The «Dexter Syndrome» The Serial Killer in Popular Culture

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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Danesi, Marcel, author.
Title: The “Dexter Syndrome”: the serial killer in popular culture / Marcel Danesi.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2016.
Series: Criminal humanities & forensic semiotics; vol. 1
ISSN 2378-7732 (print) | ISSN 2378-7740 (online)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047349 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3156-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1662-9 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Serial murderers in mass media. | Serial murderers
in popular culture. | Serial murderers.
Classification: LCC P96.S44 D36 2016 | DDC 364.152/32—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047349

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

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 contents

Preface vii
Chapter 1. The Beginning: Jack the Ripper 1
Jack the Ripper 4
The Serial Killer 7
The Shadow Archetype 14
Pop Crime 18
The Dexter Syndrome 21

Chapter 2. The Killer Inside Me: Fantasizing the Serial Killer 25

Pop Fiction 27
Serial Killer Fiction 31
The Media 36
Fantasizing the Serial Killer 41
The Dark Passenger 44

Chapter 3. The Lodger: Visualizing the Serial Killer 51

Serial Killer Movies 54
Biopics 62
vi the “dexter syndrome”

Visualizing the Serial Killer 67

The Simulacrum  72
The Lodger amongst Us 74

Chapter 4. Criminal Minds: Explaining the Serial Killer  77

Unmasking the Serial Killer: Criminal Minds 78
Tracking the Serial Killer: True Detective 83
The Serial Killer as Folk Hero: Dexter86
Telling the Story: Identification Discovery90
Explaining the Criminal Mind 92

Chapter 5. Copycat: Does Life Imitate Art? 99

Copycat Crime 100
Mythology104
Moral Codes 106
Restoring Moral Order 110
Concluding Remarks 117

References119
Index 123
 preface

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices
and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the con-
scious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible,
unpredictable.
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

Dexter Morgan is the protagonist of a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, of which

Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), Dexter by Design (2009), Double Dexter (2011),
and Dexter Is Dead (2015) are probably the best known. The Dexter narrative
was adopted and adapted in 2006 by Showtime into a very popular TV series
that ended in 2013. The Dexter episode in contemporary popular culture has
provided many subtle insights into how modern society perceives serial mur-
der and especially the persona of the serial killer. Dexter is a forensic blood
spatter analyst by day, serial killer vigilante by night who eliminates those
serial killers who have escaped justice. He justifies his own killing by basing it
on a “moral code” given to him by his adoptive father, Harry, which he calls
the “Code of Harry.” The code hinges on two basic principles—he can kill
only those who are undoubtedly guilty but have evaded justice, and he must
dispose of all evidence so that he himself can avoid being caught.
The popularity of the Dexter saga was due in part to the fascination with
the serial killer narrative within pop culture—a subgenre of both the thriller
viii the “dexter syndrome”

and horror genres—and in other part to its intelligent treatment of the whole
topic of the serial killer, constituting a kind of implicit philosophical-psycho-
logical treatise on the topic for the general public. The elusive and ever-mor-
phing figure of the serial killer as hero, anti-hero, dark personage, avenging
angel, deranged psychopath, monster, creepy brute, handsome and charming
bad boy, all wrapped into one is a modern mythic one. The persona of the
modern serial killer is where the real and the imaginary merge, as in all myths.
Indeed, this is perhaps why we find it irrelevant to distinguish between a Ted
Bundy (a real serial killer) and a Hannibal Lecter (an imaginary one) in any
conceptualization or understanding of who (or what) the serial killer is. This
can be called the “Dexter Syndrome,” a term that will be used throughout this
book, not only in reference to this fact, but also to the broader psychosocial
implications that the serial killer phenomenon entails, such as the possibility
that he (the serial killer is typically a male) literally “embodies” the darker
side of the psyche for a world that may have lost its moral compass or, as the
Dexter saga phrased it, its “moral code.”
The serial killer is a modern-day mythical monster. Attempts by crimi-
nology and forensic psychology to explain his emergence in the modern world
abound. But science alone seems to be incapable of providing a definitive
answer. The best way to gain insights is, arguably, to look at the myth itself
as a myth. The reason why we are addicted to serial killer novels, movies,
documentaries, and the like, and why distinguishing between the real and
the imaginary serial killer is irrelevant, is that myth is still a powerful psychic
force in a secular age that has no overarching narratives or myths to guide its
journey. This is, as a mater of fact, a subtext in various serial killer narratives,
such as the movie Se7en (1995) and, of course, Dexter itself.
This book is my attempt to make sense of the popularity of this new
mythic monster. When I started researching this topic it became saliently
obvious to me that there is no one way explain the serial killer. As a semio-
tician, I decided to base my research on pop culture itself, which is in many
ways a culture that has extended classical mythic culture, updating it with
its own versions of mystical personages and beings, and its own approach to
morality and spirituality. I believe that it is through the lens of pop culture’s
texts and modes of representation that we can get a good sense of why the
serial killer plays such a prominent role in what can be called the “theater of
the grotesque.”
I wish to thank all the students in my Forensic Semiotics classes at the
University of Toronto (where the topic of serial killers comes up often). They
 preface ix

