The Heroic Monster

Men, Masculinity, and Violence

As masculinity scholar Timothy Edwards succinctly summarizes, “The vast majority of violent acts across the world, past and present, are committed by men” (Edwards 2006, 44). While this always and everywhere association between violence and men has been the cornerstone of texts ranging from Susan Brownmiller’s radical feminist condemnation of ahistorically raping men (Brownmiller 1993) to Waller Newell’s neoconservative paean to, and nostalgia for, ancient male heroism (Newell 2003), contemporary scholarship on masculinity and violence focuses on the multiple and complex ways that different masculinities become linked with, constituted by, and expressed through violence. ¹ Much early work on these topics, particularly in the social sciences, drew on Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity—a term that refers to the ascendant ideal of masculinity in a given context and that seeks to explain the ways that this gender ideal produces differential relationships between men and between men and women (Connell 1987, 183–88). In a 2005 essay defending the concept against criticisms, Connell and J. Messerschmidt note that the formulation in its original sense was designed to capture “the plurality of masculinities and the hierarchy of masculinities” as well as the possibility that “there could be a struggle for hegemony, and older forms of masculinity might be displaced by new ones (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 846, 833). Indeed, it is with respect to this very possibility of new forms of (hegemonic) masculinity that Connell and Messerschmidt suggest that there might be room for optimism: “Masculinities are not simply different but also subject to change. Challenges to hegemony are common, and so are adjustments in the face of these challenges” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 835). The idea that multiple forms of masculinity exist simultaneously and in possible contestation lends itself to an analysis of Dexter’s treatment of masculine archetypes, as does the idea that new forms of masculinity emerge and might achieve ideal (or hegemonic) status.

The concept of hegemonic masculinities has already proven useful to scholars working on representation, as can be seen in E. F. Hatfield’s essay on the television sitcom Two and a Half Men wherein she considers the differentially valued masculinities of the program’s characters and T. Linneman’s essay on Will and Grace and the “feminization” of gay masculinities. Each of these essays offers important insights on the dynamic of multiple masculinities, demonstrating how representations of dominant (in Connell’s terms hegemonic) masculinity serve as the ideal in the presence of subordinate (or complicit) forms of masculinity. In both cases, however, the authors conclude that the programs they analyze do little to challenge or contravene extant gender norms. About Will and Grace, Linneman concludes that “while the show does have diversity in the gay characters it has developed, it ultimately reemphasizes the divide between hegemonic masculinity and the masculinities embodied by gay men” (Linneman 2008, 587). Hatfield ends her essay with a very similar idea:

The television series Two and a Half Men displays men performing various forms of masculinity. Charlie is positioned as the ideal—the fantasy figure of hegemonic masculinity. . . . Rather than portray Alan’s masculinity in a positive or even neutral light, it is endlessly mocked. Charlie’s hyper-masculinity demonstrated through his rampant sexual encounters, income level, and hobbies contrasts Alan’s. Trapping Alan’s masculinity between gay stereotypes and a heterosexual performance framed as undesirable forces effeminate masculinity to remain obscured. Effectively, viewers are left to wonder whether Alan is the “half man” of the show’s title. (Hatfield 2010, 546)

While neither critic demonstrates any particular optimism, Connell’s configuration of gendered archetypes proves especially useful in these essays because the texts Linneman and Hatfield analyze rely heavily on the manipulation of gendered archetypes. Each essay engages texts wherein multiple forms of masculinity are present and the tensions between, and differential valuations of, these multiple masculinities serve to centrally structure evolving character, plot, and narrative development. It is important to specify this use value of Connell’s theory for reading these texts (and Dexter) in light of recent challenges to Connell’s work.

Michael Moller’s “Exploiting Patterns: A Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity” offers a particularly cogent critique of Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity. Perhaps most significantly, Moller suggests that the concept of hegemonic masculinity fails to account for the complexity, slippage, and dissonance inherent to all gendered subjectivities (265). Indeed, Moller argues, Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity merely replaces an overly predictive model of individual gender formation (sex role theory) with an overly predictive model of social gender formation (267). As far as real, historical gender formation goes, there is little doubt that Moller’s call for greater complexity is well placed. (Moller’s own work is on rugby fans, but examples abound.) But while Moller is “less convinced about the use of Connell’s theoretical concepts . . . in reading images of masculinity in popular media,” I would argue that Connell’s schematic understanding of masculinities remains quite useful in analyzing static gendered archetypes within representational forms, particularly when these forms are centrally organized by schematic, static gendered comparisons: gender functions in Will and Grace and Two and a Half Men as it does in Dexter—through one-dimensional archetypal contrasts (275).

