Sexter

In October Showtime premiered its latest original series "Dexter" starring Michael C. Hall. Based on the serial-killer novels by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter has so far fulfilled the fucked up promises it extended to viewers through You Tube videos of mutilated corpses and insousciant poster art of disembodied arms.

What's most disturbing about this series, however, are not the dead hookers and ice truck killers but the pornographic tone that bleeds through all the violence. I know Showtime's going to be forever known as the home of Red Shoe Diaries, Queer as Folk and the L Word, but not ALL of their original shows need to be metaphors for sexual "dysfunction" do they?



Apparently. As the above clip shows, Dexter the series, at its core, seems to be the story of an emotionally, sexually repressed man who chooses to sublimate his sexuality through the transferred pleasure of violence. No, Dexter himself does not kill indiscriminately to satisfy prurient passions, but his awkward relationship with sister Deb's boyfriend and the inescapable aura of M.C. Hall as that guy from Six Feet Under (even Eric King's character in Dexter bears an uncanny resemblance to Hall's first season lover from SFU) do nothing to dispell Dexter the series' overall tone of homo-erotic snuff.

I didn't actually read Michael Warner's "The Trouble With Normal" but I knew some kids that did and eeked through enough Gender Studies classes myself during undergrad to assume that Warner's jist was normalcy as a social desirable served as a weapon to alienate and other homosexuals. Normalcy is nothing to aspire to, he probably argues, but something to reject as an overbearing and totalizing institutional power.

Dexter is not normal but makes his life work trying to be. The most subversive part of the show? Dexter working to uphold the law and compensate for its shortcomings instead of tearing that shit down. Or maybe that's where Dexter fails.