Yesterday, Lucy Mangan wrote a pretty damning critique of Dexter, the new 12-part Showtime drama currently being screened on FX. The response from readers, both positive and negative, has been overwhelming. Here are 10 reasons why I would like Lucy and all other naysayers to carry on watching.
1. Dexter is about as good as post-9/11 drama gets. The idea that the ends justify the means is celebrated in 24 by heroic torturer Jack Bauer, brutally questioned in The Shield and brought chillingly to its dreadful and compelling apotheosis in Dexter.
2. The title sequence is simply the most bewitchingly seductive there has ever been. All it involves is Dexter clumsily shaving, squeezing orange juice and frying an egg. The mundane is rendered both beautiful and ghastly.
3. In the days of TV's Miami Vice, the city was all orange and pink sunsets, palm trees, cheap rolled-up suits, sports cars and drug deals. In Dexter, South Beach is an emotionally vacuous, sexually promiscuous purgatory populated by dead souls; a place where the truly creepy feel most at home. Very much like the real city in fact.
4. Dexter himself is not a misogynist as Lucy claims. Neither is he really a misanthrope. He simply feels compelled to kill people, having been trained to do so by his doting foster father. He finds himself as puzzling as we do. During his frequent internal monologues he doesn't go so far as to judge his own actions but clearly invites us to do so.
5. To say, as some posters did yesterday, that Dexter celebrates serial killers is misguided. It is part of art's purpose to illuminate the darker areas of the human condition - and it doesn't come much darker than serial murder. Dexter, like Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho - to which it often alludes - is not an easy experience, with Dexter himself like a cross between Batman, Bret Easton Ellis's Bateman and Patricia Highsmith's desensitized Tom Ripley. But should you choose to view it in such a way, the series can function quite brilliantly as a pure, white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat thriller.
6. Dexter is very, very funny. The more his inner world is revealed to us, the more aware we become that he possesses a dry, droll take on his unfortunate condition and the world at large. He has enough self-awareness to appreciate that he is not exactly a model citizen, but this awareness also affords him a keen eye for the hypocrisy of others. Admiring the work of another killer he says, "I wish I'd thought of that."
7. Dexter doesn't do feelings. He is in a relationship with a woman almost as damaged as himself, and is constantly bemused at the notion that two human beings can ever connect - emotionally, intellectually or sexually. It is this thread of the story that I find the most compelling and excruciating. Possibly because most of us have, at some point, wished that empathy came far more easily to us.
8. Lucy is not alone in disliking the premise of the show. Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays Dexter, admits to having doubts about taking on such an unsavoury role, relenting only when he began to understand Dexter in terms of moral ambiguity. Perhaps poster Vertigowooyay put it best yesterday when he wrote, "Dexter deliberately puts the viewer in a moral quandary - as does The Sopranos - based on, 'I'm being asked to empathise with this character, yet he is perpetrating horrific acts.' That's a fairly complex dramatic idea to convey. Any violence in Dexter is most certainly intended to repel, not seduce."
9. The psychological reasons for Dexter's condition are given a convincingly horrific reason. As the first season evolves and we are plunged further into Dexter's past, we are reminded in the most forceful way that violence begets violence. It took the Hannibal Lecter franchise four books and five movies to even begin exploring the reasons behind the protagonist's thirst for blood. Dexter does so right from the get-go and in a way that makes for superb drama.
10. My wife tends to be somewhat squeamish. She dislikes The Shield for its machismo, random violence and its pessimistic depiction of the law. She loathes the so-called torture porn of movies like The Devil's Rejects and the Saw trilogy. But she adores Dexter, finding it funny, moving, gripping and genuinely provocative. What a pair of sick pups we are, eh?
