The final season of “You” asks viewers to consider their own role in condoning Joe Goldberg’s actions
BY JULIE HUANG – arts@theaggie.org
The fifth and final season of “You” was released on April 24, bringing viewers a definitive conclusion to Joe Goldberg’s story that doubles down on the repetitive nature of his obsessive need to murder and emphasizes the criminality of his actions more than ever.
The preceding seasons, largely narrated from Joe’s perspective, were drenched in a darkly comedic atmosphere. Joe’s internal monologue is bitingly irreverent and endlessly entertaining. The discrepancy between his awful thoughts and the cooperative front that he shows to others adds a level of absurdity and humor that seemed to be the show’s way of suggesting that the audience not take his more serious actions too seriously. However, as the show progresses, his crimes begin to add up in a way that cannot quite be ignored and it becomes clear that “You” wants audience members to understand that Joe’s narrative is deliberately divorced from the reality of his circumstances.
In the first season, Joe is a bookstore clerk who pursues his idea of the perfect love story with graduate student Guinevere Beck. The second season shows him with a higher body count and a new identity, yet almost immediately repeating the same narrative of romance with Love Quinn. Then, the third season shows the fallout of Joe failing to uphold his role in the narrative of a happy family and making his escape by latching onto yet another woman to idealize.
Every new season made increasingly clear that Joe’s crimes are not incidental or necessary actions for love, as he desperately reiterates to himself and viewers, but instead the product of a twisted coping mechanism for his deep-rooted issues with his mother and childhood. His behavior is blatantly Freudian in its repressed and cyclical nature, and Joe comes close several times to realizing that he is the center of all his problems. Every time, he turns away from that revelation in order to remain in the cycle of violence that he calls love.
With Joe unable to ever hold himself accountable, this last season then seems to be the show’s attempt to finally bring him to justice by showing viewers just how irrational his destruction really is at heart, attacking the biased sheen of reason that his own perspective glosses him over with.
At the start of the final season, Joe seems to have successfully escaped any legal or social consequences for the past crimes he committed. He has a relationship with Kate Lockwood, access to tremendous wealth, his son Henry and a positive public image, yet he remains unsatisfied and bored. The relationship that Joe starts with newcomer Bronte reveals that his need to live out a love story is not a product of circumstance but pathological in nature.
Joe’s affinity for books hints at his truest love, which are the narratives contained within pages that never change and thus never betray him. Constructing and projecting a self-serving narrative onto his reality, Joe needs everyone in his life to play their roles to keep that narrative from splintering. The women that he falls in love with are two-dimensional characters who must stay in character or be discarded. Meanwhile, Joe never perceives himself as wrongful in carrying out retribution against them for breaking out of their assigned roles. He has assigned himself the role of the misunderstood hero wounded in love. When anything deviates from the static ideal that he upholds, Joe revises his storyline in order to keep that core component of his self-perception intact, remaining the well-meaning victim of others instead of being seen as the murderer that he really is.
Joe’s desperate attempts to change always end in failure. because he is able to rationalize his crimes and wrongdoings every time. He uses every resource at his disposal to arrange comfortable narratives that remove the need to hold himself accountable, and then lives in those narratives as if they are reality.
Directed as a pointed lesson toward viewers, the irreversibly damaging effects of approaching romance the wrong way are shown over and over through Joe’s descent into the deepening grave dug by his own crimes. Joe’s many murders are meant to serve as an extreme example of how toxic ideals of love have disastrous consequences. His ability to escape with new identities and start over numerous times illustrates how easy it is to perpetuate the cycle by clinging onto one’s destructive behaviors instead of truly examining and acknowledging them.
In many ways, Joe is a mirror of his audience, and “You” attempts to illustrate how audience reactions to his crimes are evidence of a larger societal trend of prioritizing comfort over change. Most people do not turn to murder as an option. Yet everyday, toxic behaviors and habits are often brushed aside, rationalized and thus allowed to continue undetected and unpunished. How we perceive Joe might be how we perceive ourselves.
This conclusion to his story asks the viewers who pardon Joe for his history to examine why they keep rooting for him to get away with a clean slate and what that might say about how they perceive their own actions.
Written by: Julie Huang — arts@theaggie.org
