On January 24, 1989, the archetypal serial killer of the second half of the 20th Century United States, died in incarceration. He could credibly have claimed a second coming in the television series You on Netflix. We are attracted to the grotesque, so it seems fitting that a retrospective show centred around the life of a serial killer in the making doles out a great deal of legend and some fantastical scenarios which will show us that Joe (Penn Badgley) is ordinary yet extraordinary. But there is no doubt that three seasons of this show have dulled its edge – there is only so much violence our conscience can tolerate until it must head back to the comfortable couch of psychoanalysis. But the show brings these different elements to perfection, in a playful manner that contrasts against the morbidity of its narrative.

As someone who likes frequenting bookstores, dreams of opening his own kiosk one day, thinks Woody Allen’s masterful act as Zelig represents the epitome of character-changing trapeze-swinging, and has an unhealthy (entirely filmic) obsession with New York City and small-town America, this show for me had the double distinction of being You and becoming you. Not because of any awards it might have earned on the circuit, but because of the paradoxes it engenders, the confused values it spouts, and the suggestive delicacy with which it does both things. Violence in Rashomon or The Seven Samurai always seemed to project a false sense of prestige that relegated the killers in those films to a space of minor exoticism. Instead, irrefutably turned to “you”, You becomes a bit richer with each scene – each shot a more manifest and instinctive reflection of the human. There can of course be little comparison between Kurosawa or Mizoguchi and this Netflix original, but just as You creates a cosmogony of its own, negotiating “cancel culture” and the woke multi-verse with the ease and panache of a master, addressing each question addressed to itself to “you” the audience, Mizoguchi’s idyllic narratives also resisted making any impositions on to the audience.

In Season 3, after producing one show each year since 2019, it is like the Middle Ages exiting and making way for the modern. Three years is a long time in the 21st Century, and in the life of a couple. The dizzying headiness of an initial relationship gives way to the sobriety of suburbia. Love and Joe’s relationship becomes a prominent fixture. The purpose of any good show is to discourage solicitation of any trope irrelevant to its object, to leave things to unfold themselves organically, naturally, without admiring its progress or denigrating its lack thereof. In Season 3, I detect no embellishments of that sort, the substance reaches us without forced complexity – it reaches us with simplicity. Who amongst us has not worked with their partner – without that work becoming a thorn in our side from time to time? It’s a dagger in the side in this case, but you get the gist. Tracking shots and camera slides are rare here, most of the show is left to linger on its own – sometimes they do burst onto the scene but always with the limpid line of an eagle’s feather tracing the sky as it makes its flight towards its prey.

It is a fatal enchantment that keeps us involved in the dance – we know it’s going to be over soon, sooner than soon, but we still dance our way to the edge where we swiftly dissolve into the furrows.

The action takes place both on-screen and off-screen – the action comes at a time when questions of propriety on cinema are being rethought. The response to the first season was muted admiration and outrage at the supposed-gallant protagonist employing reverse psychology to explain his actions. Joe in his virginal apparel of baseball cap, sunglasses, and chiselled jawline was accused of being the toxic masculine identity made real, making excuses for his behaviour (as any man would do). But Joe abstained from that the most in Season 3. Violence plays out for violence’s sake. However much we empathise with him against the domain of white privilege, North Cal, to which the young industrious couple moved after the killing of several people in Los Angeles. It is a peachy place that hides its secrets behind a veneer of forced smiles and toxic positivity. Tenderness knows no place here – Joe’s eye glosses over as he witnesses the desperation and duality hidden beneath the garb of ‘Momfluencers’ in this town, using motherhood as a ‘brand’ in order to gain fame on social media. For all his voiceovers declaring that he’s beyond it all, one sees him resenting himself. His love life with Love (Victoria Pedretti) isn’t going so well either – one hears Bob Dylan crooning “I am sick of Love, and I am loving it,” – landing both of them in couples’ therapy. In this Hannibal-inverted sequence, reaction shots dictate the dependence of their survival with each other – 180-degree shots are systematically used to emphasise this new institutionalisation of this otherwise-renegade couple. The camera is tranquil in even the most murderous episodes – this is just life. Life that we have taken too seriously. It is a fatal enchantment that keeps us involved in the dance – we know it’s going to be over soon, sooner than soon, but we still dance our way to the edge where we swiftly dissolve into the furrows. In You, other furrows take their place, with each dissolve, the camera continues tranquilly on, alighting onto new pleasures and new regrets.

There are moments of repose – the camera pans along with Joe as he looks at his flesh and blood, his firstborn, sHenry, after murdering someone else’s flesh and blood. Here we too, are inclined to believe that there’s something behind the scenes of this scheming mind – his gentle wife and his boy are the epitome of middle-class living. And thus, civilisation is under no real lasting threat, that since the cover is intact, the theatre of living can carry on living.

The art of You is that it proves that real life is strange and radiant, one and the same everywhere and elsewhere. Households all along – in You and in you – are one and the same.

The author is a student of   history and comparative   literature at LUMS