YOU is a show about identity
At its core, YOU is a show about identity: Joe Goldberg tries to play the romantic lead to his fixations
At its core, YOU is a show about identity: Joe Goldberg tries to play the romantic lead to his fixations; Love’s own murderous tendencies simmer below the surface; Forty desperately attempts to hack it as a Hollywood writer. Questions on identity take on an even deeper meaning in the second season when Joe escapes to L.A., fleeing from his undead (surprise!) ex-girlfriend Candace. L.A. has long been a mecca for people seeking reinvention. But--as Joe notes when he lands at LAX--in a city of four million people, he is the one person looking to disappear rather than be discovered. Soon after he arrives in California, we see Joe skulking along an L.A. boulevard, grimacing at a hoard of influencers posing against a mural like vultures picking over the same carcass. Joe’s shirt is the same color as the mural he passes on his walk: he is camouflaged in his surroundings. The outfit that Joe wears in this scene becomes a kind of uniform throughout the season: a button-down layered over an unsuspecting plain t-shirt and pants. Joe’s clothes, then, symbolize his attempt at being the everyman. When he meets Love, his clothes are a canvas for romantic gestures gone awry--they become a fashionable clue to the subversive romance between Joe and Love that unfolds throughout season 2.
Joe’s uniform recalls a different masculine sartorial standard: the ubiquitous man in the gray flannel suit from the 1950s that represented an idealized type of masculinity in postwar America. If we want to find a precedent for how clothes underscore cinematic narratives, we need only to look at the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock collaborated with costume designer Edith Head on each of his films, and their collaboration has given us some of the most memorable outfits in cinema history, from Grace Kelly’s entrance with her black and white gown in Rear Window to Tippi Hedren’s iconic suit in The Birds. In one Hitchcock movie, however, it’s the man’s clothes that are a driving force: Cary Grant’s gray suit in North by Northwest. Grant’s suit represents anxieties about masculinity in postwar America: the conflict between the virility of men defending their country on the frontlines against the “domesticated” male as the breadwinner and thus protector of their families. In “The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit,” Steven Cohan notes that the gray suit in North by Northwest represents an unmistakable part of his identity in the film. In his designer suit Roger Thornhill is instantly recognizable as the kind of middle-class professional whose values had come to dominate the entire culture during the postwar era. While the trials and cultural milieu experienced by Joe Goldberg and Roger Thornhill in their respective universes are far removed from each other, there is one key commonality: both works center on cases of mistaken identity and deceptions. YOU links their shared interest in the moment that Joe and Forty crash a party in Hollywood and North by Northwest is playing, projected on a wall behind the partygoers.
