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Magdalene Bailey

GSWS 0500

Dr. Jordan Bernsmeier

14 December 2023

Guinevere Beck: A Case Study on Voyeurism in Cinema

In the Lifetime-turned-Netflix show “You,” the plot centers on the main female lead,

Guinevere Beck, from the perspective of her stalker-serial killer boyfriend Joe Goldberg. Beck is

an MFA student at NYU when she bumps into Joe at the bookstore he works at. Immediately

upon their meeting, Joe takes to the internet to find out everything he can about her, narrating it

to the audience as if we are Beck. How does the format of the show change how the audience

connects and relates to Beck? How does the audience perceive Beck based on the information

given through the perspective of Joe? Why do viewers not connect with Beck, and why do they

feel it is “too late” when it switches to Beck’s perspective?

From the moment Guinevere Beck, referred to simply as “Beck,” appears, she is

characterized through someone else’s perception rather than leaving the interpretation up to the

viewer. Much of the first few episodes consist of Joe stalking Beck online, trying to learn

everything about her. In dominant culture, specifically in cinema, the male gaze “…projects its

fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey, 808). Beck’s character is

built underneath Joe’s perception and his actions, and from the first episode, there are scenes

where Joe is having fantasies about Beck while watching her inside her apartment. In Elizabeth

Cowie’s book Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, she references and builds

on Mulvey’s ideas. She writes, “Dominant ideology, however, Mulvey argues, requires that it is
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the male hero of the film who is the active controller of the film’s fantasy, and who has the look”

(168). Because of the structure of “You,” Joe is seen as “the male hero,” even though viewers

watch him murder time and time again. Mulvey’s argument continues, saying, “At the extreme, it

[scopophilia] can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping

Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an

objectified other” (806). In the pilot episode, Joe watches Beck and her “boyfriend” have sex and

says that she “probably isn’t satisfied” before proceeding to watch her finish while fantasizing

about sleeping with her. Joe gets satisfaction in watching and knowing things about Beck without

her realizing. He memorizes her routine, following her around campus, New York City, and just

about everywhere she goes. He gets to see her when she does not think she is being watched at

all, which gives him a sense of control over her and her life.

“You” was created to flip typical tropes on Lifetime and show their stories from a

different perspective. As Ani Bundel argues in her NBC article, “Expected, clichéd stereotypes

are revealed to be creepy when viewed through the lens of a controlling man like Joe. This also

changes how we think about Joe’s victim Beck, because the audience doesn’t identify with her.

She is, after all, not us. She is ‘you.’” Lifetime is a network that airs shows like “Sleeping with a

Killer” and “#TextMeWhenYouGetHome,” which places a show like “You” in context and

conversation with those true crime tropes. Seeing the perspective of Joe and what his motivations

are add to the discomfort, but this same concept can make him human. The way cinema and

media in popular culture exist rose from “…its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual

pleasure” (Mulvey, 805). Joe’s actions are pushed as a guy who is in love and will do whatever

he can to make the girl he fell for have a better life. He tries to justify his actions, and for some,

they feel he did. Ani Bundel explains, “Even when the show switches to Beck’s perspective in
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the final episodes, it feels almost too late for the audience to get in her corner or feel much

sympathy for her fate.” Because the audience is shown Joe’s actions and told his motivations by

him narrating his thoughts as the plot pushes forward.

Joe is a complex character that creates a mixture of feelings that can be hard to name. He

kills people, yes, but he is trying to help his neighbors get away from an abusive relationship. He

stalks Beck, but he tries to tell her that her graduate advisor wants to sleep with her. He seems

like a nice guy despite the creepy behavior he exhibits. Because of the show’s centrality on Joe

and his relationship with Beck, “…audiences figure out this romantic love story is too good to be

true long before the heroine does. But by taking the story and telling it from the killer’s

perspective, viewers are in on it from the start, changing how Joe’s actions are perceived”

(Bundel). Beck seems foolish and ignorant to the gravity of the situation she is in, but she does

not know about any of Joe’s behaviors. He is completely offline, so she cannot stalk him as he

does her. It is in Cowie’s work that an explanation of this disconnect between the audience and

Beck and the audience’s feelings toward Joe. She writes, “[I]t is through identification that film

narratives are assumed to produce their emotional effects upon us” (109). The audience is

primarily shown Joe’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, which makes the viewer more likely to

identify with him. They understand him, which they cannot do with Beck. Branding and the

network on which a show airs are incredibly important. “You” is a prime example of this, as

explained by Bundel: “On Lifetime, viewers went in expecting to sympathize with the heroine,

and the show’s bending of those tropes stuck out far more prominently. It felt more purposeful.