have assisted me at different times and in various ways to investigate this topic,
collecting information and data for it, and above all else providing me with
their own fresh and valuable insights. In particular, I wish to thank Daniele
and Valentina Alonzi, Emily Dyer, Joey Di Domenico, Matteo Guinci, Alex-
andra Harte, Stacy Costa, Vanessa Compagnone, Mariana Bockarova, Laura
Martinez, Maiko Mitsuhashi, Danielle Orr, Adam Popatia, Emily Mitchell,
Victoria Bigliardi, Ruby Chandrasegaram, and Kelly Rahardja. I must also
thank my wonderful companion for over half a century, my wife Lucia, for all
the patience and support she has always afforded me throughout the years. I
dedicate this book to her, my daughter Danila, and my grandchildren, Alex,
Sarah, and Charlotte, hoping that they may live in a world free from fear and
danger.
Marcel Danesi
University of Toronto, 2015
 ·1·
the beginning
Jack the Ripper

One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the 20th century.
—From Hell (2001)

The November 9, 1888 edition of the London Daily Post carried the following
shocking headline: “Jack the Ripper Claims Fifth Victim,” a proclamation
that, in hindsight, can be seen to have heralded the genesis of a new and
bizarre social obsession—the serial killer. The crimes were gruesome, but not
any more so than the countless butcheries that had occurred before in history.
There was a difference, though. The killer perpetrated his crimes as if he were
enacting some heinous mysterious plan. From this, there emerged the public’s
fixation with the serial killer persona as a dark, mysterious, dangerous loner—
an image bolstered (indeed probably generated) by media sensationalism. The
obsession quickly morphed into a social mythic narrative that blended reality
with fiction. Jack the Ripper was its first protagonist.
The image of the Ripper as a shadowy and terrifying figure, who commits
murders intentionally, motivated by some inner dark force, rather than spon-
taneously by such passions as revenge or envy, dovetails with the rise of what
can be called “dark literature” such as the gothic novel and the detective
crime story, the latter originating in 1841 with the publication of Edgar Allan
2 the “dexter syndrome”

