In Which Dexter Divorces His Sister For Good

Dead Already

by DICK CHENEY

Dexter
creator James Manos Jr.

It was an awkward situation, on a number of levels, when the titular character of Showtime's long-running serial killer comedy Dexter found his sister Deborah (Jennifer Carpenter) watching him stick a knife in the chest of Colin Hanks.

The most obvious discomfort arose from the fact that Deborah Morgan, head of Miami metro's homicide division now knew her brother was the fabled Bay Harbor Butcher, the killer of killers, murderer of murderers. The second level of disgust was that Ms. Carpenter was witnessing the finest performance of her ex-husband Michael C. Hall's career.

ew. gross. stop.

If you were not previously familiar with Michael C. Hall as the simpering brother of the worst actor in the universe, Peter Krause, on HBO's Six Feet Under, you would be forgiven for thinking he was the bloodthirsty blood spatter analyst for the police, so completely is Hall subsumed in the role. Granted, the part isn't exactly Richard III, although I would certainly pay my money to watch Hall take a crack at that, too.

Now that Dexter's sister-wife is onto him, she is going through the twelve stages of grief. I can identify with what she is experiencing because America just elected a guy whose chief qualification for the highest office in the land is the number of different anecdotes he unfurls on Leno and Letterman. Karl Rove lied to me.

brb getting my lawyer to improve my spousal support

At first Deborah Morgan focused on preventing her brother-husband from killing anyone else. This resolves soon dims to, in one hilarious scene, begging him not to interfere in police investigations. She makes Dexter promise, and after he agrees she says, "Are you lying to me right now?" "I don't know," he responds. (Expecting candor from a serial killer is of course a metaphorical analog for the IRL expectation of fidelity from a popular actor. Carpenter sued for spousal support, he got a new girlfriend who appears only slightly less annoying than his last.)

Jennifer Carpenter examines her ex-husband during her scenes with him as an eagle responds to a particularly runty member of her offspring before swallowing it whole. Because the distrust she shows for him is so real it on some level cannot be hidden through Stanislavsky's method, Dexter has become half drama, half true-to-life reality show. Some of the scenes between the two are so tense the possibility of sex between brother and sister (Dexter was adopted) is as plausible as cold-blooded murder. It's an exciting time.

they found out paula broadwell googled "Fucking a general"

Finely tuning the reaction of the most important person in his life to Dexter's obsession was not an easy task. Yes, Dexter takes lives on a fairly routine basis. Yes, wikipedia is the main resource providing evidence for his kills ("I googled poison! She's guilty!). On the other hand, if the general public were ever actually made aware of all the unbelievably nice things Dexter has done for the state of Florida, he'd be the most popular man in the state behind Marco Rubio. (I am not totally sure what stage of grief I am in now, but I am completely open to Latino options, that much is certain.)

Dexter's reaction to Deborah's reaction is itself complicated. He is very happy his sister finally knows him for who he is, because before now the possibility of anyone accepting his true self was merely a temporary fantasy certain to end in their death. But he also knows he cannot stop killing, and Deborah's involvement in his somewhat off-the-cuff plans, what I call killcations, complicates matters more than he would like. The real-life and fake-life conflict between the two has completely invigorated the show after a somewhat dull Sixth Sense-esque season in which Edward James Olmos fell asleep during one of his own scenes.

OKcupid profile reads, "Best feature: flaring nostrils, worst feature, dental hygiene"

As Dexter's seventh season continues, it has introduced Chuck's Yvonne Strahovski, an Australian actress who portrays a Bonnie-type character finally met up with Dexter's Clyde. After learning of this lovely woman's murderous ways (she uses roughly the same weaps as Poison Ivy), Dexter plans to murder her in Miami's only makeshift Santa's Village. "Do what you gotta do," she whispers to him. Instead of stabbing her, he cuts off the packaging tape binding her and has unprotected sex on his killing table while fake snow descends around them. Yvonne's teeth are the tragedy that makes her advances towards our hero completely resistible; her guilt and lack of compunction for her crimes are the nudge that tips the needle back in the other direction.

It was always thought that Dexter would have to, at some point, be caught. It is presumably how the show will end, and indeed there is such a preponderance of evidence against him that it is almost an inside joke no one has even so much looked in his direction for some time. The African-American officer who he framed for about forty murders and imprisoned in a cage is now many seasons dead. Race is an issue that hovers at the edge of Dexter, since if he were to demographically target those who commit violent crimes, he would surely find himself killing his share of Latino and black men.

