It feels rather meta appropriate that one, Joe Goldberg, sometimes known as Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), should end up in L.A. for the season two narrative of Netflix’s You. After all, Gossip Girl had to take the show there eventually when New York got too unbearable (read: too stale) to handle as well–it’s simply the inherent and cliche pattern of most New Yorkers, whether privileged or not (and whether murderous or not). And even though Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) might have said, “Los Angeles is a plastic surgery layover, not somewhere you live,” it’s equally just as true what Serena Van Der Woodsen (Blake Lively) appraised: “Everyone in Hollywood reinvents themselves.”
In Joe’s case, that reinvention is into Will Bettelheim, and for the purposes of reanimating into someone even more cipher-like than he was before. For you see, his ex, Candace (Ambyr Childers), has vowed to make him pay for what he did to her (which was attempt to kill her, only to end up burying her alive, a fate perhaps worse than Guinevere Beck’s [Elizabeth Lail]). So yes, Joe has decided to go to the last place anyone would look for him: Los Angeles. A place he has billed as his own version of Siberia (Crime and Punishment is referentially interwoven throughout the season). After all, it’s culturally devoid, especially of book lovers that aren’t simply trying to adapt something au courant (like Beck’s novel, The Dark Face of Love) into a screenplay (to that end, it’s no secret that You doesn’t do much to make anyone who reads literature seem like anything other than a freak).
But it will have to do for now, as Joe waits out Candace’s hunt for him, driven by her sheer hate. Ah, but then there is Love (Victoria Pedretti). As in, that’s really the new object of Joe’s affection’s name. And maybe the real reason the series’ writers chose to set the season in Los Angeles is because it’s the only place in the world where a girl could be named Love. And while it might be a different city with the purpose of reinvention–of “changing”–in mind, it’s a replica of the same cage. Literally–not just metaphorically. For Joe has seen fit to reconstruct the exact same human “enclosure” that he did while working at the bookstore on the Upper East Side (again, Bizarro World Gossip Girl connections abound). Presently, the real Will Bettelheim (Robin Lord Taylor) is in it–though even his identity is fake, for he’s a hacker in bed with some highly dangerous people from the dark web, something that Joe has to learn about the hard way in the second episode, “Just the Tip.”
By this time, Joe is already deeply enmeshed in his full-tilt stalking of Love, who works as a manager at a health foods store called Anavrin (which, yes, is intended to spell “nirvana” backwards). She also works there with her twin brother, Forty (James Scully), both of whom were given names picked from a retard pile. Forty, too, holds a manager position thanks to the fact that their parents own the joint, along with many other things in L.A., including the police department, which will, of course, come in handy later on.
With Love’s name allowing for double meaning whenever the word is employed, it seems fitting that Joe should announce, “Love has taken me to some pretty dark places. But Los Angeles has got to be as dark as it gets.” His neighbor, Delilah (Carmela Zumbado), an “investigative journalist” a.k.a. gossip columnist and the building’s manager, along with her precocious aspiring filmmaker sister, Ellie (Jenna Ortega), would beg to differ with his opinion. And the latter is quick to try to change it with recommendations of Raymond Chandler books (she’s an avid film noir watcher, as if someone her age would be, but hey, L.A. and its characters are all about suspension of disbelief). So, too, is Love, berating, “You ex New Yorkers are the worst.” This in response to his overt surliness toward an environment with 24/7 sun (giving him a sunburn rather than a tan). And then she proceeds to, in cliche California fashion get extremely bathetic about falling in love with the work of Joan Didion (though she does throw in, like Ellie, Raymond Chandler and Francesca Lia Block for good measure). At least You didn’t see fit to get “edgy” enough to mention Dennis Cooper or Bret Easton Ellis. After all, it’s a setting that exists in a place where “Celebrating Bisexual Pescatarian Authors” is a thing. Because, yes, Joe has deliberately landed a job at the “cute little” bookstore cordoned off near the coffee shop area where he can watch Love from afar all day.
