There will be blood, or: Don’t watch a show about a serial killer if you don’t want to see people get killed
Filed Under Dale Cooper, TV
Warning: this post contains a big fat spoiler for the fourth season finale of “Dexter,” which aired Sunday night, but which perhaps some of you have not seen. I know my benefactor here at the Porch is a latecomer trying to get caught up on the show, so I warn him first and foremost: the spoiler I’m about to discuss is major. If you don’t want to know it, turn back now. (There are also less major spoilers for the resolutions and overall arcs of previous seasons.)
Salon.com’s TV reviewer Heather Havrilesky is supposedly a new mother. Good for her. She also seems like a sensitive human being, someone who requires humor and light in her art, and is repulsed by (if not outright rejects) nihilism and amoral grotesquery. Again, good for her. What I have to wonder, though, is why Salon has her watching and reviewing “Dexter.” Did she start down this path of her own accord, or was it an assignment? Either way, why hadn’t she found an excuse to bail long before the finale upset her so?
Havrilesky goes out of her way to give us the answer in the above-linked article:
But somehow, despite several nihilistic seasons before it, the fourth season of “Dexter” felt more like a cross between a murder mystery and a very, very dark comedy. …Dexter seemed to be changing his stripes, making choices that were less about his own homicidal compulsions and more about an abiding need to serve the other people in his life.
And the tone of the episodes during the first half of the season was unabashedly comedic… The whole show started to feel like an off-kilter procedural slapstick comedy. Plus, wasn’t Dexter ultimately trying to do the right thing by ridding the world of killers who were roaming free, looking for their next victims?
“Dexter” has always been a bleak show that still managed to balance its darkness with light…
To the astute viewer (i.e. the one who agrees with This Guy), it may seem like Havrilesky was misreading the show, badly and often. Yes, “Dexter” mixed a little light into its darkness and yes, there were times that it played like a dark comedy or a straightforward pro-vigilante story like “Dirty Harry” or “The Punisher.” But it’s a show about a serial killer. Regardless of who he chooses to kill (murderers and irredeemables), he does so because he has a NEED to kill, not because he is trying to make the world a better place. If that’s even on Dexter’s agenda, it’s a secondary item, in 8 point font. Dexter alludes frequently to his “Dark Passenger,” the thing inside him that makes him need to kill. He gets sloppy and unfocused when he hasn’t taken a life in a while. He was close-to-literally “born in blood,” in an infamous flashback that showed young Dex in a shipping container, awash in his dismembered mother’s blood. This was a dark show from the outset. It had all the makings of a tragedy – not a comedy (even a dark one) or a superhero story. How did an allegedly professional TV critic miss this?
Havrilesky summarizes her objection to the finale here:
…[Y]ou know what isn’t an artistic choice? Pouring a gallon of fake blood on the floor and then sitting an infant down in the middle of it. I’m still struggling to get into the minds of the writers who could stand around on the set that day, snickering to themselves and shaking their heads and saying, “Oh, this’ll get them! They’ll never forget this one, no sir! No one has ever seen anything quite so shocking as this before!”
Tune in next season when Dexter lops off a dog’s head and eats it, and then Debra unknowingly falls in love with Pol Pot. I’m sorry, but provocation on this level is as artful as hurling shit with the chimpanzees.
…[O]nce you set the baby into a big pool of his mother’s blood? Personally, I’m out. Because not only did the show snuff out its last ray of sunshine, it did so in a way that felt like a direct act of hostility against the audience itself.
So we’ve come to the spoiler I talked about. If you haven’t already linked to the article on Salon or haven’t seen the finale in question, it ends with Dexter finding the body of his new wife Rita in their bathtub; she was the last victim of the Trinity Killer, who Dexter dispatched earlier in the episode. Their baby sits in a pool of his mother’s blood, crying. An unsubtle flash layers the image of young Dexter in the shipping container over the near-identical shot of his baby on the bathroom floor.
The general tone and specific accusation by Havrilesky here is irritating enough. A show about a serial killer is going to be provocative by its very nature – definitely a case of “what did you expect?” – but she seems to be making the case that there is no art here whatsoever, simply a giant dose of shock value. She can’t or won’t confront the possibility that such an appalling image is intended to have a deeper meaning. And as if to brush aside any such objection, she simply doesn’t bring it up. Focus on the provocation, ignore the narrative mirroring and thematic meaning. Many commenters wondered (rightly) if Havrilesky even knew that Dexter himself was turned into a monster under nearly the same circumstances, in response to which she clarified:
Yes, of course I remember Dexter’s past. They showed him as a kid, covered in blood, in the last scene, in case anyone missed the parallel.
