On Super-Special White-Dude Protagonists Faking Their Deaths

Dexter did it. So did Mulder. And House. Sherlock Holmes did it in both his shows, sometimes more than once.

It almost makes you think there should be a support group: “Hi, my name is Sherlock, and…” (“Go on, Sherlock.”) “… I get out of tough situations by faking my own death.”

To be fair, for Sherlock Holmes in his original stories, the fake-death gambit wasn’t exactly planned. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously meant for the Great Detective to stay dead, but the fan outcry forced him to retcon his creation’s demise and cook up a plausible way to bring him back. Ergo, our narrator Watson mistakenly announced his friend’s demise because Holmes pretended to be dead for Reasons and couldn’t reveal his continued existence without risking the Greater Good/his own life/both.

But the device has grown into more than that. Sure, it gets dragged out every so often as a big ol’ “CTRL+Z” when a character’s tragic end turns out to be inconvenient, story-wise. Or when the writers write themselves into a corner and can’t figure out how to extricate the character without trashing all the plot that came before. Or when the cliffhanger end of part 1 turns out to be much easier to write than the resolution in part 2 (I’m looking at you, X Files 4×24 “Gethsemane”).

Sometimes, it works out. Other times… well, let’s just say, there’s a pattern.

Specifically, I see a pattern of troubled, white-dude protagonists faking their deaths and starting a new, anonymous life that’s portrayed as freeing them to do whatever they want.

For some, this is the “happy” ending. For others, this is an interval of freedom from responsibility for others, like pesky friends and colleagues, and liberation from annoying guidelines and laws that have been put into place for the non-genius plebs.

Either way, being dead (but not really) is presented as idyllic. These characters can finally do what they want–escape the consequences of their past actions, investigate what interests them without restraint from authorities, not worry about how their behaviour affects the people they say they love.

Most telling, although there is sometimes a note of bittersweet, it seldom comes from the life the characters left behind. Instead, the audience feels bittersweet that the protagonist is leaving his story behind: House isn’t solving medical procedurals anymore, Dexter isn’t hunting down other Miami serial killers among the characters we know and love/hate. Modern Holmeses seem to be having a great time chasing international killers on their own–we’re the ones who feel that they ought to be back with Watson because that’s how the story goes, dammit.

We don’t see these characters struggle with the practical ramifications of being dead either. Nobody takes their stuff–when/if they choose to waltz back into their old lives, everything falls comfortably in place around them. We never see them fight to find housing or earn money when they have no credit history and no references and frankly are all unsuited for any employment but “moody self-centred genius/psychopath who does what he wants.” They don’t find themselves in difficulties because they lack government ID or health insurance.

Which is why it matters that all the characters I’ve mentioned are well-off white men. There are plenty of people in real life who lack ID; most of them lack the systemic privileges these protagonists share. It doesn’t occur to House that he might get pulled over by the police for “looking suspicious” or to Holmes that not being able to prove his identity on command might land him in prison, because neither of them is as likely to face that situation as people who’ve been marginalized in other ways.

For these characters, “faking your own death” is a fantasy version, the ultimate vacation. If only everybody else thought you were dead, you could live your life without busybodies’ interference–a libertarian utopia.

Because it is a fantasy, it neglects the less interesting truth that no man is an island. Even geniuses and secret vigilante killers and iconoclasts are embedded in systems. They depend on others to keep those systems running: to maintain the roads they drive on (and cars they drive with); to run the supply chains that result in the products they consume; to keep society functioning in the way that allows them to live the lifestyle to which they are accustomed.

The less-fun consequences of these systems are for other people–obviously we can’t let law enforcement investigate people willy-nilly with no oversight because they feel like it, but, dammit, Mulder knows something fishy is going on. Those rules aren’t meant for him.

When watching the show or reading the book, we agree, because 1) we know this is a story, and those don’t usually change tone halfway through to end with the brilliant investigator being wrong and getting successfully sued for violating due process and harassing an innocent person; and 2) we’ve been in our rebel’s head this whole time, seeing what he sees and concluding what he concludes. Sometimes, we even get to see that his wild logical leaps are accurate before he has the evidence to justify it himself. In the language of the story, he’s always right.

But when we zoom out to assess this trope as a pattern, it starts to look toxic. Faking your own death is presented as a cool, exciting thing to do–a fix to any impossible situation. It’s not difficult, and, most importantly, it’s all about you. It’s about cutting yourself loose, not cutting yourself off.

Many of the stories with protagonists who use this as a solution already struggle with healthy messages about what people–especially people who seem to be “smarter” than those around them–owe to other people out of basic human respect. Having a protagonist “win” by faking his own death and/or using it as a way to send him off into the sunset reinforces the themes that “geniuses” are self-sufficient and shouldn’t have to compromise or change in any way for other people, because not only do they not need other people but everyone else holds them back.

Some of the stories I’ve listed recognize this. When Mulder returns from his brief hiatus as a dead man (no problem getting back all his assets, including his rented apartment), it’s because his actions appear to have contributed to Scully’s terminal cancer (The X Files was… complicated). The BBC’s eponymous Sherlock starts off his resurrection by accepting Watson’s rightful fury. When Elementary‘s Sherlock Holmes returns, he has to deal with the emotional reactions of those who love him, and he eventually makes the explicit, final choice that being part of society with the people he loves is more important than his lone-wolf genius work.

But the fact that being “dead” is almost always framed as a temptation for these men–it’s just so much easier to do the work they want to do–shows this trope still has a ways to go. It ties in too strongly with the same sexism that sees asking men to do some of the less glamorous, undervalued labour of taking care of themselves, their living spaces, and their loved ones as “nagging”–that obscures and minimizes the worth of the (gendered, racialized) support work necessary for the existence of independent “genius” work.

I don’t know what a subversion would look like (yet), but I’m excited to see it.