So the new season of Dexter premiered last night and I'm excited to see Dexter deal with religion, which seems to be the arc of this season. However, that's not what I want to write about. I want to talk about the introduction to the show, which I believe has been the same for the run of the series.
The introduction is about violence and routines. Dexter cooks breakfast and makes coffee, flosses, dresses and leaves. What's interesting about this is how the normal starts to look abnormal. The food all becomes flesh - and the flesh (the egg, the ham, hell, the coffee grinds) is consumed. Breakfast is an act of violence. Then Dexter flosses and we see this as yet another violent act in the morning ritual. Finally, Dexter puts on a t-shirt and just for a second it covers his face, ostensibly cutting off oxygen.
The violence of making breakfast, of simply getting ready for the day, is something I rarely think about. Dexter is suggesting that by the time one leaves for work one has already acted like a monster. Time to stare at Francis Bacon paintings.
I can't believe I missed this! I've always been a bit titillated by that very same intro, and for the very same reason.
ReplyDeleteFor years I've perceived life and the world in that very same fashion. I've always felt it to a small degree; but as I aged, this sort of tunnel-vision for the lurid grotesquerie of the banal and commonplace crescendoed, until perhaps a year or two ago, at which point it plateau'd.
Our world, and our universe are, at their most fundamental level, violent. Indeed, if I had to slowly peel off layers of the universe's attributes, the last two that could be peeled away before the whole damn thing ground to a halt would be violence and chaos. The apparent order of the cosmos is merely a precarious equilibrium of incredibly vast numbers of objects and particles colliding with each other, tearing each other apart, exploding, etc.
Once life is introduced, the violence is incarnated; once SENTIENT life becomes involved, the world's violence is codified, systematised, and suddenly conscious of itself.
I will always remember my third or fourth LSD experience, when for the first time I attempted to defecate, brush my teeth and shave while under the influence: At the end of it all I stumbled out of the bathroom, feeling utterly bedraggled and shell-shocked, having realised that even if I were to do NOTHING but eat, sleep and shit for the rest of my days, I would STILL be contributing an incredible amount of violence and unpleasantness to the cosmos. Some form of innocence I wasn't even aware I'd still had died in me that day, to be replaced with an embrace of the world's essential violence and ugliness. Those are the only options we have--ignorance and acceptance. Once we are made aware, there is nothing gained from resisting it but unhappiness and insanity.
Nicely said - I really like the last sentence. Every time I watch the into to Dexter I think about teaching it. It really feels like a magnificent piece of art to me. It's a completely disorienting/reorienting experience, particularly the egg-yolk and the coffee grinds, at least for me.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting to me is that the violence isn't related to animal-rights. Dexter isn't saying that violence was done to the chicken so we can have the egg. Dexter is saying our relationship to the egg is violent and that argument is much more disturbing to me somehow.