The third season of “You” released on Neflix Oct. 15 and brings back reoccuring characters Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) and Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) in a storyline that parallels stalking on college campuses. Credit: Courtesy of John P. Fleenor/Netflix via TNS
There are more Joe Goldbergs out there than one may think.
Netflix’s American psychological thriller series “You” portrays a charismatic bookstore manager, Joe Goldberg, who falls in love with and begins to stalk his romantic interest, killing those who get in the way. Mary Reiter, an Ohio State sociology and criminology lecturer, said stalking is not exclusive to thriller shows — it can be observed on college campuses and may be more common than people realize.
“Stalking on college campuses is not something that is rare,” Reiter said. “There’s a web organization called Stalking Awareness, and they estimate that about one in 10 undergraduate women and about one in 30 undergraduate men will be a victim of stalking.”
Reiter said the Los Angeles Police Department has listed three different types of stalking cases — erotomania, love obsession and simple obsession. Goldberg falls underneath the love obsession category, she said.
“There’s the love obsession stalker, which is often a stranger who just targets somebody and is obsessed with them and mounts a campaign of stalking against the target, who then becomes aware of their existence,” Reiter said.
Reasons for stalking can come in many different forms, but most stalking cases have the same underlying motivation, Reiter said.
“Experts typically list mental disorders and the desire for control over the victim,” Reiter said. “So there are typically, like, attachment disorders or things like obsessional disorders that, in psychology, they would point to.”
Logan Hartnell, a postdoctoral fellow in the sports psychology department, said childhood trauma can be a cause of abnormal behaviors in adult life, such as stalking, but that is not always the case.
“People are seeing this kind of glamorized movie-type setting where we assume people who are abused as children become the abusers,” Hartnell said. “Although that is true, that many abusers have childhood trauma, people who are abused as children cannot all grow up to be abusers themselves.”
For Goldberg, however, Hartnell said this was probably a large contributor to his habits and personality in his older years.
In his childhood, Goldberg protected his mother from an abusive significant other by shooting him, and since then has had the notion that the only way to save people is through violence, Hartnell said.
“He doesn’t see himself as a stalker, as an abuser,” he said. “He sees himself as the savior.”
Hartnell said some of the show’s marketability comes from the way it makes the audience form complex thoughts about the characters.
While watching the series, Hartnell said he even found himself having conflicting emotions toward Goldberg and, despite watching him commit murder and other crimes, wanted him to avoid getting caught.
“You can start looking for ways to kind of feel sorry for him,” Hartnell said. “The show itself is really written well to give him space to be human, to be sympathized with, despite these egregious things that he’s doing.”
Reiter also said the show has a high entertainment value because watching from the perspective of a stalker is something that hasn’t been done much in entertainment before. Usually, the primary perspective is that of the victim or law enforcement officials, she said.
“We haven’t seen a stalker like that on TV or in the media, so it’s pretty innovative in that sense,” Reiter said. “If you think about stalking, it’s a relatively new crime. So, we have a new crime and a new take on a new crime.”
Goldberg uses social media and technology to stalk his victim, which Reiter said is an accurate portrayal, as most stalking takes place online, contributing to the newness of the crime.
“Young people publicize all of this information about themselves online,” Reiter said. “That just makes it so much easier for a stalker, for somebody to figure out where they live and where they work and what they do and who their friends are, where they’re going to be in particular places and times.”
Reiter said there are precautions people can take to help avoid being stalked, such as making social media accounts private and making sure passwords are safe. She also said there are organizations that will wipe information from the Internet, so companies that have mined personal data, such as addresses and workplaces, no longer have access to it.
“There are general things that people should do to protect themselves from the potential for stalking, but they should start doing it now so that if there ever is a situation that they find themselves in with somebody stalking them, they already know what to do,” Reiter said.
Stalking is never the fault of the victim, but Hartnell said there are actions one can take to decrease the chances of experiencing it, such as changing up routes to and from class and being aware of surroundings.
“Trust your gut,” Hartnell said. “If you ever feel like you’re not in a safe situation, you feel like you are in danger at all, it’s better to be aware of that and to be seen as over-aware than it would be to say, ‘Oh, it’s not a big deal.’”
