such defiant forms in the first place also restricts their analogies from any precise application outside their settings.  At best they point to parallels in the real world, make us question our assumptions, and, if they are persuasive enough, change what we think or believe about something fundamental, often despite ourselves.

This is not that easy in a time of high ideological polarization.  Yet, it remains among the charms, powers and moral perils of storytelling, that in our willing suspension of disbelief, we may also suspend our beliefs for story’s sake.

Seldom has this storytelling power been more evident than in Showtime’s remarkable television series, Dexter.  The story follows the secret life of serial killer/blood spatter expert, Dexter Morgan.  If that prospect alone would make us flip to another channel, the mitigation in Dexter of the evil a serial killer represents is one of the hooks that has drawn and kept viewers riveted for the past seven seasons.  For, Dexter witnessed the murder and dismemberment of his mother at age three, and it did ‘something’ to him.  That ‘something’ has made him a killer.  His father, Harry Morgan, a Miami Metro cop, saw what was wrong with Dexter and channeled his son’s pathology by means of a moral code.  Dexter would kill only other killers.  Harry taught Dexter everything he knows including how to avoid detection by law enforcement.  Oh, to have such a supportive and accepting parent!

Another mitigating factor in our identification and outright rooting for the morbid killer, is that Dexter knows he is a monster.  Through voice-overs that give the show its interior substance, Dexter confesses his own sickness.  Even if his thought process is wrong and we know in our gut he is making a mistake, a kind of appealing humility shines through in the aftermath when Dexter understands his error.  It is an ingenious device, not only because Dexter’s mind becomes an underlying texture, but also because in a way it becomes our mind, and it feels he is confiding in us.  While he may be lying and hiding from everybody else, with us he is candid.  We see every awkward moment, understand each instance where the empathy lacking Dexter is at a complete loss to respond in appropriate ways, and we smile or wince sympathetically at these droll and pointed moments.  We are in on all his secrets and so respond as his confessors, if not as accessories after the fact.

One element of Dexter's character that gives us confidence in him is that innocence—often a bull’s-eye for pathological killers—is safe in his presence.  That he appears as a bulwark (the sole familial and emotional support) to his adopted sister, Deborah, even if that is a false perception on her part, gives him another redeeming quality.  Though, in fact, Dexter has no such emotional support to offer, it may be that his unflappable cool and lack of empathy appears as the strength the emotionally labile Deb needs in her life. 

Perhaps what we admire most about Dexter is his daring, and, if such attributes apply to serial murderers, his savoir fare.  Season 5 comes to mind, when Lumen has botched her attempt to avenge her kidnapping and rape on one of the guilty men against Dexter’s advice.  Dexter arrives in time to finish off the man, get Lumen out of harm’s way, recapture the cellophane wrapped man he’d intended for his own killing table, set him up with Lumen’s victim to make it look like an autoerotic encounter gone wrong, and walk onto the scene just as Deb and the Miami Metro homicide team arrives.  Avenging and guardian angel all in one.

At these moments, when storytelling’s power pushes Dexter to his limits, we are most closely allied and complicit with him.  And as with any bravura performance, we want to stand up and cheer.

So is there a place in our world for a principled killer?  If the state can do it, mistake prone as it is, why not a highly trained killing machine with an unwavering moral code?  This brings us back to my opening premise:  it is impossible to translate the metaphoric world of a Dexter into the real life scenarios of criminal justice for the simple reason that Dexter is a fiction.  Fictional Dexter may feel empowered to carry out the work that state institutions are set up to do, but as of yet there aren’t any sociopathic killers in real life that can marry a pathological need to kill with a dead eye for justice.

The show has framed these questions dramatically over the years, but has wisely steered clear of them rhetorically.  While the human desire for vengeance is an open subject on the show, Dexter’s eye for an eye moral code internalizes the issue of the death penalty itself without ever uttering the words.

