Dexter: Just Blood

Showtime’s dark drama Dexter (don’t blame me for the alliteration – after all, the show is based on a book called “Darkly Dreaming Dexter”) is about a forensics expert who’s also a serial killer. But wait! He’s a moral serial killer who only kills bad guys, so he still qualifies to be the center of a whole television show.

I had heard this line explaining Dexter so many times from people saying the show was excellent over the last couple years, and frankly I was a bit turned off by this summary of the premise. A serial killer anti-hero seems like such a gimmick: we’ve seen anti-heroes abound in critically acclaimed television recently – think Dr. House, Tony Soprano, Malcolm Reynolds (from Firefly), and even Jack Bauer breaking all those laws. A gimmicky serial killer show doesn’t interest me much as a concept. Who needs another crime drama? And serial killers are so Other that they’re not that psychologically interesting to me, unlike those other anti-heroes.

But I finally caved – partly because Dexter is on Instant Watch on Netflix and mostly because my sister started watching it. My sister being intrigued by a show is a good indicator that I will be, too, whether I initially like to admit it or not (see, e.g., Firefly & Doctor Who). So I watched the first episode, and then the whole first season.

Dexter, as both a show and a character, troubles me. They trouble me so much that this is a snapshot from my computer camera as I watched the second episode:


This show certainly trades in its share of blood and gore, and those who like that part of crime shows (or, say, liked the Angel of Death scene in Silence of the Lambs) will be satiated. I, on the other hand, don’t particularly like it. I’m either creeped out, or – more likely – disappointingly unmoved by fake gore because I keep thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what the techs used to mix that blood.” The sneer of disgust in the above snapshot isn’t me being grossed out by a murder scene, actually. It’s me watching the credits and thinking about the show in general. And yet I watched it, because I kept clinging to the theory that this show is more than it seems. I still think so, even though I’m not totally convinced.

(By the way, I also don’t find the show that funny, as many people on Netflix say. Yes, the sister has her moments and Dexter has some pretty dry jokes, but this isn’t a dramedy or a macabre black comedy about a serial killer (which has been done to perfection in Keeping Mum, a delightful movie I highly recommend). It’s a cruel little show that keeps your attention with a weird twist on the anti-hero trope and a bunch of blood.)

On the one hand, Dexter as a main character seems like a clever ruse by an inept writer who was tired of hearing that his characters weren’t lifelike or human enough. Creating a “loveable monster,” which is how Dexter is billed on the books and the DVD blurb, seems an easy out. A guy who has no human emotion is supposed to be an unconvincing character, right? This is no offense to the author Jeff Linsday. I haven’t actually read the books so I don’t know if they’re any good. But it certainly seems like a cop out.

The show also seems to cop out with respect to the larger themes it engages. Other shows about unlikable characters grapple with mortality, morality, and religion by creating equally articulate but oppositely opinioned supporting characters (one of the reasons I like House so much). Dexter, on the other hand, just starts from the premise that some people deserve to die; the only grappling comes with the question, “Yeah, but does that mean it’s OK for a serial killer to kill them?”

By creating a non-human main character – less human even than anthropomorphized animals and aliens in other shows – Dexter is no longer a human we have to condone or condemn. Instead he becomes a symbol of rightful anger and bloody justice. He is an outlet for viewers, who believe in the death penalty in overwhelming numbers, who hear about killers going free on legal technicalities (and who may remember O.J. Simpson), who live vicariously through the righteous vengeance of television characters. But vengeance isn’t ours, even in made-up books and television, and I find myself extremely reluctant to relate to Dexter or “root” for him as so many fans claim to do. The show ultimately rests the likeability of its main characters in an assumption about the inner cruelty of the viewers, and this conceit is what disturbs me the most about the series. That the show is popular seems to indicate that many people agree with this conceit, which is what disturbs me the most about the viewers of this show.

On the other hand, maybe the show and its viewers are more nuanced than that. The plots and overall arc of the first season are compelling and downright good storytelling. The multi-episode arc involving another mysterious serial killer is good (and I don't want to spoil it), even if parts of it are pretty predictable (as in, I figured out who it was the first scene he/she was in, even though there was no positive identification for several more episodes.) The actors are good, too, and some of the side stories of intra-office politics are delightfully raw and nuanced. Many of the side characters inspire empathy as well, such as a painfully honest cop who is separated from his wife because he told her about the one time he cheated on her.

