Dhe aesthetic drop of decline is always a question of the setting. Does he appear in the colors of the Californian evening sun, on a BMX bike, as hesitant approval from cyan-blue eyes, with the beat of the musician Drake? When you’re young, the decline looks final, irrevocable. From a distance it looks artistic, revisable. That’s the charm of this series, or rather, one of the charms.
“Euphoria” is the eighteen-rated, drug- and sex-heavy story of a gang of high school students dealing with the madness of growing up, the violence of American suburbs, the curse of family abysses. Her leading actress Rue (Zendaya) is heavily addicted to drugs, her friend Jules (Hunter Schafer) has a traumatizing experience right from the start. But with the first season of Euphoria becoming a phenomenon in 2019, with banned images being the most exciting and with the English Season 2 kicking off in January, the new clips have been floating around on Tiktok for weeks, and from the heroic demise of Euphorias Heroes become material for their own daily struggle.
How it starts like Tarantino: A blond woman marches with a gun into a brothel, it should be around the turn of the millennium. There, unmoved, she shoots a half-naked man in both thighs, returns to the street with a great deal of screaming, falls into a convertible next to a little boy and says: “In the future you will live with Granny.” Exit, fade out. Everyone who has seen season one has already figured out the boy in the car, for whom violence is supposed to be part of everyday life: it’s Fezco, the later dealer, one of the most reasonable guys in the series. And about the tattooed grandmother, the voiceover states dryly: “He liked that she didn’t treat him like a child.”
Rue (Zendaya) has become the idol of a youth culture.
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Image: obs
There is no narrative level on the surface, is one of the principles of screenwriter and director Sam Levinson. All those leading into California’s decline, the beautiful, ever-angry Maddy (Alexa Demie) and football star Nate (Jacob Elordi), the validation-starved Cassie (Sydney Sweeny), got their backstory in Season One and the motives that grew out of it: “What if he could start all over again,” dreams Nate, and despite all the unpredictability, images of a completely normal family life haunt his head: “His father screwed up his life.” Certainties constantly collapse, dissolve alliances, new doubts arise. This is the side of the high school fairy tale that hasn’t been told yet.
Timelines and aesthetics are deconstructed to the nostalgic soundtrack by Drake, who was executive producer of the series, from the sheltered, static, composed spaces of the children’s rooms to the parties. The camera zooms through the room, follows its tottering, swaying, storming protagonists, climbs out of the window over the roof, where intertwined people are already sitting, and returns to the chaos on the dance floor. Parties are never left out in “Euphoria”, at best ecstatic, they are dangerous places where young women with overdoses measure their pulse and death looks are exchanged, places where youthful brutality breaks out.
They do exist, the moments of light-heartedness, even if they belong in the world of intoxication. And there are moments of fantasies. Rue dreams of taking cruel revenge on her imagined and actual opponents. And her friend Kat (Barbie Ferreira), who lies depressed in bed and thinks she’s overweight, is being stalked by self-care women from her YouTube bubble who yell their mindless mantras at the same time: “Just love yourself!” “Every day, where you stand up is a victory!”
All of them, the small and cocky failures and fighters, have become icons of youth culture with “Euphoria”. This is most true of Rue, portrayed by former Disney child star Zendaya. Rue’s father died of cancer, now she shuffles around in sweatpants, knows every opioid by name, wants to be a better person, and then falls down again to look at her world from deep eye sockets and inexplicably wisely.
If there had to be something wrong with Sam Levinson’s work, it would be the naïve eroticism, the willingness of his characters to reveal themselves ruthlessly to the camera – a means that results in exactly the discomfort it intends. Here, too, “Euphoria” remains true to itself: truthfulness and depravity stand side by side, and it never gets kitschy.
Euphoria runs on Sky