Tag: Joe Goldberg

Caroline Kepnes on Parker Posey, ‘The Western Coast,’ and the Book That Sealed a Friendship

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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Having gone from New York to L.A. to the PNW, Joe Goldberg heads back East, this time to Cambridge in For You and Only You (Random House), Caroline Kepnes’s fifth novel and fourth in the NYT-bestselling series about a homicidal bibliophile that was adapted into hit Netflix show You.

The Cape Cod-born, L.A.-based author is a former magazine journalist (Tiger Beat–which she chose over Conde Nast, Entertainment Weekly) and former E! Online gossip columnist who played blackjack instead of tailing Britney in Vegas as assigned. Before her show, she’d written for TV (7th Heaven, The Secret Life of the American Teenager), and has had her short stories published in numerous horror anthologies.

Kepnes won honorable mention and a typewriter in a Sassy short story contest; studied abnormal psychology for a summer during high school then created her own college major that combined psychology and creative writing; was inspired to move to NYC (where she lived in the 2000s) by The Last Days of Disco; and has been a Jeopardy! clue twice. Likes: songs on repeat and exclamation points, Knot’s Landing, Fluffernutters. Dislikes: summer camp. Good at: Going down rabbit holes. Bad at: penmanship. Some of her favorite writers below.

The book that:

…sealed a friendship:

I got a bound galley of #FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar. While reading and laughing hysterically, and dog-earing all the pages, I was like…Amina is my friend. She always has been, she just doesn’t know it yet.

…shaped my worldview:

It has to be What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry. The visuals and the attention to detail made me feel way less self-conscious about being a curious little child who wanted to snoop in everyone’s house.

…I’d give to a new graduate:

I’m gonna pull a Joe Goldberg and say Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. It mashes smart into stupid, silly into serious and it made me excited about the great big (perverted) world out there, in you, in all of us. Yay!

…broke my heart:

I could pick any book by Catriona Ward. Sundial slayed me. It’s a riveting page-turner, an autopsy of a family, a study in generational trauma, a meditation on science. You feel like the whole world is in there tugging at your insides.

…should be on every college syllabus:

The Street by Ann Petry. I read it in a class at Brown called “Black Women Writers.” Petry’s style is otherworldly, and this novel should also be mandatory reading in Best Writers 101.

…has the greatest ending:

The temperature rises slowly in Sarah Pinborough’s Insomnia. You’re locked in a house and the house is a woman and there is no escape, no sleep. You wonder how this will end and then…. I read the last few pages standing up, biting my nails.

…helped me become a better writer:

How do you know that you became a better writer? You don’t, but The Western Coast by Paula Fox transported me to Los Angeles in 1940. When a writer is that powerful and magical, it makes you want to find your own style.

I read in one sitting, it was that good:

I am a very repetitive person, so I have told many people about the way A Good Man by Ani Katz kept me glued to a chair for several hours even when the sun was on a mission to make me relocate. Not possible. Nope.

…fills me with hope:

Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater. Inhaling fresh, excellent, quotable, entertaining fiction from a debut novelist is a guaranteed way to breathe a little easier in our world. Red Widow by Alma Katsu. Inhaling fresh, excellent, quotable, entertaining fiction from an established writer is a guaranteed way to breathe a little easier in our world.

…describes a place I’d want to visit:

When I make it to Amsterdam, I will reread Spalding Gray’s Impossible Vacation on the plane and let his scratch-and-sniff-ish descriptions of what it’s like to fall apart in that city be my primer.

…has the best opening line:

An oldie: “So let me dish you this comedy about a family I knew when I was growing up.” (Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm.) A newbie: “There’s a time and a place for erect nipples, but the back of a Seattle police car definitely isn’t it.” (Jennifer Hillier’s Things We Do in the Dark.)

…I’ve re-read the most:

An ideal feast: Rewatch a few episodes of The Middle for the 98,976th time and chase ‘em with yet another visit to Cormac McCarthy’s taut, haunting Child of God.