Better still, even though the show revolves around a character who describes himself as neither human nor monster, Dexter does become slightly more human throughout the first series, once the premise is firmly established that he’s not. This might be because it’s impossible to create an interesting character with no emotions, but I like to think that the show is trying to break down what we think it means to be human.

If you look at it this way, the show raises questions it never discusses. In a way, this is more skillful than the shows I love (like House) that hit you with a Big Issue 2x4 whenever an interesting ethical or philosophical tension arises. And the questions raised by Dexter are both important and complex: If we fake intimacy, is it still intimate? What are the limits of anti-Kantian ethics in terms of preventing harm to others? Do we feel more compassion for Dexter because he’s a foster child with hints at a horrible past, and if we do, why? Can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you had a bad childhood”? And that raises the question of the whole premise: can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you killed the bad guys, at least”? Why is Dexter the serial killer our hero, but Ice Truck Killer the serial killer our villain, when they are so clearly linked? Ultimately, how can we say someone is irreversibly good or bad? And what do we do about it if we can make such a determination?

That a television show can raise so many questions, especially about what it reveals about the people who watch and like the show and the main character, reveals some hidden mastery. I’d like to think so, at least. And so who am I to judge my fellow viewers who may be thinking on this level, too, rather than simply using Dexter as an outlet for bloody justice or merely blood?

So, even though I started with that grimace, I did end up entertained by some good storytelling and intrigued by some interesting questions. All in all, 3 stars.

Priceless

Another mini-review:

I came to this movie to watch Audrey Tatou, who I enjoyed so much in Amelie, and to relive Breakfast at Tiffany's, a brilliant and beautiful movie of which this is a loose adaptation. In the end, though, Ms. Tatou suffers from a script and direction that to some extent reduced her to a mannequin for all the expensive labels draped over her body. The best scenes are closeups of her, where she is actually allowed to act and remind of us her gamine quality rather than being forced to strut about in a manner very much like the women in Sex and the City. However, this movie still has wit and charm, and the minor characters are all perfect caricatures (especially the dog owners at the beginning of the movie). Most importantly, I absolutely fell in love with Gad Elmaleh, whose fumbling and awkwardness is subtle enough to reveal both charm and intelligence. I've read (but not yet seen) that he is even better in the Valet, but this was plenty good for me.

3 lbs

3lbs, the television show named after the three-pound organ that is the human brain, aspired to be complex, intriguing, and provoking. Achieving such a goal should have come naturally; the show revolves around two world-class brain surgeons and one neurologist and the cases they encounter. Instead, it got cancelled in the US after 3 weeks, leaving five more episodes unaired. But, being in Bangladesh, I get to see all of them on the Hallmark channel, and I've seen four so far.

In a House-like format, each episode involves a case or two that include bizarre, medical-mystery-meets-medical-journalism symptoms and results. Of the episodes I've seen, each case highlights the enigma of the brain -- is it "wires in a box," as one character claims, or is the human brain (or the human pysche) more elusive than that?

The most natural tension of neuroscience is, of course, what makes us human, which is mirrored nicely in the science/religion dichotomy that crops up quite frequently in the first few episodes of the first season. This could make for a fascinating, unspoken dialogue in the series, a tension that keeps the subject of the show relevant and thought-provoking, rather than simply the fodder to give the characters something to do in addition to their more trite interpersonal interactions.

Instead, 3 lbs makes that dialogue spoken between the characters, which is somewhat necessary to explain the science and philosophy, but makes every character a little too much like "Exposition Boy!". The show tries too hard to be both scientific and poetic, and ends up failing at both. The science goes by fast, but not fast enough to think that these people know what they're talking about, and also not fast enough for me miss the fact that some of the science sounds surprisingly suspect. And in an attempt to be mystical and poetic about the brain, the show's creators establish bizarre visual tropes in each episode to represent the mental effects of the brain damage at issue in the show. The special effects are generally surreal or dada-ist (my favorite so far has been the hanging lights in the hospital corridors acutally being upside-down dandelions that have gone to seed), but they disappear too quickly for the audience to be able to process them or figure out how they fit into the reality of the show. Most annoyingly, it's often unclear who "sees" these visual effects -- sometimes they are clearly the experience of the patient, but often they seem to be created by the mind's eye of the cynical doctor (played by Stanley Tucci).