This kind of restraint and intelligence is paired with uncompromising grit.  The show’s trademark over the years has been its refusal to take the easy way out, either in setting up its harrowing story lines, or in subjecting its characters to the highest degree of pressure—so that impossible choices, and life changing decisions loom at every turn.  In my opinion and to my amazement, the show got better in each of its first four seasons, climaxing with the shattering and pivotal Trinity case.

Newly married and a father to boot, Dexter found himself trying to reconcile his ‘dark passenger’ with family life, and through his son, Harrison, there were hints of a possible transformation.  These were dashed with his wife Rita’s murder, and the nightmare of cyclical violence looming.  The season ended with Dexter finding Harrison sitting in a pool of Rita’s blood just as he had as a child with his mother.

At the time, I had hoped the show would attempt the most daring feat of all, if it could have done so believably: to deliver Dexter to the threshold of a new existence where he no longer needed to kill.  This may have never been in the cards, but the question of determinism is a major one in Dexter, and one the show seems to have answered very early on:  Dexter cannot banish or resist his desire to kill.  I have wondered whether this conclusion was a question of strict realism for the show, because sociopathic killers cannot change or stop killing until they are caught.  But, strictly speaking, as noted, Dexter and his code have no real life parallels either. 

So would it be possible for this fictional Dexter--who not only seems to relish the ritual of killing and shedding blood, but also reacts emotionally to the murder of the innocent and becomes enraged at the unrepentant killers on his table--could this thinking, reflective and self-aware killer come to be disenchanted with killing altogether?  If Dexter is a metaphor for us, the answer should be yes.  But, I have a feeling this game of killing the killers will have no happy ending.

As the eighth and final season is set to premiere, one thing seems inevitable.  If Dexter cannot stop killing, then somebody will stop him.  In the end, the ingenious writers of the show will have had it both ways.  For in lulling us into identifying and rooting for Dexter all along, they have gotten us to admit, at least provisionally under the spell of great storytelling, that a mitigated form of evil is necessary in the world, and, in as much as Dexter’s pathological thirst for blood and his code of vengeance is a metaphor for our own, they remind us that this long running spree really needs to end.

WORSE JACKIE

Showtime's Nurse Jackie has always been an entertaining if flawed program.  From the way it dragged out the secret of Jackie's addiction into the 2nd season, to the slap-stick absurdity of Cooper's boob grabbing, and now, it seems to me, the way the characters have become caricatures (Thor and Zoe for instance), it has been skating on increasingly thin ice. 

The reason why many of the characters are left standing around with nothing to do except slyly speculate about Jackie's new romance, or reel off zingers at appropriate moments, is part and parcel of the shows original charm:  the secret and unknowable life of Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco).  Nobody can really get close or have more than a superficial relationship with her.  Even Dr. O'Harrah, who Jackie truly confided in, fell victim to Jackie's addictive behavior.

Now that O'Harrah has gone and Jackie's split with ex-husband Kevin is final, there's room for a special someone in Jackie's life.  Of all the interesting people in the whole city of New York they had to pair Jackie up with, the producers of the show chose a New York City cop.  He's so New York down to earth you can practically smell the coffee and doughnuts on his breath.  Despite, the Season 5 promos talking about the wonderful chemistry of the actors and how perfect Adam Ferrara is as Officer Frank Verelli, the romance feels a bit canned to me.

My larger objection is yet another intrusion of law enforcement personnel into our lives.  Even a fictional one.  It isn't bad enough that we've been conditioned and softened up to accept the burgeoning police state and the excesses of the criminal justice system with the Law and Order franchise, CSI crime procedurals, shows about elite military crime fighters and psychological profiling teams, but when Nurse Jackie needs a man in her life, somebody who is "good" for her, wouldn't you know we'd get her a policeman. The metaphoric message is there for all of us to internalize.  More law and order is more security.  Or in Frankenspeak:  "Cop Good; freedom bad!"  It might be good for addict Jackie one year into recovery, but I for one would like a lot less big brother in my life.  I heard Bill Maher talk about the 4th amendment being obsolete and I just about foamed at the mouth.  Privacy in the global internet age may be a practical impossibility, but it doesn't make privacy any less fundamental a right.

