The New American Hero

Stop reading. It’ll keep.

The first thing you do is head over to the torrents section and pull down Dexter 1.01. (Or order the Dexter Series 1 (DVD).)
The show is brilliantly written and Michael C. Hall is a powerful, subtle talent.

Of more interest to me, Dexter Morgan embodies a cultural shift. He is a direct descendant of the heroes we threw out with our training wheels; the righteous, strong men who enforced virtue in the wilderness. But unlike them, we can believe in Dexter.

Dexter Morgan is incorruptible.

Heroes are formed not by our fears, but by our faith. The source of a hero’s power, the values they enforce, their relationship to the greater society- you can lay out these factors for a startlingly clear state of the zeitgeist.

Show me who your heroes are, I’ll tell you all about yourself.

Dexter’s mythological granddaddy is the Sheriff, a self-reliant man with a hard core of values honed in the abyssal Western desert. Alone, he rides into a lawless town on the edge of civilization, a place suffering from absent government and gang violence. By the end of Act One, he pins the tin star to his chest. “There’s a new Sheriff in town.”

We believed in law, and that peace was only possible with strong men in charge. We believed in their stern, quiet hearts and stubborn self-reliance. The Sheriff was the heart of the West because we held faith in a tin star, a six gun, and a town worth saving.

Faith is not a constant.

That clapboard, Western town becomes a city with a city’s problems. Dexter’s mythological father is a cop in that city, with his hands tied and belly twisting as he watches his city slide out of control. All he wants is to be a good cop, to keep us safe, to protect the city he loves despite itself. Yet he can do none of that and remain a cop. Corrupt or meaningless laws shield monsters from justice, and it is impossible to tell which side his superiors are on.

In a reversal of his Western forerunner, act one wraps with the hero stripped of his place in society by a fat man in a cheap suit: “I told you to leave this one alone. Turn in your badge and your gun”.

Faith shapes the hero. We lost faith in government, though in the father’s time the government was not yet explicitly the enemy. Civilian society, also, has gone the way of indulgence and self-destruction. With the goodness of law also in doubt, all that is left for us to believe in is that somewhere, someone still understands its spirit. Someone strong enough to make it stick and brave enough to lose everything in its pursuit.

At some point, we lost faith even in this.

You and I live in a world where corruption and evil is assumed. We don’t struggle with faith in law or government, but pity those who cling to it. It’s a matter of public record that our leadership is corrupt, disconnected, and murderous. It’s a matter of public record that the amoral rich write our laws, that the police exist to keep democracy off their lawns. It’s a matter of public record that we did this to ourselves.

The criminals write the laws, the monsters keep the jails. All we do is shut the windows.

It’s hard to say what room there is in this for faith. Looking to the heroes, the ones that truly resonate, they are as lost in the abyss as we are. They are perfect symbols of our alienation, lashing out against cops and robbers in equal measure and with an absence of conscience so pure as to be mistaken for moral courage. Any protection they provide us is incidental, because we no longer believe in any other kind.

The hero still clings to his internal core of values. That’s the only place left for him to draw strength. But they are his own values, with nothing left of that long-ago Sheriff.

Yet the anti-hero doesn’t satisfy, does he? He provides spectacle, certainly. But the hero was more than that, more than a vehicle of escapism through proxy-murder. The hero once stood for things, protected us, and showed us how to grapple with the things of the abyss without becoming less than ourselves.

The hero used to be heroic.

The next logical step of this (d)evolution is Dexter Morgan.

Dexter is a native son of the abyss: a psychopath and veteran murderer. He works forensics for Miami Metropolitan Police (blood spatter analysis) by day. Nights he spends either with his girlfriend and her two children, or killing people and dumping their meticulously wrapped pieces into the Atlantic.

What redeems Dexter from monstrosity is the Code of Harry.

Officer Harry Morgan found Dexter locked in a shipping container when he was two years old, sobbing in a flood of gore. He’d been trapped in the dark for several days with the dismembered corpse of his mother for company.

Someone took her apart with an electric chainsaw while the boy watched. Her last words were, “Cover your eyes”.

The work of one monster, the birth of another.

Harry took Dexter into his home and raised him carefully. Being a hero himself, Harry knew all too well how the abyss marks a man. If you’re ready and committed, the struggle can be an initiation into heroism. Too early, or too afraid, and it twists a man.

The neighbor’s dog disappeared when Dexter was ten years old.

“It got into you too early,” Harry explains, after years of controlling Dexter’s urges through father-son hunting trips and supervised vivisection. Harry’d taught Dexter to blend in, act human, and to honor his mother and father. But he knew after thirteen years that he could never rid his son of the compulsion to kill.

This conversation marked the beginning of Dexter’s heroic career.

“We can’t stop this,” Harry says, and he may as well be talking about our cultural slide into faithlessness and banal evil. “But maybe we can do something to channel it. Use it for good.”

“How can it ever be good?”

“Son, there are people out there who do really bad things. Terrible things. And the police can’t catch them all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying… they deserve it.”

“That’s right.” In this moment, you can see the abyss looking back from Harry’s eyes. He has fallen, over years of seeing justice yield to technicalities and corruption. But he makes the final transition from Sheriff to rogue out of love for his son. “But of course you have to learn how to spot them. How to cover your tracks.

“But I can teach you.”

Thus begins Dexter’s training in the Code of Harry. “Remember this forever: you are my son. You are not alone, and you are loved.”

Dexter when we meet him is an experienced killer of killers. He combs the unsolved cases looking for others like him, others who returned only partially from the abyss. He proves their guilt beyond doubt, plans to perfection, and only then makes his move.

Righteous, clean, and never personal.

The second half of Harry’s teachings involve taking a place in society. Dexter has a job, the respect of his colleagues, a loving girlfriend. He is quite pleasant and personable, for a killer without guilt or hesitation.

Dexter is the new American hero.

He holds the values of the Sheriff, passed down from heroes before him. He never yields his place in society (succumbing to alienation, as the antihero), nor kills for personal reasons or private gain. Dexter came out of that shipping container having everything burnt from his soul that we consider passe in our heroes, but lives their code despite that.

We put our faith in nothing but monsters, anymore. Values are synonymous with ignorance and provincialism. The law is a tool of the rich and society a panicky herd.

Dexter tells us, it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in right or wrong anymore. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lost faith in law, or in society. Recognize that neither faith nor lack thereof is an excuse for savagery.

Dexter Morgan has a lesson for America: to pass through the abyss, you stick to the Code.

The Season 2 premiere debuts September 30th on Showtime.

Also:

Dexter Series 1 (DVD)

Dearly Devoted Dexter (Book)