On Euphoria

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.

On True Detective Series One

I picked the opening series of True Detective back up again this week, for the first time since it aired back in 2014. It shouldn’t be a surprise how much I enjoyed it, as a modern walk through the Southern Gothic genre. I feel I haven’t immersed myself enough in the brooding landscape of Southern Gothic – I think the last cultural artefact I swallowed that bore any resemblance was the fairly dumb but fairly brilliant True Blood from years ago, a show about Louisiana vampires that was a truckload of spooky Halloween fun. True Detective isn’t that. It draws its Gothic magic from its quintessential location, in the chillingly flat, spacious swampland of Louisiana. There’s a lot to praise about it – the directing, the acting, the ‘themes’, unsubtle as they are – but as with all the best pieces of art, the show’s power is in its palpable atmosphere, which True Detective gets exactly right.

No new ground is broken in the show’s plot, of a chalk-and-cheese cop duo hunting a serial killer. Like the resemblance of a child to its parents, you can recognise here the features of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, mixed with a little Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but its more obvious, or perhaps open, influences are strangely literary. I didn’t know about The King in Yellow before this show aired, like most people, it seems, as the book had a resurgence in its wake, and if nothing else I can thank this series for bringing that book back to the world’s attention. The relation the show has to the 1895 collection of weird stories is arguably superficial, taking namesakes and elements; the ‘Yellow King’, a mysterious place called Carcosa, the appearance of the Yellow Sign. But by giving this series a heavily-telegraphed relation to the book, it can be understood that the show’s priority isn’t character, themes, or mystery, strong as they may well be, but in its embrace of the sensation of weird.

There’s nothing to suggest that any of what happens in True Detective’s story has any supernatural influence, but nonetheless the show seems to exist in some disquieting unreality, talking of devil worship, symbols, totems, the afterlife. The character Rust even hallucinates regularly, supposedly due to a history of drug use, though he refers to them at least once as ‘visions’, and this allows for a few moments of surrealism, when nature falls apart. The crimes themselves are baroque and ceremonial, with certain atrocities wearing the bizarre paganism of The Wicker Man. All these nods or allusions to something metaphysical, these unseen forces and hidden layers, are what give the show its unsettling personality. Though the subject, miserable as it may be, is a grounded one, it still feels throughout as though the rational world might abandon the viewer completely, and so there is always a sense that something beyond the comprehensible evils of criminality lurks beneath the soil or at the bottom of the bayous.

The show’s philosophical wanderings also caught much attention, being lacquered with a pessimistic attitude where very little respect is given to any perspective that isn’t aimed squarely towards the abyss. I can see why Rust Cohle can be a hero to many, openly shitting in the proverbial breakfasts of Jesus worshippers, and I can also see how he could be irritating to many others, espousing well-rehearsed dialogue about the nature of existence at a moment’s notice, acting as the show’s thematic mouthpiece. Nietzsche is predictably mentioned by name, redrawn once again as a proponent of nihilistic fatalism. I actually haven’t any hostility towards these famous ‘time is a flat circle’ moments, but I do feel as if they’re better digested when they’re taken less as thought-provoking standards to march under, and more as additional support to the aforementioned queasy atmosphere. At the heart of True Detective is a lightless and frightening world. As well as being a world of local sex offenders, or of an organised establishments of sex offenders, or of possible folkloric demon-monsters, Rust’s diatribes expand this terror to the entirety of the universe. They add to the show’s nature in much the same ethos of philosophical horror, with creator Pizzolatto citing Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race as another of his influences. Just as Ligotti’s ultra-negative philosophy is the centrepiece, not just the inspiration, of his horror writing, I believe that True Detective weaponises an openly atheistic, pessimistic, antinatal worldview to add to its menacing flavour, one that is given a glimmer of Hollywood optimism as the series bows out.

Watching it again, I got the sense of Rust Cohle as a bit of a Mary Sue. Not only outstandingly talented at basically everything, he also sees the world with total clarity, penetrating through all of mankind’s deceits with total, accurate certainty. I picked up a Holmes-and-Watson vibe to him and Marty’s relationship – Rust as the brilliant mastermind and Marty, with his flaws and his family, as the vessel of humanity to be the audience’s ambassador. It could be argued that Marty’s warm heart counteracts Rust’s cold one (Hart and Cohl, I’ve literally just got it), but in actuality there’s certainly a one-sidedness to their partnership, even if Woody Harrelson, showing as fine an acting spirit as McConaughey or Monaghan, keeps his character magnetic throughout his innumerable bad decisions. I thought about this as a problem as I watched it again, with Rust’s gravelly voice stealing the show as he took the lead in practically every plot point. By the end, at least, I did come to appreciate that what bound these differing characters together was their fealty to justice, and that Marty does, eventually, put aside everything to join Rust in the pursuit of something he knows is right. So despite Rust being written as superior to Marty in a myriad of ways, it is in this, their moral sense, that the two of them are equals.

True Detective couldn’t keep up its momentum, which was probably an inevitability. I didn’t care for the second series and as of yet have not seen the third, which swam under my radar with minimal fanfare, seeming to speak of the trauma that the response to the second series left on its creators. The decision to make the series an anthology, swapping setting and characters every season, made sense to me, but the problem I found with the second series is that they lost the first series’s two shining assets: its haunting mood and its dynamic central characters. The characters in series two were empty and dull, and the setting was completely dry of atmosphere. It’s a bit of a shame, as like I said the real draw of the show for me was its ominous weirdness, palpitating beneath its removable parts. Then again, the first series is so tightly constructed, with its excellent back-and-forth structure that couldn’t simply be reused, that any continuation might always have been doomed to fail. I might get to watching the third series, as one of the positives of an anthology series is it can always change for better or worse, but either way this opening series has proven itself as a short, strong and supremely effective work of television.