Harry Potter and the Strangest Serial Killer, Part II

So this isn’t “next week” as promised. Sorry. As it is wont to do, real life interfered. But you know what? That’s probably for the best. Because last week, I’d watched only the first season of Dexter, the one based on the book. This week, I’m already halfway through the second season of Dexter, the one the writers are making up from scratch. And I’m finding myself not so crazy about it. So now, I feel like I’ve got a much better perspective on what I liked about season one.

How does that benefit you? I don’t know.

Two weeks ago, I blogged about how much better I liked the Harry Potter 6 movie than the book, and why I thought that was so. I said that turning a story into a movie means flaws that zip past in writing jump out from the screen, so the adapters are forced to fix them.

In fact, I’m beginning to conclude, it’s much more difficult to hide certain storytelling flaws in a filmic medium than a literary one – well, at least from viewers like me, I guess. The first season of Dexter, plot-wise, matches that of the first of Jeff Lindsay’s books: Dexter Morgan is a forensic blood-spatter specialist who is also a serial killer who kills only other serial killers. Enter the Ice Truck Killer, an intriguing killer who seems to be inviting Dexter out to “play”… and whom the rest of the Miami PD, including Dexter’s sister, Deb, is trying to track down before he murders again.

When I read Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the plot seemed perfectly cool to me. When I watched the TV series, all of a sudden it hit me how ridiculous it was that every other character we meet is a serial killer of some sort. Like, I know serial killers exist, but one in every three people? Really? I know there need to be lots of serial killers so Dexter can, you know, go around killing them, but it somehow seemed less absurd in the book, when you didn’t actually see faces onscreen and have to imagine that most of them belong to killers.

Still, the verging-on-Monty-Python world-of-serial-killers isn’t the biggest difference. The main change between Book!Dexter and TV!Dexter is the purpose and effectiveness of his narration. In the books, Dexter’s voice is what keeps the reader hooked: he’s funny and likable, despite the fact that he runs around chopping people up. In the TV series, his voiceovers are part of what make the story interesting – and really the only way we get to know the character, as otherwise all the viewers would see of him is the mask he wears for his loved ones and colleagues. But they’re not the all-pervasive foundation of the story the same way they are in the books.

In the books, the reader is Dexter – it’s the only way to be, since we don’t really get to “see” the other characters except through his distorted perspective. In the TV series, the viewer is allowed to be him- or herself, looking on. We learn things Dexter doesn’t know, we make our own judgments about the people who surround him, and we even get to eavesdrop on scenes when he’s not present. We have a much better-rounded picture of LaGuerta and Doakes and Deb because we get to see how they are when they’re not around Dexter. In the book, we learn who the Ice Truck Killer is when Dexter does; the tension works differently on TV when the audience is shown the identity of the Ice Truck Killer at the end of an episode halfway through the first season, and none of the other characters finds out until the week before the finale.

Because of this new perspective, the end of the story changes significantly. We the audience aren’t as willing as we the readers to let go of certain secondary characters who die or are otherwise incapacitated in the book, and we’re not as accepting of open-ish-ness when it comes to endings for the main antagonist. We feel for the characters the Ice Truck Killer has hurt, even though Dexter doesn’t. So the tragi-comic, darkly ambiguous ending of Darkly Dreaming Dexter becomes the tragi-dramatic, tied-up-quite-nicely ending of the first season of Dexter.

The different medium also lets Dexter accomplish something the books could never do well. I haven’t yet made up my mind whether the TV series does it well, but I think it’s certainly possible. Because the viewers aren’t in Dexter’s head, it’s not a cheat if Dexter hides information from them in the same way it would be if this were a first-person narrator in print. Dexter likes to make you wonder exactly how bad these characters are by showing one of them – usually Dexter, but sometimes his girlfriend Rita or his sister Deb – stuck in a dilemma that has an obvious, horrible solution. How should Dexter get rid of Rita’s abusive ex-husband Paul? Kill him! How should Deb handle the obnoxious bystander at the crime scene who pushes all her buttons? Punch him! The camera work hints that the worst scenario just may happen… and then we find out that the TV crew has been deceiving us, and although it looks like Dexter is about to cross the line from sympathetic serial killer to egomaniac serial killer, he hasn’t. Yet.

Usually, it’s a situation in which the viewer sort of wants the character to do the wrong thing – even though we know it’s not right, it would be so satisfying to watch Obnoxious!Bystander get punched, or Paul be the one on the receiving end of the violence for a change. So the TV show has the potential to draw on themes that the books can touch only in a different, less visceral way. How much are you hoping that Dexter really will pull out his sedative-filled needle? What does it mean that although you’d never consider that in real life, part of you feels like it’d be a good ending to this story?

Whether Dexter lives up to its promise remains to be seen. I have to admit, I’m kinda pessimistic: only two or three episodes into the second season, I started to feel like the show was doing the “edgy” TV thing of “the potential for characters to sleep/have slept with other characters is limited not by audience interest or what’s good for the story but by the number of possible mathematical permutations!”.  And “Will Dexter get caught?” just doesn’t have the same dramatic kick to it as “Who is the Ice Truck Killer? Who will catch him first, and what will they do?”, especially since, with season four coming out this fall, the answer to the first question is “No.”

But I’ll give it a chance: on my to-do list, underneath “Read Dexter by Design” (coming out in Canada this September (??? I hope)), I’ve now got to add “Catch up on Dexter before the fourth season starts”. And regardless of whether the plot turns into a bedroom drama, it’s at least interesting to see where both stories – TV and book – take one of my favourite characters.

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