Warning: Spoilers for the second season of You ahead.
You know the days: your parents have left town after an exhausting holiday visit, your depression is in full swing, there are continents literally on fire and the only thing on the planet that will satiate your malaise that isn’t drinking, drugs or sleeping for days is watching Netflix. In the early days after Christmas, I bounced between bingeing the entire first season of You and reading Last Days at Hot Slit, a new collection of the writings of Andrea Dworkin, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder (Semiotext(e) 2019). Then I turned the full glare of my attention onto the newly released second season of You. It was a lot.
Much has been made of You, often described as the story of a serial killer told from his own point of view, although Joe, played by Penn Badgley, isn’t so much the typical serial killer we anticipate from other television shows—cold, methodical, sociopathically taking pleasure in violence—but what Dworkin would call a batterer. Joe is emotional, obsessive, and utterly blind to the ways in which his conception of love is a decorative brand of misogyny. “I swear,” his voiceover tells Beck, the object of his fascination and the “you” of the first season, “I’m the only real feminist you know.” His disdain for women focuses entirely on her friends, other people’s girlfriends, and, well, on just about every woman in the world but her. You, surprisingly, is funny: both riddled with smart snark and physical gags, such as Joe and his bookstore coworker diving out of sight to avoid being in the background of an Insta-influencer’s selfie. In the early episodes, we’re able to take delight in it precisely because Joe’s cynical commentary is often so dead-on in his assessment. Beck is dating a douchy fuck-boy, her friends actually are insipid. The show makes an asshole of everyone, even its audience, laughing along with Joe’s quips.
In one of her many essays about domestic violence, Dworkin wrote: “the batterer has to be stopped. He will not stop himself. He has to be imprisoned, or killed, or she has to escape and hide, sometimes for the rest of her life, sometimes until he finds another woman to ‘love.’” Dworkin is perhaps best known for her antipornography stance in the seventies and eighties, which placed her squarely against sex-positivity and branded her a pariah of third-wave feminism. She barely earned a passing nod in my college studies, but her work takes on a cutting clarity in our current #metoo, Trump-dominated world. She wrote not just against prostitution, rape and battery of women but also against imperialism and racism, and she made a career out of the exquisitely painful work of turning her own experience as an abused wife into a flashpoint for prolific political writings. It might just be the coincidence of consuming them so close together, but it’s hard to believe Dworkin didn’t inform, to some extent, the writing of You. After all, Blythe, Beck’s pretentious writer friend, paraphrases Dworkin when she tells Joe, “Personally, I’m of the opinion that all penetration under patriarchy is rape,” the explanation of which Joe quickly zones out. What sex-positive feminism finds so problematic about Dworkin is exactly that: there was no space for penetrative sex under patriarchy that wasn’t, essentially, rape. If you happen to enjoy penetrative sex, this is a hard pill to swallow. What about nice guys?
There’s no such thing. Nice guys don’t exist. This is the central thesis of You.
In the final episode of the first season, Beck is given, in a limited capacity, a voice. After imprisoning her, Joe gives her a typewriter and demands that she write, one of his many abuses disguised as an act of love: it’s for her own good. Beck writes the manuscript that delivers Joe his perfect fall-man, telling the truth of their relationship but giving her abuser the identity of her therapist, Dr. Nicky, who is ultimately arrested for her murder. In her account, she juxtaposes her experience with the men in her life with the stories women are told, the fairy tales about romantic love. She’s been taught that, eventually, there will be the “right” man, the prince. What she has learned from Joe is that the prince and Bluebeard—the husband with a bloody chamber filled with corpses of his previous wives—are the same man (the episode is titled “Bluebeard’s Castle,” wherein Beck discovers the body count of Joe’s murderous obsession). Dworkin writes of this confrontation, familiar to so many women: “The husband’s violence against her contradicts everything she has been taught about life, marriage, love, and the sanctity of the family. Regardless of the circumstances in which she grew up, she has been taught to believe in romantic love and the essential perfection of married life… she will find that society loves its central lie—that marriage means happiness—and hates the woman who stops telling it even to save her own life.”