With these problem, 3lbs fails to be a stellar show. However, the three main actors prop up the show enough to keep it decent. Stanley Tucci plays the star surgeon, a brilliant but cynical, Dr. House-like character who doesn't like people that much except as brains to tinker with. Indira Varma plays the neurologist, who's much more new age-y and loves patients and people (think Dr. Cameron in House), and Mark Feuerstein plays the new guy who is Tucci's sidekick and is supposed to represent the wise and happy medium. All three actors are likeable, and try their best to overcome the cheesy, formulaic plots and interactions with "unsolved scientific questions." I for one am certainly willing to put up with a certain amount of plot stupidity for Stanley Tucci and Mark Feuerstein, though for completely different reasons. One's an amazing actor, and the other, well, is just fun to watch, if you know what I mean.... In the end, though, with better medical dramas on television (especially House, M.D., which has practically the same formula and characters) it's not surprising this show got cancelled so fast.

1.5 stars

The Pursuit of Happyness

I watched The Pursuit of Happyness on an airplane from Newark to Heathrow this week, so it was probably not exactly the best experience to evaluate the movie, especially as it was on for about an hour before they stopped it (the entertainment had started because we were stuck on the plane for many hours before we actually took off). So I kind of watched the movie in two parts, which definitely breaks the flow of the narrative.

That being said, I think this was an excellent, if slightly trite, movie. It’s pretty much your powerful Hollywood drama, complete with a big star and a cute kid. In the movie, Will Smith plays a man struggling to get by in San Francisco in the year 1981. He’s a salesman of some obscure medical device, which basically means his job is to constantly be rejected as he tries to sell all the devices he invested in. Then his wife leaves him, leaving him a broke and single dad to his four-year-old son, Christopher, played by Will Smith's real-life son Jaden. (That casting certainly makes the father-son bond convincing, a huge benefit for a movie that's main danger is becoming too schmaltzy.)

Enter your favorite “overcome adversity” soundtrack. Will Smith’s character, named Chris Smith, is only a high school graduate, but he's also something of a math whiz. To prove this point, there’s a few fun scenes involving the “latest hot new toy” – a Rubik’s cube, which is one of the few things that solidly grounds the story to a date. So Smith applies to a stock brokerage internship to try to work his way out of his shoestring lifestyle.

Oh yes. It’s an unpaid internship. So, he has to be a single parent, a salesman of an unsaleable product, AND an intern in a highly competitive program. And pretty quickly, make that a homeless single parent.

If I have to worry about spoiling the plot for you, you haven’t paid enough attention. Did you notice that this is movie with Will Smith, the man who has saved us all from aliens multiple times? And that there’s a cute kid involved? Through all the hardship, all the juggling, all the immense pressure of trying to succeed, our hero finally does, and I was surprised to see how much I actually cared, given the fact that the outcome was never really in question.

My favorite part about this movie, though, isn’t the inspiring story, though that makes it worth the watch. What pushes this movie into the above average category is how unconventionally it gives the audience cues with which to understand and invest in the story. It does this in two ways. First, the first-person narration, which some might consider a crutch, is actually used quite effectively here by providing short comic relief or philosophic consideration, so necessary for making a drama not seem too didactic, without actually having to break the story. The narration also helps keep the audience aware of when the story is about to turn; every once in a while, Smith narrates the beginning of a scene saying, “This part of my life is called Being Stupid,” or “This part of my life is called Running.”

Second, the obscure medical device (a bone density scanner or something like that) also really helps the narrative. At first, I thought it to be just a strange and slightly annoying way of making Chris Smith unemployed but unable to get unemployment checks. But each device is very expensive, and so each one, and its sale, represents a significant if unreliable economic buoy for Smith and his son. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, the mere image of the nondescript off-white, sewing-machine-sized device had become a visual representation of the elusive monetary security that drives the whole movie. Very cool to use something that initially seems pointless and boring to the advantage of the story. (If I were still in college, and a film major, I would definitely write a paper about what that device achieves in the movie.)

All in all, if you want a quality uplifting drama, of which there seems to be very few these days, this is definitely worth a look. 3.5 stars.

Stranger Than Fiction

People who know me best know that I've never grown out of the "What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?" stage of childhood. And, like the stereotypical child, I often change my mind based on what new and fun encounter I've had. In the past year and a half, I've wanted to be the following: an architect, a professor, a writer, a missionary, a third-world developer (specifically in public health), an entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a journalist, a pastry chef, and a Lego enthusiast (OK, maybe that last thing doesn't count as a job, but it certainly seems to take up a lot of time). And, of course, a lawyer. Some of those I can probably be at once (like, lawyer + writer + professor), but some are harder to fit together.

