In the recent history of American television, fictional violence has gone from a status of good versus evil, to one where audiences root for the bad guys and hope that they don’t get caught. This is the idea of the …show more content…
The example of fictional television violence we will look at for the purpose of this paper will be the show Dexter—one of the more famous antiheroes in American television in the last ten years.
Dexter was adapted by James Manos from the novel “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” which was written by Jeff Lindsay. Dexter aired for eight seasons on Showtime, lasting from 2006-2013. The story is about Dexter Morgan who works for the Miami Metro Police Department as a forensic blood splatter analysist—but this is only his day job. By night Dexter is a serial killer. When he was very young Dexter witnessed his mother’s brutal murder which later became the source of his killer tendencies. Dexter is not like other serial killers though because he has a code instilled to him by his late foster-father Henry. Henry worked for the Miami Metro as a detective until his health problems forced him to stop working and …show more content…
If it is so easy to turn off our morals in a fictional format, how easy would it then be to do so in other formats? If we follow Vaage’s idea of the “bad fan” we are faced with a person, or group of peoples, that could potentially become violent. It is the belief of many people that such violence in television shows cannot be disengaged from, or that doing so can cause a further disengagement, and can lead to real-life violence. Violence breeds violence. This is the type of phrase that we hear thrown around frequently in conversations like this one, but what does it mean? Let’s look at the example of a criminal defense lawyer for a moment. It is not uncommon for such lawyers to argue that their client is not responsible for their actions because of what they were subjected through on television or in video games. They argue that the violent nature of television plants its seed for violence in viewers who then act out based on what they are shown (on television) is an acceptable way to deal with their problems. Now, let’s adapt this rather vague argument to a scenario. Dexter shows audiences that it is okay to be violent towards someone who might hurt others. Now, a person, let’s call him Joe, watches Dexter on TV and sees how he gets away with murder week after week. After watching this Joe perceives another man (he can be called Simon) as being violent/ dangerous