The Dangerous Entitlement of YOU’s Joe Goldberg
There’s a lot to unpack in the first season of YOU, the television adaptation of Caroline Kepnes’s novel of the same name. Created by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti, YOU is the story of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a seemingly timid bookstore owner with a devastating dark side.
Through first-person narration, Joe takes us through his world. We hear the synapses firing in his brain in real time, understanding the assumptions he’s making about the world around him and the conclusions they lead him to.
When Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) appears in his book shop, Joe is instantly drawn to her. He interprets benign choices as signals – her use of credit card versus cash, for example, is a sign that she wanted him to know her name – and begins to pine for her in a way that he believes she has invited him to do.
At first, Joe’s interpretation of events seems harmless. Of course, we know that most people Beck’s age use credit cards because they never have cash on them. But, so what if Joe misread that choice? Does it really matter?
As time goes on, though, it becomes clear that Joe takes all of these small moments and combines them into permission to violate every aspect of Beck’s being. As the show progresses we see more and more how Joe’s behavior crosses over all boundaries, from hacking into her social media accounts and spying on her inside her apartment to murdering several people in Beck’s life – all in the name of protecting her.
The two sides of Joe are hard to reconcile. He is kind and attentive when he is face-to-face with Beck. He sees the best parts of her and seems to truly want her to succeed.
His concerns about her friends are not unfounded. It’s easy to forget that the reason he always knows what to say and how to support her isn’t that he’s a good listener or a genuinely intuitive friend; it is because he’s spent so much time stalking her.
By the end of the season, Beck learns Joe’s secrets and he, in turn, murders her as well. The issue for Joe isn’t that Beck knows the truth – in reality, there was probably some relief in that – the issue is that she turned on him.
To Joe, Beck is the one who doesn’t understand love. If she truly loved him, she’d have understood. His own bastardization of the concept is completely lost on him, and more alarmingly, on some of the viewing audience as well.
What makes Joe so dangerous isn’t just that he’s a serial killer. That fact is a clear line of demarcation, but the biggest red flag about Joe Goldberg would remain even if he’d killed no one: he is dangerously entitled.
From the moment Beck walks into his book shop, Joe believes he is entitled to her. Everything he does from that point on stems from the fact that he believes he deserves to know what’s in her head.
He is able to justify his constant violation of her privacy because he truly thinks it’s his right. YOU takes us down a path where this entitlement leads to violent behavior, but it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that the entitlement is problematic in and of itself.
For the last few months, Twitter has been awash with comments from female fans confessing their attraction to Joe Goldberg. (To his credit, Penn Badgley has been doing his part to shut down this twisted view of Joe).
We, as the audience, are not limited to the version of Joe that Beck was limited to. We see the whole picture. Joe’s inner monologue should not act as an explanation or excuse for his bad behavior; it should highlight how toxic male entitlement can be and the potential danger it poses for women.
Most men aren’t serial killers. But far too many of them — particularly the straight white variety — feel entitled to a lot in life, including sex from whatever woman they choose. It is that deep-rooted misunderstanding that presents the biggest threat and it is why we should all be terrified of Joe Goldberg well before he starts kidnapping and murdering Beck’s friends.
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YOU Season 1 is currently streaming on Netflix.
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Tamar Barbash
Tamar Barbash is a TV-loving mother of three. She hosts the Shipping Room podcast where she has the opportunity to take advantage of her social work degree and dive deep into relationships portrayed on television. Tamar loves nothing more than to overanalyze the lives and experiences of fictional characters and she's so excited to be able to do that as part of the Tell-Tale TV community.