He can also do the same thing from his apartment, conveniently equipped with a telescope with a view right into her window. Once an obsessive stalker, always an obsessive stalker. And if You seeks to prove anything this season, it’s that L.A. lets all of its freaky deakies hide in plain sight. Like famed comedian Henderson a.k.a. “Hendy” (Chris D’Elia), a man who serves as some kind of talisman for the six degrees of separation that exists in that town. For he’s connected to both Forty and Delilah, and soon, Ellie–which brings out Joe’s faux protectiveness the same way it did when he instated himself as Paco’s (Luca Padovan)–yes, a name more fitting for L.A. than N.Y.–guardian when he was the boy’s neighbor in New York, constantly having to bear witness to his mother being abused by her boyfriend. This is a subject that comes up consistently throughout the second season, with Joe trying to outrun his past as we’re given more insight into “why he is the way he is”–as though the show’s developers, Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble, really want to make sure viewers understand that Joe isn’t pure evil, he just had a fucked up upbringing. Like Hitler.
With that in mind, his obsessive tendencies stemmed from a constant fear of losing his mother, the parent he clearly preferred. Noting to himself, “Even when I was a kid, one glance from a girl and I was trying my last name out with hers,” it’s evident that Joe’s insatiable hunger for love was derived from a childhood also spent trying to chase it down. Does that excuse murderous behavior? Well, maybe, so long as it’s for love. And Love. Oh yes, and Ellie. Which is precisely why Hendy must die for being a cliche of a Hollywood male in power, using it to take advantage of underage girls. Plus, it wouldn’t have given Kathy Griffin the chance to have landed her only gig in many moons, cameo’ing in episode six, “Farewell, My Bunny,” to give a speech at his funeral, asking, “Who really new Henderson? The famous belong to everyone, and none of us.” Profound, indeed. Almost as much as Forty and Love unearthing Joe’s true identity thanks to Candace posing as “Amy Adam” (“What, was ‘Britney Spear’ taken?”) and then being exposed by Love. It is then that she confesses her true motive for being in L.A.–to protect them all from Joe. Love doesn’t bite, paying her off to leave but still prompting her to break up with Joe. Forty remains loyal to him in spite of it, commenting, “You did lie about your identity, but you are still more authentic than half the fuckers I know.” Ah, how easily fake people posing as “real” buy into people of the same nature. Just as, “Damaged finds damaged.” Something Joe repeats from one of Love’s guru friends, Gabe (Charlie Barnett), to Delilah, who remarks, “Every time” before they proceed to fuck in an alley for their own respective purposes of “coping.”
In Joe’s case, it’s a reaction to being dumped. In Delilah’s, it’s a reaction to her fear of the public after releasing an article detailing her own abuse from the now deceased therefore deified Hendy. Hendy who Joe has seen fit to punish through his own means of vigilante justice that ends up going awry (for most of Joe’s kills in this season are mere “accidents”). Throughout the show, in fact, everyone tells Joe–the serial killer–to stop apologizing. As though genuinely believing him to be a good person. That’s the thing about L.A.: everyone takes you at face value. If you say you’re something or someone, all you have to do is become it and believe in it. More than New York, it really is the place where reinvention thrives. For everyone genuinely wants to believe in the other’s bullshit. Still, Joe laments, “I’m damaged.” “Everyone who came out here is,” Gabe says to him after they run into one another on the trail while Joe is stalking Love’s new boyfriend. Apparently, it’s what you do with that damage to “work on yourself” that counts.
And meanwhile, Joe starts to think maybe he ought not to punish himself so much. After all, “If a man has a conscience, he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment, as well as his prison.” This much is narrated in the final episode, “Love, Actually,” bringing it all back to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment from when Joe was first applying for the job at Anavrin. If his conscience isn’t self-flagellating enough, however, maybe the fact that Love just might accept him for who he really is could turn out to be the worst punishment of all. Arguably the most satisfying line from the entire series comes from Love, who essentially shrugs, “Guinevere Beck was unspecial and mediocre.” While You does its damnedest to excuse a lot of “white male savior” (tan though Penn Badgley may be) behavior, it is this line alone that assuages all of Joe’s fears about being a bad person. All it took was an equally as fucked up L.A. girl to make Joe tiptoe around his inherent nefariousness with the same adept passive aggressiveness as the average West Coastian.
