Since the demise of my beloved Deadwood (shot in the back at Nuttall’s No. 10 Saloon), there isn’t a whole lot to get me excited on television anymore, with two exceptions. Mad Men, a stylish and anthropologically fascinating show about a Madison Avenue ad agency on AMC, and Dexter, a police procedural/serial killer thriller/fish-out-of-water black-comedy-drama on Showtime. Both deal with double-identities, perception, and how living one’s life can be the same thing as lying; but as only one of those shows even loosely fits within the purview of this site, then that’s the one I’ll be talking about.
Dexter really is superb — dismiss, those of you who haven’t seen it, all the obvious hackneyed plots and characterizations you might imagine a show that’s protagonist is a serial killer might employ to win your affection. I didn’t want to like Dexter when I turned it on the first time, I was prepared to roll my eyes at any heavy-handed attempts to whitewash or skirt around the very real fact that the central character kills people for pleasure. Well, the character of Dexter is surprisingly sympathetic and not, as one might imagine, just because he only kills other killers as a rule.
Anyway, a dissection of the entire show is beyond my purpose (and endurance) — I want to remark on Season 3. For fans that haven’t seen the first four episodes consider yourselves warned — for those of you that haven’t seen Dexter at all I highly recommend you get a hold of the first season and check it out and give the rest of this post a dodge.
I’ll start by saying I doubt Dexter will attain the heights of suspense it did in Season 2 — with Dexter’s own killings being investigated, Doakes breathing down his neck, and a psychotic new girlfriend who fed upon his own ‘dark passenger,’ Season 2 had me ticking away the days until the next episode in a way few shows ever have. Of course, at the end of the first season I was convinced the show couldn’t top itself, so I’ve been wrong in the past . . . .
Season 3 is a somewhat different fish from Season 2, thus far more fascinating than suspenseful, more a character drama than a thriller. It took four episodes to really hook me (not that I wasn’t along for the ride from the word go, I just wasn’t emotionally invested) but last night’s ‘quiet’ episode got me excited again. Here was an episode in which no killings took place, Dexter engaged in no ‘night work’ or clandestine deeds, instead balancing the manipulation of Miguel’s brother against his own decisions to embrace a life with Rita and her kids.
Firstly, the manipulation was excellently enacted. One thing I’ve missed in Season 3, thus far, was the dislocation of Dexter, the sort of emotional naivete he exhibited in the first two seasons. But last night contrasted Dexter’s ‘reactive’ and ‘active’ states in a fascinating way — and Michael C. Hall proves once again what a tremendous talent he is. When caught unawares by a social situation, Dexter is circumspect, parceling-out his words with care and always looking for behavioral cues from the people around him. Last night showed him in overdrive, posturing and mimicking behavior that would achieve the sort of results he was looking for with Miguel, Miguel’s brother, and finally Rita. Dexter, an actor in every situation save the commission of murder, becomes totally animated, minutely and specifically normal when he’s acting out a role with a purpose in mind.
Acting, of course, was the overriding theme of episode four, and one that capped-off the rising action of the first third of the season. So far we have seen Dexter reject his father’s dictates and start making his own moral decisions, be confronted with the prospect of fatherhood, and become open to the idea of a possible friendship with Miguel — one growing from something he understands, namely death. All of this threatens to demolish the performer’s facade that is Dexter’s protection.
But the performance reaches a crescendo, the ‘will-to-normal’ exerts itself in an acting tour de force in the last scene of the episode, when Dexter proposes to Rita. It’s exactly what she needs to hear, the kind of soul-bearing pronouncements impassioned lovers make to one another — and it also happens to be parroted almost completely from a deranged woman that just that day was apprehended for the murder of a man she obsessed over. A beautiful juxtaposition that would have been cynical and creepy from the lips of a character who knew better, but from Dexter it had a redemptive quality that elevated the whole exchange — it was Dexter feigning emotion by crafting a lie salvaged from his own dark world in order to brighten someone else’s. It was Dexter addressing the ultimate question of his existence — could he become real?
Can any of us? Here is the brilliance of the show, the confluence of the dark and mundane, the aware and the instinctual, the notions of self and the lies we live out everyday. ‘Serial killer by night, cop by day’ is a great soundbite — but Dexter continues to prove that it is so much more than that.
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A perceptive review, Bill. I liked the Dexter books, but they are, sad to say, schtick. The television show is so much more.
I’ve never read the books, but I’ve heard the much the same from several people that have. A rare thing when an adaptation is an improvement on the source material.
Indeed. For me, the beautiful thing about Dexter is that it asks so many questions. Are any of us in control of our lives? Can we suppress the urges of the unconscious mind and act as we believe to be right? We all have heard the fable of the scorpion and the frog. This season, Dexter told the pedophile photographer, “We are who we are.” I think the series is challenging that statement and is asking, “Can we consciously change our nature?”
I adore this show but the locations are detracting from my enjoyment and distracting me. They have gone cheap this season. No new scenes are filmed in Miami!!! I don’t understand why Producers don’t think that the location (in this case Miami) is a key element of their success. Producers often choose not to travel anymore to save money once the show has an audience and just assumes the audience is stupid, stupid, stupid. All of the water side or harbor side scenes now are in Long Beach near the Queen Mary or in stucco homes in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach. That’s why they didn’t really show street scenes in Rita’s house hunting, just the stucco exterior of a Long Beach home. Film locations people should pay attention to this fact. Those long Beach sites have been used so often in so many films and of course every “Hollywood” TV production over the last 30 years as to make them a back lot setting used by every B movie cheap schmuck producer. In fact it may be indicative of the show’s jumping the shark, when Dexter is supposed to be in south Florida, we viewers want to see and are paying to see something new. New locations and different architecture not with the Long Beach skyline and landmark buildings in the background or indeed foreground like the Coast Hotel dock used in last night’s (10/26) episode where I used to moor my boat from Catalina when I came overtown to shop. In one scene last night over Dexter’s shoulder we can clearly see the Long Beach Ports o’ Call shopping area This sloppiness and penny pinching is very distracting to true film buffs. It may increase the bottom line for one season, but it will truncate the success and longevity of the production. Mark my words.
I thought being a movie buff meant being into movies and what they are about, not knitpicking over trivia, such as location.
I think, Filip, that for a person already familiar with the locations like Jerry obviously is, seeing a shot of his backyard when he is supposed to be imagining a story taking place 3,000 miles away can be a bit off-putting. I can sympathize, I think it only seems overly nitpicky for those of us (like me) who wouldn’t know Southern California from Saskatoon.
I found the information interesting, actually, because I thought the look of the season was different this year — I would have never figured out what it was on my own.