There is one Latino male in the entire department and he frequents prostitutes and can't keep custody of his children. The black guy died.

Instead, the individuals Dexter targets are overwhelmingly white. The reason is for this is obvious: if Dexter hewed closer to reality, he would not only subtly seem like a white supremacist, but he would be dealing out justice for crimes that occur in urban areas and are somewhat less clear morally. Dexter himself has already proved that even killers can be sympathetic if their stories are presented in the right light; after all, the Navy Seals and the president who killed Osama Bin Laden have done nothing but brag about it since.

"Let's have them talk on the phone as much as possible." "Roger that."One thing you rarely see in Dexter is the inside of a prison. The staggering number of incarcerated individuals is the chief way the crime rate became so low this past decade. Jailing criminals is effective at preventing crime, we can be relatively sure, but the financial cost is absolutely enormous. It impairs the government's ability to fund a public television station that, despite costing millions to a country that can't afford it, is apparently the justification some need to steal wealthy people's incomes.

The approach Dexter wields to the problem of crime is actually far more humane. If someone has committed a crime that deserves death, Dexter provides it for them in as painless a fashion as possible. If the individual involved does not at that moment deserve death, Dexter allows them to go on living, but he will often tail them in his car until he can get more evidence, or enter their name in AskJeeves and nod approvingly at the results.

"Deb, you obviously didn't see 'That Thing You Do'."

In practice, this could be accomplished with a simple monitoring bracelet instead of degrading imprisonment. If the shame and anger we felt when Dexter imprisoned Doakes is any indication, savages jail their ne'er do wells, civilized people either kill them or fine them a sum appropriate to their offense. Instead of paying to house and feed the worst elements in our society and creating monsters in the process, we could be letting them go free, watching them closely, and spending the money on more important things, like diplomatic protection for honorary generals and airtight security while the president plays another round of golf.

In the meantime, Guantanamo continues operating. The left is more concerned with a secession movement than reforming the justice system. Holding anyone accountable except for the businesses that create actual jobs is anathema to them. Sending Michael C. Hall just a few miles south to Cuba remains the most cost-effective option.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Downton Abbey.

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In Which Heaven Help Me For The Way I Am

  Criminal

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There are many popular and infamous criminals in American history, but they usually become popular after the fact. When the real-life "hero" of the Jim Carrey-Ewan McGregor comedy I Love Philip Morris, con artist Steven Jay Russell, steals millions from a company and escapes prison multiple times, we do feel a vague thrill. Despite our enjoyment of the way he flaunts authority, it's hard not to identify domestic economic instability with thievery. It may be fun to watch someone escape from prison, or even vicariously exciting, but there might as well be a calculator in the corner of the screen tallying up the cost to taxpayers.

Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor in 'I Love Philip Morris'In France, there is no such problem. The release of Jean-Francois Richet's magnificent two part film Mesrine in the United States, a four hour epic about the Paris-born thief and killer Jacques Mesrine proves this. Not since Jean Valjean was it so obvious that civil disobedience was not only an acceptable part of being French, but increasingly essential to it. Portrayed by the incredibly charismatic Vincent Cassel in a performance that makes Scarface look like an afterschool special, the Jacques Mesrine of Mesrine is so much more raw fun than his equally wonderful American counterparts.

France is currently enduring a period of civil unrest because of the prospect of the retirement age rising from 60 to 62. (They are evidently unaware that most people live thirty or forty years beyond this date.) Since living off the government is a more accepted and pervasive way of life over there, the fact that the magnetic Jacques Mesrine robbed banks and escaped from prison is in some sense just another in-house quarrel, like debating a thorny topic with your dad.

When Mesrine comes home from Algeria in the first part of the biopic, Death Instinct, he rips on his own father for collaborating with the Germans and explains his turn to a life of crime as a revenge act. Later on, he justifies returning to a prison he had earlier escaped from with automatic weapons as an expression of his discontent with the abuses of the prison system. L'Instinct de Mort, Mesrine's autobiography written from prison, describes his life story and how being an insane madman is actually a rational act. Richet's overly violent masterpiece in two parts is the most exciting film ever created by someone who idolized Michael Mann's Heat.

robert de niro and val kilmer in 'Heat'

The reason that a criminal (or the idea of one) is a remedy to societal malaise and not simply a symptom is because although a utopia would have no criminals, the fact that it would be impossible to defy the ruling power means that world would be no utopia. Still, we can hope for a better class of criminal. The fact that America has a bad, but not quite as bad, a system as France is morbidly clear from the fifth season of Showtime's Dexter. Its protagonist and hero is a police officer and serial killer of other killers: Dexter Morgan almost never punishes a crime other than murder, perhaps because it is his own crime.