Dexter is defined by a central preoccupation with multiple and competing forms of archetypal, often static masculinity. But while this preoccupation centers on heterosexual conquest in the case of Two and a Half Men and on sexual identity in Will and Grace, ideas about violence organize and value the masculinities on Dexter. Dexter’s world is teeming with policemen, military special operatives, abusive husbands, sadistic fathers, serial killers, murderous boyfriends, and vigilantes and the show’s plotlines are driven in large part by exploring these various types of (almost exclusively) masculine violence. As the differences among these men, between these men and Dexter, and the plotlines develop, the show makes clear that different masculinities are present and in contestation concerning questions of violence.

Early scholarship on Dexter hones in on the show’s preoccupation with violence but largely overlooks the fact that the violence in the show is organized around, and through, masculine archetypes. Instead, these emerging critical responses understand the central problem in the series to be a problem of morality, or ethics. A recent collection of essays on the series suggests that “the very act of viewing [Dexter] itself puts us in an uncomfortable position, as if any enjoyment that we get from the show at all amounts to complicity on our part. If we watch, doesn’t our watching amount to endorsement?” (Howard 2010, xvii). This assertion does raise an important question—what enables viewer attraction to a “monstrous” central character who has killed nearly fifty people before two seasons of the show have elapsed? Likely, some small part of the answer can be found in the space traditionally reserved for the justified vigilante—the heroic and courageous man who acts in the face of an allegedly failing State. But this is only the beginning of what enables Dexter’s character, and our attraction to him, to work. The larger part of Dexter’s legitimacy is born of an intricately and carefully constructed space for the character and his violence—a space that is created through, and as an effect of, his difference from the more conspicuously monstrous men around him.

Dexter, Heroic Monster

By profession, Dexter is a forensic blood expert for the Miami Metro Police Department. In this context, Dexter and his police colleagues represent State-sponsored, nominally “legitimate” violence. This conspicuously legitimated violence is starkly opposed to Dexter’s secret life as a serial killer wherein his violence is illegal, criminal, and “monstrous”; this discord becomes particularly apparent during seasons two and five when the bodies from Dexter’s kills are found and his departmental colleagues are unwittingly investigating him. But this facile distinction between “legitimate” and “criminal” violence is complicated by a number of crucial factors central to the show’s structure. First, Dexter serially kills only other serial killers who have successfully evaded the law. ² In other words, the people that Dexter kills have done horrible things to innocent people and “should” be subject to the State’s control; Dexter goes to great lengths to meet this standard of proof for himself, and by extension, for viewers. The potential legitimacy of Dexter’s violence is only emphasized by the fact that he learned many of his kill skills from his retired police chief father, Detective Harry Morgan. Before a single episode has elapsed, the structure of the show has done a great deal to mitigate Dexter’s alleged monstrosity.

Each season of Dexter has a roughly similar and recurring narrative arc wherein Dexter comes into intimate contact, and conflict, with another man’s violence. Inevitably, these plotlines return to the same set of thematic questions. Is Dexter’s violence like the violence of other men? Will Dexter be able to develop an intimate relationship with another man—a brother, a comrade-in-arms, a friend, a fellow killer, a mentor? Inevitably, the answers to these questions in each season is “no,” which leaves viewers with an even more interesting and troubling set of questions. To what extent does Dexter’s ability to be intimate with these other men require that he share their ideas about, and methods of, violence? Does Dexter’s inability to share these modes of violence and thus masculine homosociality suggest that the two are inextricably linked?

Season one introduces the template of the show’s plotline and its central thematic concerns. The series opens as Dexter realizes that a new serial killer in Miami is sending him both overt and encoded messages at murder scenes. Up until this time, Dexter has successfully and secretly killed a significant number of bad guys while maintaining his public life as a forensic expert. We know this in part because Dexter, who likes to take a little souvenir sample from each kill, has well over two dozen blood slides in the box he keeps hidden in the air conditioner in his apartment wall. ³ While the show offers us a number of flashbacks throughout the first season which explain how Dexter learned to perform these murders so successfully, we also know that he’s achieved a real mastery at serial killing by the time we meet him. The narrative, in other words, doesn’t arise exclusively from the fact that Dexter is a vigilante-esque serial killer and the show does not focus centrally on the “secret life” aspect of Dexter’s existence. It’s easy to imagine how different this show might have been were these issues its central preoccupation. Instead, the narrative picks up at the point that Dexter’s asociality becomes complicated by the arrival of the “Ice Truck Killer”—the person who is singularly interested in Dexter and who rockets him out of his safe, carefully honed isolation.

