 Starring: Michael C. Hall, Julie Benz, Jennifer Carpenter, Lauren Velez, James RemarDirector: Various Year Of Release: 2006 Plot: During the day, Dexter Morgan is a jovial employee in the Miami Metropolitan Police Department’s crime lab, but his meticulously crafted life masks his true nature. In reality Dexter is a disciplined and murderous psychopath (a self-admitted “monster”), and he slakes his blood lust at night by carefully killing the serial killers he tracks down during the day. |
Modern culture sure likes serial killers. Whether its in movies, TV series, documentaries, novels or non-fiction books, there are few other subjects that hold such a peculiar fascination. But what exactly is it about these killers that fascinates people so much that theyre prepared to spend hours watching TV shows about them, films about detectives trying to capture them and books dissecting their gruesome crimes?
I reckon part of the reason is the same as what I talked about in the Movie-A-Day article about CSI. Serial killers represent the world going completely out of whack and the rules of society being smashed into the ground. TV shows and films about serial killers may revel in the bloody crimes and the pornography of murder, but its really all about the people who comes along (normally the police) and put the world back to rights. In CSI or Bones they catch the killer, closure is granted and the rules of society are put back in place. Documentaries are normally about the serial killers whove been caught, detailing how the police tracked them down (which is often more to down to pure chance than is comfortable). Its almost as if these things are a kind of wish-fulfilment, comforting us that even when something truly terrible and almost beyond comprehension takes place, there are structures in place to sort things out, find the logic in whats going on, and bring closure.
You even see this in a movie like Zodiac [SPOILERS AHEAD]. That film is about the search for a killer who in reality was never caught and even now his identity is unknown. While its a fascinating dissection of what the Zodiac killer actually did, much of it is about the almost pathological need to know who the murderer was, as experienced by the character played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Its actually rather interesting because Gyllenhaals character isnt directly involved in the case, but his obsession takes over his life. It will make no real difference to him if he knows the answer or not, but its almost as if he feels that the pure fact of knowing who did it, whether theyre brought to justice or not, is enough to set things right.
It is similar to what happens when theres a real murder that takes over the press. Theres huge public anger until someone is caught with the fury mostly coming from people with no connection to the case. After we have someone to point the finger at, people tend to lose interest, but psychically there seems to be a need to find a culprit, and once we can do that, were all much happier. The world is an evil place until we can find a single person to blame, so that its not society thats gone wrong but a single person.
The other side of our obsession with serial killers is a fascination with how behaviour that seems so alien to normality could happen. Going around murdering people, as if you have an absolute compulsion to do it, is utterly inexplicable to most people. Were fascinated by its strangeness and the difficulty of imagining what its like to be in a mass murderers shoes (hence why so many murders and TV shows are obsessed with the gift of being able to think like a killer). What would lead someone to want to kill over and over? How would you go about doing it without being caught? How can anybody have no conscience about it? It is the seemingly inexplicable nature of these things that makes them compulsive.
Most of the time with TV shows, books and movies about serial killers, its about taking something that seems to make no sense and trying to apply rules to it. In murder mystery TV shows its often about trying to find an easy explanation for why someone would kill over and over a traumatic childhood normally so that we can be comforted not just by the fact that they eventually find the killer, but also that there is reason and logic behind what initially seems utterly illogical.
Documentaries talk about serial killer profiling, as if you can just look at a crime and then know everything about the murderer. Its as if even the most terrible and evil crimes, which on the surface seem to be way beyond the boundaries of anything 99.9% of people ever experience, can just be sorted out by a few nice, little pat explanations (which of course emphasise why these people arent like us). Of course the reality is far more complex, as serial killer profiling is a very inexact science (its more to push enquiries in particular directions than a roadmap), but we want to know why people would do things that seem inexplicable. We want to be able to put everything in neat boxes so the world doesnt seem quite as disturbing.
You see that in Dexter in the way it manages to make a serial murderer a sympathetic title character. The forensics expert by day, murderer by night rewrites societal rule by being a killer who only murders other bad guys. Yes, he shouldnt be murdering anyone, but he manages to be the hero because of a set-up that carefully shows us that he has to kill, but he channels it into making society a better place. Its an inversion of the normal rules, but because of the unique circumstances (his compulsion to murder), it seems to make sense in that scenario. It is a microcosm of what our fascination with serial killers is all about.
Im not suggesting its about wanting them to be the good guys, but largely about the tension inherent in situations where the rules seem to have broken down, mixed with the satisfaction of having things put back together again. We want the satisfaction of knowing the culprit will be caught and punished, and we also want explanations as to why seemingly terrible things happen. Its an ordering of the world that reality often cant match (many serial killer documentaries massively over-simplify what in reality makes far less logical sense than the after-the-fact explanations they try to pin on to it).
There is an absolute fascination with things that seem so far beyond the realms of our experience that we want to know how they can happen. I simply cant get my head round the idea of having a compulsion to kill thats so strong youre willing to do it over and over again, especially in gruesome, terrible ways, and so the likes of Dexter play with that, taking us to the boundaries of our comfort zone, but doing it in a structured way that ensures everything will be explained and sorted out in the end.
TIM ISAAC
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