Published in The Film and Media Reader 1, Phillip Drummond (ed). London: The London Symposium (November 2013)
Presented at FILM AND MEDIA 2011, London, UK, July 12-14, 2011 (Presenter: Joanna Ioannidou)
In this paper I discuss the case of Dexter Morgan, a fictional character, who is the eponymous protagonist of the television show Dexter (produced by HBO). Dexter is constructed in a way that invites sympathetic reactions, despite the fact that he is associated with rather negative traits, which one would expect to result in him being read by audiences as antipathetic.
Dexter, which recently aired its fifth season in the US, focuses on the life of the eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police by day and a serial killer by night. Despite the fact that Dexter is a serial killer, and thus one would expect him to be an antipathetic character, a sympathetic reading of Dexter is possible and in fact it could be argued that viewers are largely encouraged to side with Dexter.
So, using a cognitive approach on emotional reactions to fictions (largely focusing on the work by Murray Smith in Engaging characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (1995), where Smith describes three stages in audience’s emotional engagement with fictional characters), I will analyze the construction of Dexter’s character focusing on the elements that allow for a sympathetic reading, aiming to show that negative traits associated with a character can be overshadowed, resulting in audiences being able to sympathize with that character.
