Toxic Masculinity Manifested in the Monster in You and the Tolkienian Hope of Its Defeat
What’s Up Tolkien Poppers!
Today, I have a heavier and more vulnerable piece for you today.
I have been obsessed with the Netflix series You for awhile now and I recently finished its last season that came out this past April.
Throughout its run, the challenge of patriarchy and toxic masculinity has been at the forefront of its storytelling. There were a higher rate of Tolkien references in Season 5, so an idea started brewing in my head. I asked, “What does Tolkien have to say about masculinity?” and “How is Joe (the main character in You) like the monsters and villains in Tolkien’s legendarium?” And here is the result of the idea and questions.
SPOILER ALERT: There are some major spoilers for the entirety of the series, so be warned now.
I hope you enjoy this piece. And I hope to hear what you think of my analysis of You and if my connecting Tolkien it it sounds plausible or not!
My book Tolkien and Pop Culture: Volume I is now available! This book is a selection of my Substack posts from the past couple of years, cleaned up, and formatted for publication. For the first time, you can get all these essays in print or in your Kindle library. It’ll look great on your shelf and be available for your own Tolkien purposes! You can use the QR code, the link, or direct message me to order your copy: https://a.co/d/eBE7jiH
If you are familiar with the name Joe Goldberg then you may also be an aficionado of murder documentaries, podcasts, and stories.
Or, maybe not.
Murder mysteries and thrillers are not my go-to for interest or entertainment, but the Netflix series You has captured my attention since 2021. During the pandemic, my wife caught COVID and we were quarantined in late November and into early December in which I also caught it from her. Thankfully, both of us experienced minimal symptoms and quickly recovered within the quarantine timeframe. During that time, however, we had nothing to do and we decided to give You a chance. We binged the entirety of the first season in onr day and have been obsessed with the show ever since.
So, for someone who is not drawn to these types of morbid stories, what lured me in and kept my attention? In short, the main character, Joe Goldberg–particularly, his masterful ability to hide his monstrous thinking, intentions, and actions with deceitful chivalry. He is the toxic man personified, i.e., a monster: the Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll; the werewolf; the dragon etc. As I watched the final season, I began to connect Joe Goldberg to the monsters and villains in Tolkien’s legendarium. Joe seems wholesome and kind on the outside, surveils those that he finds as valuable means to his ends as well as those he considers obstacles to those ends, is subtly deceptive, adept at manipulating others, and steals the voices and lives that are subject to his desire for control.
Immediately, this brought to mind the dragons Glaurung and Smaug, Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman, and even characters who are not monsters or villains per se, but act monstrous or villainous such as the likes of Fëanor and Thingol. This post’s purpose is to compare Joe with these various characters in Tolkien’s legendarium and highlight their demonstrable similarities while showing that Tolkien–with all his own patriarchal baggage–creates heroes that are antithetical to the toxic masculine embodiments and actions of his villains. Further, I want to show that both You and the stories within Tolkien’s legendarium largely promote an ethic of communal resistance against domination. This is written in an explicit 21st century feminist perspective in You while Tolkien’s is derived from a generally religious and philosophical position.
All of the characters mentioned above are all male. While there are female monsters in the legendarium such as Shelob1, Thuringwethil, and Ungoliant and, as I have cited in earlier work, Sauron embodies aspects of the femme fatale2, male monsters and villains vastly outnumber the female–as is the case with all characters coded male in the legendarium3. Because Joe Goldberg is a cisgender heterosexual man, I will primarily be comparing Joe with the male villains in the legendarium under the same assumed category with the particular focus on the ability to gaslight, entrap, and steal the lives and voices of their subjects, i.e., the monstrous and toxic masculine side of that gender identity.
You quickly welcomes its audience into the mind of Joe Goldberg, who narrates the story–partly to himself, to his love interests, and to the audience. He is a literary man who works in a book shop called Mooney’s in New York City, is charming, and offers romantic gestures to the women he desires to be in a relationship with. Additionally, Joe is kind to a kid who lives next door to him and is living in an abusive household. If the viewer was entering the show without any context, Joe would seem like a genuinely nice guy. But it doesn’t take long for the veil of Joe’s charm to be pushed aside to reveal his obsessive and own abusive tendencies.
In the first episode of Season 1, Joe, while working at Mooney’s, encounters a woman named Guinnevere Beck. With Sherlock Holmes-like skill, he observes her and attempts to paint a picture of who Guinnevere, aka Beck, is. He successfully flirts with her by engaging the topic of books and making fun of other people’s literary tastes. Beck buys a book, gives Joe her name via her credit card, and offers him a handshake in goodbye. Joe’s coworker Ethan goes full dudebro, telling Joe he needs to Google her. On the surface, Joe plays it cool by acknowledging that Beck was just being nice. However, when the audience returns with Joe back to his apartment after work, he full-on internet stalks her with the intention of following her literal footsteps to learn her schedule, so that he can figure a way to insert himself into her story.
