So, last weekend, I spent longer than I should have (read: 10+ hours of my life) bingeing the first season of the Netflix original series “You.” The show stars Dan Humphrey — sorry, Penn Badgley — as Joe, and Elizabeth Lail as Beck, Joe’s love interest. Short synopsis (spoilers ahead): boy meets girl, boy stalks girl, boy manipulates the situation to get close to girl, boy must do increasingly crazy things (read: kill multiple people) in order to hold onto girl … etc etc. You get the picture. Suffice it to say that Beck eventually figures out that her boyfriend is a total psycho who has been playing her this whole time and not the nice, unassuming guy he purported to be. He finds out that she knows, traps her in a locked room in the basement of the bookstore that he manages, and eventually, after many long, drawn out, I’m-not-really-the-bad-guy-I-still-love-you pleading scenes, kills her to save himself from being outed to the police. Oh, the drama!
Aside from giving me heart palpitations every time I see a man wearing a neutral colored bomber jacket and a baseball cap in broad daylight, this show also brought to mind several concepts from social psychology that we have talked about over the past few weeks. While it would take much longer than a single post to get through every aspect of what is at play in one episode, let alone an entire season, here I’ll discuss two important elements and how they relate.
The power of the situation and self-monitoring: Simply put, the power of the situation basically means that an individual in one set of circumstances will not behave exactly the same way as they would in another set of circumstances. The situation the individual is in will affect how that person behaves or responds. People are complex social beings, and we don’t always act the same way. For example, think of how you act at a party on the weekend in the company of friends. Now, compare that version of you to the one that sits in a classroom during the week. Different people adjust their behavior to different degrees — this is known as self-monitoring. If you are a high self-monitor, you examine situations closely and adjust your self-presentation and behavior to fit the current circumstances. If you are a low self-monitor, you are more likely to behave in a way that aligns with your traits and preferences, regardless of the situation at hand.
In the context of the show, this plays out through the use of Joe’s perspective. While we are in the position of an omniscient viewer, we can see how he changes his behavior and actions from situation to situation. While he is shy and kind around Beck, always letting her lead the conversation, when he is in a different situation, for example, interrogating her ex-boyfriend through the transparent wall of a locked cell in the basement, he acts quite differently. More violent scenes are often juxtaposed against situations that show Joe’s softer side, and voiceover from his perspective shows the gap between how he behaves and how he is actually responding internally. This is part of what makes the show so chilling (and addictive), because we can see every side of him at once, while everyone else only sees what he wants them to see. He is also clearly a high self-monitor, and can shift effortlessly from one minute to the next in an effort to conceal what he needs to conceal to stay safe from suspicion. In one episode Beck goes out of town with a friend, and he follows her in his car. When he gets pulled over by a cop, he manages to convince the cop that he is a local, and lies so he won’t run the plates on his car.
socially psyched 