What YOU on Netflix Is Really About

NOTE: This essay contains major spoilers for every season of "You" on Netflix

The television series You was adapted for the small screen from the Caroline Kepnes novel of the same name. It premiered on Lifetime in 2018. Before the premiere of the second season, the series moved to Netflix, where it has lived ever since. The premise? Affable, handsome, slightly oddball New York bookstore clerk Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is just an old-fashioned romantic who was born in the wrong generation. Repelled by bad manners, technology, and readers of The DaVinci Code, Joe is looking for love in all the wrong places. Enter Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a grad student who walks into his bookstore one day and immediately captures his attention. The first season of You is, essentially, a dark subversion of the classic romcom formula. After their meet cute, Joe becomes enamored with Beck, convinced that her every styling choice and personality trait is a performance meant to seduce him. His infatuation starts off benign—scouring her public social media profiles, something we’ve all done with a new crush—but almost immediately becomes sinister, as he shows up outside her apartment and pleasures himself while watching her through her window. Before long, he’s bludgeoning, kidnapping, and eventually murdering every person in Beck’s life who he deems to be an obstacle to her happiness (read: their union). Insanely, he manages to keep his violence a secret, and his pursuit of Beck actually works—for a time. Joe and Beck break up and get back together a couple of times, but eventually it ends how it was always destined to end: Beck finds Joe’s box of murder mementos, including a pair of her underwear, her old phone (which she believed she lost), and her missing (dead) ex-boyfriend’s teeth. Once Joe knows that Beck knows his secret, her fate is sealed.

In the second season of You, Joe is back to his old tricks, this time in Los Angeles. Once again, he successfully courts a new hyperfixation—now a woman quite literally named Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti)—while committing murders he believes to be justified on the side. The difference is that at the end of this season, when his love object discovers his bloodlust, she’s not scared off; she falls harder. Because Love, too, has a history of murder, including the murder of one of Joe’s less consequential season 2 love interests. Instead of feeling relief that he’s finally met someone who can fully accept him for who he is, Joe is repulsed. He lunges toward her with the intent to kill, stopping only when she reveals that she’s pregnant with his child. Joe ends season 2 trapped in a relationship with Love, not only because of the pregnancy, but also because the Quinn family is extremely wealthy, meaning that all of Joe’s earlier indiscretions can be buried or outright erased with family money. For Joe Goldberg, who was raised by a single mom and then relegated to a violent group home, it was impossible to ignore the siren call of complete financial comfort and stability.

All of season 3 is about Joe falling out of Love and inevitably developing a new hyperfixation, this time on a librarian he works with named Marienne (Tati Gabrielle). By the end of season 3, Joe has murdered Love and faked his own death in order to escape scrutiny in the suburbs and to give their son, Henry, a shot at a better life; season 4 begins with Joe fleeing to Paris to pursue Marienne after she escapes him. By the end of season 4, Marienne has escaped Joe once again, but he’s found a new romantic fixation, who has become his second wife—Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), another fabulously wealthy woman who is willing to overlook his past (though she doesn’t know the full extent of his disturbed inner life) and use her funds to give him a blank slate. And so in season 5, Joe finds himself back in New York City with Kate, flush with cash and determined not to slide back into murderous, philandering habits. Inevitably, Joe can’t help himself, and cheats on Kate the same way he cheated on most of his other paramours, this time with Bronte (Madeline Brewer).

I’ll admit: I did not care for the character of Bronte. I blame this almost 100% on the writing; her dialogue was written like the show had to hit a quota of TikTok slang. Part of Bronte’s arc involves the Internet dogpiling on her; the show even goes so far as to have her kidnapped by an incel who plans on doing God knows what to her in the back of his van (though of course Joe intervenes before he can even get her zip tied). In real life, the TikTok comments slamming the character are overwhelmingly about her appearance. They insist that their beloved antihero Joe Goldberg deserved someone more conventionally attractive if he was going to throw away his marriage to a symmetrical billionaire. I would argue that Bronte’s styling in the final season is the entire point of her character. She doesn’t seduce Joe because she’s the most beautiful girl in the world. In fact, she doesn’t (really) seduce Joe at all. Joe preys upon her, and he does so because he identifies vulnerabilities in her the way any other predator would.

It isn’t just Bronte’s appearance that’s been up for debate—it’s her personality, too. Again, I can empathize with this point, because of the glaring and unnecessary usage of “contemporary” slang. But her other contentious traits include her obsession with romance literature, her clunky writing, and her tendency towards Reddit vigilantism. More than any other love interest on the show—maybe more so, even, than Beck—Bronte is a stand-in for the audience. We don’t really know if Beck would have been a purveyor of questionable dark romance tropes, but we know for certain that Bronte is. The well-adjusted thing to do is to find stalking and obsession unappealing, even revolting. Bronte is the human embodiment of #BookTok, of the thousands of women unleashing their repressed sexuality through graphic comments and glowing reviews of books about men physically and emotionally controlling their romantic partners. People are uncomfortable with that kind of radical honesty about sexual taste, especially when the women expressing that honesty are anything less than physically perfect.