As Joe continues to perform increasingly creepier acts of investigation, he learns about Beck’s desire to be a writer, her friends, her complicated love interest Benji, and how one of the women in her friend group named Peach has deep feelings for her. Without developing any relationship with Beck, Joe creates a narrative around her life in his head where he feels like he “knows” that she isn’t happy and that the cure for her happiness would be for them to be together. Through various instances of chance and planned manipulation, Joe bursts into Beck’s life as a hero, seemingly deus ex machina, by saving her from a subway train accident during one of his stalking expeditions.
This act of “heroism” sets the ball rolling by giving Joe the opening as an appearingly white knight, destined to save the damsel in distress. Unfortunately for Beck, this seemingly virtuous act is the catalyst to the beginning of the end of her life–and many others. Joe encounters Benji and rightly pinpoints him as a huge douche, who calls on Beck for booty calls. Eventually, Joe discovers that he had murdered someone and uses that as justification to kill Benji. Through another investigation into Peach, Joe learns that Peach has a file on all her friends that contain nude photos and other embarrassing and damning evidence to keep them in control by being able to blackmail them when needed. Again, along with Beck’s “wellbeing,” Joe finds this as a perfectly justifiable excuse to kill her.
In his mind, Beck is now free to be her “true” self, i.e., the one that Joe has forcefully curated for her in secret. From both of their perspectives, Joe being a sort of in-person omniscient narrator-author and Beck not being aware of what Joe has “written,” their relationship can bloom with little to no interference. But life happens. And the consequences of Joe’s actions eventually catch up to and break through the narrative bubble he has constructed for himself and Beck. She finds out that Peach died and it is framed as taking her own life by Joe’s design. Beck decides to go to therapy and Joe, like many insecure and controlling men, becomes jealous that Beck needs space outside of him to work out her feelings. He begins to question her whereabouts and follows her wherever she goes. Beck discovers his stalking and breaks up with him.
With space, Joe regroups and goes to Beck with a rehearsed speech about him making a mistake and admitting to his jealousy and controlling behavior. After this, he begins dating a woman named Karen and because she isn’t in a vulnerable spot for Joe to take advantage of her, he dumps her to return to Beck after they reconnect through–surprise, surprise–circumstances set up by Joe. He runs to Beck’s apartment window and makes a call worthy of John Cusack’s boombox scene in Say Anything… They make up and Beck admits that she cheated on Joe with her therapist, which Joe had already figured out, hence the scenario in which Beck and Joe are in a position to get back together.
This lovers to enemies and then back to lovers romance is short lived, however. Karen visits Beck and informs her that Joe is a liar and a cheater and that his missing ex, named Candace, was probably killed by Joe. Beck dismisses this to her peril. The morning after their makeup sex session, Joe leaves to go pick up breakfast and the kid next door, named Paco returns a book that Joe let him borrow, saying that he left it in the ceiling panel above the toilet in his bathroom; a spot that he reveals Joe told him was a great place to hide things. Beck becomes curious, looks at the ceiling tile above the toilet in Joe’s bathroom, and finds a box of mementos characteristic of a murderer. This box reflects the narrative box that Joe has conceptually reduced her to and curated in real life. In it lies things of hers stolen by Joe: a journal, her old cell phone, Benji and Peach’s cellphones, a used tampon, and a jar of Benji’s teeth. Like any normal person, Beck freaks out, realizing that she is dating a sociopath. The timing for this is less than ideal because Beck discovers this when Joe comes back with their breakfast. Unable to hide her fear, Joe finds out that she has found him out, knocks her out, and locks her in a cage in the basement of Mooney’s.
It is the conversation between Beck and Joe while she is imprisoned that we see the climax of Joe’s insanity. Beck asks Joe if everything she discovered indicates that he indeed is a murderer. He replies in the affirmative and tries to make a case that he did all that for her. He even believes locking her in a cage to be for her benefit. What we see is that Joe views himself like the author and the main character, able to determine all the elements that put him on top and eliminate all those that prevent his maintaining or climbing his desired position. He attempts to manipulate Beck with all the information before her. Believing he’s succeeded, Beck tricks him and locks him in his own cage. Joe, who has truly fallen for his own illusion as the chivalrous protagonist, is trapped by Beck, who realizes that her story has been hijacked by a truly evil man. Thinking she’s escaped, Joe reveals he keeps a spare key in the cage for emergencies such as this one, kills her, and publishes the memoir she had been writing titled The Dark Face of Love by filling in the gaps with his own writing, literally stealing her words, inserting his own into her voice, and rewrites the ending of her life by pinning the murder on her therapist and selling her book at Mooney’s in memoriam, articulating his belief that the book was truly hers and that he was tired of being heartbroken by those who cannot love him.
