'You': A Deconstruction of the “Nice Guy”
By Jordan DelFiugo
With its fifth and final season premiering on April 24, it's time to take a critical look at You—one of the most criminally misunderstood TV shows of the last decade. Based on Caroline Kepnes’ novel of the same name, You follows Joe Goldberg, a man so obsessed with the idea of love and “the perfect woman” that he stalks and kills anyone who threatens his romantic delusions.
The show begins with Joe and Beck’s “love story” which starts when she walks into the bookstore where Joe works. A brief, flirty interaction is all it takes for Joe to become obsessed. At first, his behavior seems relatively harmless, he creeps on her social media and occasionally fantasizes about her, but soon, he begins stalking her. He memorizes her schedule, breaks into her home and steals her phone to read her private messages. When obstacles arise, he escalates to violence, killing Beck’s boyfriend, her best friend and eventually Beck herself.
Image Courtesy of Netflix
Even from the start, Joe doesn’t see Beck as a real person. Before she even utters a word, he projects a perfect, idealized image onto her. He watches her and calls her a “good girl.” He’s pleased by her loose blouse, interpreting it as modesty, and assumes that because she pays with a credit card, she wants him to know her name. Everything becomes fuel for his fantasy.
But Beck is far from the woman Joe imagines. She’s insecure, self-sabotaging, and deeply wounded by her father’s abandonment. She’s not the most “likable” character, but she’s layered and real. As she says herself, “I’m hiding what a complete ugly mess I am, behind this cute acceptable version of being a mess.”
As much as Joe wants Beck to be a one-dimensional manic pixie dream girl, she’s not. And You excels at this kind of subversion, particularly when it comes to the male gaze. Coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the “male gaze” refers to how women are often depicted from a heterosexual male perspective, as sexual objects for visual pleasure. On the surface, You might seem to perpetuate this, but it actually critiques it. Joe keeps trying to reduce women to his own fantasy, and they keep disrupting it.
This becomes even more apparent in the second season with Love Quinn, a kind, beautiful baker who seems like everything Joe ever wanted. Unlike Beck, she’s upfront and clearly interested in Joe, even after she finds out about his violent, obsessive tendencies. But again, she’s not what she seems. The end of season two reveals that Love also has a history of obsession and violence, she killed her au pair as a child, and later murders Joe’s neighbor, Delilah, to cover for him. In theory, Love is perfect for Joe: she not only accepts, but profoundly understands him. However, once the illusion shatters, Joe finds himself disgusted by Love. Love mirrors Joe’s own darkness back at him, and he can’t stand it. That’s because Joe is not interested in love. He wants control.
Image Courtesy of Netflix
This desire to control women, to mold them into idealized fantasies, isn’t unique to Joe. In fact, it's part of what makes You so compelling, it’s a deconstruction of the “nice guy” trope we’ve seen in decades of TV and film.
Without his internal monologue, Joe isn’t so different from familiar rom-com or sitcom protagonists like Ross Geller from “Friends” or Ted Mosby of “How I Met Your Mother.” They’re conventionally attractive, but in a safe, nerdy way. They see themselves as overlooked romantics who are better than the “bad boys” women usually date. Joe even calls himself “the only real feminist [Beck] knows,” a line you could easily imagine coming from a sitcom.
That’s part of what makes Joe such a chilling and effective character: he feels familiar. Penn Badgley was perfectly cast, he is boyish, charming, funny and seemingly harmless. Especially for viewers who remember him as Dan Humphrey from “Gossip Girl,” another supposedly “nice” guy with a bitter, obsessive streak under the surface. He knows how to weaponize sincerity.
Image Courtesy of Netflix
But while You is deliberate in its critique of these tropes, the fan response hasn’t always reflected that. The most disturbing part of the show isn’t the murders, it’s how many viewers defend and even glorify Joe. It’s gotten to a point where Badgley himself has expressed concern. In the article “Penn Badgely Wants Fans to Stop Falling for Joe” Badgely told the Daily Beast, “I’ve been really repulsed by certain parts of Joe, and it’s weird to play somebody that you actually feel that way about... I was always kind of on the sidelines like, we don’t need to defend Joe.”
Joe Goldberg is not a misunderstood romantic, he’s a manipulator, a narcissist and even a killer. But because he's attractive and charming, some viewers struggle to see him clearly. And that’s exactly the point You is trying to make. If viewers didn’t sympathize with Joe, the writers of the show wouldn’t have done their job. But the media we consume doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With Season 5 on the horizon, now is the time to reexamine what it means to celebrate the “nice guy,” and to ask ourselves: what does it say when we’re more comfortable blaming a woman for being messy than holding a man accountable for being dangerous?
