In contrast, Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You use their studies of biased male self-perception for broader purposes – centering the female perspective and showing how the suffering of female victims can go unnoticed when they are not. not so “nice” are off the hook. “The Reason I May Destroy You Was Substantially Different [to You] was that we already had these two different views. We had Zain [and] we had Arabella, who was learning consent and “theft,” as well as the vast majority of the public – who may not have been familiar with that exact term. “

Meanwhile, Promising Young Woman and Rose Plays Julie have emphasized the element of social status in their explorations of gender-based violence to show how “respectability” can be instrumentalised by male figures who occupy high social positions. In the first, Cassie’s boyfriend Ryan (Bo Burnham), who turned out to be one of the men who stood and watched her friend Nina get assaulted in college, is a pediatrician, and when the police come to question him, it is with nauseating deference. Meanwhile in the latter, Peter is famous, while Rose is a quiet person. “[In our culture] There are [this idea] that anyone in a respectable job – especially any man – has a stronger claim to objective truth, ”as Wheatley puts it.

While cosmetically You are making a general sign that Joe may have gone about his criminal business undetected because he is a handsome white man, he has no real interest in looking into the human cost. of this undeserved excess of power. In the new series, the stakes have changed dramatically for Joe. With Love, his equally murderous and equally handsome beau from the second series, he moved to a fictional Silicon Valley suburb full of tech billionaires, anti-vaccines and blogging moms. Now father he tries – really trying – to control his murderous urges for the sake of his son. He counts with his own traumatic childhood with the end of the game to create a better environment for his child. When he falls in love with a colleague at the library where he works, tension arises from his attempts to hide this from Love, who has a habit of murdering rivals for Joe’s affection. This Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s school of gender equality is a dark and fun ongoing setup.

The problem is, now, by seemingly encouraging the viewer to encourage Joe to let the best angels of his nature triumph, the show also seems to force them to look past the number of bodies he has amassed and confront him with a woman. his wife’s opponent – who is equally violent and charming – meaningful social commentary is overshadowed by a rarefied form of domestic farce. With Series Four just announced, it seems unlikely that Joe will get any comeuppance anytime soon. A show that relies on a charismatic, handsome monster is obviously reluctant to narrow down its main appeal, as Penn Badgley is a true idol with cheekbones you could ski down. And, as the ‘nice’ villain trope evolves, so does the audience, who adopt a playful edginess as they frame their attraction to an objectively filthy man who would ruin his life in the blink of an eye. In that sense, maybe the show makes its point more effectively than it realizes about how men are off the hook, as long as they look like the part.

More generally too, now the culture recognizes the “good guy” as a potential bad guy, where do we go from there? One thing is certain: there is no level of subversion of masculine tropes that can exceed the elevation of feminine views. There are times when You flirt with the change of allegiance but at the time of writing – unlike Joe – he doesn’t have that killer instinct.

Your Series 3 is available to stream on Netflix now

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