Dr. Deadly's Book Club

Joe Goldberg. Dexter. Maybe even Hannibal Lecter. We love them, right? No matter how many people end up in the bookstore cellar or on the metal gurney. They’re killers with a… heart? 

It works, of course, because we know they’re not real. We’d worry about the sanity of anyone who wants to live next door to the real Joe Goldberg. But is it strange that we love even his fictional self as much as we do?

Aaaahhh, some of our therapists might say. All these law-abiding, kind-hearted souls who turn the lights off and the Netflix or their Kindles on to follow these serial killers…there are deep psychological reasons for that. Here are a few I imagine (with titles I created):

Vicarious Power Effect

Yeeeahhh!! Take him down, Joe! AND his annoying friend! Who isn’t carrying around at least five-to-ten-murders’-worth of repressed anger? The key word here is repressed, meaning we wouldn’t dream of unleashing it and actually hurting a living being. (Or maybe we occasionally dream about it, but we’d never want to act on it in real life.) And so we vicariously live through these killers, simply to let off some steam. And, because their creators made them not only homicidal but likeable, we can root for them with less conscious conflict.

Teddy Bear Effect

Dexter is so nice to his sister! And when Joe isn’t killing people, he’s a total sweetie! I’m relating this to teddy bears because…have you ever really thought about teddy bears? Why the heck do we make 7-foot animals that would kill us in the woods into stuffed cutie-pies for our children to sleep with at night? Maybe for the same reason some of us get all gooey over Dexter’s and Joe’s nice parts, and love to laugh when Hannibal Lecter cracks a joke. It’s because we want to make scary things – and murderous beings – safe. We want to neutralize the bogeyman, one fictional representative prototype at a time.

Shock Value Effect

Whaaaaat the #@*! is happening?! When we’re into one of these stories, are we thinking about that snippy message from our coworker today? Are we splitting our attention between the story and Instagram? Probably much less than with other kinds of fictional tales, and isn’t that, to be honest, fantastic? We love the shock value of something so outrageous and also complex as a sympathetic character who goes around killing fellow humans. Certainly gets our minds off the smaller stuff! And this one doesn’t involve us unleashing our inner demons or taming our outer ones – it’s more like being a bystander, watching a brawl erupt and get settled down the street. We’re transfixed, and we have zero responsibility.

So…which one of these is the reason you love Joe Goldberg? Maybe more than one resonates, but which feels the strongest? Look inside and cast your vote!