WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!
We’ve all seen the TikToks appearing on our For You pages where people make fun of Joe from the show “You.” He creates a monologue in which the smallest details that he picks out about women are suddenly made for his pleasure—like when Beck didn’t wear a bra to the bookstore and he immediately assumed it was for attention (attention for him, to be specific). The entire show is truly a commentary on obsession, masculinity and the hostile effects of trauma.
Joe’s childhood is definitely one that strikes up sympathy. He grew up with an abusive father and a helpless mother, and ends up shooting his father in an attempt to lessen the pain his mother is facing. This ends up sending him into the foster care system, where he is adopted by an old man whose speciality is printing and safekeeping books. He is also emotionally and physically abusive towards Joe. This childhood is bound to shape the way Joe perceives his relationships with others—he’s constantly grieving for his mother abandoning him after he killed his father, and he becomes obsessed with other women out of fear that he’ll be alone forever.
Love, on the other hand, is a product of the typical dysfunctional rich family. She was born into wealth, but constantly ignored and invalidated from her parents. In my perspective, this invalidation caused Love to view situations in either black or white, and the things she did in reaction were always drastic. She was never taught to handle her emotions in a healthy manner, and since her family’s wealth was always there to cover her tracks, Love never really managed to pull herself together. Her automatic instinct was to inflict violence upon others.
Clearly, Love and Joe are similar in their responses to their relationships being extremely drastic;they both come from a place of neglect and isolation. What I would like to point out is how Joe consistently justifies himself and manages to blame Love for everything. Love took two full seasons to come to the conclusion that Joe pulled out the deepest, darkest parts of her. Let’s also not forget Joe and Love would have never been a thing if not for Joe’s obsessive, stalker tendencies. Joe essentially created this situation, and now that he had to be responsible for his actions in Season 3, he suddenly projected everything onto Love. I am not trying to say Love was completely innocent, as she took her fair share of lives because of her violent tendencies, but Seasons 2 and 3 were filled with Joe gaslighting Love into believing she needed fixing, and that he would fix her. Obviously this wasn’t true, as he ended up killing her.
While watching the show, it feels easy to forget that Love was a victim of Joe’s stalking and obsession. Joe saw all of her vulnerabilities, but he put himself in that position by watching her every move and psychoanalyzing her every emotion. Joe is constantly blaming Love for putting their son in an unsafe position by acting recklessly, but completely ignores the fact that he’s the reason this dysfunctional family exists. Joe is engaging in a form of victim blaming, which is essentially when something traumatic happens to someone, and people blame the person for the situation turning out the way it did. According to the Atlantic, this stems from a psychological theory called the “just-world hypothesis”, which outlines the basic idea that people deserve consequences for their actions. However, this thought-process falls apart because it is entirely possible for bad things to happen to good people. Joe ends up coming to a realization that he and Love are similar, rather than painting her as the picture of ultimate evilness, but then decides to protect himself by blaming her again, finally resulting in her death.
“You” did a perfect job at describing how far a white man can go in pursuit of his fantasies–Joe covered up the murders of countless people, many of them being his lovers who finally realized the insidiousness of his nature. Joe had no problem murdering Love and crafting a letter from the perspective of Love, letting her take the fall for the disintegration of their family.
The worst part about all of this? Henry is left at the doorstep of Dante’s house, who will grow up not knowing the reason for being abandoned by his biological father. And so the cycle continues.