…made me laugh out loud:

You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir by Parker Posey. There’s a famous (to me) scene in Waiting for Guffman where Posey’s character is barbecuing a single chicken wing and smoking a cigarette, noting that she’ll “always have a place at the Dairy Queen.” This memoir feels like that scene. Equal parts out there wackadoodle and no holds barred, grounded fucking fun.

#FashionVictim

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What Do People Do All Day?

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Portnoy’s Complaint

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The Western Coast

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Impossible Vacation

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Things We Do in the Dark

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You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir

Riza Cruz is an editor and writer based in New York.

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April 18, 2023
“Exile” Is The Perfect Song to Murder Your Ex To (And Other Reasons You, Season 3 Remains A Standout Compared to Season 4: Part One)

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With the first portion of You’s fourth season out, it bears noting that there have been few scenes as indelible as one that took place in the final episode (“What Is Love?”) of season three, during which Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) drags his wife’s corpse across the floor to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “exile.” A song from folklore that was released as the second single, it features Bon Iver, and accordingly maximizes that overall “sad indie” sound Swift was going for back in 2020, when most people wanted to slit their wrists because they couldn’t do much besides go to the grocery store (spoiler alert: that’s all life boils down to anyway). To play it contrasted against the murdering and disposal of one’s significant other, therefore, lends a different layer of “sadness” to the tune, which is all about having outgrown the person who is now your ex—with the female counterpart in the duo noting that she had given plenty of warning signs before the imminent demise (therefore echoing the theme and structure of Postal Service’s “Nothing Better”). Swift and Iver rue in unison, “I think I’ve seen this film before/And I didn’t like the ending/You’re not my homeland anymore/So what am I defending now?/You were my town, now I’m in exile, seein’ you out/I think I’ve seen this film before/So I’m leavin’ out the side door.” This being exactly what Joe does after he sets their house ablaze with the stove.

At the beginning of the episode, Joe mentions Shirley Jackson’s declaration (in her story, “Pillar of Salt”) about how suburbia is where people start to come apart. Unravel. Mentally, needless to say. More specifically, the quote goes, “Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, ‘I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,’ and when Brad said, ‘What starts to happen?’ she said hysterically, ‘People starting to come apart.’” Yes, there’s an entire genre about “coming apart” in the suburbs (mostly written by Richard Yates). But Joe has been “split” since childhood, pulling something of a Dexter Morgan by compartmentalizing his “alter ego” and using it for “good.” Joe, of course, views “good” as killing anyone who gets in the way of his “ownership” over a current obsession. The latest in season three (briefly extending into season four before Joe gets distracted by a new girl to pump) is Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle). The surly librarian (is there any other kind?) who makes Joe all the more certain that marrying Love (Victoria Pedretti) and having a child with her was a huge mistake (and not just because it entailed all those sex scenes Badgley now won’t do). Even though he plays the “protective papa” role well enough, he’s not so caring about Henry as to take him along when he flees from Madre Linda (a fictional town meant to be somewhere in the Silicon Valley realm). “It wasn’t fair of me, but it was the right thing for Henry,” he assures the viewer as the finale comes to a close. The abandonment comes after finishing Love off, of course.

Tidily wrapping up his “chapter” in Madre Linda by turning Love into a “Mrs. Lovett” figure, Joe bakes a meat pie with one of his toes in it (which he cuts off himself—committed to the authenticity of the narrative he’s trying to create). The wordy email Joe then sends to the HOA on Love’s behalf when he’s done putting together all the fake details goes, “I moved to the suburbs because I bought into the dream. Community, prosperity and, most of all, safety. But I never felt safe here. Judged from day one, for my past, my body, how I was raising my child. If I wasn’t perfect, I would lose it all. A game so rigged, it could only exist in a world that hates women.” It all sounds pretty rational until the suicide note Joe pens (making him all the more “undercover” misogynistic because he thinks he can write women so well) veers into a rant about how she needed to do what she “had to” in order to really protect her family: kill the adulterer next door, kill and frame the anti-vaxxer who got her child sick, trap the couple (Sherry and Cary) who tried to “sabotage” her, etc. Of course, these were things Joe was complicit in, pawning his own crimes off on her and leaving her holding the (body) bag, as it were. Thanks to the benefit of her corpse to take the blame for everything. As women so often do no matter what their “motives” might have been. Men like Joe, on the other hand, are examined and analyzed so as to determine what might have went wrong in their life to make them “this way.” Women, not so much. They’re either psycho bitches or docile duckies who can get along in a patriarchal society.