One of tricks You pulls on us is Joe’s concern for kids caught up in potentially dangerous situations: one neighbor kid per season. This functions better in the first season, in which Joe tries to protect his neighbor Paco from the terror of his mother’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend. The show signals to us that Joe is, essentially, good. Confronted with another batterer, he positions himself as morally superior; he would never, he says again and again, hurt someone he loves. We believe he must have good in him if he’s so concerned about a ten-year-old boy. The trope doesn’t hold up as well in the second season, when he follows a fifteen-year-old girl around trying to protect her from sexual predators. In both seasons, he ends up killing another abuser. The tightrope walk between nice guy and vigilante always tips into violence. Joe’s niceness is never actually good; it always serves his purposes.
You is deeply invested in its own cleverness, sometimes obnoxiously so: the first word Joe ever says to Beck is, “Guilty.” But the show also is actively engaged with the tropes of modern romance: Joe’s heroic rescue of Beck on the train tracks, the sweetness of their morning routine, his run, after their breakup, through the streets to get her back, set to triumphant pop music. Outside her apartment, he tosses a pebble at her window and shatters the glass. Beck shrieks, and then sighs in relief when she sees it’s only him: the nice guy. That broken window is almost too apt: destruction at the end of a well-intentioned romantic gesture. Beck is only safe depending on how hard he throws the rock. Joe’s “nice” behavior doesn’t live side by side with his acts of evil; his violence is an extension of his niceness. In other words, the problem isn’t what side of the coin a man is on, Prince Charming or Bluebeard. The problem is the fairy tale.
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that 20,000 calls are made to domestic violence hotlines each day in the United States. One in seven women are stalked by an intimate partner to the point of fearing for their lives; one in three women experience some level of violence and one in four experience severe physical violence, “eg. beating, burning, strangling.” An overwhelming percentage (94%) of victims of intimate partner murder suicides are female. Last year, the New York Times reported that murders by romantic partners are on the rise.
In this context, You walks a razor-thin line. Narrating a pattern of violence from the point of view of the perpetrator is a risky move, because audiences are conditioned to believe the narrator. Joe has a rationale for his actions: he doesn’t mean to kill so many people, he’s driven to it with noble purposes. His victims deserve to die, he explains to us. They’re in the way of his love story. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence also reports that 20% of victims of intimate partner homicide are not the intimate partners themselves: they’re family members, friends, or neighbors who tried to intervene. Which is to say, despite the obvious absurdities of You—the plexiglass prison in the basement, not knowing the difference between a literary agent and a publicist, affording those apartments on minimum wage—the show is depicting and interrogating a very real and prevalent epidemic of violence in the United States, one that is getting worse, not better. Why are we still watching? Because the fairy tale that Joe believes in is the one we’ve been taught, too. We love our central lie. We want this damaged man to reform, to be saved by love, to turn, as Beck says, from beast to prince.
* * *
So I, like many, watched the second season of You. Like other abusers, Joe is penitent. He wants to put it behind him, to create a new life. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone; he’s a nice guy. The world—and his audience—just has to give him the chance to prove it. He’s left New York behind and is starting out in LA with a new name and a new set of rules for himself. But it surprises no one that he has quickly chosen a new love, named Love (her twin brother is named Forty: the ultra-wealthy siblings bicker while playing tennis to drive home the joke). The second season of You continues to be meticulous in its language, despite losing momentum in its plotting and taking some truly wild side trips; there’s an entire subplot where Joe has his finger cut off and has to do some quick murdering before he can reattach it. As in the first season, the dialogue is deliberately playing with the ways in which we talk about love. “What if I’m damaged?” Joe asks Gabe, one of Love’s best friends. “Honey,” Gabe says, “Everyone came here because they are.” These are normal conversations; we have them with our therapists and with our friends. The characters make jokes about spying on each other and being stalkers, they say, “I could kill you,” they talk about needing boundaries; Joe does this most of all, often sounding more rational than the others. “Your brother is a monster,” his voiceover grumbles. Hyperbolic language is part of our lexicon, a tool for navigating our way to healthy relationships, and You consciously plays with the ways figurative language makes space for violence.
It also gives Joe space for the mental gymnastics he performs in order to seek absolution. Being both pretentious and delusional, he uses Crime and Punishment as a touchstone for his own life, misunderstanding the requirements for redemption. Like other batterers, he truly believes his battering is behind him; like other abusers, while he recognizes the violence as going too far, he doesn’t ever truly believe that he’s at fault. Over and over he tells himself that he’s a “good man,” and he demands that other characters say the same of him.
