I have so much to say about Euphoria, HBO’s teen drama. First being, if you haven’t seen Season One go watch it, baby!
[This essay is about Season One. Season Two is … fine but not really what I was there for.]
It’s one of the few things I’ve ever rewatched start-to-finish, and I did it a month or two ago for no other reason than I missed the characters and needed an emotional catharsis/check-in with my girls.
There are heights and corners that the show fits in me that I’ve never seen even touched by other shows; it is one of those that feels so personally “made-for-me” that you wonder if anyone else will even watch it. Always the best shows, and frequently the most successful.
These aren’t really spoilers, although they may feel like it. Proceed at will.
Euphoria is dogged by some expectations that are unfair, such that my fingers typed “MTV” above, rather than HBO, despite there not being TV shows on MTV since Teen Wolf and Sweet/Vicious were canceled. It has the unmistakable scent of “teen” about it, which, we know from Gossip Girl and everything else that “teen” plus “girl” equals irrelevant.
There is also the pottymouth reputation that any HBO show must earn, wherein realistic depictions of sex and sexuality are easily seen as sensationalistic and silly. I say “pottymouth” because Sarah Silverman on a recent podcast pointed out that it’s a gendered term: Male comedians rarely, if ever, get the “pottymouth” label.
She also pointed out that, like most things with that label, she’s good for young girls. And so too is Euphoria. Its huge heart and sometimes self-impressed brain are good for kids, good like Tumblr (or now Twitter) for kids.
So third we have a certain age-related issue of wokeness, cancel culture, political correctness, whatever name we’re using this week to say that caring for other human beings is the weaponized domain of literal children who haven’t grown up enough to be numb to bigotry and disrespect yet.
You know I have no truck with that nonsense, and I will tell you why because it’s relevant here: Because the worst of the Tumblr Social Justice Warrior fourteen-year-olds, with their bizarre extrapolations of common sense into the absurd, are — more importantly — working with a social vocabulary with which most of us so-called adults still struggle. Any tool’s a weapon if you hold it right — and kids should be allowed to use mental instruments as weapons a little, because there is actually no harm in doing so.
I used to joke that, looked at through a certain lens, Buffy was a weekly opportunity to see a woman get the shit kicked out of her. Since then, of course, Buffy’s gotten more problematic and I’ve even seen that argument made in earnest, and not without scoring a few points in favor on the way.
Anyway. When teens talk about privilege we can roll our eyes or we can notice how they are swimming in social justice language, born within and to it, like technological devices, and if they flounder about in it, that’s called growing up. Or to put it another way, when we see people getting defensive and Talking. Like. This. about comic book representation of pansexual nonbinary demiromantic people* what we tend to overlook is the fact that those people are saving the world.
Which is to say: Saving the world as they know it, stretching themselves to the limits of their current universe. A person who lives in comic book-land is going to negotiate with the power structures of the world in a way that uses comics as its conversation, and so on. I don’t think this gets talked about enough.
*(The joke here is not the pansexual nonbinary demiromantic people in real life, because there’s nothing funny about identity; the joke here is that “representation” is a shibboleth for something very true and often lost in translation.)
I also think the inverse, incels and trolls obsessing on the feminism of Captain Marvel or what have you, taking out their rage on corporate products in a way that can have real-world consequences… Are burning everything down. As they know it.
Euphoria has these types of young people, and more besides. You could even call it a conversation between three viewpoints of the above: One character representing the naive approach, who just wants to be seen; one character who lives in a liminal space and therefore is looking simply to survive; and one character who represents those threatened by the very existence of the first two. (The rest of the cast, I think, multiplies out from this central tension. It is a function of a well-made drama that they each deserve their own meditations, too.)
Rue, our troubled antihero and increasingly unreliable narrator, begins the series a little bit in love with her own liminality: She marches to a different drummer in a lot of ways, some of them biological and others pharmaceutical. Too smart by half, as they say. Bit of a pottymouth.
Rue is unapologetically herself — it’s just that that self isn’t something she particularly likes or cares about. She has an addict’s self-obsession, which (like a depressed person’s) always comes from being reduced down to survival mode. Simply put, she has no time for political niceties or microaggressions, because it all fades into the noise. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care, or that she isn’t subject to them, just that everything is at the same screaming level for Rue.
(There’s a little girl in my school who reminds me so much of Rue: Not just her mannerisms and energy, but the way she flits from thing to thing, simply unable to command her attention for the amount of time necessary to hear, much less comprehend, what she’s being told. This little girl doesn’t have OCD but she does have all the other markers of Rueness, and it’s a little scary but also tender to see.)
