You on Netflix have you feeling some type of way about Joe? Here’s why.
By Erin Qualey
You on Netflix elicits empathy for the devil by placing us in his shoes. This isn’t entirely a bad thing.
Throughout my decade-plus career as an addiction therapist, my best mentors and professors have repeated the same idea, over and over. The lesson was delivered to me in different forms, but the incident that sticks with me most happened years ago. Fully exasperated with a personality-disordered female with a history of violence toward staff, I went to go process the situation with the director of my program. She agreed with me that the client needed a higher level of care, but encouraged me to take a step back and consider the situation from a different perspective. She simply said, “Think about how hard it is to be her.”
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Think about how hard it is to be her. Understanding. Empathy. Catharsis.
While we can never truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, just the act of considering another perspective can be incredibly illuminating. Oddly enough, I had several professors throughout my academic life that encouraged my classmates and me – as therapists – to sympathize with not only the victims of trauma, but also the perpetrators of trauma as well. Sympathy for the (perceived) devil is what You on Netflix elicits so well, and it’s why throngs of fans just can’t get enough.
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Very few people in this life are true monsters. Harvey Weinstein comes to mind, as do Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. But the vast majority of people – even those that commit horrific acts – are living a life that most of us know nothing about. Generally, the societal stigmas of mental health and addiction issues lead most people to divorce themselves from individuals that they may perceive as living “bad” or “wrong” lives. Most of the time, we don’t want to delve into the thorny darkness of our own psyches, much less the psyches of the people who surround us. But all of that goes out the door when it relates to entertainment.
In the world of entertainment, we love to get down and dirty. Whether it’s going on a jaunt with an unstable addict (see: Camille Preaker on Sharp Objects), spiraling down the rabbit hole of schizophrenia (see: David Haller on Legion), or literally rooting for a serial killer (see: Joe on You), TV makes the world of severe mental health accessible for all.
You on Netflix sends viewers on a thrilling mind trip. Joe’s first person perspective allows us to do exactly what my supervisor once encouraged me to do with my complicated client. We think about how hard it is to be Joe because we basically ARE Joe. The series invites us to climb inside a deeply disturbed mind as Joe’s inner narrative actively gives us a play-by-play of his flawed thought process. Props to Penn Badgley for his stellar voice over work here, because his natural delivery of even the most shocking lines humanizes Joe even when he’s considering – or executing – unthinkable acts of violence. (It’s important to note that Badgley has expressed regret with how his character is being embraced on social media, but we’ll get to that.)
Viewing the world through Joe’s warped perspective allows us to see that his maladaptive ways of thinking are – at least in part – a product of childhood trauma. We hear about how he escaped an abusive household in his mid-teens, only to land in the care of Mr. Mooney, a man who exacted physical and emotional torture on his charge, presumably until he had a debilitating stroke. (Whether or not Joe was responsible for the stroke, well, that’s probably a story for You Season 2.)
A history of trauma doesn’t excuse Joe’s actions – far from it – but it does serve to cultivate a rationale for why he is the way he is. We can see where his wiring got crossed, and thus we begin to root for him as an underdog. The emotional engine that propels You chugs along on an irresistible feeling of cognitive dissonance that pulls viewers into rooting for Joe, even though logic tells us he’s bonkers and must be stopped.
Many other TV series such as Mr. Robot, Dexter, and even the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode “Bandersnatch” utilize first person perspective to provide sympathetic context for characters that, from the outside, appear to be irredeemable. On Mr. Robot, Elliot struggles with a form of dissociative identity disorder that compels him to commit atrocities that impact the entire world. Yet, even seeing the destruction he causes, we somehow want him to succeed because his constant monologuing steals a bit of our hearts and minds. Dexter Morgan tried his best to convince us that he lived by a code of murder ethics, but even when he slipped up, we forgave him because he was honest with us about why. And via the magic of Netflix interactive entertainment, we are literally Black Mirror’s Stefan, led to make choices that inevitably lead to disaster and death.
In all of the above cases, we rarely judge flawed decisions that lead to destruction because we fully understand the rationale behind the actions. Experiencing dysfunction in this way allows us to consider skewed perspectives that break societal norms with minimal judgment or stigma. So why do we place so much judgement on mentally ill people in the real world, and how can we protect them (and their communities) from their dangerous impulses? The answer to that is complicated, and it’s one that mental health professionals have been trying to crack for eons.
For all her myriad flaws, Beck’s frenemy Peach Salinger serves as a stand in for how the real world might look at someone like Joe. Free from internal context, a lot of Joe’s actions are a horrifying creepfest. If you saw a dude jacking it on the street, would you not judge? If a friend told you her boyfriend had a glass cage in the basement of his workplace, would you not be concerned? Yup and double yup. You would. Rightfully so. But in the real world, society has surrounded mental health issues with such a negative stigma that we rarely stop to think about the why, only the what and how.
But the draw of You is that it challenges us to view the world through the eyes of a person who’s fighting a losing battle with his sanity, and offers us the rare opportunity to sympathize with this perspective. Joe often knows that what he’s doing is destructive and wrong – he tells us as much – yet he indulges these impulses anyway.
By placing us directly in Joe’s head, You removes the stigma of being open and honest when experiencing destructive impulses. If we were actually present with Joe while he shared his thoughts, we’d probably give him some advice or steer him towards the closest therapist (preferably not John Stamos with his loosey goosey ethics and joint smokeage), but we’re not. Because we often inadvertently punish people who vocalize intrusive thoughts, people who experience them keep them a secret, telling nobody until it’s too late.
As You skyrocketed to pop-culture phenomenon status on Netflix, actor Penn Badgley expressed valid concerns on Twitter that the satirical nature of the show was being missed by a wide swath of the audience. The show does skewer the often creeptastic plots of rom coms and the role that toxic masculinity plays in the victimization of women in society, but it also illustrates that identifying and treating individuals with caustic views like Joe’s must be a priority. We certainly can’t condone abusive behaviors, but we can work on finding empathy in unlikely places.
‘You’ Season 1 is currently streaming on Netflix.