In
the grand tradition of works like Kids, Larry Clark
and Harmony Korine’s 1995 bleak festival of depravity, Euphoria is
an eight-episode series that acts as a portrait of the troubled youth
of today and the sinister channels of hedonism that bring them
together and tear them apart. It’s a HBO show, based on an Israeli
original and co-produced by, among others, the glorious A24.
Worrying that the show might be something along the lines
of Skins, except American and therefore four
times as irritating, I was prepared to hate it. But the good news is
I didn’t hate it, in fact, I enjoyed it a lot, even if it did
make me feel surprisingly terrible almost all the way through.
Euphoria takes
place in a dark, corrupt and miserable world of superficiality,
cruelty and temptation. Its central character is Rue, a
sometimes-recovering teenage drug addict, but the story stretches out
to include a number of other tangentially-connected members of the
same high school. You watch helplessly as even its most
wholesome characters are warped by the ambient pressure of their
environment, and who, without any real guidance to speak of,
stumble confusedly from one bad decision to another. The show is
narrated by Rue, and often opens with an expositional montage about
one of its main characters, although these sections are never so much
about introducing a character as fleshing out someone you’re
already familiar with, providing significant context for how they got
to where they are. What the show succeeds at is communicating exactly
what bruises in their development cause each character to see the
world in the way that they do, and why this carries them down their
individual paths. This structure could easily be trite, or cheap, but
here I found this style of storytelling relievingly effective.
With
the main character being a drug addict, I expected that the show would
concern itself mostly with the crushing power of narcotics, and there
are plenty of moments of heightened reality that reminded me strongly
of Trainspotting, but it was interesting to see that
probably the most pernicious euphoria of the show’s namesake was
sex, or rather the strange new frontiers of sex in our dystopian
present. Much of it was depressingly recognisable, particularly in
how the internet’s deluge of pornography has shaped our attitudes
and expectations towards sex, which also combines naturally with
old-fashioned misogyny. Knowledge of the common tropes of porn
has one character, McKay, choking his girlfriend, Cassie, without her
consent, assuming it to be not only normal but necessary. Cassie
herself has already been sexualised constantly from an early age,
particularly by her mother, and has internalised her worth as being
one in the same with her sexual value. The same is true of Maddy, who
unlike Cassie completely accepts this expectation of herself and runs
with it, telling men what they want to hear and analysing porn so as
to replicate it for her boyfriend’s benefit.
But
in the internet age, porn isn’t simply a consumer product, but an
expected part of any sexual relationship, with nudes and videos a
central pillar of these kids’ sex lives. A whole sequence is
dedicated to the do’s and don’t’s of dick-pic curation, and Rue and Jules's relationship is brought closer by Rue agreeing to take sexy pics of Jules to send to her mysterious crush. Sex
tapes, filmed with or without good faith, naturally leak from privacy onto phone screens around the school and beyond. Cassie’s
reputation, in the eyes of her insecure boyfriend, is besmirched by
the existence of a previous sex tape that has made its way around the
school, which to McKay is an affront to his own petty
masculine pride. Reputation, as anyone who’s been to school will
know well, is the most powerful force in Euphoria’s
narrative. The entire show runs on secrets and pathetic power moves
to improve someone’s standing, or protect them from social ruin,
and sex is more often than not a tool, if not a weapon, used in order
to gain something; if not respect from others, then at the very least
the pacification of the serpent-toothed insecurity that is the basis
of adolescence.
It’s
worth pointing out that all of these instances of filmed and
photographed sex amongst these kids is completely illegal, a fact
which is itself weaponised by one character to blackmail another.
Illegal or not, child pornography is as normal as ever, and it’s
the children themselves who are doing it.
One
interesting example of how the modern landscape bastardises young
understandings of sexuality is with Kat, who starts the series as a
virgin before quickly losing that virginity in a moment that was,
naturally, filmed and uploaded to the internet. Noticing the view
count rising, Kat senses an opportunity and enters awkwardly into
being a camgirl, providing dominatrix services to a handful of
dedicated viewers, and suddenly having cash to burn for doing
sometimes literally nothing. As her confidence grows, she starts to
enjoy herself, having sex with guys who she considered previously
unattainable, but her understanding of sex isn’t as wise as she
thinks it is, and it becomes apparent that she believes every
interaction between a guy and girl revolves around trying to have sex
with one another, brushing off the one nerdy virgin guy who’s
clearly right for her as simply trying to get in her pants. Kat has
learned to see sex as vapid and transactional, and while watching the
often coldly aromantic trysts between the kids of Euphoria,
it’s easy to see that perspective yourself.
But
this isn’t a world where romance has been completely killed, buried,
exhumed, and put on sale. Rue is an interesting main character as,
aside from her own substantial issues (no pun intended) and the
occasional instance of threatening to stab her own mother, she’s
often by far the most rational and observant of the main characters,
at least after finally making an honest effort to kick the habit. She
is the story’s narrator, after all. But she also has the closest to
a true and uncorrupt loving relationship that the show offers,
complex as it becomes, in her maybe-more friendship with Jules. I
think it’s notable that Rue, while forever tied to the millstone of
addiction, seems to be the least dented in her sexual understanding
than the rest of the characters, admitting to Jules that her sexual
experience, while existent, is minimal at best. Rue doesn’t want
Jules for any reason other than she adores her, she has no interest
in the sexual rat race, she wants nothing more from her than to bask
in her presence, and the same is… maybe… true with Jules.
However, even this feeling isn’t necessarily pure, as her contact
at NA points out that there’s a good chance her love for Jules is
just one more dependency to replace the one she used to fill the void
before her sobriety.
While
this show could have easily been produced as a vicarious ride of sex
and drugs made solely to entertain, there’s a surprising amount of
depth and complexity to the emotions of these characters, and more
importantly, it has you effortlessly sympathising with them, and
rooting for them despite the myriad of problems they often have no
idea how to solve. The only exception is Nate, the almost comically
psychopathic antagonist of pretty much everyone, who is somehow both
primally meatheaded yet also cunningly devious, a representation of
everything that Euphoria wants to leave you with a
lingering hatred for. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more
hateable character maybe in anything, although if like me you were
hoping for a satisfactory consequence for his many crimes, the series
finale will leave you disappointed. In fact, it came perilously close
to romanticising the abusive relationship between him and Maddy,
which I hope was just a misreading on my part. The last episode left
me thoroughly unsatisfied for a number of reasons, leaving me worried
that extending the show for another season (the original Israeli
version was a one-shot miniseries) might leave it running out of
steam.
But,
nonetheless, this show is great. It can be a little corny at times,
sometimes even weirdly moralising in a way I can’t quite
articulate, but it manages to keep up this strong and sometimes
unbearable tension, with moments of levity and genuine tenderness
that never feel too out of place, too flat, or too forced. I’ve
been hooked on it, which I guess is ironic, and I’m looking forward
to seeing more of these characters in the future, even if it does
dishearten me to be reminded of the shit kids have to put up with in
the age of the catfish, the opioid epidemic, and the unsolicited dick
pic.