And to force him to confront his behavior, the second season brings Candace, Joe’s previous victim, back into his life. In flashbacks we see him kill and bury her after discovering she cheated on him, not realizing that she’s actually just unconscious; it’s worth noting that Joe is a batterer and not a serial killer precisely because he fails to kill multiple people the first time around, and has to amplify his violence in a second attempt. In the first season Candace appeared as a ghost, but now, in LA, she’s a survivor who’s decided to fight back: she infiltrates his life, determined to keep him from killing again. In Joe’s narration, she’s the villain stalking him; she’s the monster in the dark. It’s genuinely chilling to watch her attempt to warn the people in Joe’s inner circle against him and be quickly dismissed as “crazy.” When she goes to the police, an officer advises her on the limitations of restraining orders and the realities of being believed. It’s also telling that Joe flees from her, seeking his redemption through a new love rather than by facing a prior victim.
The women of You all operate within the same fantasy as Joe. Beck conforms to it even as she is failed by it, imagining herself a princess; Love co-opts it for her own means. Candace tries to rewrite the story, and she’s killed for it: not by Joe, but, in the season finale twist, by Love, who has internalized her need for the marriage fantasy so much that she, too, is willing to commit murder. Dworkin wrote in Right-Wing Women of the tactics of conservative women who espouse “traditional” femininity as a defense mechanism; they know it’s safer inside the patriarchy than outside of it. “Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different.” Love feels rage at Delilah and Candace because they threaten her safety within her relationship. She explains to Joe, “I’m protecting you because I want to.” She wants her marriage fantasy at any cost; the season ends with Joe and Love moving into a house and expecting a child. In an overlit flashforward, Joe gets everything he says he’s always wanted, a wife who knows exactly who he is, a chance to create a better family, security, stability: “a quiet life.” And yet, as he peers at his new neighbor through the fence, we know that he is in no way reformed.
You is a horror story, not because it’s beyond the pale but because it’s so very normal. Love excises Joe’s exes from his life, just as Joe excised Beck’s exes from her life; other couples unfriend previous lovers to appease their current romantic partners. It’s fitting that Joe, in likening himself to Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, equates the suburbs to Siberia. This is the punishment, but it’s not, as he claims, redemption. The trappings of the happy ending, the house with the pool, the cheerfully pregnant wife, are, in fact, the prison of the family, a life sentence of inflicting the same psychological violence on others that was inflicted on him and on Love. Of her unhealthy childhood, Love says, “Families don’t heal from something like that. So I began to fantasize about a new one.” But as Dworkin says, the family is the source of patriarchal power, and patriarchal power is the poison that feeds the violence both Joe and Love commit. Of course, we sympathise with Joe—the show wants us to—when we see his horrible childhood, the physical pain and emotional anguish his parents put him through. The patriarchy hurts everyone. You suggests not that penetration under patriarchy is rape but that love under patriarchy is abuse.
Dworkin wrote again and again about dismantling the patriarchy against working within it. Last Days at Hot Slit asks us to deconstruct all the ways in which male power infiltrates our lives, and Dworkin’s writing can be simultaneously thrilling and defeatist. Her call to arms leaves doubt for what comes after the fight, and in the meantime, what about intimacy, communication, and genuine human love?
“As women, we must begin this revolutionary work. When we change, those who define themselves over and against us will have to kill us all, change, or die. In order to change, we must renounce every male definition we have ever learned; we must renounce male definitions and descriptions of our lives, our bodies, our needs, our wants, our worth—we must take for ourselves the power of naming. We must refuse to be complicit… We must unlearn the passivity we have been trained to over thousands of years. We must unlearn the masochism we have been trained to over thousands of years. And, most importantly, in freeing ourselves, we must refuse to imitate the phallic identities of men. We must not internalize their values and we must not replicate their crimes.”
The final twist of You, that Love, like Joe, is willing to murder, is a warning. You is a horror story because it puts us all in a compromised position. Do we want to keep watching this man kill people? Unlike other serial killers, who murder out of sociopathic pleasure, or, like Dexter, out of a very particular ethical code, Joe’s murders are simply the furthest extent of his abusive habits, a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the love fantasy, and, as it appears we’re all still watching, we’re infected, too. Joe’s not a nice guy, and neither are we.