In this regard, another appropriate track from the folklore album to have included in this episode might have been “madwoman,” on which Swift laments with a controlled rage in her voice, “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy/What about that?/And when you say I seem angry, I get more angry.” She builds on the theme of being branded as the “crazy” woman (usually as a result of the wonders of gaslighting) with the chorus, “And there’s nothing like a mad woman/What a shame she went mad/No one likes a mad woman/You made her like that/And you’ll poke that bear ‘til her claws come out/And you find something to wrap your noose around/And there’s nothing like a mad woman.” Sometimes referred to as, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

Which is why Love decides to kill Joe when she unearths his roaming attraction for Marienne. Alas, after Joe outwits her plan to kill him with his own plan to kill her, Love rightly assesses, “We’re perfect for each other.” The way Joker and Harley Quinn are (how fitting, then, that Love’s last name is Quinn). They’re both “anti-heroes,” if you will. Speaking of that particular single, Penn Badgley’s commitment to Swift’s work under the pretense of being “Joe Goldberg” continued when he joined TikTok to enact his own “Anti-Hero” challenge by trying to run away from himself, only to find that it was him, hi, he’s the problem, it’s him. This realized after trying to run away from the person chasing him, only to open the door and find the pursuer (himself) there, too. And yes, so much of Swift’s oeuvre can be sardonically applied to You, especially a song like “You Belong With Me.” Then there’s “Bad Blood,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Blank Space,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “All Too Well,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “I Did Something Bad,” “Don’t Blame Me,” “Call It What You Want,” “Lover,” “The Archer,” “ME!” and, specifically for season four, “London Boy.” The list of applicable songs from Swift goes on and on, but something about “exile” being wielded for this particular scene would make it difficult to top in terms of other songs from her canon being placed over a certain moment in You.

Despite this unforgettable soundtrack instance, You’s third season, expectedly, was met with eyebrow raises from most viewers (except probably Cardi B) who weren’t about the suburbia-driven plot, and felt that the show was starting to drag. Regardless, the You team is on board for a five-season track to wrap up any supposed “arc” for Badgley’s character. Who, incidentally, was only really challenged by Love (this being part of why he killed her—men hate being outdone by a woman in their “field”). A person described as having “no loyalty for anyone but herself.” Sounds, ultimately, like Joe. The difference being that he uses the guise of “doing the right thing” to justify every murder, as well as the subsequent inevitable need to abandon the life he faked in a new city because of his obsession du moment.

At the conclusion of “What Is Love?,” Joe can feel good about what he’s done. Even tell himself that he created a legacy for Love that she herself never would have secured by turning her into “a bit of a folk hero” (hence, folklore being the perfect album of Swift’s to pull from). “More famous, even, then Guinevere Beck.” With the dragging of her poisoned (with aconite) husk to the kitchen area (where women belong, right?), the brutal coda of a relationship that a man decided needed to end on his terms is highlighted with macabre flair in the lyrics, “So step right out/There is no amount of crying I can do for you/All this time/We always walked a very thin line/You didn’t even hear me out.” The next round of verses then includes Taylor’s echoing rebuttal via, “You never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs)/All this time I never learned to read your mind (never learned to read my mind)/I couldn’t turn things around (you never turned things around).”

