Michael C. Hall

The fourth season of Dexter premiered this Sunday, and I was rather more excited about it than I would like to admit.  I started watching back in the day because it was Michael C. Hall, and I was a Six Feet Under fan from waaaaayyy back, and I made it my business to ensure that the wonderful actors of that show continued to be employed for the forseeable future.  As it turns out, Dexter was about as different a role from David Fisher as one could hope for, and I still loved Hall anyway.  And then Dexter turned out to have a fallible narrator, which is a favorite literary device of mine.  And then, also, it turned out to be bloody.  And it had Julie Benz (Darla from Buffy and Angel)!  Also there were Latino actors who were not total background characters!  I've been hooked ever since.  It's camp, and camp can be thoroughly enjoyable when it's as well-written and acted as Dexter is.

But that aside, I tend to have a lot of difficulty justifying my love of Dexter to myself in feminist terms.  The macabre is not terribly woman-friendly, after all.  Horror movies tends to feed on the startling contrast between blood and really hot  blonde chicks, and there's more titillation in it (pun intended), one supposes, than anyone would like to admit.  I don't know what makes us morbid; I do notice, though, that the ratio of men to women of my acquaintance who hate horror, and don't like "dark" themes in their arts and entertainment, is roughly 1:1.  So perhaps it's an experience that's less gendered than I might otherwise be inclined to say.