For quite some time I resisted watching the quirky crime drama " Dexter ", that ran successfully as a television show from 2006 to 20013. It tells the conflicted story of Dexter Morgan, played spine chilling delightfully by Michael C. Hall, as a blood spatter forensic analyst who becomes a vigilante serial killer of sadistic serial killers who slip through the cracks of the justice system. Working for the fictional Miami Metro Police Department, where his sister Debra is a detective, he has first hand access to police files on criminals. Dexter witnessed as a three year old, the brutal butchering of his mother, who was a confidential informant for his father who was also a police officer, and the trauma leaves him with an insatiable need to dispose of serial killers. He tries very hard to lead a normal life to cover the tracks that might lead to the uncovering of his secret vigilante life. He marries a woman who got away form a violently abusive husband, and tries his best at raising her two kids, being a decent father and husband, and takes on the extra challenge of raising a new baby with his new wife. His vigilante passion leads ultimately to the brutal murder of his wife Rita by a major psychopathic serial killer who has been killing innocent people for over 30 years. When Dexter gets in this killer's way, played very craft fully by John Lithgow, he decides to punish Dexter by slaughtering Rita in a very gruesome way, making her and Dexter's baby watch, passing the horror on to Dexter's offspring.
Eventually, Dexter meets a young woman who he saves from a torturous death at the hands of a group of psychopathic rapists and he bonds with her need to hunt down the men who abused and terrorized her and 5 other women, she being the only one who survives the ordeal. Helping her allows Dexter to break the cycle of isolation he has had to endure to keep his code of vigilante killer secret and intact.
The show is a bit repulsive at first, as the premise is so odd and taboo, but the combination of Dexter's precise code and discipline combined with his nonchalant, detached personality won me over. I can appreciate the idea that we all need our privacy, our space where we can breathe without having to explain ourselves. Of course, becoming a vigilante serial killer is an extreme, and obviously illegal and immoral as well, but the idea is intriguing in that it deals with the illusion that we really know each other, and that we are capable of communicating effectively with each other. We try, and some of us are better at it than others, seeing some people are extroverts and others are introverts, and supposedly others a blend of both, but all in all, the older I get, the more it seems apparent that we really do not know our spouses, children, friends, neighbours, lovers, relatives,... . The narrative of Dexter's life not only deals with the fact that we do not really know each other that well, even if we live in very close proximity, but that it is more often than not a blessing that we do not. Our cover of concealment is what allows us to keep our sanity, Dexter contends, not the other way around. As an extrovert, this series is giving me a whole new appreciation for introverts, like my husband, and for my son, who is a happy blend of both introvert and extrovert personality traits, but it also is helping me with some of the traumatic events in my family's past that has made some of my open nature more opaque with time.
I have found expression in my writing, in my poems and prose stories, in the use of both French and English as a way to express myself creatively, and that doubling up linguistically is allowing me to cloak myself in different moods both intellectually and emotionally. I am discovering the joys and intrigue of being a bit of a chameleon that defies exact definition. So I am finding Dexter a sympathetic character, and the moral ambiguity does not bother me as much as I thought it would.
I have had friends with whom I shared what I thought was a lot, only to discover they were utterly uninterested in the friendship and were only in it for self revelation and self reveling. Other friends retain more of a privacy wall and somehow make me feel more at ease, much to my surprise, because it allows me some space and private universes as well. Knowing someone intimately is a double edged blade, and it can cut where you don't want it to. Knowing how to handle that blade takes skill, patience, consideration, intelligence, heart and a sense of diplomacy and timing. Companionship does not have to revel in endless sharing of intimacies and concerns. sometimes the best companion ships are the ones where you are just there for each other, like sharing a campfire where you are just content to share the warmth of the fire, some 's mores and the beauty of the stars above. It does not necessarily have to involve soul revealing stories and insights. It can, but I understand more and more that the tolerance of the mystery that are the other people in our lives can be as important as wanting to understand the secrets and mystique they are protecting. Dexter makes that abundantly clear. His character also shows in an at times heartbreaking way that we often conceal that which is too hard to deal with openly, whether it is a past of abuse, neglect, sorrow, loss or any other kind of pain, physical or mental. People hold back not because they want to a lot of times, but because they have to, to get past what stopped them in their tracks. There are things in my past that are too sharp and too painful to speak of plainly, so I dress them in poems and stories. Others choose photography, painting, music, dance, architecture, service, and some use silence. I can appreciate them all. Dexter holds a mirror to our own hypocrisies as to how transparent we think we are. Most of us aren't. It is just as well. Some things look better with a bit less light on them.
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