You and the Problem of Serial Killers

 

 

 

Source: Netflix

 

 

 

My girlfriend and I recently caught up on the Netflix original series You. We tried to watch the first season last year as part of our pandemic binging but gave up because the writing is terrible, the pacing is sluggish to near glacial, with characters so paper thin we couldn't even enjoy it as trash viewing. 

The next two seasons make almost no improvements on these problems but we went in to both seasons knowing the major twists which sort of helped. In the second season, knowing that Love is a serial killer, too, added depth to a season that completely lacked it otherwise. Knowing that season three ended with Joe killing Love didn't make the things better but it did at least add a sense of purpose, however misguided, to a stereotypical suburban sitcom.

 

If I had to pinpoint the core problem of You, it'd be that it thinks serial killers are interesting. True crime has warped people's perception of serial killers to the point that we've lost sight of what we find interesting about them, which is figuring out how their lives shaped them into the killers they became. But as for the people themselves, they're nothing, almost universally pathetic losers whose only impact on the world is the destruction they left in their wake. 

At heart, serial killers are little more than flesh suits acting out their obsessions and compulsions. Media depictions of serial killers tend to portray them as addicts, as otherwise functional people consumed by their desires. This is a necessary step because if you portrayed serial killers as they are, they'd be completely unmarketable.

Consider a scenario, if you will. You are out in public when suddenly, your stomach rumbles in the exact wrong way. You scramble, looking for a place to go, wandering, doing a mental checklist of which places have restrooms at all, ones that are open to the public, or ones where you have to buy something to justify your presence. All the while, the pressure continues to build, working its way down your intestines, each step threatening disaster. Finally, you remember where you can go, you work your way there, your every thought on holding it together for just that much longer until you reach the stall, plop on the toilet, then at long last, experience the sweet relief of release. 

This is what serial killers are, all the time. Just the tension and panic over having to take a shit in public until they find the perfect place to release that tension all at once. For all the horror they bring out, that's all every one of them is, nothing more. 

Where this causes problems for You is that it annihilates its capacity for drama. For drama to work, characters have to be put in situations that force them to make decisions that cause conflicts in the core of their identity. Emotional peril, not physical threats, is what drama runs on so, if your main character is an emotional void who doesn't have an interior life, your dramatic options become somewhat limited.

The end result of this is that Joe is forever trapped in a loop. He's always going to be looking for his perfect woman, his perfect "love," except, he never will. Joe's search will never be complete because no woman will ever live up to his fantasy because there's always going to be the pesky complications that all these women are real people. They're always going to have quirks, interests, and goals outside of Joe's need to be the center of their universe so he's always going to reject them.

That doesn't mean that there's no way to make this work. The show could have enough self-awareness to flesh out the characters so we understand what a loser Joe is, that he is essentially a child crying after they threw their favorite toy in the garbage who lashes out at every one who tells him the situation is his fault. Except, they won't. The show really wants us to be on Joe's side and it plays so heavily into his point of view with his constant voice over that everything has to be written to match his perspective. 

Problem is, his view of the world is so incredibly shallow. Every woman is either helpless in need of his protection or the latest backdrop for his mommy projections. Men are universally threats or obstacles. That's it. That is the sum total of his relationships to the outside world. 

If the show had better writing, we could see people as they are rather than filtered through Joe's fishbowl lens, but then the conceit of the show would collapse in a heartbeat. This is what torpedoes the third season, funnily enough. 

 

Love and Joe are living in suburbia, raising their baby in a life Joe says he always wanted. He's with a woman who loves him, who not only knows he's a murderer but completely accepts it. In fact, the fact that Joe's a murderer is why Love loves him- she sees him as a man who will do literally everything to protect what's important to him. Which, in a sense, is true. What Love, and by extension, the writers, miss however is that the only thing important to Joe is Joe. Their relationship falls apart because Joe, by definition, cannot recognize the validity of Love's feelings, let alone his obligation to satisfy them. That Love places expectations on Joe, that she expects to carry his own weight in their relationship and be her partner destroys Joe's fantasy, prompting his rejection and kick starting his search for a new obsession.

 

To be clear, I don't think these events in and of themselves are where the show goes wrong. Joe's failure to be a person is an accurate portrayal of what a serial killer is. We see Joe in the most perfect, ideal relationship he could ever possibly be in which just exposes  how much Joe is missing, how little there is to him, how small and inconsequential he is. Where the show screws up is that it takes Joe's side, framing everything as if Joe is the victim of circumstance, a man doing his best only to be undone by a partner with ludicrous expectations.

 

You wants to have it both ways. They want Joe to be a threat, to be dangerous, but they don't want him to be guilty of anything. The writers go all in on Joe's quest for a soul mate because it papers over his crimes, it makes it easier for us to accept the murders because they're supposedly committed in pursuit of a higher purpose instead of a sad little man compensating for his inadequacies through the destruction of others.

This reluctance to make Joe responsible means that the show lacks any meaningful tension. We know the show has no interest in making Joe face any consequences for his actions so any time Joe's worried about getting caught, we know he's not, that he's going to get off scot-free so, why bother? (To just emphasize this point, Joe kills an enforcer for the Russian mob when he comes to collect a $50,000 debt. It's never mentioned again.) 

In the end, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's only natural that a show so committed to uncritically depicting a serial killer would end up as shallow as its subject.