Poe’s short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” These two fledgling genres
catered to an increasingly secular Industrialist world’s need for an imaginary
engagement with evil outside of theological terms. The two genres and the
arrival of the serial killer persona onto the social scene came, rather prophet-
ically, just before the birth of psychoanalysis in the 1890s as a method aiming
to probe the “dark regions” of the human psyche in similarly non-theological
ways. The fascination with sinister gothic stories and characters was, accord-
ing to some literary historians, a reaction to the depressed social conditions
created by the Industrial Age. Others see them instead as stories recycling the
ancient myths of monsters and demons into new popular narrative genres,
heralding the birth of a contemporary popular culture. With the advent of
the Jack the Ripper phenomenon, stories about real and fictional murderers
merged into an overarching mythology that became a guiding metaphor for
common people trying to make sense of an increasingly uncertain and danger-
ous urban world that, so it seemed, had plunged into moral nihilism. Reality
and fantasy had fused into an amalgam that Jean Baudrillard (1983) came
much later to designate a simulacrum, a sense that life and fantasy are indis-
tinguishable from each other, one imitating the other. These turn of events
were, arguably, the first symptoms of the Dexter Syndrome, as mentioned in
the preface; the symptoms are still around today in a world where a fictional
serial killer is as well known as a real one and where stories about serial killers
are everywhere—on TV, in movies, in books, on the Internet, and so on.
The scientific study of real crime, or forensic science, also emerged at
around the same time as dark literature, forming an ideational entangle-
ment with it. Indeed, many practices used in early crime investigations were
modeled on those employed by fictional detectives such as Auguste Dupin
(created by Poe) and Sherlock Holmes (created, of course, by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle). As Ronald Thomas (1999) has persuasively demonstrated, a
specific crime-solving technique or technology (such as the polygraph, the
mug shot, fingerprinting, photographic analysis, and more) was more often
than not inspired by detective fiction. Vice versa, as new forensic techniques
were invented, they were quickly adopted and adapted by detective and mys-
tery fiction writers in order to make their stories more realistic. The dalliance
between science and fiction generated a fascination with crime within twen-
tieth-century pop culture—the comic strip Dick Tracy featured a detective
using forensic techniques; the lawyer-investigator character, Perry Mason, in
the Perry Mason stories by Earl Stanley Gardner, used evidence obtained with
forensic methods to argue and solve his cases in court; the late 1970s and
 the beginning 3

early 1980s TV program Quincy, M.E. foreshadowed, with its systematic use
of forensic science, the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) programs that prolif-
erated shortly thereafter, such as CSI Miami, Cold Case, Bones, Law & Order,
Body of Proof, and many others. Today, this fascination can be seen by the
popularity of TV programs and series dealing with crime—real and fictional—
including a channel called Identification Discovery that treats real crime on a
24-hour basis.
Serial murder is not easy to define, morally, criminologically, socially,
anthropologically, or psychologically. Medieval people would likely perceive
it, if it even existed as a social phenomenon in that era, not as the result
of some psychopathological dysfunction, but rather as a moral evil—as a sin
against God. As can be seen in the popular morality plays of the era, peo-
ple were interested in the ravages of sin on the soul. As the role of religion
in everyday life started declining by the Renaissance, the “sins” portrayed in
the plays started being reconceptualized as “crimes,” both in drama and soci-
ety. This brought about a shift in the perception of what crime is. So, while
medieval society might have viewed “sins” like murder as a manifestation of
the devil’s influence over someone, today, we would see them as crimes and
attempt to explain them as being motivated by either childhood upbringing
or some brain dysfunction. But the moral dimension to crime has hardly disap-
peared from the social radar screen. The unconscious apprehension of murder
as a moral, rather than psychological or sociological dilemma, was explored
brilliantly by the movie Se7en (1995), which is about the hunt for a serial
killer who justifies his crimes as warnings to a world that has foolishly ignored
the reality of the seven deadly sins, replacing them with scientistic theories
of crime. A similar subtext is found in the 1990 movie Mister Frost, which is
about a horrific serial killer who presents himself as the devil, engaging in a
philosophical debate with a psychiatrist who, by the end, starts to believe that
her patient may indeed be whom he claims to be—the devil himself—and
that traditional psychiatric theories about crime may be on a very wrong track.
Jack the Ripper entered the scene at a moment when the shift from theol-
ogy to psychology had taken place. In the absence of morality plays or mythic
stories about demons or monsters as the source of evil, he indirectly revived
interest in them—the difference was, of course, that the monsters were now
real human beings, not creatures from the supernatural realm. He also fit in
with the rise of psychoanalytic explanations of human behavior and especially
with the Jungian theory of archetypes. Within this theory, he can easily be
seen to represent the Shadow—an archetype that is everywhere in pop culture
4 the “dexter syndrome”

narratives and spectacles. This chapter will discuss the origin of the serial
killer as both a new mythic monster and as a manifestation of the Shadow
archetype in the new mythology of evil created by modern-day pop culture.
It will then define the Dexter Syndrome as a consequence of this mythology.