As the first season progresses, we learn that the Ice Truck Killer is Dexter’s long lost and forgotten brother—“Bynie.” Present, like Dexter, at the chainsaw murder of their mother, brother Brian has also grown up to be a serial killer. Posing as a prosthetist and suitor to Dexter’s adoptive sister Debra, Brian engages in a series of intricate family-themed manipulations of Dexter until the two arrive at a charged confrontation in the season’s final episode. And here, Brian becomes the first of many characters to misgauge Dexter’s capacity for male homosociality. When Dexter initially refuses to join Brian for a fraternal kill—not at all coincidentally of Dexter’s adoptive sister Deb—Brian subdues him with Dexter’s own favorite injectable tranquilizer. When Dexter comes to, he finds himself duct-taped to a kitchen chair and seated across from Brian, who seems intent upon salvaging the brotherly moment by suggesting that the two share a beer in the kitchen of their long-ago family home. The scene offers a great comic send-up of Dexter’s inability to meet his brother’s expectations—woozy from the injection, fascinated by the discovery of his brother and nearly frantic with concern for his sister, Dexter both recognizes what Brian expects from him and knows he will be unable to conform to these fraternal expectations. Brian underestimates, to his own demise, Dexter’s devotion to Deb and inability to be in a fraternal relationship with him. Though tempted by the intimacy Brian proffers, Dexter saves Deb and, though his anguish in doing so is evident, kills Brian. This series of events is replayed throughout each subsequent season as Dexter is offered occasions for male homosocial intimacy that he cannot inhabit. These opportunities for male homosociality are always premised on shared violence, as Brian’s invitation to join him in a kill is here. And in each case, it is not only that Dexter will be unable to have the relationship at issue, it is that he will be driven to kill another man in order to avoid these intimacies.

Large parts of season two focus on Dexter’s inability to have a different kind of male homosocial relationship—the figurative brotherhood he should be able to achieve with his fellow police officer James Doakes (Eric King). Doakes is the very embodiment of hypermasculine heroism; an ex–special operative with a shady military past, Doakes’s outsize muscles and near constant sneer make him the perfect foil for Dexter’s deliberately innocuous, emasculated guise. Doakes instinctively detests Dexter, not the least because Dexter fails to properly appreciate or express what Doakes considers appropriate devotion and/or dedication to other members of the Miami Metro Police Department. ⁴ Dexter’s abnormality, in Doakes’s eyes, stems from the fact that Dexter doesn’t understand what it means to be a cop and that he is unable to fully express the fraternal dedication to his fellow department members that Doakes considers constitutive of proper manhood. ⁵ The show also plays this dynamic, like the one with Dexter and Brian at the kitchen table, for a certain number of laughs. But the humor, at least for Doakes, is short-lived as Dexter gains the upper hand in season two, imprisoning Doakes in a rundown Everglades shack where he dies in a fire. Like the literally fraternal relationship with Brian in the first season, the figuratively fraternal relationship Dexter should be having with Doakes ends in deadly failure.

Dexter’s inability to be a man’s man becomes even more conspicuous in season three through the extended narrative arc concerning his “friendship” with District Attorney Miguel Prado (Jimmy Smits). After accidentally killing Miguel’s brother, Oscar, in episode one, Dexter and Miguel become aligned in an uneasy and improbable friendship that persists throughout each subsequent episode. The friendship “blossoms” into a vigilante alliance of sorts—a male homosocial relationship that is predictably destined for failure—but not before Miguel has courted the confused and uncomfortable Dexter in a series of environments that are supposed to support the male homosociality that Miguel seeks to nourish and that Dexter cannot understand. We are invited to recognize the familiarity of each male homosocial space as such precisely in order to laugh at Dexter’s conspicuous inability to do so. ⁶ When Miguel arrives at Dexter’s “bachelor pad” with a six-pack of beer, Dexter is comically confused: “Showing up late at night like this . . . is it creepy or is this just what friends do?” Miguel subsequently drags Dexter to barbeques, out on his fishing boat, and to the golf course—spaces conspicuously played for their male homosociality and Dexter’s attendant discomfort. The outings lead to Miguel’s most important proposition for Dexter—that the two join forces eliminating bad guys that elude the force of sanctioned law and order. Though he’s never quite comfortable, Dexter starts to “fall” for this friendly courtship, disclosing via voiceover: “I could get used to the simple joys of male bonding” and wondering, “Is it possible I actually made a friend?” Indeed, as it turns out, no more possible than Dexter’s other failed relationships with men. Miguel fails to follow the carefully crafted “code” created by Dexter’s father to manage Dexter’s murderous urges and kills a public defender, drawing the attention and suspicion of Dexter’s boss Lieutenant La Guerta . When La Guerta ends up falling under Miguel’s deadly aim herself, Dexter realizes that he will have to kill Miguel in order to stop him from killing La Guerta. In other words, Dexter once again makes the decision to forswear male homosocial intimacy premised on shared violence—here vigilantism—is order to protect one of the women in his life from having deadly violence enacted on her.

