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You Should’ve Aimed Higher
It wasn’t just the sexual predation that made Joe Goldberg so evil.
Think back to Theon Greyjoy’s neutering on Game of Thrones, which plays out as the central pillar of his torturer’s campaign to annihilate the character’s sense of self, or the famously thorny scene in Pulp Fiction where Marsellus Wallace exacts revenge on his rapist by firing a shotgun at the guy’s genitals. Castration recurs in pop culture as comeuppance for men who inflict or threaten violence on women: Recall Robocop blasting the family jewels off a nameless criminal attempting to sexually assault a woman on the street or the sequence in Hard Candy where 14-year-old Hayley convinces the pedophile she’s torturing that she’s surgically removing his testicles. In this final season, Joe’s internal narrative takes on a valence of self-determination: His violent urges are immutable parts of himself, so leaning into them amounts to a form of radical self-acceptance, and unleashing them against people who “deserve it” (abusive boyfriends, evil executives, smarmy therapists) is analogous to a harm-reduction technique.
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