The Netflix series, 'You', starring Penn Badgley, Elizabeth Lail, and Shay Mitchell, was released onto the platform in December of last year, after having been streamed with the channel Lifetime back in September. While the show did not initially take off with this network, once adopted by Netflix, it rapidly became a worldwide sensation.
In awe of the young and beautiful Guinevere Beck (Lail), Badley's character, Joe, decides he will stop at nothing to win her over. What might seem like an innocent crush in the first five minutes, rapidly spirals into obsession and infatuation. While characters like Joe unfortunately have always existed in the real world, the true terror of this programme stems from the seemingness ease with which he is able to track Beck's every movement, simply with access to the internet.
In the age of social media, relationships and dating is incomparable to what our parents and grandparents experienced. The overexposure of our lives online, as we are all already aware, makes us vulnerable to those who want to use and abuse this information; the photographs which we unthinkingly upload to Instagram, the experiences that we share on Facebook, and the videos of our lives that we upload to Snapchat mean that our followers and friends have our entire lives at their fingertips. The ease with which a psychopath is able to access Beck's online profiles will have us all switching our accounts to private in no time...
Why 'You' is Such a Phenomenon
1. Building a Psychopath
All the cards are laid out on the table from the very beginning with 'You'. The audience hear a running commentary of Joe's own thoughts, seeing through the eyes and into the mind of a psychopath.
While the analytical, cold, and calculating character is objectively terrifying, he is at the same time so cleverly presented as charismatic and charming, that the audience is very nearly able to sympathise with him and in a way ends up on his side. The contrast between the scenes in which cooly murders, steals, and lies, with no sense of moral repentance, and those kind and selfless moments in which he cares for his young neighbour, Pablo, show the true complexity of the character, who keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, waiting for his next move.
2. Constructing the Perfect Victim
As a total contrast to Joe, Beck is innocent, trusting, and fragile. She is easily taken advantage of by the men around her, and does not fit in well to her friendship group, making her the perfect and ideal victim of the twisted stalker. The character's development throughout the series, from a weak victim to a character with bite and edge, makes her even more interesting. The audience's sympathy for her decreases more and more throughout the episodes.
The relationship between Beck and Joe is a clever type of mirror, each one reflecting what the other cannot be; their love can never work. Joe is a psychopath driven by jealousy and possessiveness, while Beck is motivated by her insecurity, which leads her to self-sabotaging her own relationship.
3. Putting Together the Alternative Villainess
As if a romance with a murderer and stalker were not enough, Beck's supposed best friend, Peach, who is unlikeable from the moment that we meet her, soon is revealed to be a far more sinister character than we expect. While she at first seems to be the stereotypical rich-girl from the Big Apple, enjoying her parents' money and easy lifestyle and searching only for superficial delights, her darker motives begin to show.
When Peach realises that with Beck's new relationship she is now no longer the sole focus of her friend's attention, she begins to go to any lengths to sabotage her happiness. Her friendship with Beck is shown to be purely for her own gain, and her possessive jealousy is a trait she shares with Joe, thus making her his biggest obstacle on the path to achieving Beck as his own.
4. Creating a Toxic Relationship
Toxicity in relationships is something that we see all the time in modern media, often romanticised in a dangerous way. Here this toxicity (jealousy, obsession, infatuation) is taken to the extreme and the warning signs are exposed as the dangerous threats which they truly are.
We have all used social media to look up information about a crush; to track down their past relationships, maybe even to see what they have been up to that weekend. The writer shows how dangerous this behaviour can truly be when take to the extreme. Much of the toxicity in their relationship stems from access to social media, thus holding up a mirror to our modern society and the potentially ominous behaviours which have come to be considered norms in modern dating.
5. Connecting Fiction to Reality
'You' not only opens up discussions about toxic relationships and dangerous red flags, but also about the dangers of technology. Greg Berlanti, screenwriter of 'Love Simon', adapted this story from Caroline Kepps novel. In both screenplays Berlanti highlights the way in which social media can be manipulated and abused to ruin the lives of young people.
As a generation, we are largely unable to leave the house without our phones, feel compelled to construct a version of our lives for the public to view online. People analyse their potential partners on social media before first dates and we arrive with half the information about the other person already in our minds; this is not so far from Joe's own strategy, who simply takes the information a step further to track her very movements. The scary way in which many of us might be able to relate to the stalker's behaviour when he is combing the internet for information about Beck, surely forces us to take a step back and consider the way in which the internet has warped our sense of normal personal interactions in the 20th century.
