Dexter Morgan & Larry David: The Strangers We Know (Part I: Similar Openings)

The plain, matter-of-fact, first sentence of Camus’ The Stranger is, Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte, or in English, "Today, mother is dead." Those words are the shots fired around the absurdist world. In one fell swoop, they create distance between the reader and narrator, instantly characterize the narrator as emotionally bizarre, and speak to the complexity of the continuum of time; or, more simply: they do everything an absurdist novel should do in just one sentence. Camus is, if nothing else, a genius.

Similarly, the openings of Dexter and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in their own way, communicate much of the same absurdity in ironically plain terms. For both of these shows, it is the music that sets the absurdist tone.

There’s something silly about the theme music of Curb. It’s as if the music is gently foreboding Larry David’s social mishaps, or, it is celebrating them as in the notion of a circus; indeed, the music sounds like circus music.

Dexter begins with a theme song that eventually takes on an eerie tone. It is accompanied with a visual summary of Dexter’s morning routine. This visual summary—beginning with the swatting of a fly, moving to the cutting, cooking, and chewing of indiscernible meat, to the cracking, frying, and chewing of an egg (with hot sauce—connotating blood, and Chulula’s), to the pressing of coffee, the slicing and squeezing of an orange, the flossing of teeth, the tying of shoe laces, and ending with the pull of a white t-shirt over the head, and a look in the mirror, a look to us the viewer—speaks to the double-sidedness of Dexter’s being. This opening reminds us that we, the viewers, must remember that every time Dexter does something regular, something normal, like slice open an orange, he would slice up a dead body with just as little emotion.