While Dexter fails to achieve intimacy with, and kills, a series of men throughout the first three seasons, he simultaneously achieves ever greater intimacy (or at least proximity) with his love interest Rita and her two children. By the dawn of season four, Dexter is newly married and living in a suburban ranch house with nosy neighbors, automated sprinkler systems, and a new baby. This is all very funny for viewers—as Dexter loses after-dark kill time to a squalling baby—and very troubling for Dexter—as he tries desperately to maintain both his kill practices and the new family that he dearly loves. When Dexter locates his next victim, “The Trinity Killer” and discovers that he is a family man as well, he becomes convinced that this fellow murderer can help him integrate and manage the complicated fragments of his life. Dexter pursues Trinity, both openly through the masquerade of friendship and through his usual surreptitious means. He quickly discovers that there is little about Trinity he wants to imitate; Trinity is a cruel and despotic husband and father whose wife and children hate and fear him in equal measure. When Dexter starts to intervene on the family’s behalf, the “friendship” between the two killers goes awry. Once again, Dexter is forced to kill a man with whom he first sought to achieve intimacy.

In the culminating failure of each of these relationships, Dexter decides that there is something illegitimate about the violence represented by each of these other men—a paradox that is central to the Dexter character and to the overall structure of the show. While the Dexter voiceover may reference the character’s monstrosity, the evolving plot pattern repeatedly insists that Dexter is unable and unwilling to engage in what he (and the frame of the show) deems “bad” or “wrong” violence. It is suggested that this determination is made according to the “code” Dexter learned from his father but a series of flashbacks cautions viewers that the code is hardly definitive. We learn that Harry concocted the code as a desperate response to the violence of a son he dearly loved—but we also learn that Harry committed suicide after seeing Dexter’s first human kill (“There’s something about Harry”). While Harry intended the code to harness Dexter’s murderous urges into acceptable and appropriate channels, Harry’s suicide reveals how difficult the justification of violence can be. Perhaps most importantly, as Dexter’s ideas about himself and his deceased father evolve and change, he develops his own reservations about the code and its reliability.

The flimsiness and unreliability of the code become the topic of a crucial exchange between Brian and Dexter at the end of season one as they stand armed with a kill knife over the naked saran-wrapped body of Deb.

Of course Brian is wrong . . . it does work that way for Dexter; he is both killer and hero. But Brian is correct that the code has little to do with calibrating Dexter’s violence into an acceptable range. It is much more important that Dexter understands himself as distinct from Brian. The show’s obsession with “good” violence and “bad” violence, and the seeming centrality of “the code” in arbitrating this distinction, can be more fruitfully considered by focusing on the ways in which Dexter’s attempts to relate to the men in his life are worked out through the question of whether or not they share methods, modes, and ideas about violence. Crucially, in this exchange, Dexter understands himself as different from Brian, who is “a killer without reason or regret.”

Dexter facilitates a consideration of the relationship between violence and masculinity through its treatment of the ways that Dexter’s violence is unlike the violence of the other men in his world. Dexter’s exchange with Brian here, which is the penultimate communication between the two brothers, is the harbinger of like conversations in each subsequent season. Before Dexter kills Doakes, Miguel, and Trinity, the men will speak intimately about the particularities of their violence. And each time, as here, Dexter will use these moments to articulate the fact that he is unlike these men and their violent masculinities. These exchanges demonstrate both the show’s preoccupation with the relationship between masculinity and violence as well as Dexter’s inability to “be like” the men around him and to comfortably inhabit their world. In using these men and their violence as foils for Dexter, the show establishes the possibility of his unlikely heroism.

