Why Euphoria is my quarantine addiction
Source: 8FLiX.com
Maeve Hastings reviews HBO’s teen drama series, Euphoria.
Euphoria: a feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness.
Do not be misled: HBO’s Euphoria isn’t exactly the kind of programme to cure your quarantine blues. However, I have found myself getting lost in Sam Levinson’s technicolour haze, which feels simultaneously otherworldly yet close-to-home. Rue, brought to life (and almost death) by Zendaya, the show’s omniscient narrator and protagonist, navigates the highs and lows (drug-induced or otherwise) of the dark and often graphic landscape of teenagerhood, of an age in which sexting is the new poetry, Tinder matches are the new once-upon-a-times of love stories and nudes are the new ‘currency of love’.
Despite criticism of being over-stylised, Levinson’s contemporary suburban America is intoxicating and reaches an almost transcendental level through the lyrical interludes of Labrinth. He hews together style and substance, splicing scenes of an abortion with a figure gliding across the ice and creating luminescent carnivals as the backdrop for an ecstasy trip: his doses of chaos are matched by careful charm. I have never been one for shows like Skins and 13 Reasons Why, which handle themes like suicide and self-harm with an almost gothic romanticism. However, Euphoria floats in a separate realm, playing on notes of self-harm and body image in a way that does not evoke pity: far from a sob story, it is the story of imperfection, of doing what you want and being unapologetic about it.
Euphoria works some of the tired tropes of high-school drama: the cheerleader, the jock, the outsider; and even (you guessed it) ends with a prom. However, it tackles hot topics of the twenty-first century in a way that is all at once subtle and provocative: dating apps, camgirls, and revenge porn. Unlike other films and TV shows which cover topics such as homosexuality and transgenderism, in Levison’s they are, true to our generation, beautifully understated, as he addresses them without overworking them.
Jules (played by breakout trans actress Hunter Schafer) is the doe-eyed new kid on the block, who treats love as genderless and fluid. She becomes infatuated with men online and falls in love with girls found under the neon hues of nightclubs, crossing binaries in such a way that make you question if they ever really existed. Yet it feels wrong to call her polyamorous or bi-curious: love, in the time of Euphoria, has no time for labels. At times, it is hard to believe the characters are only in high school, as Jules produces musings among the likes of “if I can conquer men, then I can conquer femininity” (Rupi Kaur, eat your heart out), but the freedom with which they live is a clear homage to youth.
Levinson has been accused of normalising drug abuse and sexual violence, of “grossly irresponsible programming”, but he is merely reflecting the reality of the teenage experience. His vision is self-consciously shocking, populated by prepubescent drug dealers, sugar daddies and catfishes. Yet his statement is surely asking us to question why it is shocking to see something manifested on screen which is so obviously present in the era of social media and online dating.
After watching a scene which features faces bedewed with psychedelic tears, I can see how the show might be said to be glorifying drug use, but surely the images of Rue’s overdose speak louder than the family-friendly “don’t do drugs, kids”. In fact, Levinson’s success lies in how he demonstrates the ebbs and flows of addiction recovery without reducing Rue to a social-issue marker; the show isn’t moralistic or pretentious, but raw and utters truths beneath fluorescent lights. It takes stereotypical teenage drama and turns it on its head, revealing it to be a romanticised portrait of adolescence, full of PG-13 porch kisses and forced slang. It feels like a teenage show that finally belongs to us.
Profoundly subversive, Euphoria also disturbs a panorama of television suffused by images of female nudity (directed, unsurprisingly, under the male gaze), as it instead suddenly becomes interspersed with male full-frontal nudity. While controversial, such iconography is a not-so-gentle reminder of the gender imbalance in which explicit scenes of men, which are few and far between, carry a lot more cultural baggage than the hypersexualised female body. The uncovering of the masculine body symbolically uncovers the toxic masculinity which is latent in locker rooms, football fields, and frat parties.
The female and, finally, male characters move between object and subject, and the female gaze becomes equally as potent. A lot of the sexual interactions between characters seem to be driven by gender expectations rather than, as is traditional, male desire, playing on a culture in which performance is put above pleasure. But what Levinson gets perfectly right, although perhaps the visual vocabulary in real life is less enchanting, is how the teens make mistakes, and keep on making them, caught in a solipsistic world of which they have no desire of escaping.
Ultimately, Euphoria is a sensory overload, pulsating with hedonism and excess. The characters all seem to share the same carpe diem philosophy which often flirts with fatalism: they are refreshingly liberated, as “this isn’t the 80s, you need to catch a dick”. Much of the programme has to do with the intergenerational rift that has led to 2000s babies being fundamentally misunderstood, calling out adults who “relied on flowers and your father’s permission”, for “it’s 2019 and unless you’re Amish, nudes are the currency of love. So stop shaming us”, referring to the somewhat unspoken culture of slut-shaming amongst parents.
It is therefore frustrating that so much of the criticism of the show has been spewed out by 50-year-olds who do not speak the language of our generation. What was a big deal 40 years ago is now meaningless to the jaded characters; the Rues and Jules of the world live without permission, so much so that Euphoria’s parents are relatively silenced, and the teens brought to the fore, finally given a voice that carries importance. Euphoria is an ode to Gen-Zs.