ACADEMIC POSTING: Media Monsters: the shadow

How is the personal shadow and the collective shadow represented in the television show Dexter - about a fictional serial killer Dexter Morgan – and within the case of real life convicted serial killer Myra Hindley?

There is much public fascination behind serial killers and the sport of their choosing. Crime related serialized television shows and special interest documentaries have been seen to dominate the small screen within the last few years, as seen with the lage amount of programs such NCIS (2003- ), Border Security (2004- ), Bones (2005- ), and the franchises of C.S.I. and Law and Order which populate the airwaves. In early 2008, Dexter (2006- ), a Showtime Network American series premiered on the Australian free to air network Channel Ten. Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter focuses around the world of serial killer Dexter Morgan and his rationale for committing his crimes. The idea of Carl Gustav Jung’s shadow appears heavily in this text, not only within the character of Dexter, but through the audience’s projections of their own feelings towards the serial killing character. Within this essay I will deconstruct the ideas of the personal and collective shadows in relation to Dexter, in the purposes of understanding what the shadow means to the audience as active participants engaging in a text. How do audiences deal with seeing the shadow? Do they indulge in it and see their own faults or do they subvert the shadow and cast Dexter away as evil. I will also use the case of Myra Hindley as an example of a woman that the repressed collective shadow of a society chose to classify as pure evil and subhuman, thus choosing to ignore the shadow’s potential within themselves.

The shadow within Dexter Morgan

From an early age Dexter Morgan had a particular fondness for killing. His father, seeing that nothing could stop the insatiable urge of Dexter’s, chose to train him into killing those who deserved to be killed. From the very beginning of Dexter’s life there is a moral ambiguity. What constitutes whether something deserves to live or die? These are questions that only Dexter can answer, and the audience is left to watch and judge. Within the pilot episode of Dexter, the victims of Dexter’s compulsions are shown as bad, evil serial killers (one being a choir director killing young boys, the other being a snuff film star and director.) In comparison, Dexter is a charming, good boyfriend who has a reputable job in which he is an expert (blood splatter analyst.) He seems like a normal guy. However, Dexter is a sociopath. He is incapable of feelings. Michael C. Hall, who portrays Dexter notes that he is a character “that claimed to be without fundamental human traits.”[1] His sociopathic tendencies allow him to commit such acts of murder as “sociopathic behaviour is simply human behaviour minus that certain something – soul, heart, - that separates us not from the animals but from the robots”[2] Despite this sociopath status, Dexter does seem to know what is seen as right and wrong. When describing the acts that he commits “Dexter describes being “half sick with the thrill, the complete wrongness,” when the “dark passenger” inside him takes command.”[3] Here, the personal shadow has been identified.

The shadow is a side of a person’s inner being that can show the darker side of their personality where “all the feelings and capacities that are rejected by the ego [are] exiled into the shadow [and] contribute to the hidden power of the dark side of human nature.”[4] The personal shadow shows all kinds of potentials and is “part of the unconscious that is complementary to the ego and represents those characteristics that the conscious personality does not wish to acknowledge and therefore neglects, forgets, and buries”[5] Dexter’s urges could be seen as the urges that exist within the shadow. One could almost argue that Dexter’s indulgences in his urges are a healthy form of expression. But at the same time, the shadow is seen as the unconscious feelings, and expressing them could be just as bad as not acknowledging them. Once again, another question comes to the surface of the viewer. Is it better to act on what the id and the shadow feel, or to repress them? The answer is neither. The shadow must be understood, but not necessarily exercised. If not, the shadow becomes repressed and then psychological damage can be caused and a lack of understanding can occur when considering whether people such as Dexter Morgan and Myra Hindley are pure evil. Part of the confrontational thematic aspect behind Dexter is that it allows people to see Dexter’s personal shadow and perhaps subconsciously their own. Sara Colleton, executive producer of Dexter subtly mentions that “deep down, there’s an id that, if left unchecked, could lead people to behave in a way that’s very similar to Dexter.”[6]

The shadow that Dexter exposes in its audience

Within Dexter’s world, he sees a lot of heinous crimes. Working within the Miami Police Department sees “normal life [as] portrayed as so demented that a serial killer’s personality is not very much different from anyone else’s.”[7] It is perhaps only in this murder soaked world that we can see Dexter as normal. But Dexter is not the traditional hero. In fact, Dexter is not really a hero at all, but an antihero and viewers like to see an antihero. Weeds (2005- ) is another Showtime series where the protagonist has a questionable moral rationale as she (Nancy) is a pot-dealing suburban mother. Weeds’ creator Jenji Kohan notes in Joshua Alston’s Newsweek article:

Heroes show us how we’d like to be…antiheroes show us how we actually are. There’s so much social pressure on people to portray this perfect image, and most people are failing because the standards are so high. It’s sort of a relief to see someone who isn’t living up to that standard but is doing their best and having moments of triumph. It’s very relatable.[8]

However, anti heroes usually have a redeeming feature. Syracuse University’s Robert Thompson sees that “there is a glint of hope that Dexter could redeem himself, a key component of a successful antihero.”[9] It is this redeeming aspect that keeps Dexter relatable and not subhuman. Part of Dexter’s redeemable features is that from the outside Dexter Morgan appears to be normal. However, it is the inside, secret and private world of Dexter Morgan that is different. But if a seemingly normal man can commit such atrocities, then perhaps every other normal looking person is capable of such acts. It is the ordinary, normal day life that Dexter tries to expose as just as abnormal. In one episode Dexter says, “Want a real glimpse of human nature? Stand in the way of someone’s mocha latte.”[10] It is the collective shadow that the creators of Dexter are trying to highlight. The potential of every persons shadow can be released as “the beast in us is very much alive-just caged most of the time.”[11]

Despite this shadow that is somewhat uncontrollable, Dexter is very much in control of everything that he does. He manages to resist the urge to kill his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend as he “vile but not a murderer”[12] Sara Colleton mentions the irony of Dexter’s character by saying that “he does live his life by a very strict code that he carefully adheres to, and viewers can respect that.” While Dexter is proving that serial killers can be likable and just as normal as your next-door neighbour, the case of convicted child killer Myra Hindley proved a little different in the public sphere.

The Shadow within the case of Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley became one of the most infamous names in female serial killers. However, it was her gender, rather than her actual crimes, while still disturbing and horrifying, that led to her conviction by the public as pure evil. It was her femininity that Helen Birch mentions that “unleashed from its traditional bonds of goodness, tenderness, nurturance [and] strikes at the heart of our fears about unruly women, about criminality, and about the way gender is constructed.”[13] However, there is also a tendency for a society to brand something that they do not wish to understand or accept (the shadow) as subhuman, a monster and pure evil. Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams note,

While most individuals and groups live out the socially acceptable side of life, others seem to live out primarily the socially disowned parts. When they become the object of negative group projections, the collective shadow takes the form of scapegoating, racism, or enemy making.[14]

It is the idea of a woman, who is supposed to be the protecting maternal figure and not the killer that stirred up the collective shadow within society. People chose not to admit that perhaps each person may have a darker side, and that perhaps a normal person is capable of committing these kinds of crimes. This repression of the shadow led to Myra Hindley being branded evil. And despite the fact that she was an accomplice to her boyfriend’s desires, she still received more attention than he did, and this relates to gender and the shadow.

Dexter Morgan and Myra Hindley are closely related, despite one being real, and one being a creation of fiction. It is the shadow that they have in common and the reaction that their actions cause within the audiences that digest their stories. Questions of morality are raised in the case of Dexter. Is Dexter a good man doing bad things or a bad man doing good things? While there can be no denying of the crimes that these two figures have undertaken, it is the reactions of the audiences that we can learn from in an attempt to understand what the shadow is, and how it affects not only ourselves, but the people around us. While we can be distanced from Myra Hindley and the crimes she committed, we are also related to her in that we are reminded of our own potential for ‘evil.’[15] The shadow cannot be ignored.

Bibliography

Alston, Joshua. "Sympathy for the Devil; Homicidal? Yes. Charming? Absolutely. Meet Showtime's Dexter, TV's latest, and perhaps most twisted, antihero." Newsweek (Oct 30, 2006): 61.

Birch, Helen. ‘Myra Hindley and the Iconography of Evil.’ In Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, edited by Helen Birch, 32-61. London: Virago Press, 1993.

Tyree, J.M. "Spatter pattern." Film Quarterly 62.1 (Fall 2008): 82-5.

Zweig, Connie, and Jeremiah Abrams. Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature. New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 1991.

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[1] Joshua Alston, "Sympathy for the Devil; Homicidal? Yes. Charming? Absolutely. Meet Showtime's Dexter, TV's latest, and perhaps most twisted, antihero," Newsweek (Oct 30, 2006): 61.

[2] J.M. Tyree, “Spatter pattern,” Film Quarterly 62.1 (Fall 2008): 85.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Hunan Nature (New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 1991), 17.

[5] Ibid, 18.

[6] Alston, 61.

[7] Tyree, 83.

[8] Alston, 61.

[9] Ibid, 61.

[10] Tyree, 85.

[11] Zweig and Abrams, 21.

[12] Tyree, 82.

[13] Helen Birch, “Myra Hindley and the Iconography of Evil” in Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, ed. by Helen Birch (London: Virago Press, 1993), 32.

[14] Zweig and Abrams, 20.

[15] Birch, 53.