I’ve watched this show from the start. Repeating a flashback to what makes Dexter the way he is is one thing. Brutally murdering Rita and then having their baby crying in a pool of her blood as a “shocking twist” is another matter altogether.
If she remembered it, the responsible, intellectually honest thing to do would have been to mention it and address it in the article. It’s clearly important to the plot of the show. Instead she swept it under the rug, too bothered by her visceral reaction to engage in actual analysis. You can’t deride a scene as meaningless provocation – as the artistic equivalent of a chimpanzee “hurling shit” – without making ANY attempt to explain away its OBVIOUS meaning. As a rhetorical tactic, this is embarrassing.
I have read a theory online (sadly not mine) that the story of “Dexter” is about the character learning that the Dark Passenger will prevent him from ever having a normal life. In the first season, he learns that he can’t have a brother, having to kill the Ice Truck Killer in the finale. In the second, he learns that he can’t have a lover who fully knows him (the roundly-disliked Lila turned out to be a lunatic and Dexter had to kill her as well). In the third, he learns that he can’t have a best friend either (adios, Miguel). In the fourth, he learns that he can’t have a family. He can’t share himself with others or even intersect with their lives in any meaningful way because no matter how much he tries to keep it separate and contained, the blood has a way of seeping through and getting all over everything. The story of “Dexter” is essentially a tragedy about how circumstances can change you – permanently. Anyone expecting a happy ending for Dex at this point, or expecting him to become a Real Boy a la Pinocchio (and Data of “The Next Generation”) has seriously misplaced hopes for how the series will turn out.
Thus it was wholly appropriate and meaningful that the season would end this way. Regardless of our feelings for the character of Rita, or how much we think little babies shouldn’t be shown on TV sitting in a pool of blood, this was “Dexter”‘s destination all along. It wasn’t a random decision or a shock value thing to boost ratings. It was inevitability, just now realized.
Havrilesky misses (or ignores) all of this, but even worse, she goes after the writers and fans of the show – anyone that might have dared to find virtue in an ending this bleak:
Maybe we deserve it for watching in the first place. Or maybe this is the price those of us who can’t chuckle at absolutely everything under the sun will be forced to pay, over and over again in this spectacle-driven nightmare culture, for still having some shred of humanity deep inside us.
Obviously it’s cooler to think that provocation is, flat-out, worth the effort.
This is where I finally, permanently part ways with this particular critic. She posits an audience full of laughing, callous hipsters who are clearly worse people than she is. There are only two types of people left in the world, in Havrilesky’s view: Grand Guignol-enjoying, corpse-fucking 21st century Marquis de Sades; and new mothers with a “shred of humanity” who draw the line at a baby in a pool of Karo syrup and red dye (but not at any point before that, apparently). There’s no room here for people who were sickened and saddened by Rita’s death, but found it a good artistic choice, and derived meaning from it. There’s no room for me. As such, I don’t think I’ll be tuning in for future episodes of the New Mom Hates Bloody Babies show. She finally went too far. Personally, I’m out.
Comments
2 Responses to “There will be blood, or: Don’t watch a show about a serial killer if you don’t want to see people get killed”
I thought the ending was wonderful because it makes us, and Dexter, come face to face with our humanity, not deny it as Havrilesky posits. What is more important, our own happiness or that of the ones we love? Dexter made the wrong choice and it cost Rita her life. I never made the mistake of thinking Dexter could be a hero, or that he was making the world a better place. Killing can never accomplish either of those goals. He is, and will always be, doomed and damned, and we are simply watching him painfully come to that realization. If Havrilesky ever saw “sunshine” in this show I think she needs to start asking herself some serious questions. Or perhaps become a more astute viewer.
Having finished Dexter I can now fully confirm that the reviewer is a dolt. Shouldn’t she have made this complaint three years ago when an actor playing 3 year old Dexter was seated in a shipping crate filled with his own mother’s blood? Blood we actually saw smack baby Dexter in the face as it flew off a chainsaw…a chainsaw we saw headed toward the whimpering mother as she said “Mommy loves you Dexter.” I mean, for chrissakes, did the show really go off the rails when 3 month old Harrison is seen sitting in a comparatively tiny puddle of bloody water? I mean, just because the other thing, the baby Dexter thing, happens as a flashback doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in the world of the show, and it certainly didn’t diminish the gore factor for the viewer. The bottom line here is that New Mommy Critic liked Rita and decided to climb on a moral outrage high horse because the character she identified with was written out of the show. Too sad. If New Mommy Critic had drug addiction and shady friends maybe she would have gotten all up in arms three years ago instead of today.