“Euphoria”’s Descent Into Hell

In between the excessive drama and excessive conditions that these often-numbed-out children discovered their means into—tough intercourse, vicious woman fights, armed drug offers, operationally hellish withdrawals—there have been interludes of quiet and introspection. And although “Euphoria” was by no means a present that handled characters’ psychology that deeply or persistently, it had some moments of actual feeling. (Rue’s wrestle with dependancy and the ache it causes her household made for a number of the first two seasons’ most transferring scenes, maybe due to Levinson’s personal expertise as a teen drug addict who has managed to attain sobriety.) Visually, too, “Euphoria” had one thing of the lava lamp about it, all shadows and sparkle and swirling, glinting lights. The present’s suburban teen setting was much less “The OC” and extra “Carrie”—an area of trippy, oozing, horror-fantasy—and the much-talked-about make-up appears of its woman protagonists added to this impression. Dripping glitter, shimmering adhesive crystals, dramatic slashes of eyeliner and smudges of eyeshadow—there was a playful, shifting experimentalism right here, to sign the younger characters’ changeability and ingenuity. (When I interviewed the present’s head make-up artist, Doniella Davy, again in 2019, she informed me that the appears she designed for the present have been about “unbridled self-expression.”)

Season 3 transports us 5 years after the occasions of the second seasonto a brand new stage in our protagonists’ lives. Rue and the gang at the moment are adults of their early twenties, and, as she deadpans on the prime of the primary episode, “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school. Honestly? Nothing good.” Indeed. So-called actual life has now begun, the characters have hardened with it, and the sequence, too, feels as if it is clicked into its closing, hardened type: an exhilarating, disturbing horror present, delivered with a sneer and a smile, and portraying a world the place cash is the one factor value caring about.

Rue has been unable to repay the terribly massive sum of cash that she owes the suburban drug boss Laurie (Martha Kelly), and so she begins working for her as a mule, touring all the way down to Mexico, the place she swallows gumball-sized balloons of fentanyl, helped down the gullet with a hefty squeeze of KY Jelly, and shat out right into a sieve as soon as again in Cali. Cassie and Nate, in the meantime, are engaged to be married, residing in what Rue you describe as a “right-wing suburban bubble.” Like Rue, Nate is in debt, owing cash to shady figures who’ve sunk funds into the development enterprise he took over from his pervy father, Cal. (Eric Dane, who, in one other tragic loss, just lately died of ALS) Now, he is targeted on the event of Sun Settlers, “the premier end-of-life transition facility in California.” (It’s a clutch monetary alternative, Nate explains to a potential investor, as a result of “a boomer dies every fifteen seconds.”) Cassie is making an attempt to change into social-media well-known, suggestively flashing her all-American property on-line in a wide range of fetishy costumes (a pet canine, a pacifier-sucking child). Her intention is to make sufficient cash to afford the fifty-thousand-dollar wedding ceremony floral preparations that Nate is reluctant to cough up the dough for. (When pressed to log out on Cassie’s racy new profession, Nate reluctantly agrees, making her promise that she will not present “those”—her boobs—and her “pretty face at the same time,” a vow she nearly instantly breaks.)

Jules, in the meantime, has change into a sugar child, leaving out of artwork faculty to stay a lifetime of brittle luxurious in a downtown LA penthouse, paid for by a rich plastic surgeon, who’s in love together with her “poreless” pores and skin—the outcome, he presumes, of her transitioning earlier than puberty—and who tells her that her breasts are “near-perfect.” (When she questions the hedge, he clarifies that “anything can be improved.”) And Maddy is an assistant at a talent-management firm who sees alternatives within the rising market of OnlyFans starlets. “We can imply nudity,” she reassures one mannequin who’s reluctant to go full porn. “Sideboob, underboob, camel toe, a little ass cheek, feet. . . . We’ll build it up, a toe at a time.”

Everyone, in different phrases, will be offered—or can promote oneself—for components. The physique will not be a supply of energy or pleasure or play however a web site from which to seize as a lot energy as one can and maintain on to it for pricey life. (To use the characters’ magnificence appears as an indicator once more, the overdefined porn-star lips and power-bitch winged eyeliner the characters put on in the newest episodes are hardly about self-expression, however about one thing else fully: As Doniella Davy informed Harper’s Bazaar earlier this month, “The motivations for the character’s use of makeup in season three are to largely make money.”)