So I watched YOU season 2 yesterday, and I wanted to talk about my boy Joe. He has a reputation of crazy, but I still see him as a complex character; even in fiction there is this terrifying glimpse of reality in him. Major spoiler alert for the entire post. (You have been WARNED!)
Obsessive lover (Or is he?)
I totally agree that he is a paranoid, obsessive stalker plus murderer who has a pattern of feeling intense infatuation or love (your pick) for a girl that he comes across on a random day. But strangely, he cannot sustain these feelings with the fantasy he creates about his victim or lover (your pick) because he starts closing the distance between him and her and when he slowly sees all the sides of this person, he cannot accept the gap between reality and his projection of her. This is evident when Love tells him this same thing, that he didn’t ‘see’ her for what she was, in episode 10 of season 2. He played that card with Beck as well, but he never realized with her. Up until the end, he tried to make her conform to his standards of Beck and when she turned on him, he killed her. If we try to track the roots of this controlling behavior, we can find the cause to be his dad and Mooney by the way they treated Joe’s mom and Joe respectively.
Changed man?
After Joe hears Love out and reciprocates her love because of her pregnancy with his baby, it seems that Joe has changed as a person. Just before the entire ordeal of Candace’s death, Joe repented all the harm he had caused, admitting that it did not come from a ‘place of love’. He also claims that Love was the first person he had truly loved as he allegedly accepts her the way she is at this point. Skip to the scene after Forty dies and Joe and family moves out to a sunny neighbourhood, the ending scene shows Joe creeping and stalking his neighbour through the gaps in his fence. So what I think about this (my opinion) is that Joe did not really change and he is still deluded himself. In fact, this might continue as he has his child and the supposed girl (Love’s instinct) also turns out twisted like her parents. Completely unrelated, I don’t like Candace even though she ain’t crazy.
My point
So what I think about a person like Joe is…. no one is born like that. I believe that circumstances and events in the course of one’s life create their personalities, traits and obsessions. A big reason why Joe might have been so into books was because he wanted to escape to an imaginary world due to the harsh reality of his parents’ relationship, and later of course as Mooney took him in and trained him to take care of the bookstore. That might be why Joe trusted books more than people, because books were there for him when his own family wasn’t. But as a result of Mooney’s brainwashing and his mother’s encouragement that he was a ‘good boy’, Joe may have started his compulsive habit of lying and putting up a fake persona of himself as he repressed his negative emotions and fashioned his personality to befit his lover. Consequently, his shadow of repressed emotions and desires grew stronger and took him over whenever volatile situations arose.
My uneducated opinion on dealing with psychopaths
There may be people like this in real life. What we should learn from this show is how to prevent them from becoming like this. First things first, utter honesty and raw acknowledgement of emotions people face would help resolve these emotions rather than repressing them till they resurface as a wave of rage. Secondly, foster care should give extra love and help recondition them to heal the damage these kids have suffered because of their parents or immediate surroundings. Lastly, as Penn Badgely hinted, let’s not glorify these characters to the extent of romanticising their actions. It gives a wrong message.
Pursuit of Something 