Why is Joe Goldberg, the character of the series "You", so fascinating?
December 26, 2018. Netflix viewers, dumbfounded, met Joe Goldberg, the antihero of the You series. Penn Badgley – ex-Dan Humphrey, admittedly less disturbed stalker of Gossip Girl – played a bookseller obsessed with Guinevere Beck, a young writer in the making. Ready to do anything to become the ideal boyfriend, Joe spied on the young woman's apartment, watched her text messages, stole her underwear and would go so far as to kill under the pretext of protecting her.
A year later, Joe returned to Netflix for a second season of the show on Thursday, December 26. Now exiled in Los Angeles, he will quickly let himself be invaded by his old demons... The official Twitter account of the series had already unveiled a short teaser of this new burst of episodes, on Monday November 11.
If the plot of the first season seemed chilling at first glance, some Internet users had nevertheless been carried by Joe's voice-over, his advantageous physique and his exacerbated romanticism, and described him as a "sexy" or "endearing" hero. Among them, Millie Bobby Brown, herself star of the Stranger Things series. The 14-year-old actress had published an Instagram story on Tuesday, January 15, in which she claimed that Joe was not “scary” but “just in love”. Before apologizing, overwhelmed by the media lynching that followed. Michaël Stora, psychologist and co-founder of the Observatory of Digital Worlds in the Humanities (OMNSH), deciphered the You controversy for us.
Lefigaro.fr/madam. - What does the character of Joe Goldberg inspire in you? Michaël Stora. - Joe's story is a concept already seen in other series, especially in Dexter. He is one of those serial killers who will justify, under the pretext of a moral, to be killers. The added dimension of Joe is his romanticism tinged with paranoia. The paranoiac, often, explains his influence on a person by the fact that he seeks to protect him. This is called erotomania - the delusional conviction of being loved.
“Joe was himself under the influence of someone”
In what way is this character disturbing? Joe is in this problematic of a justification which is that of love: this is where the ambiguity lies. In this case, the passion would come as an “excuse” for the atrocity. Joe is what is known as a sensitive, sensitive paranoid. Contrary to the “classical” paranoiac, of a terrible coldness and very logical, the sensitive paranoiac is more in the passion. Where the very disturbing pathology of Joe Goldberg is located is that he takes action.
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When does he cross the red line, that of murder? Joe Goldberg, during his childhood, is sometimes locked in a cage by his mentor, who took him in and brutally inculcates his values. We find this idea of love-hate, of punishment-reward. This shows that Joe was under someone's control himself. He will therefore, for the good of the other, return to a position in which he was passive in order to become an actor. In child psychiatry, children who will have psychopathic tendencies have often experienced great trauma. It's a bit of a cave myth. Very young, you are brought up with this idea that the truth is first and foremost that of the referent adult, and that his acting out is all justified. The fact that Joe puts his victims back in the glass cage is significant. This stems from his own learning.
"You", the trailer for season 2
Conversely, how is Joe Goldberg attractive to some people? This character can be touching because he is overwhelmed by a love-passion, which is still one of the driving forces specific to adolescence. Passion-love is a love where one seeks to fulfill the other, or to fulfill oneself with the other. Somehow, we know Joe is blind. He wants to help this girl he is madly in love with while not accepting who she is, her past mistakes, her toxic relationships, her own freedom.
"The voiceover allows the viewer to justify the unjustifiable"
On Twitter, some call this character “sexy” and “endearing”. How do spectators come to overshadow Joe's psychopathic tendencies, in favor of his physical qualities and his romanticism? We can also, I imagine, see a certain fragility in Joe's character. A bit like Psycho, with Anthony Perkins, who is a very disturbing but terribly attractive character. In Harry, a friend who wants you well, the protagonist kills all the relatives of his childhood friend without any justification, while in You, the voice-over allows the viewer to justify the unjustifiable. It's Joe's beauty, his sensitivity, his suffering that can make the character endearing. In adolescence, we are still taken by this vital need to love elsewhere. We have only known the love-passion of the mother, for example, and certain adolescent girls may seek to get rid of this first passion in order to turn to the "savior" embodied by Joe.
Is there a form of addiction and the infernal cycle of stalking? Against all expectation, the first “stalkers” are the parents. The concern conveyed by the media and certain psychiatric colleagues who tell them to pay attention to their teenagers are responsible for this. Without talking about addiction, I would say that there is a tendency to reveal a passionate connection by stalking on social networks. When we are very in love, we will often look at the profile of the one we love to check without necessarily monitoring. This reveals a tendency to jealousy, paranoia or worry.
Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Edward Cullen in Twilight, Joe in You… Why can the line between the ideal lover and the unhealthy stalker sometimes be so blurred? There are already current series, such as Game Of Thrones, which make the question of good and evil disappear, where perversion is justified. The lack of values in these series clearly shows this problem of limits. And then deep down, in loving passion, there is all the same this question of interdependence and influence. It is enough to read Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, to see that the ideal lover, even the ideal lover, can make us live but also make us die. This idea is specific to adolescence and sexuality, tinged with Eros and Thanatos – understand, love and hate. But also of fear. To make love is also to be under the influence, to be possessed. Fiction will precisely play on the idea that accepting a love story is also dying, somewhere.
* "Hyperconnexion", by Michaël Stora and Anne Ulpat, published by Larousse.
* This article originally published on January 18, 2019 has been updated.
