Joe’s stream of consciousness is propulsive the joy of listening to it is in hearing him slip between his performed self (a nice guy), his actual self (a killer, with a few other problems I am not qualified to name), and his spur-of-the-moment feelings. (This is where You is most like showrunner Sera Gamble’s previous series, The Magicians, which, among other things, was a deconstruction of the white male protagonist in genre fiction.) They’re interested in a story that chronicles the many ways in which a nice, bookish white guy is conditioned to see women as objects of attention and obsession, and their fixations as normal or invited - to the extent that it can lead to murder. One could accuse the show of repeating itself every year if it weren’t for the fact that You’s writers aren’t interested in exploring a story where a bad guy gets away with it. Joe is always part of a community - and because You cares about the characters in that community, no matter how charming he is, he is always ultimately a cancer. And while Joe narrates the show, he’s not the only character it follows. Like lots of shows about terrible people ( Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Friends) a lot of the tension in You stems from Joe Goldberg, actual murderer, escaping consequences for his actions for three seasons and counting. Joe’s narration is also an elegant solution to a persistent problem with anti-hero protagonists: the natural tendency to sympathize with - and root for - a point-of-view character you spend a significant amount of time with. How the audience knows this is simple: Joe handily narrates nearly every waking moment. Over the course of You’s story, that woman changes, because he spends all his free time stalking his latest target, and killing anyone who gets in between him and his fantasy of being with her. And his goal in the grand novel of life? To sweep the woman of his dreams offf her feet. You is a thriller that follows Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg, a bookseller who, maybe more so than most, considers himself to be the hero of his own story. Netflix’s You, however, bucks this rule with incredible style, delivering a narrator that isn’t just good, but possibly an all-timer. Except narration runs the dangerous risk of proving why showing is superior to telling, sticking that middle finger in a live power outlet instead of towards The Man, and making the rebel much less cool. If storytelling’s golden rule is “show, don’t tell,” narration is the rebel without a cause, sticking its middle finger under the principal’s nose in open defiance of that rule.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |