The Worst Crime of Netflix's You Is Its Poetry
For a character who's supposedly attending NYU's MFA program, this stuff is pretty bad. Why would showrunners choose this niche?
You’re reading a guest post on PopPoetry by Frances Klein (she/her), a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the author of the chapbooks The Best Secret (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and New and Permanent (Blanket Sea, 2022). Her poems and writing have been published by River Styx, Tupelo Press, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library. Klein currently serves as Assistant Editor of Southern Humanities Review.
A pretty, blonde woman paces in the glass cage where she is being held captive. She chokes back tears and threads paper into a typewriter. In voiceover, we hear the poem she is writing. Despite the tension of the moment, as I watch I can think only one thing: this poem kind of sucks.
In Caroline Kepnes’ 2014 thriller, You, bookstore manager Joe Goldberg becomes obsessed with grad student Guinevere Beck. Joe’s obsession leads him to kidnap Beck (as she is called throughout) and lock her in the basement of his bookstore. In the novel, Beck is a fiction MFA candidate at Brown University. The novel makes brief references to Beck publishing essays and poems in online journals, but she is clearly presented throughout the text as a fiction writer.
However, when You made the leap to the small screen in 2018 Beck’s character had been changed in two ways that would matter to no one (except writers). Beck was now a poet attending NYU.
I have two questions about this: why make Beck a poet, when it has little to no effect on the plot, and is Beck a believable NYU candidate?
Beck the Poet: Some Theories
I have two theories as to why Beck becomes a poet in the onscreen version of You:
One theory is that poets and poetry are familiar ground for showrunner and screenwriter Sera Gamble. In an interview with Grazia magazine, Gamble describes using her own experiences as a young writer to influence Beck’s character. In fact, Beck even performs part of a poem Gamble wrote at an open mic in the pilot episode.
It stands to reason that Gamble would opt for poetry over fiction for Beck’s character, especially when the script and story include fragments of poems.
Our other theory is equally practical: poems are shorter than stories. There are multiple times throughout the first season of You where Beck’s poetry is read, either by the character herself or in voiceover. The poems are used to drive home character details about Beck, or to make plain some of the show’s themes for viewers. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to accomplish the same effect in voiceover with a short story, which would take something like 15 minutes to read out loud. Poems can more easily cut to the heart of a scene, whereas short stories require more context and space.
For either of the above reasons, Beck is a poet. That brings us to the follow-up question: is she a good poet? Is she good enough to be believable as a poetry candidate at NYU? The short answer is no, but I’ll elaborate.
The Poetry of You
Over the course of season 1 of You, Beck’s poems are read three times. The first instance, as we’ve discussed, is the open mic in the pilot episode. The poem Beck reads there includes lines like, “One day you won’t need love anymore” and “You wrote poems about him/you still write poems about him/you’re writing one right now.” This is a poem Gamble wrote as a young woman, one she admits is bad, describing it as, “pages of angst.” There are actually stronger lines in the original poem, which Gamble shared on Instagram in full to celebrate the show’s debut episode. However, Gamble seems to have selected the tritest lines to include in the episode. This is fitting, considering the scene is intended to show Beck failing miserably at reading, being heckled before leaving the stage without finishing her poem.
The next time we hear Beck’s poetry, it’s read in voiceover as she writes furiously on her laptop. Beck has just had a terrible day with her father and his new family at a Dickens festival (complete with period costumes and snotty step-siblings), and the poem is intended to serve as an emotional catharsis, a list of the ways in which Beck’s father has failed her. The poem is…fine? Not excellent, mostly a series of disconnected fragments that beat the reader over the head with the intended emotional effect: “the beached whale/the silent walk home/the grill that doesn’t start on the Fourth of July.”
Perhaps I should be more generous, though. This is a first draft, and who among us hasn’t written a tearful poem in response to adverse life events? The problem with this, however, is the reception the poem receives from Beck’s MFA classmates. Beck’s classmate, Blythe, is presented as the alpha in the workshop. She’s shown in an earlier scene cutting down other workshop members, Beck included. In response to Beck’s poem about her father, though, Blythe texts that she has read the poem twice, and is “here for it.” We are meant to see Blythe as an arbiter of literary quality, and to assume from her positive response that, in the You universe at least, Beck has written a good poem.
The final and most egregious example is a poem the internet teens have dubbed “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Beck writes this poem while she is being held captive. What she writes, in part, is this:
You used to wrap yourself in fairytales like a blanket
Sharp shivers as you uncovered the corpses of Bluebeard’s wives
sweeter goosebumps as Prince Charming slid
one glass slipper over your little toes
a perfect fit
the stories were in you
deep as poison
If Prince Charming was real, if he could save you
when would he come
and then he saw you
but you let yourself be swept
now in his castle you understand Prince Charming and Bluebeard are the same man
and you don’t get a happy end unless you love both of him
Where to start with the problems with this poem? First of all, inverted fairy tales (western fairy tales, at least) have been done to death in contemporary poetry and fiction. The idea that the fairy tales we hear as children will not deliver in reality is not new ground. The poem itself is also fairly unfocused, trying to handle too many heavy issues (class differences, sexual assault by a family member, parental neglect, relationship violence) without giving any of them the space they deserve. If I were to give feedback on this piece in a class or workshop, I would advise Beck to pick ONE issue she wants to write about, and save the others for future poems. The poem also lacks interesting language, opting instead for cliche-sounding, but ultimately nonsensical, similes.
(Yet again, I have to try and moderate our criticism with a little fairness to Beck. She wrote this draft while being held against her will, which for many people is not the world’s most favorable writing condition. Worrying about whether you will be murdered has rarely, if ever, brought writers to produce their best work, Paul Sheldon notwithstanding.)
So Beck isn’t a great poet. Does that matter? To understand why Beck’s lack of talent with poetry is jarring to some viewers, it’s helpful to know a little about the NYU writing program.
NYU’s writing program is one of the better-known creative writing MFA programs in the country, and is very exclusive. According to their website, NYU accepts anywhere from 2% to 3% of applicants each year into their cohorts. That means that, in order to be accepted, Beck would have had to submit a stellar work sample, one that would cause her to be one of the few students selected from the 800 or so applicants that year.
The NYU program has also produced some of the most influential and celebrated poets currently working. Graduates include current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, Morgan Parker, and Solmaz Sharif. The poets that come out of this program are MacArthur Fellows and National Book Award Finalists. Their poems explore everything from intimate family dramas to larger social and cultural issues. All of them, at some point, every one of these poets likely wrote an angsty poem about a family member, but it certainly didn’t see the light of day until it had gone through multiple drafts. For all these reasons, it just doesn’t seem realistic that Beck would be a student in the NYU program.
The most likely explanation for changing schools is name recognition. NYU is simply a much more recognizable school name than Brown. Even if viewers know next to nothing about writing or America, they at least recognize the name New York City. Making Beck a student there is the same as having the characters in 90210 go to “California University” instead of Occidental College.
In the end, the most likely explanation for both of our key questions can be chalked up to convenience for the showrunners. And anyway, who doesn’t like a little escapism? Perhaps Beck’s position in an elite grad program is the equivalent of the massive apartments the characters in Friends can somehow afford, or how dressed up the Pretty Little Liars girls get to go to high school every day.
Television is fiction, after all, and if it were 100% true to life, no one would watch.
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