Joe, it would seem, hasn’t been able to turn them around in season four either. But at least in season three, underloved as it was, there was a far more memorable scene to tie to it than there has been thus far in season four. However, the trailer for Part Two of the season has teased the return of Love. Whether it’s in a haunted, Shakespearean (because London?) sort of way or not, perhaps it means further use of Swift’s music somewhere in the fray. For, in spite of Badgley noting of Joe’s likely take on Swift, “I think, unfortunately, he would despise her. Because she’s successful and blond, maybe? I don’t know, but I think he would,” she’s thus far provided the most iconic marriage between music and action in the series. The only song that could really outdo it would be Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed” played during the series finale.

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Genna Rivieccio

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February 25, 2023
Penn Badgley Confirms What You Already Knew: It’s A Sexless, Sexless, Sexless, Sexless World

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There are some who have speculated that we live in such a sexless time because of technology. Not just because porn made the transition to the internet, but because the human has essentially “become one” with the screen. Inferring an inherent lack of tactility that has extended into a general absence of desire for “tangible flesh.” Of course, this mainly applies to the generation known as Z, being that they’ve never experienced an era when the screen wasn’t an additional bodily appendage. And as the AI fuses into “RI” (“real” intelligence), the prospect for any interest in sex as it once existed in our erstwhile “horn dog” society continues to dissipate—and all with the sanction of those formerly most involved in “presenting it.” That is to say, Hollywood actors.

So it is that, on the heels of a Penn Badgley feature in Variety called “You Don’t Know Penn Badgley: Surviving Gossip Girl, Staying Sober with Blake Lively and Finding Himself in a Sexy Serial Killer,” the key remark many have taken away is the declaration on Badgley’s part that he will no longer “do” sex scenes. In the Kate Arthur-written article, she prefaces his aversion to a common expectation of the average mainstream actor’s job description with, “Less typically, he was also concerned [about] how inherently sexual the role [of Joe Goldberg] was, and how many intimate scenes he would have to film. In later seasons, the show has had an intimacy coordinator, but when production began in 2017, that job didn’t exist. The whole series revolves around Joe’s romantic fixations, and how he gets the women he’s fallen for to submit to his charms. You has a ton of sex.” But not so much in its fourth season, where Joe, now under the assumed identity of Jonathan Moore, has taken a shine to the “British prude” identity of an Austen character as he finds himself enmeshed in the inner circle of an elite London friend group (yes, it sounds kind of like Gossip Girl). Hence, the presence of a moniker like the “Eat the Rich Killer”—a “branding” that proves anti-capitalism is still capitalism in that it can be sold.

Among that crew is Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie), a woman who initially passes herself off as “different” from the rest of her born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-their-mouth ilk but actually turns out to be the richest one among the lot (as is usually the way with rich people trying to pass themselves off as “just like us”). Before Joe finds this out, he’s already gone down the rabbit hole of his obsession with her, sidelining the one that brought him to Europe in the first place: Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle). When he follows her from Paris to London, he ends up staying in the latter city after a cover identity falls into his lap thanks Elliot Tannenberg (Adam James), a fixer hired by Love’s (Victoria Pedretti) father to find and kill Joe. Obviously, Elliot conveniently opts for a different approach to dealing with Joe, and now, “Jonathan” is on his merry way to clothed “sex” in a garden with Kate by episode three.

But, as Badgley was sure to mention in the Variety interview, “[On-set romance is] not a place where I’ve blurred lines. There’s almost nothing I could say with more consecration.” Which means he’s apparently “blurred” his memory about dating Blake “Serena van der Woodsen” Lively while the two starred in Gossip Girl together. Nonetheless, Badgley insisted, “That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me—and that aspect of the job, that mercurial boundary—has always been something that I actually don’t want to play with at all.” And yet, if he, and more actors like him, don’t want to “play with” it, then one must ask the blunt question: what, exactly, are you being paid the big bucks for to have so many “caveats” and “limitations” in order to take on a role?

