DEXTER (TV SERIES) Opening Title Sequence – A Close Reading

 

Use of Opening title sequence in Television Shows

Conventionally, the opening title sequences are used to give information about the television show, the actors’ and the creator’s name. However, some use this opening sequence to set a tone for the show, while helping audience identify the genre. They create images and use sound that is intended to be immediately recognizable for the audience and engage them by drawing them into the program itself. Thus while they provide a ‘brand identity’ for the program, these title sequences are meant mostly for introducing the show and need to considered independent from the particular episode of the show that follows it. 

Introduction about the show

The montage which is shown as the main title sequence is designed by Digital Kitchen Studios for the television show ‘Dexter’, which revolves around a character named Dexter, who works for Miami Police and moonlights as a serial killer of those murderers and criminals that have escaped justice. Using the ‘code’ taught to him by his father to avoid getting caught and catch only the people ‘who deserve it’, while maintaining an ordinary persona, he leads a double life – which makes him question about himself and his relationships.

The title sequence

The main title sequence, shown before every episode, takes the morning routine of the main character, converting it into a highly unusual montage by adding new layers of meaning and expanding its significance beyond the literal (denotative message) into ideological, aesthetic, hermeneutic and ontological level (connotative messages).

In this analysis, a close reading of this sequence will be done by relying on many semiotics concepts and terminologies to break it into different layers, ultimately answering two major questions  –

1. Why is this opening sequence so appealing to the viewers?
2. How we, as the spectator are affected during and after watching it?

What does it show?

Before answering the ‘Why?’ it is important to analyze the ‘What?’ This is to ask – What does main title contain and for what reason?  Answering this may help us mark the denotative layer of the sequence, helping establish on the point to build the other layers and interpretation.

On the surface of it, it is a montage of the morning routine of the main character – Dexter. This almost instantly feeds the audience with an enormous amount of information about him. While the routine by itself can be seen denotative, the choice and the process in the routine connotatively reveal a lot about the character. For instance, skin texture and eyes depict the age and gender. The choice of food – bacon, eggs, juice – gives an idea about the culture he belongs to. Even the presence of mosquito and sunny brightness outdoors crudely indicate the geographical location[1]. The choice of clothes, presence of equipment such as razor, coffee-maker, and treadmill fixate a time period this is set in.

So while the sequence establishes the character and his space, it also introduces the tone of the entire show. Furthermore, by its structural construction, it is appears to be a micro-narrative in its own right, presenting the routine as some sort a meticulous repetitive performance thus paralleling Dexter’s killing rituals.

Why use the morning routine?

As already discussed, the usage of ‘morning routine’ helps in revealing more about the character. But its aptness works at another level. It is the first stage of the day, thus becoming the first stage in human diurnal consciousness. Thus, the morning routine does not only constitute the start of his story, but the start of a new consciousness for the audience: An entrance into a new world.

Furthermore, by observing the character during that time and place, he is reduced to the mercy of the audience gaze as the space and environment, as well as the actions are extremely intimate. This routine is almost always kept out of the public sphere. This power of being able to gaze at the character during this time ends up making him look vulnerable and he becomes an object of empathy. The audience starts feeling for him without even realizing it.

Montage’s Photographic Messages

The title sequence is a well-made montage which loads the audience with an enigmatic reaction. To understand the affect more thoroughly, it needs to be broken down into different elements. This segregation of layers by some of the different ‘connotative procedures’[2] will help communicate the message(s) encoded in the sequence.

AESTHETICISM

The title sequence prepares the audience for a world with different aesthetics, a reality whose formal and stylistic treatment makes the understanding of morality differently than how it is seen in every-day life.

Paradoxically, the title sequence is the climax of audio-visual stimulation and engagement. The choice of music is highly unusual given the genre of the show – that is to say, instead of a dark ominous tune; it is very light and ‘joyful’.  However, this seems necessary, as it makes the audience take the visuals more lightly and in doing so abandon any sensual and cognitive associations made previously with the concept violence or gore, the potentiality of which is implied in the sequence. This short but efficient process takes place on a range of different epistemological levels: conscious, subconscious, intellectual and emotional.

Adding to this is a re-using of visual motifs in different contexts with different objects placing the audience into a different aesthetic and ideological mind-set.

Aesthetics are not just in overall imagery but also embedded within each frame. Screen texture oscillates between straight and circular shapes – from blood stain in sink, to texture of ham, to shot of a frying pan to blades of the knife to coffee beans and then to dental floss.

Whether it is the knife cutting the ham and the egg, or the wounding of the dental floss around the finger or shoelace being tied through the lace holes, the elements of “cutting”, “stabbing” and “strangling” – three recurring actions in Dexter’s modus operandi – are then hinted through integration of the two geometrical symbols – straight lines crossing circular shapes.

