YOU
YOU ―君がすべて―
The Moonlight essay
CinemaWhy YOU Is So Unsettling: Being Seen and Being Watched Can Look Similar at FirstRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
Joe Goldberg's love letters to the women he is stalking; the viewer is made complicit by the voiceover.
Joe Goldberg manages a bookshop in New York and narrates, in a voice that sounds like devotion, his pursuit of the women he decides to love. In the first season it is Guinevere Beck, a broke graduate student and would-be writer who walks into his shop. He follows her online and in the street, steals her phone and kills the people in his way, her boyfriend Benji and her best friend Peach. When Beck finds the evidence, he locks her in the glass cage in the shop's basement, and after she tricks him and fails to escape, he kills her and uses her writing to frame her therapist. The season ends with Candace, the ex-girlfriend he claims simply left, walking back into his shop.
In the second season he flees to Los Angeles under a new name and falls for Love Quinn, a chef from a wealthy family, while Candace hunts him. Love turns out to be a killer too: she murders Candace, confesses to earlier killings and tells Joe she is carrying his child. They move to the suburbs, where he is already watching the woman next door.
In the third season, married with a son, Henry, Joe and Love kill their way through the suburb of Madre Linda while he fixates first on a neighbour, then on the librarian, Marienne. When Love tries to kill him, he kills her first, stages the scene so that every death is pinned on her, leaves Henry with a colleague and follows Marienne to Paris under yet another name.
In the fourth season he is Jonathan Moore, a lecturer in London, drawn into a set of rich friends who are being killed one by one. The killer is Joe: the Rhys who seemed to be framing him is a figment of his own mind, and in dissociated spells he has kidnapped Marienne, who escapes by faking her death. He tries to take his own life, is rescued, and returns to New York with Kate, an heiress who covers for him.
In the fifth and final season Joe and Kate live grandly in Manhattan until Bronte, a young playwright who knew Beck, sets out to expose him. Kate, with Marienne and Nadia, a former student he framed, turns on him and records his confession. Bronte pretends to love him; when he turns on her she survives, calls the police and stops him as he tries to escape. Joe is sentenced to life. Bronte rewrites Beck's book without Joe's additions, Kate helps raise Henry, and Joe, reading fan mail in his cell, still believes that he is not the problem.
Starring
Penn Badgleyas Joe Goldberg
A charming bookseller and serial killer who narrates his obsessions as romance and changes names and cities to keep going.
Joe Goldberg’s story
Joe tells himself every killing is for love. In New York he stalks Beck, kills her boyfriend and her best friend, and when she finds his trophies, locks her in the basement cage and kills her, framing her therapist. In Los Angeles he falls for Love, learns she kills too, and stays when she says she is pregnant. In Madre Linda he fixates on Marienne and kills her ex-husband; when Love tries to kill him he kills her first, leaves their son with a colleague and follows Marienne to Paris. In London he finds he is the killer he has been hunting; after trying to take his own life, he returns to New York with Kate. Exposed by Kate, Marienne, Nadia and Bronte, and disowned by his son, he is sentenced to life, still sure he is not the problem.
Elizabeth Lailas Guinevere Beck
A broke graduate student and aspiring writer in New York, the first woman the series watches Joe stalk.
Guinevere Beck’s story
Beck, a broke graduate writing student with a cheating boyfriend, Benji, walks into Joe's bookshop and flirts. She never learns that he is following her, has taken her phone and has killed Benji, and later her best friend, Peach, whose death she turns into a story that wins her a book deal. She faces down a harassing professor, falls for Joe, leaves him when he grows jealous, sleeps with her therapist and goes back to Joe. Looking into the ex-girlfriend nobody has heard from, she finds his hiding place and the phones of Benji and Peach. He locks her in the glass cage in his basement. She writes, plays along, tricks him into the cage and almost gets out, but he frees himself and kills her, then uses her writing to frame her therapist.
Victoria Pedrettias Love Quinn
A chef from a rich Los Angeles family who marries Joe, has his son and proves as capable of killing as he is.
Love Quinn’s story
Love, a widowed chef at her family's Los Angeles grocery, falls for Joe under his false name. She shields her unstable twin, Forty, and when Candace arrives with the truth about Joe she breaks up with him, then takes him back. Finding Candace holding Joe prisoner, she kills her, then tells him she studied his past to make him love her, that she has killed before, and that she is carrying his child. In Madre Linda, raising their son, Henry, she kills a neighbour, Natalie, on finding things Joe stole from her, attacks two men who cross her and sleeps with a college student, Theo. When Joe asks for a divorce over Marienne, she drugs him and means to kill Marienne too, relents when Marienne's daughter walks in, and, as she prepares to kill Joe, is killed by him first.
Tati Gabrielleas Marienne Bellamy
A librarian and single mother recovering from addiction, whom Joe pursues from California to Paris and London.
Charlotte Ritchieas Kate Galvin-Lockwood
A London gallery director and heiress who covers for Joe, marries into his life and finally turns against him.
Madeline Breweras Bronte
A young playwright with a hidden link to Beck, who gets close to Joe in order to bring him down.
Why it matters
YOU is built on a trick of narration: Joe speaks to the woman he is stalking, and the audience hears a lover. The series makes stalking, coercive control and murder sound like romantic devotion so that the audience can catch itself sympathising, and then asks what that sympathy is made of. Its targets are specific: the way social media hands a stranger someone's whole life, the way a handsome, articulate man is given the benefit of every doubt, the way privilege protects him in every city he moves to. Its last season turns the question outward: Joe ends in prison reading fan mail, convinced that he is not the problem and that the society which admires him is. The show gives him no redemption. It leaves the harder question with whoever has been watching: why a man like this is so easy to root for.