Cute or creepy? Victoria Pedretti is the perfect “Love.”
Screen shot from season 2, episode 1 of the Netflix original You.
Spoilers ahead.
Based on the duology of books by Caroline Kepnes, the streaming series, You, plays with and ultimately lays bare the creepiness of so many romantic comedies by following the perspective of the deeply romantic Joe as he uses that romanticism as an excuse to stalk, kidnap, and murder.
You’s brilliance lies not only in its critique of so many romance tropes, but in its perpetual implication of the viewer in this critique. After all, the “You” of the show’s title is not simply the shifting target of Joe’s obsession, but the viewer herself.
And I do mean herself.
Of course, like most good media, You can engage both male and female viewers. My husband and I, for instance, watched season two together. But the show originally debuted on Lifetime—a network overtly designed for female viewers—before being picked up by Netflix, and little of its voice or perspective has changed since the switch. What separates it from and elevates it above more cringe-generating, gender-specific offerings, however, is how it talks to its female audience.
Rather than pandering to women by stocking it with feminine clichés like shopping, baking, and the importance of love and family above anything else, You asks the viewer to actively question her reactions to its dreamy-creepy-charming-delusional-smart-manipulative-caring-murderous protagonist in ways that can be deeply disconcerting.
You’s very addictiveness is largely predicated on this deeper level of audience engagement, pulling viewers along by making us not only invested in the plot for what it will reveal about its characters and story, but for what it will ultimately reveal about about us. We ask not just:
Will Joe escape? Will he be redeemed?
but
Should I want him to escape? Should I want him to be redeemed?
And, most importantly: What does it say about me that I do (or do not) want things to work out for him in the end?
The challenge for season two was keeping these questions going after the horror of season one’s conclusion. After all, it’s extremely difficult to ask an audience to buy into a protagonist’s self-delusions after so baldly laying those delusions bare, especially when it happens in such a violent, traumatic, and conclusive manner, through the death of a character the audience has also grown to care about. You’s season two takes on this challenge primarily through four different tactics.
First, it creates a physical and psychological distance from the previous season by having Joe move from New York to Los Angeles. In so doing, the show runners can better control when and how viewers are reminded of previous events, and can again repackage those events as being primarily from Joe’s perspective.
Second, Joe briefly accepts—or seems to accept—that he has done unforgivable things and actively takes steps to become a better person, convincing even his latest kidnapping victim (!) that he really is a good person who sometimes does bad things when he feels he has no choice.
Third, Joe himself becomes the target of ex-girlfriend/survivor, Candice.
Finally, they introduce a very different obsession-interest in the character of Love, one that will lead to a very different ending. And this is where the heart of the season, and its “twist,” truly lies.
In the dryly pessimistic, anti-romance context of You, even Love’s name is a winking clue to the audience that she is not all she seems, and certainly is not all Joe believes her to be. The casting of Victoria Pedretti—who at the time was best known for her simultaneously innocent and creepy role in the supernatural-cum-psychological horror, The Haunting of Hill House—is another immediate cue that something is off with Love. Then, in the first episode, we listen to her size Joe up in much the same way Joe does to his potential conquests. She even goes on to tell him (and us) she believes they are essentially the same, with similar experiences of loss. When, also in the first episode, she reveals she’s already a widow, both Josh and I immediately assumed she had killed her husband and would prove to be a mirror to Joe’s own brand of psychopathy.
I very much looked forward to being proven right about this prediction, especially if it meant seeing Joe get the poetic justice he so badly deserves.
Because I was immediately invested in this possible outcome, I watched the season with rapt attention, looking for further clues about the truth of Love’s psyche. And there they were, in every single episode: signs that Love was in fact extremely manipulative and not quite what Joe believes her to be. And since her character is partly anchored in the fact of her husband’s death, these traits make her feel dangerous. In fact, there was so much evidence supporting my belief, and I was so sure about her character’s inevitable reveal, that, had it not happened, the season simply wouldn’t have made sense. In other words, a significantly different ending actually could have ruined the show.
So, when we finally learn Love killed both Joe’s neighbor and her brother’s pedophilic girlfriend, I felt rewarded with both relief and triumph.
Photo (not of me) by Abreen Hasan.
Let’s take a moment to break down why a predictable twist works (for me, at least) here, when in other instances it causes a story to fall flat.
1) As in any good twist, the writers carefully laid the groundwork for their reveal throughout the season. In You’s case, this groundwork runs on plot, character, and thematic levels, making the conclusion feel like both a logical and poetic extension of what we see throughout the season.
2) Similarly, this is a twist I actively wanted to see because it seemed like an appropriate comeuppance for Joe’s character. On the flip side, this also means I would have been (very) disappointed if, at the last moment, they had decided to go another way.
3) Characters like Candice, Love’s brother, and Joe himself introduced enough red herrings that the writers technically could have gone another, but less satisfying, way. Having the most earned twist be the real twist therefore offers a little ego boost to viewers who paid attention and called it much earlier in the season.
In other words, this twist works because it makes logical sense, makes thematic sense, and makes the viewer feel good about herself.
Unfortunately, the conclusion still didn’t completely stick the landing due to the incomplete payoff of all the clues sprinkled throughout the rest of the season. Most importantly, the implication that Love’s husband actually died due to natural causes just feels wrong when the fact of his young death was one of the first and most significant clues to the reality of her character. Not following through on this point just made the final, dramatic reveal feel oddly stunted and clumsy, like winning a race and then immediately falling flat on your face.
But maybe it will work better in the book.
Screen shot from season 2, episode 1 of the Netflix original You.