The action takes place in a version of Miami unrecognizable to most of us. The show itself is shot in Los Angeles, and it's hard but not impossible to mistake the two places for each other. Dexter's Miami looks like Los Angeles but feels entirely like a small town. The show's transitions are the most transparent in television, staging banal sets and exteriors that remind us that this is not really our country, just a place that with similar detailing. It makes more sense to surround a fantasy with other cardboard reproductions of reality that are as difficult to believe.

Miami is one of the poorest cities in America, yet the Miami metro homicide unit has rarely processed a case involving a Hispanic or African-American until this season. Although the head of the division is a Latina, she is one real note in a litany of intentionally false ones.

Instead of prosecuting the guilty through his own offices, Dexter hunts them down. He is not great at doing this; he isn't terribly wonderful at even using the internet. The Jeff Lindsay novels Dexter is based on take place in the typical thriller-neverworld, where it's still 1986 and no one is capable of using a computer at a speed other than grandma. Most crimes can't even be committed with all the technology we have now, and fewer killers escape justice. In Dexter's world, they do, at least for awhile.

State cold case units have solved many murders that were assumed to remain unsolved, and only the Civil Rights era, the Department of Justice declared this summer, will still have unsolved crimes. Take the case of America's so-called first serial killer, H.H. Holmes. Holmes opened a hotel which became known as his Castle. Like Dexter, he thrived on elaborate ritual:

The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack.

One of the major motivations for murder in those days was finding someone who had money, changing their will to make yourself the beneficiary, and then offing the person. This doesn't happen nearly as often now. Dexter has no such amateur motive, and we approve of progress.

Occasionally, we find that one of Dexter's victims may not be quite as guilty as they appear. (His own personal burden of proof is rather low.) He does attempt some cursory research, and usually wants to meet the target under an alias before going through with the murder. It's impossible not to become increasingly sympathetic to Dexter's victims — after all, we are forced to justify Dexter's murders, and the slope of blame becomes increasingly slippery. Dexter is forgiven because he witnessed a disturbing crime as a child; other murderers can offer similar excuses. To avoid this problem, the writers conceive Dexter's targets as the wealthy white residents of Miami.

Dexter puts aside one of the basic facts about homicides committed in urban areas. As Heather Mac Donald recently noted, "In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent. In New York City, blacks, 24 percent of the population, commit 80 percent of all shootings; whites, 35 percent of the population, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings." Were Dexter to start avenging violence in impoverished minority communities, we'd feel a lot less sympathetic towards him than if he killed John Lithgow all over again.

Recently, it just occurred to someone for the first time to ask Dexter's sister Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter), his fellow officer, why she doesn't speak Spanish. She answered, "I'm too busy doing my job." Dexter's preference for killing white murderers comes from this prejudice. How can he explain what he's doing to someone who doesn't understand English?

Nor does Dexter simply eliminate the murderer from the population. He blows up large glossy photographs of their victims to show them. Did he think they'd forget? (It is never really explored who he gets to develop these glamour shots of his victims.) His first move is always to sedate the victim with a needle, an extremely dangerous tactic. Last episode, the man he tried this on turned and shot him with a tranquilizer gun. They rode together in an ambulance to the hospital. Apparently no one with a brain was at the scene.

Dexter's victims rarely argue with him. The contradiction in his own behavior isn't obvious — they never address him as a murderer. Wrapped in duct tape, preparing to be stabbed, they must think they are in some kind of otherworldly torture, or that they are already dead.

Certainly a part of Dexter longs to be caught, which is true of most people for whom crime is a compulsion, not a necessity. Jacques Mesrine wished to be caught so much that even after escaping to Venezuela, he returned against to France and continued his armed robberies. For Mesrine, the fact that he will be caught is an essential part of him; for Dexter, it is a reality he respects but does not desire. From this can we conclude it is more important to America that it survive healthy and well than the region of Gaul?

There is always someone on the show at any given time who is on Dexter's trail, but that person never confronts Dexter in front of other people. Even though his wife (Julie Benz) was murdered by another killer, the FBI never made much of Dexter's admission that "I killed her." Currently Detective Quinn (Gossip Girl's Desmond Harrington) has painstakingly uncovered pieces of Dexter's secret, but he seems baffled by just what to do about it.