Jack the Ripper

As is well known, Jack the Ripper was an unknown murderer who terrorized
London from August 31 to November 9 of 1888, brutally killing and mutilat-
ing five prostitutes. He was called “Jack,” a common British name for a ran-
dom male, the equivalent of American “John Doe,” and “the Ripper” because
he used a sharp knife to cut his victims’ throats and slash their bodies. The
mix of violence, mystery, sex, and gloom (the murders were reported as occur-
ring in the fog) that the killings involved became instantly the stuff of leg-
end, leading to the immortalization both of Jack (whoever he was) and of his
persona—the modern serial killer. To this day, novels, movies, documentaries,
Internet sites about Jack continue to be spun (out of control, some might say)
(Rumbelow 1975). Many of these aim to identify the actual killer, suggesting
that we cannot leave a mystery of this kind unsolved, perhaps because we
need to solve it in order to restore the moral order that was destroyed by the
murders (Knight 1976). In spite of the efforts of police, citizen patrols, blood-
hounds, and even fortunetellers, Jack’s identity has never been definitively
unraveled. Scotland Yard fingered three principal suspects, who were known
to be insane, hence the first association of the serial killer with mental illness.
However, there was no proof that any of them had committed the murders.
The London police received hundreds of letters from people claiming to be
the killer—a situation that has often characterized the phenomenon of the
serial killer in more recent times, showing that he had become a celebrity
in the popular imagination, gaining fame and notoriety the instant he came
onto the scene. Only one of the letters appeared to be authentic, because a
part of a kidney of one of the victims was enclosed in it. The sender’s address
was “From Hell,” a rather appropriate one, suggesting that the murderer may
have been trying to eliminate immorality from the streets of London, a city
that had descended, by implication, into the depths of the Inferno. From Hell
was the apt title of a well-known 2001 movie that took its cue from this letter
in telling its own version of the Jack the Ripper legend.
There were mass murderers before Jack, of course. But Jack was different,
establishing the modus operandi of a new kind of murder—one that appeared
 the beginning 5

to be motivated by something, rather than being spurred on spontaneously

by some passion; it was intentional, not responsive. There is no document or
piece of evidence whatsoever that even hints at the concept of serial murder
in this sense before Jack the Ripper. Jack was the first true serial killer—a
foreboding gothic monster figure and a leading role-player on the stage of pop
culture’s theater of the grotesque. This theme was captured brilliantly by Wes
Craven in his iconic 1984 movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street (the first movie in
a set of sequels). The serial killer in that movie, Freddy Krueger, is a hideous
monster, both in appearance and in character.

Figure 1: Freddy Krueger

The plot revolves around a few teenagers who are stalked and murdered in
their dreams by Freddy, causing their deaths in the real world. The dreams are
connected to a dark secret that the parents kept. Freddy is a monster—a word
that derives from Latin monstrum, meaning an “aberrant occurrence,” usually
physical (such as a birth defect) that was interpreted in medieval times as a
sign of punishment from God for some sin of the parents. The root of monstrum
is monere—which means to warn and instruct. So, the monster is a warning
who, as Saint Augustine (1912) maintained, was not inherently evil, but a
warning from God in the form of a grotesque physical appearance. Rather
appropriately, Freddy Krueger, as we learn in a sequel, was an abandoned child
who became a monster ultimately because of his traumatic childhood.
6 the “dexter syndrome”

