The (Bad) Taste Test: Outsiders, Class Politics, and Making Monsters in You
The central premise of You - in which Joe Goldberg a certified Nice Guy and Romantic goes just a little overboard in pursuing the objects of his desire - only works because Joe is hot and charismatic. The show’s narration, often punctuated with a “hello you” that’s aimed as much at the audience as it is the character Joe is thinking about, is magnetic and funny. You laugh with Joe, not at him. For all of his darkness, there’s just enough sympathy and tragedy in his backstory for the kind of person that makes horny fancams of TV villains to go “I can fix him.”
But more than that, Joe Goldberg is an outsider. The worlds inhabited by the women that he becomes obsessed with couldn’t be further away from the simple, less well-off life that Joe himself so often lives. Whether Joe is in New York, the suburbs, or now London, there are always hipsters for him to mock and haughty heiresses - from Peach Salinger in season one, all the way to the “royal adjacent” Malcolm. Each season has Joe become more of an outsider, so much so that in season four, he’s in a new country and surrounded by haughty artists, aristocratic party girls, and blue-blooded misogynists. This gallery of rogues ripped straight out of the 1% are not only easy characters for Joe to mock, they keep him and the audience on the same page.
The end of season 4’s first episode ends with the surprise death of one of these staggeringly wealthy supporting characters, and an appropriately gnarly body sequence as a frantic Joe tries to piece together what happened after a night that involved too much absinthe. But what’s striking about this first victim is how little sympathy You wants anybody to feel for them; they’re revealed early on to be - to put it lightly - obnoxious, insisting that “the rich are the real victims” in contemporary society, as their charm gives way to something ugly when Joe suggests that some petty criminals were “forced” into a life outside of the law.
Yet the traits of season 4’s first victim - the desire for sympathy, the way in which a well honed and performed mask can slip - are so easily identifiable with Joe himself. That’s what makes the relationship that You has to both its murderous protagonis and the antagonists that surround him so interesting: the two aren’t so different.
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Episode one ends with Joe discovering that he has, of all things, a stalker. Someone who sends him messages on an encrypted app that disappear in a puff of smoke just after Joe opens them. The first message is, of course, “hello, you.” This reversal of fortunes feels like a continuation of the season 2 twist that Love Quinn would, like Joe, kill to protect the things she most desperately wants to hold on to. All of the murderers and monsters in You seem to share a common thread: a desire to hold on to a world that seems to grow increasingly precarious.
“You is more than willing to break its own spell when it matters most, laying bare how well it makes monsters, and how easy it is to fall for them.”
Which is what makes season 4 so interesting by comparison: Instead of offering up the simplistic answer that the show’s first victim was killed by Joe in a drunken fit of rage, the narrative twists in another direction, turning the sharp tongue the show uses on those that Joe disdains, and turning it into a sword. Looming around the new supporting cast is a figure who becomes dubbed the Eat The Rich Killer. This moniker does what You does best: it flirts with the audience; it dares them to end up agreeing with the character holding the murder weapon. The Eat the Rich Killer has graced TV screens in a moment where taking down the 1% is having a real moment in the sun: from the idiotic, definitely-not-Elon-Musk figure of Miles in Glass Onion, to the labyrinthine madness of Triangle of Sadness or the delectable satire of The Menu, audiences are primed and ready to agree with anyone putting a target on the back of the super-rich.
In a way, You is a show that’s always been about class: there’s something morbidly fascinating about how upwardly mobile Joe’s relationships end up being; the line drawn between college student and struggling poet Beck in season one, to a wealthy wife and a suburban home in season three is actually an arrow. But Joe’s outsider status becomes a kind of armour; not only a distance that he puts between himself and those around him - often out of continual attempts to prove that he isn’t a killer when someone he’s infatuated with sees him at his darkest - and also a way for the show to keep punching up at the targets of Joe’s withering putdowns.
This strategy of covert, complex class politics is again, something that only works because of how willing You is to let Joe charm and seduce the audience. How necessary that act is for the show to stay afloat. More than any season before it, You’s fourth outing is the one that has killings the audience might find themselves cheering on. The show is like Joe himself, it often promises that it’ll try to be different, before peeling back layers of monstrosity underneath. It’s a triumph of how the show is able to make its monsters: by making everyone, not just Joe, capable of being deeply contemptible. It’s almost easy to forget about his bloodstained past, when these new supporting players are the most obnoxious, unlikeable, and kill-able yet.
But there’s one moment that throws this all into sharp relief, and it has nothing to do with the potential victims of the Eat The Rich Killer, but instead Joe’s brief London run-in with would-be-paramour Marianne. In stark, high-contrast flashbacks, Joe follows and finds Marianne. But when she sees him he turns and runs; he gives chase frantically, violently. What makes this sequence so powerful is that it exists without Joe’s narration; without the wit and charm that keeps the audience onside until it’s just too late. You is more than willing to break its own spell when it matters most, laying bare how well it makes monsters, and how easy it is to fall for them.
Words: Sam Moore