Julia Stiles and Jonny Lee Miller have been appointed to fill the gaping hole of Benz's departure from the show. Stiles plays Lumen, a woman abducted by one of Dexter's targets who accidentally witnesses him killing her captor. Instead of being grateful and writing a thank you note, she runs for it. He is surprised that she understands so quickly that is a monster too, and feels seen.

Most of the pleasure of Dexter comes from dramatic irony. We know what he is, but no one else does, even though it seems like there are plenty of reasons for people to be weirded out by a creepy blood-spatter expert. Instead, everyone in his life is incredibly supportive, with one key exception — is his now-dead wife's daughter Astor, who apparently intuits just how dangerous he is and demands to live with her grandparents.

It is fitting that Dexter hasn't inspired a copycat and I doubt he ever will. There are a million wannabe Mesrines; the life of a gangster is inescapably dangerous but both fun and profitable. Ritualistic revenge murder, especially when the revenge is not exactly your own, doesn't have the same appeal. America permits criminals to exist, even spends billions to house and feed them, but it does this not because it loves criminals, but because it hates them. Isn't it at least possible that every time the government spends money to house and feed someone, it is for this same reason?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about the HBO show Boardwalk Empire. He tumbls here and twitters here.

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In Which We Were Running For The Money and The Flesh of Dexter Morgan

Murder for Fun and Profit

by ELEANOR MORROW

Showtime's Dexter is set in a Miami of startling contradictions. Clean, polite, and homicidal, Dexter's hometown has the worst police force in recent memory, narrowly topping the LAPD of the early 1990s. Right now the town is full to the brim with serial killers, making it not exactly the ideal tourist destination.

Perhaps a fascination for continental America's nearest point to the equator lives on in some quarters. The first jungle killer is Dexter Morgan himself, who, over three seasons of gleeful murder, turned himself into a sympathetic character. Now set up with a charming wife, two garrulous children (dulcet Cody and the recalcitrant Astor), Dexter must protect his family from his dark passenger.

He's not quite doing a bang up job of it so far. Last episode, Dex beat up a female cop who he convicted in the court of his own mind of murderering her own family on a whim. Part of a bloody glove in a garbage compactor was his evidence. "Circumstantial" doesn't even begin to describe it. As he's cleaning up the wreckage from his latest kill, his family comes strolling in.

We are taught that it is wrong to kill people, but it is not really wrong to kill people. It is more about being frightened by those who do the killing. Many of mankind's most prominent civilizations legalized murder as a way of excluding certain individuals. Our country still does the same by killing citizens as revenge for their own crimes.

Thus, the glorious seasons of Dexter slaughtering every bad guy who had a traffic violation felt like a true justice, a better justice that extended beyond the system. In the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow?!?) Dexter seems to have met a rule-breaker whose passion for not getting caught exceeds his own.

While it was all right for Dexter to go around cutting up criminals, women are a different story. The writers of the show have become rather nonchalant about their protagonist's favorite pastime. Making Dexter a charming father backfired; now his darker moments fill with dread for him and us of what he really should be doing with the balance of his time. It's not even the murders that makes him a bad man, it's all the hours away from home.

This season also featured the unfortunate return of Agent Lundy (Keith Carradine), whose face was a craggy reminder that grey hair and grey suits don't generally mix. Dexter's sister Debra finds herself in a triangle between the decayed carapace of this ancient creature and weed-smoking, somewhat annoying musician Anton. I haven't been less excited by the idea of group sex since the Manson Murders.

Unable to give its Latino characters anything to do, the show's writers went with the old standby - team them up! Once the most interesting police chief on television, Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta now gives her underlings tugjobs and spends her time calling Dexter into her office for extended sit downs where she asks Dexter for advice on her feelings. Should the top cop in Miami be such a buffoon?

Of course this is all mere build-up. Dexter is at its best when it puts the resident non-moralist in a quandary from which only murder can free him. In the second season, Dexter caged and planned to murder someone who caught him red-handed. What we would give for him to put his sister or wife in such a difficult situation! Life imprisonment is really the greatest fear of a potential murderer, and there is no death he will not effect to avoid it. "Put the pressure on," Frank Herbert once said about storytelling, "and never take it off." Amen to that.

Drama is more enjoyable at a higher level of intelligence, with the characters anticipating each other's every move. With a serial killer in the Miami mist, people seems more relaxed and prone to free association. It's like Dexter is subliminally comforting everyone. Cold and unable to empathize with other human beings, Dexter hasn't become more like Miami's cattle: they've become more like him.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here.

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