Since hits like “The Big Sick”, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “Crazy Rich Asians”, the romantic comedy has been steadily making a comeback as a staple genre in mainstream film. What’s made these movies successful in reviving the genre is that all three offer compelling love stories without relying on rom-com tropes that, while heavily used in the ’80s and ’90s, are now seen as questionable at best and dangerous at worst. Whether it’s romanticizing stalking (“Twilight”, “There’s Something About Mary”), making light of rape (“Revenge of the Nerds”, “Wedding Crashers”, “Sixteen Candles”), or just simply failing to pass the Bechdel Test (“Legally Blonde”, “Miss Congeniality”, “27 Dresses”), classic romantic comedies as a whole have failed viewers by not offering more complex character representation. While I grew up loving these films and continue to watch them (and still cheer out loud when Elle is able to use her extensive knowledge on hair-care to expose Chutney Windham as a cold-blooded murderer in “Legally Blonde”), I recognize that romantic comedies today need to do better to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors.
Netflix’s “You”, a show about an NYC bookstore manager who becomes deeply obsessed with an aspiring poet, uses classic romantic comedy tropes but aims to deconstruct them in order to demonstrate how harmful they can be. The story is told from the perspective of Joe, who meets Beck when she walks into his bookstore where they flirt and bond over their love of literature. Through voice-overs which share Joe’s deranged inner monologue, it becomes immediately clear that he’s already obsessed with her: he infers that because she pays for a book with her credit card, she wants him to know her full name, so he proceeds to stalk her. Within the first episode, we see Joe track down where she lives, watch her outside her apartment, break in while she’s at work and use her laptop to track her. When she comes back early, he’s forced to hide in her shower to avoid being caught, which we hear him rationalize to himself when he says “I’ve seen enough romantic comedies to know that guys like me are always getting in jams like this”. This juxtaposition between the show’s romantic comedy references (which include “While You Were Sleeping”, “You’ve Got Mail”, and “Pretty in Pink”) and the horrific acts Joe commits out of his obsession for Beck illuminate a darker side of the problematic rom-com genre. As the series progresses and Joe further conflates his obsession with love, he continues to stalk Beck, steal from her, and kill those who he sees as threats to their relationship, which, ultimately, includes Beck herself.
Despite how ridiculous and, at times, extremely unrealistic the show can be (apparently in this universe no one password protects any of their devices), what’s compelling about the show is how normal Joe would seem to the viewer if all we saw of him was what Beck had seen. From her point of view, Joe is the typical nice guy: handsome, charming, thoughtful, humble, and loyal. However, once we’re invited inside his head, we see how actions that Beck initially perceives as thoughtful and considerate are actually motivated by his desire to control her. He paints her as a two-dimensional damsel in distress who desperately needs him to swoop in and protect her. This savior complex, in addition to stripping her of any agency over her own life, also makes Joe blind to the complexity of her identity, reducing her to a plot device in a romantic comedy of his own making. Because Joe is adept at portraying himself as the typical nice guy, the guy we always see as the protagonist in film and TV, he is able to commit heinous crimes while remaining largely unsuspected by those around him. When the police find a list of supplies Joe asked his next-door neighbor’s son to get him (a list that includes but isn’t limited to potassium nitrate, twine, burlap, and a fire starter), he convinces them that these are all supplies for the garden he’s growing, not for dead body he’s trying to dispose of. According to Joe’s inner monologue, the police view him as the “nice straight-edge guy, so there’s nothing to worry about. People believe whatever supports their worldview.”
This willful denial is a major theme throughout the series and is also something we see with real-life serial killers. In Netflix’s “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”, we see how Bundy was able to get away with murdering women for so long because he exuded qualities people didn’t normally associate with sociopathic murderers: he was described as intelligent, charismatic, handsome and well-spoken. Bundy wasn’t seen as the “type” that would kill, and even after he was convicted and committed to death row, he still received love letters from various admirers. Bundy and Joe, despite the former being very much real and the latter being fictional, share a lot of similarities: both are severe narcissists who see themselves as intellectually superior to their peers, see women as objects that are means to an end, and feel resentment towards people they view as more elite than them, which fuels their motivation to kill.
After their respective Netflix shows premiered, and especially after the release of the trailer for “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile”, a new Ted Bundy movie starring Zac Efron, both men have received an alarming amount of thirst tweets: even Millie Bobby Brown defended Joe in a series of Instagram videos. Actor Penn Badgley, who portrays Joe on “You”, promptly shut down several users glamorizing his character, and responded to one user requesting that he kidnap her with the iconic “No thx”. Netflix, in an attempt to end the conversation on Bundy’s appearance, also tweeted “I’ve seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service — almost all of whom are not convicted, serial murderers”. The reactions to both of these shows on Twitter, while some are less serious than others, demonstrate how there still remains more work to be done in dismantling the “nice guy” stereotype that has permeated our culture. This goal, Badgley tweeted, will be “all the motivation [he] needs for series 2.”