Ah, but then there is the cry of “artistic integrity” and “morals.” It is the latter category that finds Badgley hesitating on sex scenes more and more as he told Variety, “It’s important to me in my real life to not have them… [To] my fidelity in my relationship… And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down. I didn’t tell anybody that. But that is why.” Ironically, the person he wants to show fidelity to is Domino Kirke, the sister of Jemima a.k.a. Jessa from Girls, a show that prided itself on gratuitous sex scenes. Maybe that’s why Kirke was the one who encouraged him to do it regardless of his “misgivings.” And, after all, if Taylor Swift could loosen the reins on Joe Alwyn to “let” him engage in all the sex scenes of Conversations with Friends (which Jemima Kirke also appears in), then surely Domino could do the same. Even if Badgley might have had the option to give Joe more action through the wonders of CGI—as was the case in, of all movies, You People, when Jonah Hill and Lauren London didn’t actually kiss at the end.

In point of fact, the sudden inalienable right of the actor to become “bashful” about the notion of onscreen intimacy—at a time when intimacy coordinators are actually in existence to make everything feel as “safe” as possible—seems to open the door further for AI as an option to oust real actors from the jobs they won’t actually do. Regardless of how many millions they’re being paid to do it. Whether or not the shift in Hollywood’s willingness to “perform” stems from being a reflection of the sexless culture at large, there’s one thing that’s certain: “sexiness” as a concept has all but disappeared in large part because all mystery has disappeared. Once an industry that could pass itself off as something to aspire to with the tinsel and glitz promoted in now-defunct movie magazines like Photoplay and Screenland, the gradual decline of post-studio system Hollywood coincided with the advent of entities like television and, then, the internet. Therefore, unchecked gossip rags like TMZ and Perez Hilton that effectively dismantled any notion of “glamor” or “aspirational desire” re: being famous. A notable example of that in the 00s occurred with Britney Spears as she went from being the teen dream to a “Jezebel slut” who “deserved” her downfall, courtesy of constant media stalking that drove her to rightful madness.

Incidentally, Spears was a large part of why sexiness remained strong in the early 00s before giving way to the “trashy-chic” aura exuded in the mid-00s by paparazzi shots of her looking sloppy drunk while exiting a club or accidentally flashing her pantyless snatch as she got out of a car. Decidedly not sexy so much as sleazy because it took away all semblance of mystery. An additional factor in the assurance of sexlessness in entertainment today is the result of the post-#MeToo reckoning, with most men quaking in their boots about being accused of “untoward” behavior. Least of all portraying something that might end up being construed as “non-consensual” or “glamorizing rape.” With that in mind, the Badgley feature was also sure to point out that the actor is increasingly uncomfortable with sex scenes because “he’s also now older than his romantic interests on the show. ‘Didn’t used to be the case,’ he says.” And, where once even the vastest age gap between stars (i.e., Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina) wouldn’t have caused the slightest bat of an eyelash, in the present moment, the only person still willing to carry on with that type of shit is, well, Woody Allen.

What it all amounts to is that the overall climate of fear about doing or saying or, yes, acting the wrong way has undeniably and “subconsciously” fed into the sex scene about-face among actors like Badgley, who insist that such scenes are “superfluous” or “don’t add anything to the story.” Obviously, someone like Paul Verhoeven would disagree. But then, he’s of a different generation (and also not American). More of the Bernardo Bertolucci school of thought on “impromptu” sexual interactions (e.g., the infamous butter rape one in Last Tango in Paris), as Sharon Stone would later note of Verhoeven’s snatch shot in Basic Instinct, “After we shot [the movie], I got called in to see it. Not on my own with the director, as one would anticipate, given the situation that has given us all pause, so to speak, but with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project. That was how I saw my vagina shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, ‘We can’t see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.’”

And yet, as mentioned before, actors now have the unprecedented advantage of working on sets that would never allow for something like what befell Maria Schneider or Sharon Stone to happen again. Only to thumb their nose (or genitals, in this case) at it and declare, “No, I have my principles.” Thing is, if one is getting paid for anything, no such claim can really be made.

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Genna Rivieccio

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February 17, 2023