Bad guys take home the Emmy
The Emmy awards reward good work even if the best work of the actors come out of playing characters.
Last Saturday John Lithgow won his Emmy for guest actor in Showtime’s “Dexter” for playing Arthur Mitchell, an apparently fulfilled family man who was actually a serial killer with a fetish for terrible ritual killing. Dexter Morgan interpreted by Emmy nominee Michael C. Hall had to go through the worst part when Trinity, the serial killer, slaughtered his wife in last season’s finale. Lithgow outdid Ted Danson’s twisted character from “Damages” and Gregory Itzin’s corrupt president in “24″. Jesse Prinz, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, says that the explanation is that people are fascinated with the exotic and the different. He is a moral psychology expert and studies what motivates people to be good and making them understand what being bad really means. The entertainment industry introduces to people atypical characters that usually do not appear in our daily lives. Prinz says that when a television program mixes both the deviant and the familiar, like a character that seems to be a regular person but who does terrible things it captivates people and usually is the right formula for a hit show.
James Hollis, a Jungian analyst in private practice in Houston, Texas, the author of the book “Why Good People Do Bad Things”, says that people are fascinated by these characters because they represent the parts of their nature that they repress. He also says that the more people repress these emotions the more likely they are to act them out unconsciously. These types of criminal behavior are explained in one of the essays from the new book “Serial Killers: Being and Killing” generate a terrified fascination inside people that asks for a logical explanation of the way criminals act. This edition of the Emmy awards shows a long list of “evil” candidates at the prizes. Glenn Close, starring “Damages”, is nominated for the best actress for her portrayal of Patty Hewes. Rose Byrne is playing her equally evil protégée Ellen Parsons was also nominated for the awards. The category of best actor in a drama series displayed a series of bad guys: Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House is a misanthrope, Jon Hamm’s Don Draper is a serial adulterer, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White and Hall’s Morgan Dexter.
Cranston, who is probably going to win three prizes in this category for White, his character, which develops form a high school chemistry teacher with terminal lung cancer to a man that decides to use his scientific expertise to manufacture meth that will help support his family after his death. He eventually becomes an assassin. Cranston declared in an interview that he believed his character is changed man that will not be able to return from where he started. He turned into an unscrupulous man, who would kill anyone that stands in his way. Lithgow’s Dexter is a cold blooded analyst who considers himself to be judge and jury to kill criminals that escape the justice of the system. Dexter manages to keep it all a secret and insinuate himself into the life of a serial killer he was obsessed with. Hollis says that people who enjoy watching these types of characters in action are, in most cases, dumping their own hate with someone, but some of them might be incited by the stories.
