Why ‘nice guys’ became the villains
By contrast, Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You do use their studies of skewed male self-perception to greater ends – by centring the female perspective, and showing how female victims’ suffering can go unrecognised while not-so-“nice guys” are let off the hook. “The reason why I May Destroy You was substantially different [to You] was that we had those two different viewpoints already baked into it. We had Zain [and] we had Arabella, who was learning about consent and ‘stealthing’, along with the vast majority of the audience – who may not have known that exact term.”
Meanwhile both Promising Young Woman and Rose Plays Julie foreground the element of social status in their explorations of gendered abuse to show how “respectability” can be weaponised by male characters who occupy exalted social positions. In the former, Ryan (Bo Burnham), Cassie’s boyfriend, who it turns out was one of the men who stood and watched as her friend Nina was assaulted in college, is a paediatric doctor, and when the police come to question him it is with nauseating deference. Meanwhile in the latter, Peter is famous, while Rose is a quiet nobody. “[In our culture] there’s [this idea] that anybody that’s in a respectable job – especially any man – has a stronger claim to the objective truth,” as Wheatley puts it.
While on a cosmetic level, You does wave in the general direction of the fact that Joe has been able to go about his criminal business undetected because he is a nice-looking white man, it has no real interest in delving into the human cost of this unmerited power excess. In the new series, the stakes have dramatically changed for Joe. Together with Love, his equally murderous, equally beautiful beau from series two, he has moved to a fictional Silicon Valley-esque suburb full of tech billionaires, anti-vaxxers and mommy bloggers. Now a father, he is trying – really trying – to keep his murderous impulses in check for the sake of his son. He is reckoning with his own traumatic childhood with the end-game of creating a better environment for his kid. When he falls for a female colleague at the library where he works, the tension arises from his attempts to hide this from Love, who has a habit of murdering rivals for Joe’s affection. This Mr and Mrs Smith school of gender equality makes for a bleakly amusing ongoing set-up.
The problem is that, now, in apparently encouraging the viewer to root for Joe to let the better angels of his nature triumph, the show seems to also require them to look past the body count he has amassed, and in pitting him against a female adversary in his wife – who is equivalently violent and charming – meaningful social commentary is eclipsed by a rarefied form of domestic farce. With series four just announced, it seems unlikely that Joe will get a comeuppance anytime soon. A show that hinges on a charismatic, good-looking monster is evidently loath to circumscribe its main draw, for Penn Badgley is a bona fide heartthrob with cheekbones that you could ski down. And, as the “nice guy” villain trope evolves, so too do audiences, who adopt a playful edginess in framing their attraction to an objectively foul man who would ruin their lives in a heartbeat. In that sense, perhaps the show makes its point more effectively than it realises about how men are let off the hook, as long as they look the part.
More generally, too, now culture is recognising the “nice guy” as a potential villain, where do we go from here? One thing’s for sure: there is no level of subverting masculine tropes that can top the elevation of female points-of-view. There are moments when You flirts with switching allegiance but at the time of writing – unlike Joe – it doesn’t have that killer instinct.
You series 3 is available to stream on Netflix now
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