This Interplay between straight lines and circles if looked through a Freudian lens, bears an implicit reminiscence to the sexual act, turning Dexter’s obsession into a seemingly justifiable basic human instinct. This for the audience further substitutes his male sexual drive with blood thirst, during the show, thus explaining his ‘need to kill’. This fetishization for the graphic elements in this sequence brings the audience one step closer to Dexter. These forms and style put the audience in at vantage point through which they feel they can see through Dexter’s façade, and accept his inner motivations and desire.

POSE (ARRANGMENT)

While Pose originally referred to the posture and arrangement of the object within the picture[3], here it has been liberalized into meaning the arrangement of camera and shot which invariably affects the pose of the object. Looking through a technical point of view, it is noticed that there is a constant switch from horizontal to vertical compositions, either indicated by the arrangement of the props or the axis of the action. Furthermore, there is the alternation of shot sizes: ECU (extreme close-up) to CU (close-up) again and again.

This has a two-fold effect. Firstly, it creates constant visual jumps that symbolize the inner conflict of the main character (hence foreshadowing the story). Secondly, the close-ups create an abstract, claustrophobic and almost sinister mood by obscuring the character and space, reflecting one of the main tenants in Dexter’s philosophy: keep his emotions to himself and his true self hidden from the public.

SYNTAX (ARRANGEMENT OF SHOTS)

Barthes theorized that when ‘several photographs…come together to form a sequence… the signifier of connotation is then no longer to be found at the level of any one of the fragment of the sequence..’. Thus looking at this as a series of shots reveals some interesting patterns of progression and development, other than the literal morning routine. On a sub-textual level this little narrative shows Dexter’s gradual affinity for blood and killing. It serves almost as a prelude to his ultimate affects, which are manifested by the killing scenes in the actual story.

The sequence starts with Dexter innocently killing a mosquito and smiling at the bloody bite mark. It continues with him shaving and cutting himself (the audience do not see the actual cut, only the blood), then cutting up his breakfast egg and ham, pressing down the coffee machine plunger and squeezing a blood orange. In the end he ties his shoes and puts on his shirt. The activities itself reveal his drive to kill, that is to say – affinity for blood (cutting himself while shaving and blood drop in the sink), violent demeanor (killing mosquito, squeezing fruit to make juice), actual killing ( killing of mosquito and slicing bacon-egg), wrapping up the corpse (tying the shoe lace and putting on the shirt). The violence and Dexter’s true nature are gradually exposed.

OBJECT (PLACEMENT)

The placement of object or posing, as Barthes mentions, is what gives it meaning and context. Dexter interacts differently with his two main environments: indoors and outdoors. Indoors he is subjected to his affects; outdoors he is calm and controlled. In psychoanalytic terms, inside his apartment the “Id” dominates him and outside it is the “superego” controls him.

Third meaning

Though the denotative and connotative layers of the sequence are explored, there is still something that holds the audience to it. Following the footsteps of Barthes, it may not be blasphemous to call this the third meaning.

While not going into defining it, as that is not the scope of this analytic reading, it can be the couple of elements not yet explored – the gestural significance in the sequence and the use of irony.

Through the sequence, there is a gradual revelation of Dexter’s face and body. Dexter’s face is constantly blurred or obscured by shadows, tight shot sizes or shallow depth of field until finally it is revealed in the third last close-up, and then, his body further revealed in a medium shot as he leaves his apartment. This puzzle-like revelation is not only analogous to the main storyline, which unfolds like a puzzle in every season, but the character himself

Use of irony helps in transiting into the universe created here by infusing another meaning. It is very close to what Barthes described as ‘the obtuse meaning’ as it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure’.

The sequence is not in the chronological order of the morning routine or there is an element of magical realism. Like, the shaving does not make sense as Dexter is not clean-shaven when he steps out. Another instance is that he is eating the ham and egg separately, which is not how it is usually eaten. Preparing coffee and juice is not usual nor is tying one’s shoes before putting on a shirt. Yet, we do not notice these things, but rather accept them as normal. Realism is justifiably sacrificed for aesthetic and narrative logic. Acceptance of this sequence as everyday activity – when it is clearly not – is the final indicator to the fact that the audience has accepted Dexter.

Irony thus creates a complete new meaning of an illogical sequence. Thus, quoting Barthes again ‘Indifferent to moral and aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of the carnival. Obtuse is thus very suitable.’

Conclusion

How can the audience justify not only watching, but actually feeling attracted to a man who is a serial killer? Why don’t they want him to be caught when he embarks on his killing spree? And the spectators irresponsible for feeling attracted to a killer?

Dexter’s title sequence succeeds in creating a very smooth transition for the viewer from one reality to another and is thus able to answer the above question and subtly, yet not indirectly, appealing to the audience’s ‘dark passenger’[4]which is personified as the character Dexter

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[1] Mosquitoes are typical of warm environments near water. While the audience may not be able to exactly pinpoint the location to the area being Miami (USA), they get a sense of a place very similar.

[2] Used by the Semiotician Roland Barthes in his essay ‘The Photographic Message’ (1977)

[3] ‘The Photographic Message’, Barthes

[4] The term Dexter has given to his obsessive need to kill