But law and order is what we're about and what we've become.  A country that is immature about its freedoms, must then obsess about its excesses with an excess dose of the antidote.  So while Americans find a million ways to get themselves into trouble on-line--with sexting, racist tweets, racy photos, illegal porn, internet fraud, hook up sites, breaches of job confidentiality on Facebook--you name it--at the end of the day we have those guys in uniform to make us feel we've got it all under control, or, at least, somebody has.

LIGHTBEARER WINS WILD CARD AT NY BOOK FESTIVAL; HARD MAGIC NAMED RUNNER-UP IN YA FICTION

First and 2nd in my respective categories.  I still almost can't believe it.

Bruce Haring, one of the contest organizers, emailed me:  "...congrats on a fascinating book; plenty of big screen potential there."

I think he was referring to Lightbearer, but it could  easily apply to both.

http://newyorkbookfestival.com/

The Sampson Complex: the Power of Hair

We may not often think about mythic archetypes the way we used to, or consider them relevant when we do, but lately, I've been thinking a lot about Sampson, the Biblical hero whose strength came from his hair.  Recall that Sampson got played by Delilah (she cut off his hair while he slept) and lost his awesome strength.

In my lifetime, and in my life, I've witnessed the ways in which hair, and how we wear it, continues to convey surprising power and meaning in our culture.  Having come of age in the 70's, I remember the arguments and tension at home surrounding how long we got to wear our hair.  My father was from the "greatest" generation (i.e. the ones who did what they were told) and he believed that hair on men and boys should be short.  Long hair was part of the counter-culture then, and I remember my father referring to the Beattles’ mophead days as a time when they “looked like men”.  I guess relative to the White Album and Abbey Road days, the mopheads were tame.

At least my father had moved beyond the 1950's peach fuzz summer cuts, but in my childhood view of hair and how everyone was wearing it, he was cutting it too close for comfort.  It made matters worse that he was my barber for the first 12 years of my life.  He actually had a high chair in the basement just for haircuts.  He kept all the tools in a zippered leather case:  the scissors, combs, clippers and whisk brush.  I remember those minutes in the chair that seemed like hours, the shfft sound of the scissors cutting through hair and the metalic click of the scissors opening and shutting rapidly between snips--my father's rhythmic tic that sounded like the scissors themselves gaging which locks needed to go next.  More than anything that sound made me feel like jumping out of my skin and right out of that chair. If only I could have slept through it like Sampson.

In all fairness, as I look at the pictures of myself, my father did a pretty good job cutting hair.  That somehow was beside the point.  The real issue with me and hair was that mine happened to be curly (different) at a time when everybody's was pin straight.  White people wouldn't begin perming their hair curly until the mid to late 70's and in the meantime I suffered the consequences from the moment I entered first grade.

I was called Curly-Q-tips.  I was asked if I stuck my finger in an electric socket.  I was asked if I was a boy or a girl.  The kid who asked me that on the way to school one morning had one hell of a nerve, given that he was as close to an albino as you can come without being one.  He had snow white hair at age 6, pink skin, and only his blue eyes set him apart from the pigment free coloring of albinism.  Yet, somehow my curly hair trumped his straight snow white hair.

By the age of 15 I had a Jackson Five scale afro and used an afro pick on my hair.  That was 1978.  By the next year times had changed and I started to wear my hair shorter but also stopped picking out the curls of my childhood.  This new look was a more modest compromise, my parents didn't seem to mind it, but I still managed to get a nickname from one of my high school classmates:  the sponge.  Because of the cushiony spring of the curls.

If the 70’s were problematic for me in the hair culture war, the 80’s would prove equally treacherous.  Using hair gel and cropping my hair closer on the sides led to further culturally charged remarks.  A certain person, who shall remain unnamed, thought my short hair made me look gay.  Well, maybe it wasn’t the hair as it turned out.  And from other quarters came the complaint that I was using stuff that “black people” used on their hair.

