Netflix’s You and the Reform of the Rake
Note: This post contains plot spoilers for the show You.
The “sexy psychopath” lead of You, played by Penn Badgley
Audiences of the newly-released second season of Netflix’s popular show You are calling it a modern love story that speaks directly to our current cultural moment. It is a topical commentary on “toxic masculinity” and social media use among Gen-Zers and millennials. Its protagonist has been called “a psycho for the Internet age, a murderous, love-crazed millennial.” And The New York Times wrote that “it was well timed as a cautionary #MeToo allegory.” For those who haven’t seen it, the first season of You is a “psychological-thriller-slash-social-media-satire-slash-rom-com-parody,” set in New York City, about a charismatic bookstore manager named Joe Goldberg who becomes increasingly obsessed with an MFA student named Guinevere Beck. Throughout the show we hear Joe’s inner monologue in voiceover, giving an intimate and even sympathetic glimpse into the mind of a man who believes his intentions are noble enough to justify the heinous crimes he commits. He will do anything for love, even if it means he will have to lie, stalk, manipulate, steal, and murder. Needless to say, things don’t turn out well for Beck at the end of the first season.
The character type of the “sexy psychopath” is in right now. Joe Goldberg is the latest iteration in a lineage of cinematic bad boys that includes “Norman Bates in Psycho, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Moriarty in the Sherlock BBC series,” as well as Villanelle in Killing Eve, Ted Bundy in the recent biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, and the lyrics to Lana Del Rey’s song “Happiness is a Butterfly,” which run, “if he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” As timely as You may be for us in 2020, the show’s appeal and its greatest psychological insights, I think, can be traced back even further to one of the eighteenth century’s most enduring stock characters: the “rake” or “libertine.”
According to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, a rake (short for “rakehell”) was “a loose, disorderly, vicious, wild, gay, thoughtless fellow; a man addicted to pleasure.” The “rake” became a prominent stock character in plays performed during what was called the Restoration. Determined to have fun after years of political unrest and Puritanical restraint, Charles II and his “Merry Gang” of dissolute courtiers reopened the city’s theatres, brothels, alehouses, and gambling houses. Almost overnight, London was transformed into the ultimate frat party.
It wasn’t long before a cultural pushback began. Especially in the theatre, audiences and critics were troubled by what Joseph Roach has described as “the moral equivalent of zero gravity” in the universe of Restoration comedy. There was no punishment for the wicked, nor reward for the virtuous. Some viewers of You have taken a similarly moralizing tone, which we can see, for instance, in the Marie Claire review in which the headline reads, “Netflix’s ‘You’ is a Gorgeous, Thrilling Show with an Ugly Problem” or in the review from The Washington Post, which questions whether there’s too much “poison” in the show for it to continue, entertaining as it is. Even Penn Badgley, the actor who plays Joe, has taken to correcting fans publicly on Twitter who mistakenly romanticize Joe’s stalker ways. In a way, it’s comforting to know that our culture hasn’t completely lost sight of the utile in the dulce.
The final scene in The Rake’s Progress, where the protagonist lands in Bedlam
In response to the problem of morally questionable heroes who are too appealing for their (and the audience’s) own good, the eighteenth century offered a solution: the reformation-of-the-rake plot. In eighteenth-century versions of this plot, there are two main outcomes: the rake who repents and reforms and the rake who sticks to his vicious ways and is punished accordingly. Among the first type is Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), in which the rakish aristocrat Mr. B finally turns to the light after repeatedly attempting to assault his housemaid, Pamela. The two eventually marry and live virtuously ever after. Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) is a picaresque novel in which the good natured but rash hero must learn that without prudence and discretion, you risk, among other things, sleeping with your own mother. And in Colley Cibber’s 1704 play The Careless Husband, the chronically unfaithful Sir Charles Easy finally learns to value his virtuous wife. On the other hand, plots where the rake fails to repent and reform teach by negative example. Tom Rakewell in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress gambles away his inheritance and finally is imprisoned in Bedlam for insanity. In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the don refuses his last chance to repent and is dragged down into Hell by a chorus of demons.
