You

We are all stalkers. We’re all being stalked.

In 1948 George Orwell foretold a future where governments spy on citizens: the novel? 1984. They would be watched and monitored to ensure they didn’t do anything that opposed the regime. This surveillance state came with the euphemistic tagline, Big Brother is watching.  A cruel appropriation of a benign role. An older sibling is tasked with watching over the young, protecting them when challenges arise, responding to real problems, they don’t log every thought and action; for this is not protection, but invasion. In 2013 Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA, with it Orwell’s fiction was made real.

From 1984.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window threw a dark light on cutesy ‘people watching.’ James Stewart plays Jeff, a photographer nursing a broken leg. His rear window faces onto a courtyard where he can see all the comings and goings of surrounding apartments. Soon he becomes obsessed with what he observes, transforming himself into a quasi-surveillance camera, training his binoculars into people’s living room, zooming in and out on their lives. Hitchcock it seemed was saying that spying wasn’t restricted to government agencies, everyone had the potential to snoop and pry on the lives of others. We all love hearing gossip about strangers; now, with tower block living we could watch it too.

Rear Window

In 1997 Channel 4 monetised Orwell’s nightmare and made a TV show out of it. A group of volunteers were put in a house where viewers could watch them every second, minute, hour and day. This was fine: they weren’t people; they were 'contestants.' This wasn’t life, but a 'game show.' Through the bars of my telebox, I watched the human zoo play out night after night. I was a voyeur peeping into the lives of strangers  - worryingly I felt no guilt doing it.

In the end people stopped watching.

Now we have social media, where everyone is invited into our lives. We’ve all made ourselves available for appraisal and censure. Yes, we might have privacy settings, padlocking our diaries from trespassers, but in all honesty how many of our ‘friends’ do we really know? And for those that don’t set their privacy, then potential employers, flatmates and dates can have evaluated you before you've even arrived. Today our first impression comes before we've even shaken hands - it happens online without us knowing. Orwell’s 1984 then has gone darker than even he imagined: the telescreens haven’t been forced into people’s homes, rather they’ve been welcomed in.

This brings me to You, a TV series developed by Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble from the 2014 novel by Caroline Kepnes. The story follows Joe – or I should say – the story follows Beck, given that Joe is her stalker. Joe Goldberg is a bookshop manager who first spies Guinevere Beck when she comes into his store looking for a book. Like a criminal profiler, he measures her up, surmising correctly her occupation (student) and book taste (‘too sun-kissed for Stephen King’). They get talking when she asks for helping locating a Paula Fox novel. The badinage they exchange when reflecting on other customers is witty and low-key. Already there’s a frisson of attraction between the two: they’re both attractive, literate and snarky.

The source material.

In yesteryear people would research topics for a paper they had to hand in, now they put the hours into studying peers. At home Joe looks up Beck’s online profile and manages to ascertain where she’s from, what she’s studied and her relationship with friends and family. In the real world he only got her name and a whiff of character, whereas in the digital world he’s able to inhale her whole scent; in doing so he becomes intoxicated.

Soon he makes corporeal his virtual stalking. He inveigles his way into her home by watching from the street, and conducts field research by blending into crowds. If Joe were not so nice to his neighbour’s kid, we would find his behaviour entirely repellent. As it is, we shamefully root for him: an antihero, kicking against Beck’s high society friends, scoring a win for the everyman. The ingenious trick the creators play is for us to forget that Joe is a hypocrite. He mocks the vacuous world of hashtag and Insta yet spends most of his time online, seduced by the thing he hates. A moment from the show helps further my point. When asked about Don Quixote, Joe explains how it’s a tale of chivalry, a virtuous knight treating a woman right – it is not. It’s a book of madness where the protagonist has become so consumed by literature he's unable to separate artifice from reality. In Joe, we too misread a madman for a knight. Credit must go to the creators and actor Penn Badgley for executing this trick.

Joe and Beck.

As an English teacher I loved the references to literature in the show. Beck’s first name is Guinevere, a name that comes from the Arthurian legend. Even now people can’t decide whether the heroine of the medieval tale was virtuous or not – like you’ll find over the show with Beck. Beck’s friend has the surname Salinger, a famous recluse that people didn’t know much about- relevant? You'll see. There’s also allusions to L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series (if any of you have theories of how this connects, then I’ll be happy to hear them). I guess what I’m saying is for all the far-fetched plotting there’s real intelligence here, making for clever-dumb fun.

Halfway through You I’m excited to see how it all turns out. With 40 million viewers on Netflix, it seems many of you already have. 40 million people watching a man watch someone else: stalking has gone meta; Orwell turns in his grave; and I spend my Sunday afternoon celebrating it. Having worried about voyeurism, it seems the struggle is over. I have won the victory over myself. I love Big Brother.

Pink Floyd invoking Orwell.

You is available on Netflix.