The battle over what I did with my hair had become as archetypally meaningful as Sampson’s:  people were trying to control who I was and what I did by controlling how I wore my hair, as though they had zeroed in, like modern Delilahs, on the source of my power, as though once they had my hair, they had me bound—the way Sampson ended up chained between two pillars.

If hair is somehow tied in our minds to personal power and freedom, then power and freedom often have sexual overtones.  So it is in cultures where only a woman’s husband gets to see her hair; or in our own culture, where a full head of hair on a man is a symbol of virility, thus all the hair regrowth formulas and hair replacement procedures offered to the balding.  Likewise a dark head of hair absent of gray is a sign of youth, while many men shave parts or all of their body hair, not only to show off their gym work, but to look boyish.  Women shave their legs and arm pits to appear more feminine.  And is anybody really ever happy with their hair?  Have you known anyone who didn’t think there was something wrong with theirs?  Too limp, too thin, too dull, too frizzy, too straight, too curly, too nappy, to thick, too coarse, too fine.  While we may sporadically battle our cellulite, muffin tops, beer guts, love handles and saddle bags, we quietly and persistently battle our hair every day of our lives.  From decade to decade, trend to trend, style to style we wage our private battles, and those of us with “different” hair battle the forces of culture of conformity.  There are occasional truces, but the war is never over.

By the mid-90’s when my hair started to get too thin on top, I decided to get out of the hair wars forever and began buzzing my head down every few weeks so nobody really could tell what kind of hair I had or have, what color or how much.  I balded by choice.  In the decade to come, even in the immediate years after I gave up hair, it became a popular look, even for young men with a full head of hair.  Finally it was the best of both worlds.  No hair products, no expensive haircuts, no combing, no gels, no styling, no teasing (in any sense), no nothing.  And it was cool besides! Life without hair was pretty sweet.

But, last winter when I got really busy one week I didn’t shave my head and beard at the usual time, and then a few more weeks passed and soon I was confronted, tempted, by the idea of growing a beard for the rest of winter (the first full beard for me in 25 years) and that meant growing my hair too, because I hate beards with bald heads.  I warned those who had never seen me with hair that it was curly when it got long enough, and I even brought in pictures of me with my afro, and my sponge look and my modest curls with the close cropped sides.  I knew as soon as it got long enough to start to curl it would stick out first.  That meant hair gel again.  Sigh.  And as it lengthened in early spring toward a full-fledged curly head, the hair gel served to give it shine and keep the curls from frizzing out.  Many seemed to like it, mostly women.  I was ambivalent for the very reasons I went bald in the first place:  it was too thin on top.

Then the whispering began, and it came back to me one day that someone said that I had to be coloring my hair, because it couldn’t be that dark, and that I was perming it also.  Even though I had shown pictures of my curly hair.  There it was again.  The battle over my hair:  what it was, what it meant, what I did to it.
I had planned to buzz it off by Memorial Day, but I took it off two weeks early, and that’s how it’s going to stay.

Consider that in my lifetime, the war over how long, what style, and what I put in my hair had raised fears to the point where most of the major isms in our culture had gained utterance.  Early on it was sexism, then racism, homophobia and finally ageism.  How did my poor, doomed, genetically-programmed-to-go-bald, head of curly hair end up being about all those things?  Maybe, like hair, all those isms, if allowed to grow, just can’t help coming to the surface. It has something to do with human expression, and hair has been a form of expression for thousands of years.  As it projects from our heads, chests, legs and arm pits, we seem to project so many of our fears onto its portentous growth.  The Bible has it right.  Hair is a powerful thing.

Ann Aikens Reviews Hard Magic

New post on uppervalleygirl

A YA Mystery Both Smart and Charming by uppervalleygirl At the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival on May 18, Braintree author John Caruso’s textured novel Hard Magic received an Honorable Mention for Young Adult Fiction, in what organizers called “a very, very tough competition.”  A dark yet sparkly mystery comprising multifaceted characters, dialogue among kids and adults that is neither corny nor precious, and […] Read more of this post