Basically, though, the common thread of all of these things is that something sparks my imagination. My father used to always have to remind my big sister that imitation was a form of flattery whenever I copied my big sister in what she did when we were little. But I still have the same tendency, and it *is* perhaps the highest praise I can give to something to say that I left wanting to do that thing for a living.

With that preface, I came out of the movie Stranger Than Fiction this weekend and wanted to be a novelist. When I come out of incredible plays, I want to be a director or actress. When I come out of exceptional movies, I want to writer screenplays or be a film editor. Stranger Than Fiction had neither of these effects on me, because in fact it wasn't an exceptional movie. It had a lot of flaws: an inability to commit (the cardinal sin of dramatic arts), and in general an intellectual feel that never quite expanded beyond the cerebral, and an aesthetic that was sometimes confusing. There were lots of wonderful details in the movie that were almost hidden - the quote around a bakery store's exterior, a throwaway background quote about the novelist's religious beliefs, fleeting visual references to books and authors throughout. If you do go see the movie, try to keep alert for these things, even as you get bombarded with silly animations of maps and calculations.

But at the same time, the movie *did* inspire me. Its premise is quite smart and intriguing. Artists create worlds and characters in order to manipulate them into something beautiful - but what if that beauty were actually destructive? It doesn't matter when they are just bits of printed words on paper, but as most artists and writers know, they often seem more separate from one's own creation. In a word, they seem more real. And so, what do you do then? Sacrifce them to the story and the beatury of Art, or do we recognize a purpose of Art other than to illuminate its own beauty? All these thoughts and more poured out of my head as I left the theater, feeling a little empty by the wishy-washy ending of the movie. The movie is about a novelist (or perhaps, more acurately, a tragedian), played by Emma Thompson, and the hero of her new novel who is, inexplicably, real. But - and here is the catch- the hero finds out that he is a character destined to die when he begins to hear the narration of the story in his head. So now he has to figure out what is going to happen to him, and if and how he can save his own life. Throw in a little romantic sideplot with Maggie Gyllenhaal (who is, by the way, delightful as a Harvard Law School student drop-out turned baker. yay!), and you've got pretty much all the important plot points down. Will Ferrell, as the bland anti-hero Harold Crick, seems a bit awkward containing his manic persona to play such a subdued and insecure character, but he does quite well. And we know there is more life bursting to get out from underneath his monotone and bewildered expression, which is important to win over the audience and make us care about his fate. Dustin Hoffman, as the literature professor Harold seeks out for guidance, has apparently perfected the likable but callous (and somewhat phoned-in) performance. See I [Heart] Huckabees and, (oh horror) Meet the Fockers for examples.

The film's biggest problem, however, is the same as Emma Thompson's character's: the ending. How do you end a film about a book character who is real? Unfortunately, you've only got two choices: tragedy and comedy. In the first you kill off Harold Crick, as Emma Thompson's character originally intended. And really, what movie with Will Ferrell as the main character is going to end with such a dramatic and terrible note? In the second, though, you destroy all the build-up of the movie, and end up with a bland cop-out. Or at least, it feels like a cop-out if you can't explain why it makes more sense - for the *story* - for Harold Crick to live. At the end of the day, this movie *is* fiction, and just saying, "oh, you shouldn't kill people" doesn't seem like enough. The script in Stranger Than Fiction makes some half-hearted and cursory attempts to explain a decision of comedy over tragedy, but they aren't explained well or even taken very seriously. Which leaves the film somewhat abrupt in its ending, with me sitting through the credits trying to figure out if there was a better ending out there than the one the film seemingly painted its way into.

All the film's weakness, though, I forgive, not because I think the movie is great, or even necessarily one that i would recommend to any movie goer (think: if you liked I [Heart] Huckabees, you'll probably like this, too). But I forgive the weaknesses of Stranger Than Fiction because I came out of that movie theater with a heightened awareness of the world around me and its beauty, and also a renewed conviction that I wanted to write about it. I came home and sat down in front of my computer and opened up an old story I started about a year ago and started working on it some more. Some new characters came out onto the page, ones I didn't know and didn't expect to meet. But I like them, these new characters of mine. And now, with Strange Than Fiction in the back of my head, I hope they survive the story.