Friday, July 2, 2010 By Mike LaSalle “All men are rapists” –Marilyn French “Marriage. Children. You never expect it to end in tragedy. Unless you’re me.” –Dexter Morgan
On Sunday, December 13, 2009, 2.6 million television viewers turned on Showtime to watch the season 4 finale of Dexter. According to the Hollywood Reporter, it “was the most-watched original series episode ever on the network, and the most watched telecast since a Mike Tyson fight in 1999.”
If you haven’t seen the show, watching Dexter for the first time is a little bit like having your first cigarette, or that first taste of gin when you were 15.
It’s sickening.
Later on, as the early warning signs pass away, you might end up acquiring a taste for the very thing that made you want to vomit in the first place.
Dexter is like that.
Dexter Morgan appears an ordinary but successful urban man, fully engaged with the wheels and levers tact and clicks of the postmodern world: He is a Crime Scene Investigator for the Miami Metro Police Department, specializing in blood spatter metrics. He is competent, discerning, and responsible. He is protective of his family, responsive to his co-workers, and faithful to his girlfriend.
Dexter is young, free, and shows a few trappings of material advantage. He has an apartment, and enjoys traveling the Florida waterways on his own 3282; boat — the Slice of Life.
His younger step-sister, to whom he is devoted, is likewise a career up-and-comer at Miami Metro. Police work runs in Dexter’s family. His step-father had been a detective with the police force before his death by apparent suicide.
When he was 3 years old, Dexter and his older brother witnessed the brutal murder of their mother by a crazed drug dealer, who then locked the boys in a cargo container alone with her bloody remains.
The police officer who rescued Dexter, Harry Morgan, adopted the boy and gave him a home.
As we learn in the course of the series, the murder occurred in the first place because Harry was having an affair with the boy’s mother, who had been a police informant.
By the time Dexter reached adolescence, he was dismembering neighborhood pets. Harry finally realized that the boy was irreparably traumatized by his experience; he was bound to become a full-blown sociopath, venting rage through ritual killing.
But Harry also believed that Dexter’s irresistible urge to express catharsis through homicide could be channeled, given a purpose, and harvested for a community benefit.
In this way, Harry mentored young Dexter in the art of getting away with murder – while at once teaching him that the urge to kill must be applied only within a well-defined Code.
While Harry’s Code was shaped to accept Dexter as he is — a cold blooded killer who knows no empathy — it also constrained him to kill only those who were demonstrably deserving of the punishment he was compelled to deliver. In other words, this reconstructed serial killer has been trained to kill justly.
Taken as a whole, Dexter is the stuff of black comedy. The role of a serial killer of serial killers is a tongue-in-cheek play on the postmodernist cycle of simulacra and simulation: Dexter is a feminist deconstruction of everyman. He is the ultimate primary aggressor. He is hegemonic by nature. His very existence is a threat to good people everywhere. And though he is a quintessential outcast, he remains a protector.
Dexter is a thoroughly postmodern man.
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
As Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young argue in their book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, feminist postmodernism apes the techniques of revolutionary Marxism.
For Marxists, the word “ideology” refers to carefully concealed assumptions that most people leave unexamined…. These hidden assumptions amount to “false consciousness,” invented and propagated by members of a ruling class through a symbolic and institutional “superstructure” in order to perpetuate their own power and privilege. The masses are, in effect, prevented from understanding their own reality and thus from rebelling against it. All of history, in short, is reduced to a titanic conspiracy. Ideology is ‘their’ sinister plot designed to perpetuate hegemony over “us.”
For some feminists, all this applies to gender no less (or even more) than to economics. They want to abolish culturally propagated notions of masculinity and femininity, believing that these are insidious notions subconsciously carried, as it were, by both men and women, and thus bring down “the patriarchy.” (199-200)
Under the feminist postmodernist regime, men and women have been virtually divided into two unequal classes, wherein Governance Feminism codifies all men as bourgeois exploiters, and all women as downtrodden proletarians.
Marxism’s check against False Consciousness has also been appropriated by feminist institutions and applied as a punishment against allegedly unreconstructed men. With the rise of feminist postmodernism, all men are now suspected of harboring “false consciousness” to the material detriment of all women. In this way, the habitual inversion of traditional biases has become a revolutionary purpose in itself.
In their recent appearance at the Male Studies Symposium at Wagner College, Nathanson and Young repeated their description of the three pillars of human social maturity, to whit: for an adult human to become fully individuated, he or she must do something that is
1.Distinctive, 2.Necessary, and 3.Socially Valued Unlike other serial killers, whose “work” would not be considered socially valued, Dexter is arguably fully individuated by the standards of Nathanson and Young.
Dexter’s work as a killer-of-killers is certainly distinctive, as his extra-judicial “authority” is arguably necessary and socially valued. Certainly his father’s training could be considered a social compact, even though it only took place between two people. Two people are enough to create a social consensus, if two are all there are.
ORIGINAL SIN
In his book The Decline of Males, anthropologist Lionel Tiger pointed out that postmodern men share a universal stigma of “Male Original Sin” – a social debt that each man must carry for the collective misdeeds of other men from ages past, and for the ongoing sin of False Consciousness.
As a consequence, writes Tiger, “Male behavior is treated as intrinsically questionable if not outright pathological.”
As other men carry the burden of False Consciousness, Dexter must carry the burden of being a killer. He suffers his public role in silence and shadows, puzzling and calculating, hiding the truth to save his skin.
Like all men under feminist postmodernism, Dexter’s False Consciousness was passed in secret through the paternal line – hidden even from his own sister. Similarly, Harry’s training of his son in the Code constitutes a form of paternal intimacy — something like a father training his son for membership in a sacred trade — or a secret society. Dexter was never alone with his murderous impulses; his dad shared the burden of his original sin, and eased his passage into adulthood.
Considering Dexter as a American male role model, let me quote Nathanson and Young again, this time from their book, Legalizing Misandry (p.172). They are talking about the idea promulgated by the radical feminist theory that “all men are rapists”. The reasoning here is that women who appear in pornographic photos or movies are incapable of giving their informed consent to publishers….
And therefore their participation is “coerced”. This is the same argument used else against any sexual relations between men and women, according to which women are “powerless” almost by definition. Therefore they are incapable of giving their informed consent. And therefore, all sexual relationships between them and men are “coerced” – which is to say, they are rapes.
The authors cite a case argued by Catherine McKinnon, for which she won a court victory in 1988: Louise Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards. The upshot of this case was that porn in the workplace was recognized as a form of sexual harassment.
Certainly the character of Vincent Masuka in the series Dexter — who is always making sexual innuendos — would not stand a harassment claim under the current feminist legal regime. The depiction of Masuka as a sexual harasser is too acute to be real, yet Masuka “gets away with murder” in virtually appearance on Dexter.
If Dexter is a black comedy, it is also post-soap opera meets Julliard. With 12 episodes per season, Dexter’s pacing is sometimes dreary, and the ritual murders blur in memory. Having seen three full seasons, I don’t remember them all. But I do remember a few hard laughs, and the challenge of being puzzled.
If you can stomach it, Dexter is a deeply satirical series lampooning the state of men under postmodernism. Adults only.