All About YOU

More often than not when I watch a Netflix show, I find myself making comparisons to each of the characters. I empathize with Blair Waldorf’s eating disorder, I saw myself dating every male protagonist over six foot and could close my eyes and just imagine the wind blowing through my hair on the beach running alongside the cast of 90210. These parallels are easy to make when you’re a financially-privileged, White, cisgender woman -- one whose experiences mesh with ninety-percent of popular television shows. So when I found myself occasionally empathizing with Joe, the stalker and murderer on Netflix’s hit series You, even I was taken aback.

I’ve asked a number of friends what they thought about You and every single person responded with the same adjectives: dark, unsettling, creepy. And I have to agree with them. The stalking (particularly in the nascent age of social media), the public masturbation outside of Beck’s window, and the numerous murders are, undoubtedly, creepy. But there is something unsettling about You that truly differentiates it from other shows. We are imprisoned in Joe’s point-of-view the whole time, whose narration tries to convince us that he is protecting Beck, an average, blonde NYC girl who studies literature. We watch a murder occur and subsequently watch how Joe frames it as chivalric. Of course, I do not condone murder, but for the first time, the murderer is not the creepy guy in the dark whose appearance is always marked by some tension-building music, nor is he an incredibly complex character battling multiple personalities. In a sense, we see many things in Joe that we can see in ourselves. He’s in love and he keeps track of his crush on Instagram...I mean don’t we all? He is passionate about books and has a very sweet, brotherly relationship with his young neighbour, Paco. But Joe is still troubled, clearly.

But there is something about Joe’s love for Beck -- this incredible passion he has to transform her into her best self -- that almost leaves me rooting for them as a couple. I often have to stop myself from agreeing with him during his killings; Yes, Benji does suck, stupid, millennial, soda-making douchebag! Peaches is entitled! Sera Gamble, the show’s producer does something incredible with the show. She holds us in two places at once. We are repulsed by Joe, at his killings, his stalking, and his questionable decisions, but we are concurrently repulsed by ourselves. How can we possibly be sympathising with a killer?

But there is something to be said about the way that You captures the topics of privacy and current culture, making the show incredibly realistic amidst the moments of hilarity. It is scary to think that we live in a world where these things could realistically happen and that I, myself, can, in far less dramatic way, see parts of myself in Joe. We all have tendencies to romanticize people from afar, even those we don’t know, whether it be a model we follow on Instagram or the man we sit next to on the bus every day. What makes You so poignant is not just how unsettling it is, it’s how realistic it is. It is how powerful love can truly and quite frightfully be. It shows us that in many ways we are all a little bit like Joe, whether we like it or not. We just (hopefully) don’t kill them if they don’t love us back.

By Sophia Parvizi-Wayne

Duke Student, leader of national campaign on mental health, Cross Country All-ACC, fashion alchemist, Huffington Post writer, and all-around world-runner.