The monster myth was a central one in a large part of gothic literature,
starting with the novel Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, which tells the
story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who tries to create a living being for
the good of humanity but instead produces a monster. He creates his monster
by assembling parts of dead bodies and then activating the creature with elec-
tricity. The creature is actually gentle and intelligent. But everyone fears and
mistreats him because of his hideous appearance. Frankenstein himself rejects
him, refusing to make a mate for him. The monster’s terrible loneliness drives
him to seek revenge by murdering his creator’s wife, brother, and best friend.
He is, arguably, the first fictional serial killer. Subsequent gothic novels such as
Ormond, The Partisan (1835), and The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) all “present
multiple body counts and Shadow villains in which one can see the literary
prototypes of the contemporary American serial murderer,” as Philip Simpson
(2000: 31) remarks.
Before Frankenstein, dark literature, and Jack the Ripper, the monster
legends revolved around mythic creatures called werewolves and vampires,
which may have been modeled on real murderers, as some sources suggest
(Schlesinger 2000). So, one can ask: Are Jack the Ripper and his descendants
modern-day werewolves or vampires, as some scholars suggest in the popular
imagination (Colville and Lucanio 1999)? Jack was never named a serial killer
as such, until the 1970s, when that term surfaced for the first time at a lecture
in 1974 to the British Police Academy in Bramshill, England, given by FBI
profiler Robert Ressler (Vronsky 2004). Ressler coined the term in reference
to the description he had heard about some crimes as occurring in a series.
The description reminded him of the term “serial adventures” referring to
the cliffhanger movies shown in theaters on Saturday afternoons during the
1930s and 1940s. Ressler recalled that each episode in the serials increased
the tension in the viewer, who came back the next week to seek an emotional
resolution to the cliffhanger ending of the previous episode. Similarly, Ressler
suggested, the conclusion of every murder increases the tension and desire of
a serial killer to commit more murders and of people to seek emotional resolu-
tion by identifying the killer. For Ressler, serial killers, unlike other murderers,
keep on repeating their killings in an unending “serial” cycle as if driven to do
so by some inner evil force.
Stories of marauding mass murderers abound throughout the legends of
many nations. In ancient China, for example, it is written that the Prince
of Jidong murdered at least 100 people (Qian 1993: 387). In the fifteenth
century, Gilles de Rais, a wealthy aristocrat, sexually assaulted and killed as
 the beginning 7

many as 800 peasant children (Vronsky 2004: 45–48). The Hungarian noble-
woman, Elizabeth Bathóry, killed over 650 young women in the early 1600s
(Vronsky 2007: 78). The list of such stories is a long one. The stories are actu-
ally relevant to the topic at hand, because in most of them the killing is traced
to some inner lust for sex and blood that is repressed by social mores, thus
foreshadowing modern-day psychological theories of the serial killer, such as
the early one by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing who, in his 1886 book
Psychopathia Sexualis, describes the case of a French serial killer in the 1870s,
named Eusebius Pieydagnelle, who murdered six people in order to drink their
blood.
While there is of course some truth to theories such as this one as expla-
nations of the serial killer persona, one can also not underestimate the role of
pop culture and the media, which have become our modern-day equivalents
of the makers of the medieval legends and morality plays. There is little doubt
that the media treatment of the Ripper crimes introduced the serial killer to
the world. Jack’s case created a worldwide media frenzy. The dramatic murders
of prostitutes in the midst of a changing world caught everyone’s attention.
Many saw the crimes as a symptom of both the plight of the urban poor and
of the hypocrisy of puritanical Victorianism with its underground sexual trade
and fascination with sexual morbidity. Jack was seen by some as a kind of
Avenging Angel against Industrialism and Victorian society, an Angel who
wanted to shake up his society in a dramatic way.
The British media’s obsession with Jack and the serial killer persona soon
surfaced in America, where journalists became mesmerized by the case of
Howard Henry Holmes who killed at least twenty-seven people at his Chicago
Hotel in the early 1890s. Yellow journalism—an early prototype for tabloid
journalism—made the case notorious through sensationalistic articles and
features on Holmes. From such coverage, the serial killer saga spread to the
U.S., where it was appropriated by pulp fiction and dime novel writers. It is
now a mythology that undergirds our perception of real and fictitious serial
murderers.

The Serial Killer

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment (1866) is, on one
level, a study of the criminal mind, long before the advent of FBI profiling; at
another level, it is an indictment of a world that was beginning to forsake its
belief in the moral structure of the human mind. The main character, Rodion