I will spare you from recapping the entirety of the show, but each season following the first generally follows this same formula, except that Joe continually climbs the social ladder with each new relationship he develops. In Season 2, he falls in love with a girl named Love Quinn, who comes from wealth and ends up also being a murderer, leading Joe to marry her, have a kid with Love, and buy a white picket fenced house. In Season 3, Joe becomes tired of Love because they are equal partners in their violent and toxic tendencies, which leads Joe to cheat on Love with a woman named Marienne Bellamy. Eventually, he kills Love and stages it as a murder/suicide, where he writes a manifesto in Love’s name, again, taking away her voice and rewriting the narrative. He starts a new life in England, where he meets a trust fund art dealer named Kate Galvin. He successfully kills Kate’s dad and many of her rich friends that he deems worthy of execution. Through wild circumstances, Kate saves Joe from drowning himself in the River Thames, marrying him and elevating him to being one of the amongst the richest and most powerful men in the world.
It was in the final season that the show runners really emphasized Joe as the monster through their writing, cinematography, and horror tropes such as the Final Girl. Joe and Kate build a life together and get custody of him and Love’s kid named Henry. Joe attempts to raise Henry in a way that his father failed to raise him, but begins planting the seeds for Henry to blame everything on the women around him rather than take any responsibility for his own actions as his dad does. Throughout the season, Joe and Kate read The Hobbit to Henry and bring up Tolkien quite a bit. At the end of the season when Joe is discovered and on his way to meeting the consequences of his actions, he illegally calls Henry to try and win him over to his side. Henry rejects Joe by calling him a monster and hanging up on him.
I read Tolkien’s presence in the background of Henry’s upbringing and development as a foreshadowing into the rejection of Joe as a monster rather than joining him like Saruman joins Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Further, all the surviving women who suffered Joe’s abuse and murderous attempts work together to trap Joe and get him arrested. Ultimately, even with his limited knowledge, Henry joins the ranks of Kate and others in rejecting the way of Joe. Like the Fellowship coming together against Sauron and his servants, the survivors of Joe’s violence–including Henry–join forces to create a better world for everyone by taking back their power to make Joe face the consequences of his actions and shape their lives without the imposition of a toxic masculine monster like Joe and the Joes in the real world.
Tolkien presents multiple masculinities in the legendarium4. All the monsters express and posture themselves in a toxic masculine way–with the intent to dominate, manipulate, and control. As mentioned above, this is not to say that all the monsters, villains, and scoundrels in the legendarium are homogeneous in their expressions of masculinity. However, all those who embrace and enact their toxic masculinity are willing to sacrifice everything and everyone but themselves and the possessions they hold most dear to them to achieve their dominant aims.
Let’s go back to the First Age in The Silmarillion. Fëanor, arguably the greatest craftsman in the history of Arda, a Noldor Elf is able to take the light from the two trees of Valinor, Laurelin and Telperion, and encase it in three jewels called the Silmarils. These trees were the light source for all of Arda and were the pinnacle of beauty and goodness during this age. The evil Vala Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant work together to destroy the two trees. The remaining Valar ask Fëanor if they can break open the jewels and use the light to restore the trees. He haughtily refuses, wishing to keep them solely for himself. News reaches Fëanor that Morgoth went to his dwelling, killed his father Finwë and stole the Silmarils. This leads Fëanor to kill his kin, separate the Elves from one another in Valinor, encourage his sons to take an oath to recapture the Silmarils at any cost, and lose his own life in his quest of vengeance.
Similarly, Thingol, king of the Silvan Elves in Middle-earth also desires the Silmarils and wants to keep his daughter Lúthien reserved for the most worthy of future suitors. Beren comes in and fulfills both Thingol’s desires by retrieving a Silmaril to prove his worth to marry Lúthien. Beren and Lúthien end up together and become the archetype for future marriages between Men and Elves, but the greed that motivated Thingol to send Beren to retrieve a Silmaril leads to his death and the overtaking of his realm by the servants of Morgoth.
