As I mentioned in a previous post, Dexter is focusing on god or God this season, and I'm impressed with the ability of the writers to integrate it somewhat naturally into the story. Dexter will always utilize the grotesque—in the Flannery O'Connor sense of the word—so some components of the story will be over the top (e.g., a mutilated man fastened to mannequin parts and riding the Four Horses), but mixed in with the Saw-like puzzle deaths this season has been a pretty good delivery of what might be unbelievable if not acted more than capably by three of the industry's most underrated actors: Mos, Colin Hanks, and Edward James Olmos. All three manage to bring credibility and subtlety to roles that could easily carom out of control. That's not to say they won't as the season progresses, but right now, all is well.
***Spoiler Alert*** Last week's episode featured Dexter's son suffering a ruptured appendix, leading to an emergency surgery. Dexter is comforted in the hospital by his new friend, ex-con turned minister to ex-cons, Brother Sam (Mos). I really don't know if Mos is a Christian, but he delivers his lines with such conviction, I wouldn't be surprised to discover he actually believes this stuff, and kudos to the writers for handling redemption and interfaith friendship with a straight face (flesh and blood pastors could learn much from Mos this season). During the surgery, Dexter goes through the classic "bargain with God" scenario. This is away from the main tableau of the action, at a coffee machine that is refusing to deliver coffee. Once the deal is "made," the machine dispenses the coffee. This follows Mos's story about how a light caused him to change his ways, another seeming coincidence or the hand of God.
The son pulls through just fine (an overwhelming majority do with burst appendix—this is the 21st century, after all). Dexter unwittingly says "thank God," and then immediately corrects himself, thanking the surgeon in front of him. It's a nice device. Mos goads him kindly about it, and the scene ends. The viewer is left to ponder the activity of God in our lives. Are all such activities really theistic tampering or coincidence or just the way shit plays out?
Mos is consumed with his new life purpose, a purpose he has developed once being "called by God." Fine. It works for him. I'm a little weary of the "religion gives me purpose" canard, but I understand that it really does give some people a specific sense of purpose (yet undefined) in their lives. Somehow, they are afraid of purposeless existence, as if the immediate experience of love and kindness and aesthetic pleasures are insufficient. No, life must have a grander purpose in the form of a metanarrative that makes all my actions and all my goodness and all my suffering make existential sense into eternity. This strikes me as weakness of imagination and mind more than a necessary facet of existence. If loving others isn't purpose enough, how is it helped by loving others for reward in the next life? How is this not selfishness on an eschatological scale? If I need a god to have a plan for my life such that my actions have weight and import, it simply means I lack the imagination to conceive how my actions can be meaningful in the moment. All this is made worse by the very real possibility that the purpose I have determined god has for me is a complete fiction, as is the personal god behind it. What then? I live in happy delusion until I cease to exist? Lovely. How is that an improvement?
As for prayer, Dexter illustrates the almost instinctive impulse to cry out for help similar to the "no atheists in foxholes" sort of shit we hear from time to time. Put humans in enough trouble, the assumption goes, and we'll soon cry out to god, even if like Job, we are too craven to curse the "good" god who sends us boils and death and poverty. I rather prefer the response of one my recent students, a veteran of the Afghanistan war. When asked about crying out to god in the foxhole, he phlegmatically replied: "Some people did. I just pulled the fuckin' trigger." Better the mechanism that can be seen and relied upon than the mechanism that may well be a sad and primitive fiction we've created from superstitious fear, I suppose.