I Am Not Like You: Dexter, Confession, and the Ways That Men Are Violent

The men in Dexter’s life—Brian, Doakes, Santos, and Trinity—are all exceptionally violent men ⁷ and each of the men represents a familiar hyperviolent masculine archetype defined by the enmeshing of violence, gender, and sexuality. Brian, for example, is a sexually sadistic serial killer—we can see this through his focus on prostitutes as victims and the ways in which he fetishizes their “dismembered” bodies both before and after death. The episodes concerning Brian’s kills reveal his obsession with prostitutes, amputation, and amputees and explicitly map his violence onto and through his sexual identity and desires. To put it bluntly, the women who sleep with Brian are likely to die. In a clear contrast, Dexter’s killing behaviors are largely devoid of sexual content, making his violence crucially distinct from his brother’s, and Dexter crucially distinct from Brian. ⁸

Equally important distinctions inhere between Dexter and each of the other three men. Doakes is an ex-military man, a cop’s cop and the “manliest” man in Dexter’s world. We learn about the special nature of Doakes’s military type of violence following an execution-style murder of a woman in Miami. Doakes, recognizing the assassination style, figures out that the killer is a former special-ops colleague, Curtis Barnes, and catches up with him as he is trying to escape. What ensues is one of the show’s important dialogue sequences about violence—an exchange that locates Doakes within the realm of the military, posttraumatic stress, and domestic violence.

We learn here that Doakes (like Barnes) is a trained killing machine—his massive muscles and sneer are mere markers of the deeper truth that his military training and history have made it impossible for him to control his own violence. This exchange also posits a second archetype of violence—the militarized, putatively masculine killing machine who has lost the capacity to distinguish between a battlefront and a bedroom. It is not only that Doakes is the dark result of military masculinity, it is that these dark effects will inevitably be directed against the women with whom he is intimate.

The fact that Doakes is programmed for violence rises to significance later in the season when he has his chance to discuss violence and masculinity with Dexter as he tries to wheedle his way out of Dexter’s captivity:

But of course, Doakes is wrong; Dexter would never hurt Rita or their children. While Dexter may experience the compulsion to kill serial killers, he is conspicuously and exceptionally non-violent to the women in his life. ⁹ And this makes Dexter unusual in the context of the other men on the show. Rita’s ex-husband is a bully and an abuser—we know this by anecdote, the failure of their marriage and his dismal conduct when he reappears in Rita’s life during season one. Deb is (happily, she thinks) engaged to Brian (aka Rudy) at the time he invites Dexter to kill her. Sergeant Maria La Guerta is having an affair with Miguel Prado at the moment when he plans to kill her, and Trinity routinely terrorizes his wife and daughter. The women in Dexter’s world are exceptionally vulnerable to the men in their lives—the men in Dexter’s world being, it would seem, intent up killing their wives and girlfriends. But Dexter is not violent in the same way that other men are violent; we see, here, the way in which bad violence and familiar masculine archetypes are associated with one another and set up in opposition to Dexter and his aversion to both of these things.

By the end of the third season, Dexter has begun to recognize his problem with male homosociality. Dexter’s exchange with Miguel during the minutes before he kills him reflects his emerging sense that he is not able to relate to the men in his life.

This exchange, like the ones in earlier season, rehearses an associated set of issues—Dexter, his violence, the violence of another man, and the men’s ability to connect. In each of these exchanges, the show works the same complicated and subtle vein; while the show’s central premise is that Dexter is a killer, he is also the show’s continuing and enduring hero. To achieve this complicated representational possibility, Dexter and his violence need to be continuously distinguished from violent men and violent practices that are wrong, bad, and unacceptable. In order to do this, the show calls up familiar archetypes of masculine violence in order to invite our recognition and condemnation of these men and their violence. This process reaches its fullest articulation in season four when Dexter confronts his seeming Doppelganger, Trinity. Trinity’s most important difference from Dexter is expressed through his violence toward his son, Jonah. Dexter, by now himself a father to a son, reviles Trinity and his cruelty—his difference from Trinity and his felt obligations to protect Jonah (as well as his mother and sister) are absolute. Dexter may be a violent monster, but he is no monster we know. He is not a sexually sadistic serial killer, a military killing machine, a vigilante, or an abuser. Within a representational world where dominant masculinity is synonymous with violence (and particularly violence toward women), this opens a space for Dexter’s unusual heroism.