But predators do not choose their victims based on who is the most attractive. They choose their victims based on access and vulnerability. Notice how in Season 1, Beck’s best friend, Peach Salinger, is played by Shay Mitchell—undoubtedly one of the most beautiful actresses working today. But Joe has absolutely no interest in her, even fleetingly—in fact, when he’s forced to see Peach as a sexual being, he is bored, even disgusted. Why? Because she is guarded, skeptical, stubborn, and angry. Manipulating Peach would be infinitely harder than manipulating Beck, who is uncertain of herself and is struggling in literally every area of her life. Joe is attracted to Love in season 2 because he perceives her as especially friendly and guileless; even though her family has money, he can read the baggage she carries from her emotionally unavailable, overly critical mother, as well as the abandonment she still feels from the death of her first husband (no matter her role in it). In season 3, he wants Marienne because she is a single mom—much like the woman who raised him—and because she is tormented by her abusive ex. Yes, the actresses who play all these women are absolutely gorgeous, but Joe’s attraction to them is because he has convinced himself he can control them—or, in his mind, “save” them. While Madeline Brewer is objectively beautiful, her hair, makeup, and clothing on the show are meant to make her look more eccentric. Everything about her appearance reads as a kind of armor developed by a woman who is trying to protect herself from the world, but her immediate attraction to Joe, who she already knows is dangerous, belies this attempt at self-preservation. By styling Bronte in this way, the show is emphasizing that Joe’s “taste” in women is not about women who perform capitalistic femininity the most accurately. It’s about women he believes he can dominate.

The other key theme of You is class. Joe alternately covets and resents wealth after growing up poor in a single parent household. His first relationship on the show is with Beck, a struggling poet whose Ivy League degree means she’s surrounded by friends with whom she is desperate to keep up. When that relationship ends, however, Joe ends up with the fabulously wealthy Love. When his relationship with Love sours, and when his distaste for privileged suburban life reaches a fever pitch, he becomes obsessed with Marienne, a single mom with a history of drug addiction and whose evil ex-boyfriend is exactly the kind of moneyed jackass Joe relishes eviscerating. When Marienne slips through his grasp, Joe runs to Kate, the daughter of a billionaire tycoon. Joe uses the women he preys upon as proof of his own legitimacy—even the less wealthy women he dates are extremely well-read and articulate. Joe is desperate to be seen as intelligent and desirable and worthy. When he perceives that his partners are abandoning him, they aren’t just triggering the wound that his mother made when she left him at the group home. They’re also taking their ticket to another world with them.

The public distaste for Bronte has caused the public to deem her unworthy of defeating Joe. Surely one of his more likable past loves should be the one to vanquish him once and for all, they crow in comment sections. Similarly, they remark on how the Joe of previous seasons would have been too cunning and calculating to fall for any of Bronte’s scheming. I disagree. I concede that Joe has proven himself almost supernaturally skilled at evading detection. But the notion of the super genius sexual sadist is a myth. Whatever intellect this archetype possesses pales in comparison to his desperation, his appetites. I think mostly of Ted Bundy, the prolific serial killer of the 1970s, who was able to operate with impunity across the United States until his final kills, where he devolved to the point of total annihilation, of killing a victim far younger than any of his previous ones, and of ultimately being captured by a small town cop on a traffic violation. Season 5 Joe has been running for a long time—in some senses for several years, and in another sense for his entire life.

And so the real story of You is not a love story—of this notion you have ideally been disabused within the first couple of episodes. But the real story of You is also not of an evil mastermind. It is the story of a tragically and pathetically common man. A man whose love map was forged by early trauma and abandonment wounds, a man whose idea of love is codependence and total annihilation of his partner’s identity, a man who stalks and manipulates and abuses his partners in order to achieve this end. In the aftermath of the series finale, Penn Badgley addressed the elephant in the room about Joe Goldberg’s crimes:

“It was important for him to be seen, finally, as a sexual predator,” he added. “We never, we purposefully [didn’t show that] — I mean writer’s choice, and I think the right choice, ultimately. [So] I think [the finale] had a responsibility.”

Though You eschews graphic onscreen sexual assaults, Badgley points out what should be obvious to every viewer, but eluded many: that Joe Goldberg is a sexual predator. Joe Goldberg is a rapist. But like many real-life rapists, Joe Goldberg doesn’t even know that he is one. There is the argument to be made that vanishingly few of Joe’s sexual encounters on the show are consensual, because of how much lying and emotional abuse is involved with getting these women into bed. But even more transparently, we must acknowledge that we spend our entire tenure as Joe’s captive audience viewing the world through his eyes. When he needs it to, the camera cuts away. What did we really think was happening in that cage?

No, the real story of You is not a love story. Nor is it the story of a twisted genius. The story of You is the story of how, in a vessel of unprocessed trauma, masculinity can curdle into violence and murder. And it is the story of how these cycles go unnoticed for so long, when they are in the body of a man who looks just like the boy next door.