videophage.com

I’ve found I quite enjoy a thing after everyone already else has. There’s no pressure to like or dislike it; I can take it as it is more or less. I’ve also found that my more snob-like tendencies are becoming a bit too pronounced for my taste, so it seemed about time to bring myself down to earth—away from the rep theaters, away from prestige miniseries, away from the film schoolers—which, as it turns out, delivered me to You. After an impulsive thought to watch a show that first streamed to massive popularity seven years ago, I watched the first four episodes of the first season last night. Maybe it was in part to my remembering the woman who lived in the dorm next to me freshman year of college, who told me I reminded her of Penn Badgley’s obsessive/delusional Joe Goldberg but in a good way. (Does that say more about how weird and offputting I was or her taste in men? Looking back, both claims are certainly valid.) The other half of this impetus likely lies where it always does for me: Steven Shaviro. In one blog post from 2003, he attacks the “high-minded backlash” of what he calls Anti-Harry Potter-ism: more broadly, in this case, the obnoxious, pretentious, classist tendency of academic/intellectual types to decry the actually existing consumptive habits of the average person outside the ivory tower. Anyway, I gotta say, the court of public taste was onto something with this Lifetime/Netflix original series. The premise alone and the complications/contradictions that arise because of it are entertaining and rife with interesting ideas to think over.

I will have to keep watching the show to see how my thoughts toward it develop, but so far, You (as centered around the lead character, Joe) seems to adopt a bit of that snobbish tone discussed above. However, it takes this stance not toward pop culture media writ large (although it does take its fair share of shots), but toward digital communications technologies—namely, social media. Yet, its attitude is not a hard stanced, uncomplicated one. Joe, the manager of an independent bookstore disavows social media in favor of what he calls the “real thing.” For him, real life is epitomized by books. For example, when Beck asks to know the real Joe in episode four, he takes her into the climate-controlled box in the basement of Mooney’s Bookstore, home to the rare and collectible books (and former prison/murder site to Joe’s first victim in Beck’s ex-lover, Benji). Joe’s anti-technology tone is ironic and hypocritical in his navigation of this dialectic he has unrealistically established, certainly played for laughs all the while complicating his already unreliable narration (in the form of voiceover monologue). The object of his obsession is the unbelievably boring Guinevere Beck (but I feel this actor/character shortcoming only highlights and hyerbolizes Joe’s delusional fantasies). In addition to his usual stalking and breaking and entering, he pickpockets her phone after saving her from an oncoming train. Thanks to the convenience of the cloud and Beck’s poor password protection, Joe receives all her messages in real time, in addition to access to all her log-ins. And so, with the cognitive dissonance that defines his character, Joe nonetheless insists upon his avoidance of social media. The series cleverly depicts the impossibility of being a recluse from the digital, unable to free oneself from the demanding entanglements of network society. Thus, Joe still stays up late stalking potential lovers online, worries about the subtext of a text message, and of course, posts (even if through the Twitter account of the imprisoned/deceased Benji; it’s all the same.) Rather than being unimpeachable or uninvolved due to his reduced digital footprint, Joe is inescapably complicit, in fact, he epitomizes the very lifestyle he postures himself in opposition to. However, on the other hand, according to his status as a force of surveillance via social networking applications, I suppose he really thinks he is above it all.