But there is a third plot option, one between repentance and reform, in which the resolution to improve paradoxically prevents the hero from ever actually changing his ways. What I have in mind here is chiefly James Boswell’s London Journal, which is not a work of fiction but a journal that Boswell kept while he was a young man living wildly in London from 1762-63. Boswell’s personal papers had been lost for over a hundred years—at least in part because the Victorians wanted to bury Boswell’s ignominy in obscurity—until they were discovered in an Irish castle in the 1920s. Yale University Press published an edition of the London Journal in 1950, and it became an instant bestseller—even President Truman read it on vacation. While most readers were intrigued by the frankness with which Boswell recounts his amorous escapades, one of the most remarkable aspects of his journal is its psychology of self-improvement. Boswell opens his journal with a short introduction meditating on the Delphic maxim “Know thyself,” declaring that because “a man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge ‘what manner of person he is,’” the purpose in writing this journal will be to assist him in self-knowledge and self-improvement: “knowing that I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well. Or if I should go wrong, it will assist me in resolutions of doing better.” Indeed, Boswell does not forget the purpose of the journal after he arrives in London—he often calls himself out for doing something wrong and includes daily memoranda for how to do better in the future—but most of the time it doesn’t result in any positive change.
Likewise, Joe Goldberg, haunted by the recent memory of Beck’s murder, begins season two with a new resolution: “Addiction management is key. Ten minutes a day. Do not fixate on any one person. Do not get involved, do not even look them up, because I know I can get swept up. But that’s not happening. This is a fresh start.” What makes the second season more interesting than the first is precisely the question of whether Joe can successfully break his destructive habits and become a better man. At first, it seems like season two merely replays the first season formula, just with different particulars: New York becomes LA, the vulnerable neighbor boy becomes a vulnerable teenage neighbor girl, Beck’s skeptical friend Peach becomes gossip columnist Delilah, etc. But, as the show continues, it becomes clear that this repetition is part of the season’s artistry: Joe’s vow that things will be different clashes with the reality that Joe, as one review put it, “is stuck reliving a similar situation, despite his best intentions.” In each episode, Joe continues to be optimistic that tomorrow will be better, even as things get worse as he continues to repeat the same mistakes he made in season one. Boswell’s London Journal shows the same pattern, though, of course, his vices are not nearly of the same magnitude as Joe’s and primarily include excessive drinking, buffoonery, and repeated bouts of venereal disease: a resolution followed by a failure, followed by the hope that it’s not too late to do better, only to make the same mistake again.
Both You and the London Journal offer compelling cautionary warnings about this paradox: self-improvement can easily become a form of self-deception. This paradox should be familiar in an ordinary way to anyone who has tried to keep a New Year’s resolution. Let’s say that at the beginning of January, you promised yourself to cut out refined sugar from your diet, but it’s now the middle of the month and you’ve already succumbed to the temptation of a blueberry Danish. In the face of that first Danish failure, you have two options: 1) despair and give up—what’s the point of trying to eat healthier once you’ve already failed? 2) stay hopeful that just because you’ve had one slip up doesn’t mean you should stop trying. Of the two options, the second seems obviously better. The first option guarantees failure. The second, while it could also end in failure, at least promises the possibility of growth. No one is perfect, and it’s best not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. But what if this self-forgiveness becomes too lenient, a kind of self-deception? What if the resolution to do better in the future just becomes an elaborate justification for present vice, so that we find ourselves saying, like Augustine in the Confessions, “Lord make me chaste—but not yet”?
The end of the second season of You makes this problem of self-improvement abundantly clear. In the closing shot of the final episode, Joe has a Dostoevsky-inspired epiphany: “In Crime and Punishment, the hero willingly walks into exile. He is killed, but he’s also found love. And if he repents, he can be redeemed . . .” But only moments later, his resolve vanishes when he catches a glimpse of his new neighbor through a crack in his fence, and the show ends where it had begun, with the start of a new cycle of obsession and violence. To read Boswell’s London Journal, which sees the buoyantly hopeful twenty-two-year-old with his whole life before him, while knowing how his life actually turned out—by the end of his life, he had never fulfilled his dreams of entering Parliament or the army, he descended into alcoholism, continued to solicit prostitutes, and likely died of complications related to frequent venereal disease—is a sobering reminder that intention to improve, while a necessary place to begin, can betray us into a complacency disguised as hope.