Stripped of the Lifetime branding, however, the weaknesses inherent in the show’s writing left

‘You’ more open to misinterpretation. On Netflix, many viewers seem to see the series less as a

response to standard romantic tropes and more the saga of a misunderstood anti-hero in the vein
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of ‘Dexter’ or Walter White in ‘Breaking Bad’ — but without the nuance that made both ‘Dexter’

and ‘Breaking Bad’ worth watching.” Netflix houses shows like “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer

Story” and “Mindhunter,” which focus on getting into the mind of serial killers and other violent

offenders. Without the context the show had on Lifetime, the satirical nature of “You” does not

come across.

Even then, each choice made on the show impact the reaction of the audience. As Cowie

puts it, “Cinema is not simply filmed reality; it frames the world in order to picture it on

celluloid, hence it selects and excludes” (26). There are scripts written, actors hired, scenes

filmed. All of it is meant to portray a certain feeling. Because of this, the characters do not

always have the time to come to life. Cinema “…and the conventions within which it has

consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to

the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their

voyeuristic fantasy” (Mulvey, 806). What is generally consumed by the public is something they

want to be mindless, something that does not require a lot of thinking, but consuming a show like

“You” cannot be taken that way. The world created is one that should be learned from, not

promoted.

The format of “You” creates an environment where the victim is not seen as that: a

victim. Cinema generally produces a spectacle, but “You” is even more so. This idea ties back to

one mentioned in Visual Pleasure: “Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-

ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” (Mulvey, 815). The

central plot is Joe watching Beck and learning more about her by stalking her online, and that

makes Beck a spectacle, even if it is not in the typical way. She is not being overtly extravagant,

but her entire life is analyzed and pulled apart by Joe. Cowie argues that the images of women in
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cinema help create the spectacle that is “woman.” She writes, “For images, it was argued, not

only exploited women…but, and more importantly, they produced definitions of women and

femininity that were presented as true, timeless, and hence ‘natural.’ Such representations

presented not woman, but mother, virgin, whore, or just image. She was a sign of everything and

anything but herself” (16). Beck does not get to characterize herself to the audience; Joe is

creating the image of her. The patriarchy controls how woman is represented, “…assigning it a

function and value determined by and for men, and in the service of the construction of the

definitions…” of masculine desire and the male gaze (Cowie, 19). Because of the viewpoint of

“You” being from Joe’s perspective, the audience only sees the other characters out of his

perspective. Cinema and photographic images outwardly appear to be the “real” world, but those

objects and people depicted in cinema and photographic images do not have meaning until they

are organized (Cowie, 18-19). The argument that the point of view switches to Beck’s is “too

late” for viewers to sympathize with her falls under this idea. Viewers do not see how or care

about Beck because everything they learn about her is through Joe’s stalking. Him watching her,

reading her texts, pretending to be her boyfriend (that he murdered before becoming Beck’s

boyfriend) while he figures out what to do with him; all of those are entrenched in the patriarchal

ideal of man. Because Beck is only shown through Joe’s eyes, there is no room for her to develop

and grow outside of him, not to most viewers.

The format that made “You” a popular show is the format that makes it questionable in its

representation of women. The show was intended to play with the true crime tropes it uses, but it

has lost that nuance upon the switch from Lifetime to Netflix. This switch also exposed the poor

writing of the show, leading audiences to humanize Joe and his actions. Many viewers reported

that it was “too late” to sympathize with Beck at the end of the season because her perspective
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was only seen toward the end. The lack of sympathy for the heroine of the story exemplifies the

true crime culture we have cultivated. We as audiences love to see the nitty gritty of why a killer

committed their crimes. We love to get into their heads, to understand them. Most consumers of

true crime content neglect to think about the victims in the stories, not when there is a killer to

psychoanalyze. “You” walked straight into the pitfall within the empire of true crime content.

Everyone romanticized Joe and could see the human in him when he killed several people over

the course of the first season alone, let alone the other three. “You” preys on the inherent

disconnect that we feel while consuming media and feeds into the fantasy of watching another. It

goes even farther by watching someone watch someone else, something most television shows or

movies do not do. Despite all of the negative criticism “You” has gotten, it is an incredibly

popular show. People watch it because of its perspective, not despite it. That is the trap viewers

and production companies alike fall into.

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Works Cited

Bundel, Ani. “‘You,’ Netflix’s New Hit, Darkly Satirizes Romance and True Crime Stereotypes.

but Do Fans Get It?” NBCNews.Com, NBCUniversal News Group, 20 Jan. 2019,

www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/you-netflix-s-latest-hit-darkly-satirizes-romance-true-

crime-ncna960736.

Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Macmillan, 1997.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film: Psychology, Society, and

Ideology, pp. 803–816.