For the monsters and villains such as Glaurung, Morgoth, Sauron, and Smaug, these elements are turned up to the endth degree along with their particular skills in deception. Going in chronological order within the history of the legendarium, I want to begin with Morgoth. In FA 472, an alliance called the Union of Maedhros was organized to siege Angband, the stronghold of Morgoth. This was called the Nirnaeth Arnoediad or Battle of Unnumbered Tears. One of the leaders of Men named Húrin protects the Elf Lord of Gondolin, Turgon by keeping the forces of Morgoth busy while they escape. Húrin slays many orcs, but is captured by Morgoth, placed on a chair at the tops of the mountains of Thangorodrim, and cursed to view the unfolding of events trapped and through the deceiving eyes of Morgoth.
Glaurung continues Morgoth’s ruin and manipulation through the story of Húrin’s son Túrin, who, although tragic, is considered one of the greatest heroes of Middle-earth. Túrin experiences multiple hardships with the loss of his father, the conquering of his homeland, and having to leave and be raised by the Tiningol in Doriath, where he was Lord. Morgoth’s curse extended to Túrin and he goes through a series of tragic events that lead to the avoidable deaths of many innocent lives and hardships for Túrin.
At one point, Túrin makes his way to the hidden Elven kingdom of Nargothrond and becomes an advisor. He advises the king of Nargothrong Orodreth to let go of the Nargothrond’s policy of secrecy and build a bridge across the river Narog, leading to its gates. This gives the dragon Glaurung direct access to the Kingdom and is able to sack it entirely. During his raid, he captures the gaze of Túrin and deceives him into believing his mother and sister are suffering in his homeland of Dorlómin, who were actually safe in Doriath at this point. Survivors of Nargothrond flee to Doriath without Túrin, which leads to his mother Morwen and sister Nienor to try and find Túrin. Glaurung, seeing their approach to Nargothrond, cuts them off, leading Morwen to run away and Nienor to be caught in the dragon’s gaze, causing her to lose her memory. As the dominoes fall, Nienor arrives at Túrin’s home in the woods naked and unable to remember who she is, Túrin marries her and calls her Níniel, he kills Glaurung, both Túrin and Nienor are lifted from Glaurung’s spell and both take their own lives, unable to live with the reality of Morgoth’s curse.
Smaug, the first dragon readers of Tolkien would have encountered, attacks and infiltrates Erebor, the Dwarven kingdom under The Lonely Mountain. Even though Smaug’s primary aim for sacking Erebor was to acquire its vast hoard of treasure, he also attempts to deceive Bilbo when he successfully enters the treasure chamber while wearing the One Ring to keep himself invisible. Bilbo seeks to coax information out of Smaug while also trying to stay alive. Smaug tries to catch Bilbo with his eyes and deceive him by turning him against the Dwarves:
“...don’t have more to do with dwarves than you can help…I suppose they are skulking outside, and your job is to do all the dangerous work and get what you can when I’m not looking—for them? And you will get a fair share? Don’t you believe it! If you get off alive, you will be lucky.” (Hobbit, 232-233)
Luckily, Bilbo is able to riddle Smaug enough to not reveal himself and everything that the Quest of Erebor had entailed. Thinking he knew more than he did, Smaug goes to attack Lake Town and also meets his demise under the Black Arrow show by Bard.
In the Second Age, Sauron specifically disguises himself as Annatar to deceive the Elves of Eregion to create Rings of Power while he created the One Ring in secret, so that he could control those who wore them. Fast forward to the Third Age during the time of The Lord of the Rings and he deceives many powerful people including Saruman and Denethor, partly through their use of the palantíri. While both Saruman and Denethor begin as characters of virtue, their being deceived leads them to be “rather authoritarian, dominant, and imposing; [they are] thus…representative[s] of a type of masculinity that is constructed on the exertion of power over everyone else through oppression and domination.”5 Sauron’s spread of his toxic nature leads to the doom of all three characters.
Evil exercised through the embodiment of toxic masculinity in Tolkien’s legendarium leads to the destruction of those embodying this form of masculinity. Similarly, Joe’s own outward acts of lying, murder, and deception lead to his own self-deception and self-destruction. At the end of the final season of You, Joe tries to run away from the cops in the woods like a hunted werewolf after thinking he successfully murdered his latest love interest, Louise aka Brontë. He becomes surrounded and then is confronted by Louise with a gun. Astonished to see her, Joe begs her to kill him, giving him the option of opting out of the consequences of his actions and corrupting Louise by manipulating her into doing something he would do. Joe screams at her:
Joe: “Kill me. I deserve it. You know you have it in you! Please. You’re more like me than you wanna admit, come on! You’re the one who gets to kill me, Brontë. This is how our story ends.”
