Women Don’t Win in ‘You’ 2

“What I am is all that stands between you and people who are worse.”Really? Really, Joe?

If you’ve been following the deluded exploits of Joe Goldberg, the central psycho in ‘You’, you’ll know that the second season sees him on some kind of redemption tour.

Livin la vida lunatic in the City of Angels after fleeing New York in the wake of multiple murders, Penn Badgley’s Joe now goes by the name Will Bettelheim, who is actually a fake ID guy he has locked up in a storage container.

New season, same Joe. Although, this time around Joe seems to be interrupting his creepy streams of exculpatory internal monologue with some serious self-reflection that posits that maybe, just maybe, he’s a bad guy who needs to lie low and leave women alone.

Ding ding ding!

However, after the murder of his ex-girlfriend and the return of Candace – another ex he buried alive who has sworn to blow up his life – we all know that’s not gonna happen. Enter Love Quinn, chef and over-protective sister to her brother Forty, played by ‘The Haunting of Hill House’s’ Victoria Pedretti.

Yes, Joe’s new love interest is named Love and her brother is named Forty and as if that’s not cringey enough, the new season of ‘You’ imagines Joe as some kind of #MeToo hero.

Working at Anavrin (Nirvana spelt backwards), a wellness market owned by the Quinns in Los Angeles, when not donning his black cap to do something dodgy, Joe is hot on the heels of a comedian/sexual predator named Henderson who got away with sexually assaulting Joe’s neighbour Delilah and is making moves on her little sister Ellie.

While Delilah works hard to expose Henderson in the press, Joe takes matters into his own hands and will ultimately be the one to bring the man to book. Problematic is co-opting a women’s activist, dispatching vigilante justice and then locking up that woman to save your own murdering skin.

Yes, ‘You’ is a work of fiction but the issues it deals with are not which is why watching it is an essay in cognitive dissonance. Positioned as the sympathetic character through his villain origin story, his narration, justifications, good looks and perspective, Joe is who we are supposed to be rooting for even though he does terrible, excessive and violent things primarily to women.

This point of view is unsettling and while Joe’s positioning does attempt to draw us into a psyche that is clearly deranged, there is something missing in the treatment of women that is dishearteningly reflective of the real world but which misses the opportunity to do better in fiction.

For example: Candace is framed as the obsessive ex-girlfriend and her trauma is ignored, gaslighted and glossed over by everyone she speaks out to. Delilah is not believed, her work is cut short and an undeserving man earns brownie points for dispatching violent ‘justice’. Ellie has her life exploded by Joe and is forced to go on the run and the man (the real Will Bettelheim), who could have helped avoid all this by going to the police, protects and coddles Joe by staying silent in a grotesque example of the bro code that helps perpetuate, amongst other things, violence against women.

In ‘You’ season two much like in the last season, women don’t win.

Instead their bloodied bodies are on display. Their stories are disbelieved and the male gaze still takes centre stage imbuing patriarchal meaning into how we act and how we dress. The real world is slowly changing but in ‘You’, the worst of it is presented as entertainment and as a cautionary tale. How one digests the series will be closely linked to one’s own experience, trauma, triggers and politics.

Should the romanticising of real or fictional serial killers still be a thing? Are multiple seasons of a show rooted in violence against women legitimate entertainment? Do shows like ‘You’ ultimately glamourise and lowkey encourage toxic behaviour? And, finally, if we want changed behaviour, killers brought to book more quickly and far more women to survive their abusive partners, why don’t we show that on screen instead of these calculating, violent multiple season fantasies where the murderer is the handsome star?

Recently confirmed for a third season, one can only hope women fare better as the story progresses, because as anyone who has watched this instalment to the end can attest, the murderous adventures of Joe Goldberg aren’t done yet.

‘You’ (2019) is now streaming on Netflix.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, marthamukaiwa.com

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