The End of Heroism and the Beginnings of Change

The first three seasons of the series seem to hold open the possibility that Dexter, despite his serial murdering, might be a different masculine archetype—the hero. He rescues Deb in season one, Maria in season two, and Rita in seasons one and two. But in season four, a provocative and compelling plot twist makes it clear that the narrative here is not a familiar one about masculine heroism. When Dexter returns home after killing Trinity, he discovers that Rita has been killed and that their infant son has been left sitting in her blood. This is particularly cruel to Dexter, of course, because he was discovered as a small child by his adoptive father after his own mother was brutally killed. Rita’s murderer (presumably Trinity) has gone out of his way to restage Dexter’s earliest and most bloody memory in order to amplify the fundamental horror of Rita’s death. Dexter’s inability to save or protect Rita adds a critical layer to the show’s treatment of Dexter’s complicated and unusual relationship to masculinity and violence. Because if the first three seasons of the series enabled viewers to focus on Dexter’s heroic side, as opposed to his monstrous one, this possibility is withdrawn with Rita’s bloody death.

The removal of Dexter’s heroic potential is actually crucial to the show’s revisioning of the relationship between masculinity and violence. In a collection of essays on gender and public policy, Sharon Meagher and Patrice Diquinzio foregrounda dynamic that Sarah Hoagland first called the “predation/protection” dynamic (Hoagland 1995; Meagher and Diquinzio 2005). They argue that the discourse of protection—configuring women and children as victims in need of protection and men as those who can offer this security and safety—is in fact an aspect and effect of the logic of predation, the material circumstances whereby some women and children are, or become, vulnerable to harm. Their insight on this dynamic reveals the second important component that makes Dexter such a unique program. Just as Dexter’s interactions with other men have made it clear that he has a very different relationship to violence, his complicated relationship with Rita makes this clear as well. Dexter is not the familiar archetype of villainy that is represented in the show by all of the male characters that surround him, nor is he, we discover, the familiar archetype of heroism that gendered narratives of predation and protection have trained us to expect. Hoagland, Meagher, and Diquinzio enable us to see that the one—predation—cannot be lost without the other—protection.

The idea that representation might foreground an idealized masculinity that holds “good” violence in contradistinction to bad masculinity and expressions of “bad” violence is overly familiar within the context of television and the representation of crime. As succinctly summarized by Lisa Cuklanz in her work on rape and television, the cop/detective format “displays male achievement and performance, using the role of male as savior (rescuer) to distract attention from the ideologically problematic role of male as privileged oppressor” (Cuklanz 2000, 19–20). In other words, and as Cuklanz goes on to elaborate with respect to rape and television in particular, narratives about gender and violence that reinscribe women’s vulnerability to violence and men’s heroic capacity to save them are largely concerned with shoring up masculinity rather than real social change (Cuklanz 2000, 22) ¹⁰ This is why Dexter’s inability to save Rita, the fact that he cannot hold onto the normatively configured role of the male protector and hero, is so important. We have learned from the beginning of the series that Dexter does not represent a threat of “bad violence” to the women around him and we learn at the end of season four how high the stakes of this new gendered characterization will be.

During Dexter’s final exchange with Trinity, Dexter foregrounds this idea of change and new possibility:

Dexter, it would seem, believes he can do better and in season five, we find out that he can. Reeling from Rita’s death, Dexter embarks upon yet another dark and dangerous relationship with a violent man—this time, Jordan Chase, a Robert Bly–like motivational speaker and life coach. But Chase is also part of an all-male gang of sadistic rapists—the gang that captured and tortured Lumen before Dexter (inadvertently) enabled her to escape. As the season evolves, Dexter and Jordon engage in an explicit game of cat and mouse—by this point in the series’, and Dexter’s, evolution, the men’s relationship is given little sustained attention.

Instead, the relationship that matters in season five is Dexter’s evolving alliance with Lumen. And this time, the violent intimacy works. Following the crucial scene at the beginning of the season, when Dexter hands Lumen his knife, the narrative thrust of all of the season’s episodes concern Lumen’s gradual acquisition of the skills, mentality, and materials necessary for her to exact retribution on the men who hurt her. As tutor and pupil, partners in crime, and ultimately lovers, Dexter and Lumen develop a relationship that is metonymically captured by the moment in which Dexter concedes his capacity for violence—both predatory and protective—to Lumen. It is therefore bittersweet but not surprising when Lumen leaves Dexter at the end of the season. Gendered narrative expectations here, about violence but about romance as well, will not be fulfilled. In a representational context that is all too often governed by the normalization of gendered violence and victimhood, this new script offers viewers not only an unlikely hero but a theory of how we might begin to understand gender construction and violence in a radical new way. In this imaginary world, masculinity can be delinked from violence and violence and self-protection are made available to female embodiment and gender.