Louise: “My name is Louise…I’ve been asking myself over and over: why? And finally, I see it clearly now. The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you.”6
Joe tries one more time to attack Louise and she shoots him in the dick, stripping him of the traditional and reductionist understanding of “manhood.”
The words of Joe in this scene resonate with the words of Saruman to Théoden in Isengard after the Battle at Helm’s Deep:
“Why have you not come before, and as a friend? Much have I desired to see you, mightiest king of western lands, and especially in these latter years, to save you from the unwise and evil counsels that beset you! Is it yet too late? Despite the injuries that have been done to me, in which the men of Rohan, alas! have had some part, still I would save you, and deliver you from the ruin that draws nigh inevitably, if you ride upon this road which you have taken. Indeed I alone can aid you now.’” (TT, 755)
While Saruman is not imposing his own identity onto Théoden’s, he is still attempting to twist his actions and his listener’s perception of them to make it look like Saruman is the good guy, the reasonable one who had to do what he had to do to make the world a better place.
I interpreted Louise’s words to Joe to mean that the fantasy of the men she is referring to are the patriarchally constructed archetypes of the chivalrous man that were made and put forth by men. This chivalry was never meant for the betterment of women or the wellbeing of others outside of the men who embraced this construct. It “allows men to evolve, while dictating that women only devolve.”7 This sums up what Joe does to all the women around him and especially those that become subject to his desire and it is a posture that resonates with the way in which Tolkien’s monsters, villains, and scoundrels see themselves.
For You, it is the surviving women who work together to bring down Joe, while positively influencing the future generations of boys to reject the monstrous behavior of toxic masculinity via Henry. Tolkien, while clearly internalizing elements of various forms of patriarchy including the concept of chivalry, creates heroic male characters that embrace more feminine aspects to counteract the toxic masculinity of men such as Saruman. For example, Aragorn “never uses his superiority or authority over others and never tries to dominate the weaker characters, he is never proud or impulsive and even in his worst moments, he never falls into despair…”8 Many of these traits can also be seen in the other heroic men in Tolkien such as Faramir, Frodo, and Sam.
While there is no perfect person and no perfect archetype of gender identity and expression, interrogating what is considered good and bad about the embodied acts of people is needed. The likes of Joe, Saruman, Sauron, and Smaug are able to bolster their toxic masculine power because they spend so long going unchecked. Like the toxic masculinity in our primary world, it has gone largely unchecked for an extremely long time. In order for the monsters of toxic masculinity to be slain, we must acknowledge their existence and work with others to make an effective plan.
Being a cisgendered heterosexual man, it is easy for me to miss things, appropriate others’ voices and views to enlarge my own place of privilege, and ignore the negative impact my gender identity and expression has on myself and those around me. While picking out characters like Joe, Thingol, and Morgoth to deconstruct, all of us have both a Joe and an Aragorn in us. In fact, that binary sense of thinking is what keeps many of us stuck in the cycle of oscillating between healthy and toxic forms of personhood. Rather, I find it helpful to see that there is something more like a Joe, Aragorn, Éowyn, Ungoliant, Samwise and much much more in me.
In order to face the toxic masculine monsters in all of us, we have to acknowledge the temptation of creating an eternal form of us, one that desires dominating and controlling things to shape the world and those in it we see fit. In slaying our monsters, we are not literally slaying ourselves, but putting them on trial. Along with others, we utilize the evidence to make a case for the letting go of that aspect of us so that we emerge as selves that truly benefit ourselves and those around us for the prosperity of future generations.
I’ll give the last word to Louise in the last episode of You:
Louise: “Joe was wrong about me. My life doesn’t boil down to before and after him. Every day that passes, he shrinks. Eventually, he’ll just be some asshole I dated. I still have no idea what I want to be, but I can’t wait to find out.”
Brown, Sara (2024) "Monstrous Feminine, Deviant Mother: Tolkien’s Shelob and the Grotesque Maternal," Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 20: Iss. 2, Article 9. Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol20/iss2/9. Brown argues that Shelob actually draws from traditionally masculine power structures to perform her monstrosity.
Natis, Mercury. “Sauron’s Femme Fatale Sources and Their Role in the Númenor Narrative.” YouTube, 2023.
“Middle-earth in Numbers: Population by race and sex.” http://lotrproject.com/statistics/.
Domínguez Ruiz, Beatriz. “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Construction of Multiple Masculinities in The Lord of the Rings.” Odisea, no. 16, Mar. 2017, pp. 23-38, https://doi.org/10.25115/odisea.v0i16.295.
Domínguez Ruiz. 28.
Domínguez Ruiz. “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Construction of Multiple Masculinities in The Lord of the Rings.” 31.