Jules Vaughn is the second point in the triangle: A self-aware liminal figure who knows and can use the language of social justice to get things across — both to her peers and, crucially, to adults. When she loses it on people — and boy can she — it’s always as much a choice as Rue’s own behavior never is. (Of course it is. But the difference between the deliberate choices we see ourselves making, and choices we make so fast or so unconsciously that it bypasses deliberation, is a difference we’re mostly all still learning in our 40s.)
There’s an early scene, practically her first scene, where Jules escalates an encounter with a mean-eyed drunk so quickly you can barely see how it happens. She loses control on purpose, cutting herself to make her body dangerous in a way that simply put it — small, female — could not otherwise be. If Rue cut herself at a high school party there would be theatre to it, but for Jules it’s a simple mathematical equation.
In the dueling two-handers that fill in the blanks of Season One as special episodes, we see just how deliberate Jules truly is: How her seeming reticence or reluctance in love is actually a choice, a cover for her own insecurity. She plays dumb with Rue (we learn) for the same reason she prefers a faceless catfish and nameless hookups: A sort of awful unsureness of her own worth; a needing permission for cohesion as the person she defines herself as. When a third love interest enters the picture late in the game, it’s telling that she’s the aggressor: Fascinated by Jules, unthreateningly positive, and most of all enraptured by her femininity.
Which brings us to Nate Jacobs, the third pillar of the sort of wokeness triangle I’m building: He’s someone who can also use the language of social justice surprisingly well, but only in order to reify the status quo. He weaponizes his own body and everyone else’s to preserve a tenuous but strongly-felt gender-and-sexuality situation; he desires and despises women for the same reasons all shitty men do, with an extra fillip of family trauma to give it spice.
It’s offensive for me to elevate Nate to co-lead with Rue and Jules; I know that. But without Nate, and his alter ego Tyler, we would exist in a safe place where nothing is defined, everything is subjective, and even the real-world problems of Rue fade into the background. Rue and Jules is an immovable object in perfect balance — Nate is the unavoidable force that represents the real, timebound, moving world they have to live in.
Nate injures, invades, invalidates this idyll as a synecdoche of the larger world, its cruelties and iniquities. He provides the plot — gives forward momentum to the stable and quiet feminine space that Rue and Jules find in each other. (Stable, for Jules, is a moving target; quiet, for Rue, is the same.) The feminine is a goad and a goddess to Nate the same way it is to his father, and of course to Jules herself; Nate’s body is not the only weapon. (In fact, it’s what ties the rest of the cast and story together — nothing so much as a collection of weaponized bodies trying to comprehend themselves.) But is Nate necessary? Is the real world worth representing, in this love affair?
He provides plot, but I don’t think that’s all. So much of the story is about moving away from a place where even just being physically alive, for one reason or another, represents too much pain to bear. The real world is dysphoric, from this perspective: The inside and the outside jar and clash and rub holes in each other. But perhaps we need a little Nate to see the greater world that lies outside the cage; the ecstasy that is the all-connected world we actually live in.
The euphoric.
It’s important for both Rue and Jules, for different reasons, to critique and deconstruct their relationship when they’re separated — to take apart, for example, the unfair burden Jules takes on (or yes, is given, by someone not accountable for her actions, see above) for Rue’s sobriety. They have to come to their separate conclusions that the idyll was never going to last — that if not for Nate, it would be Rue’s demons that eventually tore them apart.
But I have to wonder. Rue and Jules challenge each other in mostly healthy ways, perhaps slightly offset by their medical situations. They support each other in ways both fierce and softly unspoken. We love because we want to change; we change ourselves through the act of love.
It’s with love, and his sister passion, that we take the weapon of our bodies and make it into something beautiful; something that heals rather than hurts. Or, not to put too fine a point on it:
The line between dysphoria and euphoria is a simple one that’s very hard to cross. We spend our days and lives and all our energy trying, and we can’t do it without help, and we can’t do it without the real world nipping at us all along, like the puppy on the Tarot card.
It’s a deep dark forest we’re all scrabbling through — the irrelevance of “teen” and “female” are the perfect way to avoid it altogether. So the next time you’re thinking about pottymouths, about young women and their stories and how we overlook them, think too about how much easier that makes everything. Maybe it’s not that we look away from young women because they don’t matter; maybe we look away because they’re too bright.
Or: How much easier it would be for Nate, if Jules never existed at all.